lollovern

[lollovern]

Scream For Me

enhypen masterlist

my wattpad story

ghostface!park sunghoon x fem!reader | slasher horror au | slow reveal | body horror & mindfuck romance | dirty phonecalls | final girl vs charming killer | sadistic smut slow-burn | DARK CONTENT AHEAD !!!

wc: 13k

summary: Four students are dead. Their bodies carved open, their faces mutilated beyond recognition. There’s no pattern, no motive—just blood and chaos. And somehow, you keep surviving it. While your campus spirals into panic, you cling to the one person who makes you feel safe: Park Sunghoon, your best friend. Funny, kind, protective. The only one who stays when everyone else falls away. But the killer is always one step ahead. And when the mask finally comes off, it’s not a stranger.

warning: extreme body horror, corpse mutilation and staging, stalking through cameras and photos, manipulation by trusted friend, gaslighting, graphic murder aftermath, filthy phone calls, knife play, bloodplay, dubcon blurred by fear, mask kink, coercive sex, choking, orgasm denial, sadistic praise, forced striptease, crying during sex, degradation framed as love, mirror sex while terrified, captivity disguised as aftercare, reader slowly breaking and choosing him because there’s no one left.

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They found Wonyoung's body behind the student union dumpster.

No face.

Just a head wrapped in gauze and a blood-soaked cardigan knotted tight around her neck like a silk scarf, stiff with dried gore. Her phone was left in her hand. Music still playing.

IU's "Friday."

The first week, it was a news story. The second, it was a warning. Now, it was just real. Everyone had stopped pretending it couldn't happen to them. You started locking your doors. Walking home with friends. Leaving class before dark.

And you weren't the only one.

"Come on," Sunghoon nudged you with his elbow as you stood frozen by the bulletin board, eyes stuck on the third memorial flyer of the month. "I'm not letting you walk alone. I'll just lie to Coach and tell him you got vertigo again."

You blinked out of it.

"Hoon, you can't skip conditioning for me. You'll get benched again."

He tilted his head. "And if you get stabbed in the quad, I'll have no one to borrow notes from. So really, it's about me."

You tried not to smile. It felt wrong to smile.

"I'll be fine. I just have one more lab, and I'll Uber right after."

Sunghoon frowned at you like he didn't believe a word of that. His hair was slightly damp from practice, dark strands clinging to his forehead. He smelled like cedar deodorant and Gatorade. Familiar. Safe.

The way he looked at you—reluctant to leave, backpack still slung halfway off one shoulder—made you feel warmer than you wanted to admit.

"You know I'm not trying to be annoying, right?" he said more quietly this time. "It's just getting bad out here."

"I know," you murmured. "I appreciate it."

He held your gaze for a second too long, then sighed and pulled his hoodie from his bag. "Then at least wear this. So you don't look like someone walking home alone. Guys are less likely to—"

He caught himself.

"—to bother you if you look like you have someone."

You swallowed.

The hoodie was still warm. It smelled like him. It was oversized, long enough to hide your skirt and make you look like just another girl heading back to a dorm. You slipped it on, heart thudding with guilt. You hated the idea of needing to disguise yourself just to stay alive.

"I'll text you when I get there," you said, not looking at him.

Sunghoon nodded, jaw clenched. "You better."

—

Campus was quieter these days. Like someone turned the volume down on everything that made it feel alive. Fewer skateboards crashing into stair rails. No one blasting music from their dorm windows. The quad fountain was dry. Halloween flyers had been replaced with grief counseling slips.

You kept your keys clenched between your knuckles the whole walk.

Sunghoon's hoodie made you feel heavier, but it wasn't bad. It was comforting in the same way your childhood blanket used to be. The lab had gone long—nearly 10:30 p.m.—and you'd already had to leave in a hurry, skipping the campus shuttle since it broke down halfway through its route this week.

Your fingers trembled a little when you typed in your building code.

You told yourself it was just the cold. Not fear. Not trauma. Not paranoia.

You didn't realize someone was watching until much, much later.

—

Sunghoon sat on the edge of the locker room bench, scrolling through your texts with a clenched jaw.

You: home safe 🖤 hoodie returned tomorrow You: sorry for being annoying

You: thank you thank you thank you

He stared at your name for a long moment. Then deleted the whole thread.

No evidence. Just like always.

He didn't smile. He didn't smirk. He just pulled his duffle bag onto his lap and unzipped it halfway, revealing a gleam of black latex tucked under a pair of cleats. The mask inside was blank. Cold. A different version of him.

He didn't plan to use it tonight.

Not yet.

But the thought of you walking home, scared but stubborn, still shivering in his hoodie...

Yeah. He wasn't done with you.

Not even close.

_____________

Wonyoung's funeral was closed-casket.

You'd never seen that many flowers in one place. White lilies piled along the edges of the altar, sprays of roses draping the casket like a bridal veil, little picture frames tucked among the arrangements—her in middle school, on the beach, holding a diploma. Smiling, always smiling.

You sat in the third row, hands clenched in your lap. You didn't cry. You felt like you should, but nothing would come out. Not yet.

Sunghoon sat beside you in a black button-up that didn't quite hide the tension in his shoulders. His jaw was tight the entire time. Not from sadness. From something else. Resentment, maybe. Rage. He never liked funerals. Said they made people lie.

"She hated lilies," he muttered under his breath at one point, leaning closer so only you could hear.

You blinked at him.

"She was allergic," he added, gaze fixed ahead. "Swelled up from the pollen once. Had to get an epipen."

You didn't know that.

You'd never been close with Wonyoung—not like Sunghoon had. They were in the same communications class last semester, always bantering, walking out of lectures side by side.

It made sense. Wonyoung was loud and glossy and magnetic. Sunghoon could be just as loud when he wanted to be. When he wasn't next to you, quiet and careful.

You looked over at him again.

He didn't look like he was grieving. He looked like he was memorizing something.

—

Jake was the first to break the silence after the service.

"I mean, how is this even real?" he said outside the chapel, rubbing his face with one hand. "She literally gave me a piece of gum, like, three days before it happened. That's the last thing she ever said to me—'you look like you chew your pen caps.'"

"That's because you do," Yunjin said beside him, arms crossed, sunglasses perched on top of her head despite the overcast sky. "I'm surprised you haven't gotten lead poisoning."

"That's not how ink works, Jesus—"

You tuned them out. Sunghoon's hand brushed yours when the wind picked up, and you flinched before realizing it was just him. He didn't take your hand, just stood close, staring at the lawn like he was expecting someone to walk out of the hedges with a knife.

"I hate this," Eunchae whispered. "I feel like a bug in a jar."

You looked over. She was hugging her tote bag to her chest like a shield. Eunchae had never been skittish—she was the kind of girl who walked barefoot into parties and played Bloody Mary in dorm bathrooms just for fun. But this week had drained the shine out of everyone.

"Do you think they'll cancel the Halloween party?" Yunjin asked, like it was a casual thought. "I mean, they should, but you know the frats."

Jake shook his head. "There's no way admin lets it happen. Four deaths. That's serial killer territory."

"Don't say that."

"I'm just saying, if this was a movie, we'd all be fucked."

No one laughed.

—

You didn't realize until later that night that Wonyoung wasn't the fourth death.

She was the fifth.

The fourth hadn't been identified yet—found behind the maintenance shed near the performing arts building, body left in a janitor's closet. That one was messier. The school hadn't even named them publicly. They were still working on dental records.

You read about it on Reddit. An anonymous user from the theater department posted a blurry photo of yellow caution tape and a smear of blood under a mop bucket.

The caption read:

"They're not gonna tell us the truth. But he took her eyes. He took them and arranged them like dice."

You closed the app.

Threw your phone.

Curled under the blanket in Sunghoon's hoodie and stared at the wall until you couldn't see anymore.

—

Campus lockdown started the next morning.

You were woken up by the sound of your RA pounding on doors, yelling instructions like a fire drill.

"All students must return to their assigned dorms or apartments immediately! No overnight guests! No off-campus parties! No exceptions!"

Yunjin sat up in her bed, bleary-eyed. "What the actual fuck—"

"They found another one," you mumbled, already checking your phone. A new headline. Another body. This time in the bio building stairwell.

"SNU Serial Killer Suspected in Sixth Campus Death—Classes Suspended Indefinitely."

Eunchae called ten minutes later, crying. Her roommate hadn't come home last night.

You sat with your head against the window, phone pressed to your ear while she sobbed and begged you to check the quad for signs. "Just go see if the lights are on—please—I know I sound crazy, I just—if her light's off, maybe she's just sleeping somewhere else—please—"

You told her okay. You told her you would. You told her to breathe.

You didn't tell her that your hands were shaking.

—

Sunghoon found you on the steps of the student center two hours later, sitting alone with your head in your hands. He didn't ask what happened. He just dropped a coffee next to you and sat down beside you with the softest thud.

You didn't speak for a while.

Then he said, "Do you remember sophomore year? When some creep stole your gym bag, and you thought it was because your name was on it?"

You nodded, slowly.

"And then we found it in the vending machine room, cut open like a trash bag?"

You nodded again. A dry laugh stuck in your throat. "I forgot about that."

"I didn't," he said. "I remember thinking how easy it was. To scare someone. All you need is access and time."

You turned to look at him. His face was unreadable.

"Do you think that's what this is?" you asked. "Just some guy with too much time?"

"No," he said flatly. "I think it's someone who's been planning this for a long, long time."

A shiver crawled down your spine.

Sunghoon finally turned to meet your eyes.

"And I think if you keep walking home alone, I'm gonna lose my mind."

—

That night, Yunjin went missing.

Her phone was found buzzing under the bleachers near the soccer field.

The last message sent: "i think someone's following me lol"

She never came home.

She never texted back.

__________

They canceled classes.

For real this time.

Every department. Every building. Every lecture hall emptied like a cut artery.

Your dorm group chat was nothing but blurry police cars, reposted rumors, and panicked voice notes. By the time you left your room to check the laundry machines, you counted seven missing students. One of them was Yunjin.

Her bed was still made.

Her tea mug was still in the sink.

Her charger was still plugged into the wall beside your own.

You didn't speak. Didn't cry. Didn't blink for too long. You just moved. Loaded laundry. Checked for campus alerts. Counted the names.

And waited.

You knew the police wouldn't find her.

You didn't say that out loud, but it was there. A dry ache in your throat.

They hadn't found the others either—not whole, at least.

—

Sunghoon came by at 5:12 p.m. with food.

Ramyun in plastic containers. Gimbap from that spot near the tennis courts. You hadn't eaten since breakfast and your stomach still turned when he set it all down.

"You need to eat something," he said, voice quieter than usual. He didn't look at you directly. Just handed you chopsticks and sat on the edge of your desk like it was any other night.

Like your roommate's shoes weren't still sitting by the door.

You managed three bites. Maybe four.

Sunghoon didn't push. He just tapped his foot in rhythm against the leg of the desk and waited like he could soak up your panic just by staying close.

"Eunchae's staying with Jake tonight," he said finally. "They're panicking. I think she's gonna have a full breakdown soon."

"I should go see her," you whispered.

"No."

He looked at you now. Stern. "Let them handle each other. You're not her therapist. You need to sleep."

"I can't sleep."

"I'll stay."

You hesitated. Then nodded.

—

Sunghoon fell asleep in the desk chair around 1:00 a.m., arms crossed, head tilted slightly like he was listening even in dreams.

You watched him for a while.

Not out of suspicion. Out of envy.

You wondered how he could be so calm. So steady. You felt frayed at the edges, like a wire stripped down to copper.

You scrolled. Checked your notifications. Opened Instagram. Closed it.

You were reaching to plug your phone in when it vibrated.

Unknown number.

No contact photo. No preview.

Just:

incoming call

00:00

Unknown Caller

You stared at it.

Didn't move.

Didn't answer.

Then—

On the fifth ring—

Your thumb slipped.

You brought the phone to your ear with shaking fingers. "...hello?"

Silence.

"Who is this?" you whispered.

Still nothing.

You pulled the phone away to hang up—

—and then the voice came.

Low. Gravelly. Slightly distorted, like it was coming through cheap speakers.

"...did she scream?"

You froze.

"Excuse me?"

"Yunjin."

A breath.

"Did she scream when she died?"

You opened your mouth but nothing came out.

The voice on the other end didn't care.

"I think she did. I think she screamed so loud, it made the teeth rattle out of her skull."

You stood up without realizing. Backed into the closet.

You could see Sunghoon sleeping in the chair, unaware.

"Who are you?" you hissed, voice cracking.

The line crackled.

"You're cute when you're scared. But I like it better when you fight back."

Something twisted in your stomach. Cold. Rotten. Violent.

"Go to hell," you spat.

"Say it again."

"What?"

"Say it again. C'mon, say it like you mean it. Say it like you'd say it if I were right behind you."

Your legs buckled.

You didn't know it yet—but someone was behind you.

Not in the room. Not in the closet.

Outside.

On the fire escape.

Watching. Listening.

The call went dead.

—

You hung up and stared at the blank screen.

Your hands were numb. Your throat burned.

You turned to wake Sunghoon—

And stopped.

He was already awake.

Eyes open.

Phone in his hand.

Looking at you. Not startled. Not confused.

Just... quiet.

"What happened?" he asked softly, like he already knew.

You shook your head.

"Wrong number," you lied.

He nodded once. Didn't press.

Just stood up, stretched, and said:

"I'll stay in the hallway. Text if you need anything."

—

He didn't go to the hallway.

Not right away.

He walked outside first. Around the side of your dorm. Past the bushes.

All the way to the alley behind the engineering building.

Where a cracked burner phone lay in a puddle.

Still warm.

Still slick with fingerprints.

He crushed it beneath his heel and didn't flinch when the glass snapped.

Then he pulled out another one. Unmarked. Clean.

Just in case he wanted to hear your voice again.

__________

Jay always thought he'd be the one who figured it out.

He wasn't arrogant—just interested. He watched documentaries, took forensic electives for fun, edited murder podcasts for his media club. He didn't panic when the first girl died, or the second. He even told you once that if a serial killer ever came to campus, he'd be the one to catch him. "You guys don't pay attention to detail," he said, tapping the side of his head. "It's all patterns. Psychology. Weak spots. Nobody kills for no reason."

And for a while, it made him feel safe.

But safety is a story. And Jay was a side character in someone else's.

The killer came for him after midnight, when the studio was empty and the audio booth still smelled like spilled Monster and foam glue. Jay had stayed late—again—editing a voiceover for a girl who hadn't shown up to record her lines. Her name was on the missing list now. He kept checking her Instagram, waiting for it to update.

He didn't hear the door open. Not over the headphones.

But he did hear the click.

Metal on tile. Something scraping.

Jay turned slowly, pushing the headphones off his ears—and the first thing he saw was the mask. Smooth, pale, long-lipped and hollow-eyed. The kind that meant no expression, no hint, no mercy. He barely had time to stand before the blade sank deep into the side of his neck, not clean, not cinematic—messy. It crunched through cartilage and scraped bone on the way out.

He dropped to the floor choking, blood burbling up into his mouth as he tried to scream, but his vocal cords were already severed. The knife came down again—shoulder, then ribs, then back. Six times. Then ten. Then too many to count.

And when it was over, the killer knelt beside him in the pooling red, gloved hand reaching into Jay's hoodie pocket.

He pulled out a tiny recorder—still blinking red. Jay had been recording again. For safety.

The killer chuckled once under the mask and clicked it off.

Then cracked it open. Smashed the memory card under his heel.

Jay's body was found twelve hours later, twisted in the corner behind the mic stand, intestines looped around the boom arm like a scarf.

—

The school went into full lockdown mode. Metal detectors at every building entrance. Campus security at every door. No dorm visitors. No after-dark passes. And still—still—the killer left no trace.

You didn't sleep that night. Not after the call. Not after seeing Sunghoon walk out so calmly, hoodie still half-zipped like nothing had happened. You sat in the corner of your bed with a pair of scissors in your hand until dawn broke, the sky going from ash-grey to orange-pink like it didn't know people were dying here.

Jake texted you the news at 7:32 a.m.

"It was Jay."

Just that. No emoji. No caps.

Eunchae came over three hours later with a bag of breakfast sandwiches she didn't touch. Her mascara was already running. She curled up at the foot of your bed and cried into a pillow without saying anything, and you sat beside her with your hand on her back, numb. It was starting to feel like a countdown.

Sunghoon didn't come by that day. No texts. No hoodie returns. Just silence. It didn't bother you at first. Not until late afternoon, when Eunchae finally fell asleep and you were left alone in the stillness. You found yourself staring at your door. Expecting a knock.

When it didn't come, you checked your phone.

Still nothing.

You chewed the inside of your cheek, anxious in a way you couldn't explain. You weren't worried something had happened to him. You were worried that maybe—he was done keeping an eye on you.

And that thought unsettled you more than it should have.

—

Sunghoon was in the fencing studio, alone, moving in silence.

The campus was locked down, but he still had keycard access. Technically, all athletes did. He moved across the mat with practiced steps, shoulder blades flexing under his black t-shirt, sword flicking forward again and again like he was imagining something specific. A shape. A target. A face.

He didn't think about Jay while he practiced. Jay had been too obvious. Too eager. Always watching people like they were puzzles to solve. The kind of guy who left clues without knowing. He probably thought it would be cinematic—that if he died, someone would avenge him.

Sunghoon didn't care about drama. He cared about control. Timing. Silence.

He lunged forward and stopped, blade inches from the wall.

Breathing slow. Body steady.

Then he walked to his bag, opened it, and pulled out your photo.

The real one. Taken from the second-floor railing two days ago. You were wearing his hoodie again. Hands deep in your pockets. Talking to Eunchae, head tilted just slightly, lips parted like you were about to laugh but didn't.

He stared at the photo. Tilted it. Then tucked it into a pocket sewn into the lining of his jacket.

He didn't smile.

Didn't speak.

Just went back to practicing.

____________

They held a vigil for Jay in front of the library. Not because he was religious, but because no one could think of anything else to do. Candles, handwritten signs, plastic sunflowers, all circled around a warped photo board the media department made in a rush. He was smiling in every picture. Arms slung around shoulders, peace signs up, chin tilted like he was already in on the joke.

It rained halfway through.

The candles sputtered out one by one.

You watched from the back with your hood up and your arms wrapped tight around your middle. Not crying. Not blinking. Just counting the people around you and wondering how many of them would still be alive next week.

Jake stood beside you, stiff and angry and pacing slightly in place.

"I told him not to stay late," he muttered. "I told him. I said it wasn't worth it—editing some dumb podcast for people who didn't even show up. But he was like, 'nah, it's chill, I've got this.'" Jake's voice cracked. "He didn't got anything. He got gutted."

Eunchae sniffled softly on your other side. "Do you think he knew it was coming? Like... did he see him before it happened?"

You didn't answer.

The truth was—you didn't want to think about what Jay saw. You didn't want to imagine that mask from the call crouching beside him, blade in hand, voice low and laughing.

You wanted to disappear.

Jake suddenly swore under his breath and turned away from the crowd, pulling his phone out with trembling fingers. "No one's doing anything. The cops are useless. You know they haven't even released the time of death? You know how easy it would be to fake an alibi without that? I should—I don't know—post something. Maybe we track who wasn't around."

You reached out, grabbing his wrist before he could tweet anything stupid. "Jake. Don't. You'll make yourself a target."

His jaw locked. "Maybe I want to be."

You didn't say what came to your mind next—You already are. Not just because he was loud, or nosy, or brave in the wrong way. But because he was close to you. And that felt like a pattern now.

Sunghoon wasn't at the vigil.

You didn't expect him to be.

—

He came to you the next night instead, just after midnight, like nothing had changed. He knocked once, soft, and you opened the door to find him in a black windbreaker, hair wet from the drizzle, plastic bag in hand.

"Choco pies," he said simply. "And banana milk."

Your breath caught. "Seriously?"

"You looked like you needed sugar," he shrugged. "And trauma burns calories."

It was stupid, and tender, and made your eyes sting harder than anything at the vigil. You stepped aside and let him in, pressing the heels of your palms to your face to hide how much it hurt.

He didn't comment. Just toed off his sneakers and sat on the floor like he used to sophomore year, back against your bedframe, snacks spread out like a campfire picnic.

"I haven't been sleeping," you admitted quietly after a while, voice rough. "Every time I close my eyes, I think I hear someone at the door."

"Then don't sleep," he said, chewing. "Rest with your eyes open. That's what I do during lecture."

You managed a laugh—barely.

"I mean it," Sunghoon added more seriously, tilting his head. "The moment you start thinking you're safe, that's when you fuck up. You're doing good right now. You're alert. You're still breathing. That's what matters."

You looked at him.

At the faint bruises under his eyes. At the slow, careful way he tore the wrapper of another choco pie and handed it to you like you'd drop dead if he didn't.

"Sunghoon..."

"What?"

You paused.

"Why do you care so much?"

His chewing slowed, then stopped.

You thought he'd say something cocky, like someone's gotta keep you alive, or because you'd be boring as a ghost, but he didn't.

He looked at you for a long time, eyes unreadable.

Then he said, "Because you're not like the others."

It was such a simple answer.

It made your stomach twist.

—

The police started interviewing students one-on-one the next day.

You got pulled into a side room near the campus security office—white walls, flickering ceiling light, cheap folding chair. The officer had tired eyes and a half-finished coffee in his hand, and he asked you questions like he was reading off a checklist.

"Did you know Jay Park personally?"

"Yes."

"Was he acting strange in the days before his death?"

"No stranger than usual."

"Did he express fear, concern, or mention anyone following him?"

"He was paranoid, but that wasn't new."

"Did you have a romantic relationship with the victim?"

That one made you blink.

"No," you said, slower. "He was my friend."

The officer nodded like it didn't matter either way. You watched the way he scribbled, how he didn't even look up.

"Are you in a romantic relationship with anyone else?"

Your mind went blank.

Then, without thinking: "No."

And then: "Wait. Why does that matter?"

He didn't answer.

—

Later that evening, Jake called. Not texted—called.

His voice was fast, out of breath. "I think I figured something out. About Jay's audio. I found a backup he uploaded to the drive before they scrubbed it—he was recording. I can hear something in the background. Heavy breathing. It's faint, but it's there."

You sat upright. "Where are you?"

"Library basement. I didn't want to open it in my dorm. Too many people around."

"Jake, go home. Don't listen to it alone. Please."

"I'm fine. I just need to clean the audio a bit. Then I'll send it to you. Give me—wait."

Silence.

"Jake?"

Static.

Then:

"I think someone's down here."

You stopped breathing. "Get out. Jake—don't wait, just leave."

But he didn't answer.

You could hear his footsteps, fast and uneven, the slam of a door, the rustle of his backpack— Then a thud.

A long exhale.

And a sound you'd never forget.

Metal against teeth.

The line went dead.

____________

Jake didn't die clean.

He ran, just like he should have. Grabbed his laptop, bolted from the basement computer bank, shoved through the emergency exit even as the alarms shrieked around him. He was smart—used the stairwell instead of the elevator, kept low, didn't look back. The file was still on his drive, auto-uploaded. He just had to get to someone. Anyone.

But the killer knew the building better than he did.

The third-floor hallway was empty when Jake burst through the door. Lights off. Security camera blinking. He sprinted for the side exit, the one that led to the media labs—he didn't see the figure waiting behind the bulletin board. Didn't hear the creak of the floorboard under their foot until it was too late.

The knife caught him low in the gut, not a fatal spot, just enough to slow him down. He hit the wall, gasping, fingers scrabbling for anything to throw, but the killer moved fast. Not like a wild animal—like a professional. Like someone used to silence. The second cut slashed across his thigh, severing muscle. The third went for the shoulder. Then the fourth, fifth, sixth—by then, Jake was shrieking. His screams echoed through the empty halls, bouncing off the lockers and soundproof walls.

No one came.

When he collapsed, twitching and wide-eyed, the killer crouched beside him. Gloved hands searched his pockets with meticulous care. Laptop. Gone. Phone. Crushed under a boot. Flash drive. Yanked from his coat lining, snapped in half, tossed aside like a toy.

Jake bled out five minutes later. His body was staged under the audiovisual banner, arms spread like wings, headphones placed gently over his ears. The killer wiped the knife on Jake's sweatshirt, stood, and walked out through the emergency stairwell without a word.

—

You found out the next morning when Eunchae screamed.

She dropped her phone in the sink while brushing her teeth, soap still dripping from her fingers as she shoved the cracked screen toward your face. The campus alert was already trending: "SNU STUDENT FOUND DEAD IN LIBRARY HALL—POTENTIAL AUDIO FILES MISSING."

You didn't breathe. You didn't move. You just stared at the words until they stopped making sense. You'd heard him. Heard the way he whispered I think someone's down here. And now he wasn't anywhere. Not online. Not in the group chat. Not answering your texts.

You ran.

You didn't care about curfews or security checkpoints. You sprinted across campus in pajama pants and a hoodie, heart pounding, skin clammy with dread, until you reached the taped-off side of the library. Uniformed officers and paramedics hovered like vultures, pushing back students who tried to get a look. You stopped at the edge, breath caught in your throat.

You saw the shape under the tarp. You knew his shoes.

You turned away and threw up in the grass.

Someone steadied you by the shoulders—warm hands, familiar voice. Sunghoon.

He said nothing at first. Just guided you away, one arm wrapped around your back like a wall. You didn't realize you were crying until he handed you a tissue, and even then, you could barely hold it steady.

"He called me," you croaked. "He was trying to send me the audio. He said he found something—he said someone was in there with him—"

Sunghoon didn't react. Not a twitch. Just held you closer, fingers pressed to the base of your spine.

"I should've gone," you whispered. "I should've—"

"You would've died too," he said, voice low. "You know that, right?"

You couldn't answer.

"He was trying to help," Sunghoon added quietly, brushing a damp strand of hair from your cheek. "That's brave. But he didn't do it right."

You blinked up at him. "What?"

"He told you he was scared. That was his mistake. You never say it out loud. Fear gives them permission."

The way he said it—so calm, so sure—made your blood run cold. You stepped back, just slightly, and his hand dropped to his side without protest.

"I'm sorry," he said, softer now. "I just don't want it to be you."

You wanted to ask him more. About what he meant. About how he knew. About why he was even there—but your throat felt raw, like your voice had been carved out. So you nodded and let him lead you away again, not because you trusted him, but because he was the only solid thing left. Everyone else was gone.

—

That night, your phone buzzed again.

Unknown number. No preview. Just the cold pulse of a call waiting to be answered.

This time, you let it ring.

Your breath came fast. Shallow. Like your lungs were locked in place.

It rang seven times. Then stopped.

No voicemail.

No message.

Just silence.

But you knew—somewhere, out there—he was watching.

And this time, he didn't need to speak.

You already understood.

Jake was the last warning.

Now it was your turn.

______

You didn't leave your room for the next forty-eight hours. The lights stayed on. The blinds stayed shut. Your phone stayed at one percent, clinging to life only when you remembered to charge it between waves of nausea and grief. You weren't eating, not really. Not sleeping either. Just sitting. Staring. Listening for something you couldn't name. Yunjin was still missing. Jake was dead. Eunchae had stopped replying entirely, retreating to her own dorm where she locked the door and refused to answer when you knocked. It felt like the campus had rotted from the inside—like something was eating it, piece by piece, and you were too frozen to outrun the teeth. Every time your phone lit up, your heart stopped. Every time it didn't, you thought it meant he was already inside. There was no winning.

On the third day, the photos arrived. No warning. No text. Just a dropbox link from a blocked number sent to your school email. Your hands shook as you clicked it open, dread already clawing at your throat. There were only four images. The first was of Jake's body from above—someone had taken it before the paramedics arrived, before the police tape, before the crowd. His arms were still spread, his head twisted slightly to the side, a thin stream of blood trailing from one ear. The second was Yunjin's student ID, snapped in half and left on a tile floor you didn't recognize. The third was a blurry picture of your dorm window, taken from across the quad. Curtains half drawn. Lights on. You could see yourself in the frame, back turned, unaware. The fourth—was you. In the laundry room. From three nights ago. Folding clothes in Sunghoon's hoodie, headphones in, completely alone. The timestamp matched the first night you got the call.

You slammed the laptop shut so hard it cracked the corner of the screen. Your stomach twisted, bile rising, hands clawing at the edge of your desk like the wood might break before you did. This wasn't random anymore. It wasn't about being in the wrong place or knowing the wrong people. He wasn't just hunting students. He was circling you.

Sunghoon came to your door twenty minutes later, and you nearly didn't let him in. Your pulse was still erratic, sweat sticking your shirt to your back, jaw clenched so hard your teeth ached. He knocked twice and didn't say your name—just waited. When you finally opened it, he took one look at your face and stepped inside without asking.

"What happened?" he asked, voice low.

You didn't answer right away. Just went to your desk, opened the laptop again, and turned it toward him. Sunghoon didn't flinch. He looked through each photo with unreadable eyes, jaw tight, fingers flexing once against the edge of the screen. Then he sat down slowly, elbows on his knees, and stared at the floor like he was calculating something.

"He's escalating," he said after a long pause. "This is personal now."

Your voice cracked. "I don't understand—why me?"

"Because you're still alive."

You hated how calm he sounded. How steady. But it made sense. The killer wasn't just picking targets. He was staging them. Leaving them as messages. Making you watch. Maybe he wanted to break you first. Or maybe he wanted you scared enough to slip up.

"Should I go to the police?" you whispered.

Sunghoon tilted his head. "And say what? That someone emailed you photos after five students were butchered? That you've been getting mystery calls? That Jake was trying to send you a recording and died before he could hit send?"

Your stomach churned. "Yes."

"They won't believe you," he said flatly. "They'll think you're hysterical. Or worse—they'll think you're next."

Your mouth felt dry. "But I am next."

He looked up at you then, gaze sharp.

"Then you need to stop acting like prey."

You didn't know what made you do it. Maybe it was fear. Maybe it was the quiet panic humming under your skin like a motor. You sat down across from him, face still burning, and asked, "Why do you always know what to say?"

Sunghoon's expression didn't change, but something about his posture shifted—shoulders looser, mouth twitching almost into a smile.

"Because I pay attention."

—

The next morning, your bed was empty. Not just unmade—empty. Sheets gone. Pillows gone. Mattress stripped to the bone. In their place was a single item.

A copy of The Bell Jar, open to a page you didn't remember reading.

A line was circled in red pen:

"The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence."

You stood there, frozen, skin prickling like someone had just breathed on the back of your neck. You didn't scream. You didn't cry. You just sat down slowly, stared at the book, and realized: he'd been in your room.

Not at the door. Not through the window.

Inside.

___________

You didn't go to the police. You didn't tell anyone. You didn't even replace your sheets. For a full day and night, you lived with the knowledge that someone had entered your room while you slept, moved around you while you dreamed, touched your belongings without a sound. You sat on the bare mattress with your back to the wall and your phone clutched in your fist like it could save you if it rang. It didn't. Not once. Not even to mock you. That, somehow, was worse.

You couldn't eat. Couldn't shower. Couldn't stop replaying the line from the book over and over in your mind. It was my own silence. It echoed louder than your thoughts. You couldn't tell if it was a warning, a threat, or something else entirely—an invitation. Either way, it meant one thing: he knew you wouldn't speak. He'd taken your trust in law, in systems, in safety, and twisted it into a gag. And it was working.

Eunchae stopped responding completely. You hadn't seen her in days. Her dorm light stayed off. Her messages were left unread. You texted her twelve times before finally deleting the chat. Jake was dead. Yunjin was missing. Wonyoung was buried. And Sunghoon was the only person still checking in. Not constantly. Not suspiciously. Just... enough. Enough that when he knocked again that evening with a thermos of soup and a bag of apples, you opened the door without asking why he knew you hadn't eaten. You didn't have the strength to question anything anymore.

"You look like shit," he said gently, brushing past you.

"Thanks."

He didn't laugh. He just set the bag down, handed you a spoon, and sat at the edge of your stripped bed like he didn't notice it was bare. His presence was grounding in a way that made your stomach twist. He shouldn't have felt safe. He shouldn't have been the only one still standing. But he was. And the more you unraveled, the more that started to matter.

You didn't ask why he came. You just let him stay.

—

The second intrusion happened the next night. You were in the bathroom, door unlocked, brushing your teeth with the fan running. When you returned, one of your pictures was gone—an old polaroid taped beside your desk, taken at a freshman orientation party. You, half-drunk and grinning, Sunghoon next to you with his eyes squinting from the flash, arm slung around your shoulder. It had been there for over two years. Now the tape was still there, but the photo was gone. Peeled carefully. Intentionally.

You stood frozen for a long time.

This wasn't about death anymore. It was about presence. Proximity. Touch. He was in the walls of your life now, prying them apart piece by piece. You were no longer being hunted. You were being groomed. And that realization made your skin crawl more than any knife could.

When you told Sunghoon, he didn't look surprised.

"You need to start thinking like him," he said. "Stop reacting. Start anticipating."

You curled in on yourself, shaking. "I don't want to think like him."

"You might not have a choice."

You looked at him then, searching his face for something—fear, maybe. Empathy. He didn't give you either. Just leaned forward and said, "Whoever this is, he's not just killing for fun. He's building something. A pattern. A narrative. And you're the main character. So the question is—how does your story end?"

You stared at him, stunned. "Do you think I'm going to die?"

"I think he doesn't want you dead," Sunghoon said calmly. "Not yet. If he did, you wouldn't be here."

You tried to swallow. Your throat clicked dryly.

"I think he's studying you," he continued, voice low. "I think every time you flinch, he learns something. Every time you don't speak up, you confirm it."

"Confirm what?"

"That you're his."

—

You woke up the next morning to a message written on your mirror in lipstick. You didn't own lipstick. It was a deep, waxy red, smeared slightly in the corners like it had been applied slowly, with pressure.

"don't let him touch you. he doesn't deserve it."

You stared at the words for a long time, chest tight. You didn't know who "he" was supposed to be. The killer? Sunghoon? Someone else entirely?

You wiped it off with a towel, but the words burned behind your eyes the rest of the day. You couldn't concentrate. Couldn't sit still. Your phone buzzed twice with news updates—Eunchae still missing. No leads on library murder. And the last—Campus-wide power outage scheduled for midnight due to electrical grid overload. Students advised to remain indoors.

That night, you sat by your window and watched the lights go out one by one. Dorms, classrooms, the streetlamps lining the quad. Everything vanished into blackness.

And then, just beyond the trees, you saw it— A flicker.

A shape.

A white mask, standing still at the edge of the field. Not moving. Not coming closer. Just... watching.

You blinked and it was gone.

Or maybe it never moved.

Maybe it just waited.

Knowing you'd see. Knowing you'd panic. Knowing you'd do exactly what you did next.

You texted Sunghoon:

"I saw him."

"Outside."

"I'm scared."

No reply.

You called. Straight to voicemail.

Then the knock came.

Soft. Precise. Not frantic. Not hurried.

You didn't know who it was.

But you opened the door anyway.

________

It was Sunghoon at the door.

Of course it was. Not that you knew for sure until you saw his face under the dim hallway light, rain dripping from his jacket, hair flattened to his forehead like he'd run through a storm to get to you. He looked out of breath. Alarmed. Human. You were too disoriented to question it.

"I got your texts," he said simply, voice tight. "I came as fast as I could."

You opened the door wider and let him in.

It didn't occur to you until much later that you never heard his phone ring.

He stepped inside and pulled off his jacket, glancing quickly around the room like he was checking for signs of a break-in. Your hands trembled as you closed the door behind him and turned the lock. It didn't feel like enough. No lock did anymore.

"I saw him," you whispered. "He was outside. Just standing there."

Sunghoon turned to face you, eyes sharp. "Are you sure?"

"Yes." You tried to breathe. "He was just watching. He didn't move."

Sunghoon exhaled slowly and crossed the room. He didn't touch you, but he stood close. His presence took up space like armor.

"He wants you scared," he said. "That's the point. He wants you to feel him even when he's not there. It's not about death anymore—it's about obedience."

You swallowed. "How do you know that?"

He looked at you carefully. "Because you're still alive."

The words chilled you more than the wind through your half-open window. He said them so evenly, like a fact he'd memorized. You stepped back instinctively, hugging your arms to your chest, and he watched you like he was noting the reaction for later.

"He's getting bolder," you murmured. "He's not hiding anymore."

"He doesn't need to."

You didn't ask what that meant. You weren't sure you wanted to know. Instead, you moved to your desk and picked up the shattered photo frame—the one from freshman year, the one that had been whole the last time you looked. Now only the backing remained. The picture of you and Sunghoon was gone again.

"Was this you?" you asked before you could stop yourself. The words were bitter, stupid, but honest. "Did you take this?"

He didn't flinch. Just tilted his head slightly.

"If I did, would you still let me in?"

You stared at him.

He smiled then. Not wide. Not sinister. Just enough to make your stomach knot.

"I'm kidding," he said after a pause, too lightly. "Probably."

That night, he didn't leave. He stayed until the power came back on. Sat on the floor. Watched the window. Every time your phone buzzed, he glanced at it before you did. You told yourself it was just instinct. He was just trying to protect you.

He fell asleep with his back against the closet door. You didn't ask him to. He just did. Like he knew where you needed him to be.

—

In the morning, the body was found outside your dorm. Not a friend this time. Not someone close. Just a girl from your chemistry lecture. You didn't even know her name. She was pinned to the wall with a screwdriver through her collarbone, mouth sewn shut with red embroidery thread. Her fingertips were missing.

A single note was taped to her chest.

"i liked it better when you were afraid of me."

You threw up in the bathroom.

The police locked down your building. Again. Officers flooded the halls. Questioned everyone. You didn't say anything. You didn't have to. Sunghoon said it for you.

"She's been in her room all night," he told the RA. "I was here. Ask anyone."

No one questioned it. Not when he spoke so clearly. Not when he looked so calm.

You sat on your stripped mattress and stared at your closet, heartbeat dull in your ears. There was no part of your room he hadn't touched. No part of you, anymore, that felt untouched. Not by him. Not by it.

When the officers left, Sunghoon turned to you and crouched beside the bed, watching you carefully.

"He's testing you," he said. "He wants to see how close he can get before you break."

You shook your head, hollow. "Why?"

Sunghoon reached into his pocket, pulled out something small, and held it between two fingers.

It was your photo. The one from the polaroid. No glass. No frame. Just the print.

You froze.

"I found it outside," he said smoothly. "In the bushes. I thought you'd want it back."

You took it slowly, like it might bite you. He watched you the entire time.

Then he stood up, stretched, and said he'd see you later.

—

He didn't text that night. You didn't sleep.

Instead, you sat in the dark with the photo in your lap, thumb brushing over the corner that had been bent, wondering if it had always looked like that. You stared at your own smiling face, at his beside you, mouth open in mid-laugh, arm heavy on your shoulder. You looked happy. Safe.

You didn't feel safe now.

Not from the killer.

Not from the quiet.

Not from yourself.

You didn't know who to trust anymore.

But you did know this:

Someone was watching.

Someone was close.

And whoever they were, they didn't want you dead.

Not yet.

They wanted you alone.

______________

It happened in the rain.

Not the quiet kind. The kind that drenched you to the skin in minutes, that hammered against the sidewalks like it was trying to erase the campus piece by piece. You weren't wearing a jacket. You hadn't meant to be outside at all, but the power had flickered again—just once, just long enough to trigger something inside you, something primal. You bolted. Out of your dorm, through the courtyard, past the chapel where Wonyoung's candlelight vigil had collapsed into puddles. You didn't know where you were going. You just needed to move.

You made it as far as the athletic center before the panic caught up. You ducked into the side entrance by the locker rooms, soaked and shivering, shoes squelching with every step. The building was dark. You didn't care. You pressed your back to the wall, fists clenched, teeth chattering.

You weren't alone. You knew it before you saw him.

Sunghoon stepped out from the shadows near the fencing mats, hoodie damp, hair flat, eyes unreadable. He wasn't startled to see you. He never was.

"What are you doing out here?" he asked calmly, stepping closer.

You didn't answer. You just stared. Your chest was heaving, and it wasn't from the run.

"You're not safe out here," he said, slower this time. "You shouldn't be alone."

Something inside you snapped.

"Then why am I always alone after someone dies?" Your voice cracked, loud in the empty space. "Why do you always show up after something happens? Why are you always the only one left?"

Sunghoon's expression didn't shift. But he didn't step closer again.

You kept going. "Why do you always know things you shouldn't? Why do you talk like you're reading from his script?"

Silence.

Then: "Because I am."

It didn't sound like a confession. It sounded like a fact.

Your stomach dropped.

He walked forward, slow, deliberate, steps echoing against the tile.

"I tried to wait," he murmured. "I really did. I thought maybe you'd figure it out on your own. That you'd say something. That you'd see me."

You stepped back.

"You're lying," you whispered.

He tilted his head. "Am I?"

Your hands were shaking.

"You called me," you said. "You called me while you were asleep in my chair. I heard your voice and you were right there. How the fuck did you do that, Sunghoon?"

He smiled. Not big. Not fake. Just... pleased. Like a magician revealing the final card in a trick you never even saw him shuffle.

"I wasn't asleep."

You blinked.

"I watched you the whole time," he continued softly. "Your hands. The way you stared at your phone before it rang. I timed it perfectly—waited for your fingers to twitch like they always do when you hesitate. And then I called."

You backed into the wall, heart slamming against your ribs.

"The phone was outside," he said. "On the fire escape. I left it there earlier. Synced it to a second burner. Voice mod on. Just enough distortion to make you wonder."

You stared at him. Your breath came in short, uneven gasps.

He stepped closer. "And then I watched. I listened. You were beautiful."

"Stop."

"No," he said, almost tender. "You asked."

You swallowed bile. "Why me?"

That stopped him. For a moment, he actually looked thoughtful.

"Because you never looked at me like they did. Not like I was just another pretty boy. Not like I was someone to chase or brag about. You looked at me like I was real. Even when I wasn't trying to be."

He took a step closer.

"And then I saw how you fought. How you survived. Every time I pressed a little closer, you didn't break. You sharpened. You stopped crying. You started watching. And I realized..." He smiled again. "You were mine."

"No," you whispered.

"I didn't want to hurt you."

"You killed them."

"I killed them because they were close to you." His voice didn't rise. It didn't need to. "Jake was sniffing. Yunjin was slipping. Eunchae wouldn't stop asking questions. They didn't protect you. They put you in danger."

Your knees felt weak.

"I kept you alive," he said simply. "I scared you into locking your doors. I trained you. I made sure you learned. And now look at you." He paused, head tilting again. "You're still standing."

You backed away, toward the exit. He didn't follow. He just watched you go.

"I'll give you tonight," he said, like he was doing you a favor. "But don't lie to yourself. You'll come back. Because now that you've seen me, you'll never feel safe around anyone else."

You stood frozen at the door, breathing hard.

He looked at you like he already knew.

"You don't want to run," he said. "You want to understand."

___________

You didn't run. Not that night. Not even the next morning. You packed a bag. Not much—just what you could carry in one arm. You walked through the campus like a ghost, eyes lowered, face blank. Everyone was grieving. Everyone was scared. No one noticed you slipping through the cracks, silent and slow.

You didn't go to the police. You didn't text anyone. You didn't try to leave town.

You didn't know if it was fear, shock, or some kind of numb fatalism that stopped you. Maybe you thought you had more time. Maybe you believed he meant what he said—that he would wait.

You were wrong.

—

It happened in the stairwell.

You were almost at your floor, bag slung over your shoulder, one hand on the railing, steps echoing under your sneakers—when you heard the shift. A breath. Not loud. Just enough. Enough to know you weren't alone.

You turned.

He was behind you. Hoodie up. Gloves on. Mask in one hand. His face wasn't hidden, but he might as well have been a stranger.

"Sunghoon—" you started, voice tight.

He didn't let you finish.

You screamed. You actually screamed, raw and loud and full of something primal—but it was muffled by his hand, shoved over your mouth with brutal force. His other arm locked around your waist, hauling you off the stairs like you weighed nothing. You kicked, thrashed, scratched. Your elbow caught the edge of his jaw—he grunted, hard—and for a second you thought maybe, maybe he'd stop.

But then he whispered against your ear: "Wrong move."

Your legs hit the concrete. Your bag hit the floor. The stairwell door slammed shut with a deafening clang.

He didn't speak again until he had you pinned—your back against the wall, his hand still over your mouth, body pressed too close.

"I told you," he breathed, "I'd give you one night."

You made a choked sound, tears stinging your eyes, the fear catching up with the shock. Your mind screamed he's going to kill me—but he didn't reach for a weapon. He didn't raise his fists. He just looked at you like something sacred and furious.

"You were leaving," he said. "I saw the bag. You were going to disappear without saying goodbye."

You tried to speak, but your voice cracked into nothing under his palm.

He leaned in closer, mouth to your ear.

"Did you really think you could walk away after everything I've done for you?"

Your knees buckled.

"I scared you into surviving," he snarled. "I cleansed this place for you. Every threat. Every noise in the dark. I made it mine so you could exist in it without fear."

Your tears came faster now, hot and soundless. You shook your head. His hand stayed firm.

He paused, then pulled his hand away, just enough for you to breathe—but not escape.

"Look at me."

You didn't.

"Look at me."

You met his eyes. And that was worse. He wasn't smiling. He wasn't cold. He looked devastated.

"I didn't want it to be like this," he whispered. "But you gave me no choice."

Then something snapped behind his eyes, and before you could brace for it, he was dragging you down the stairs. Not fast. Not clumsy. Efficient. You kicked. Screamed again. Bit his shoulder through his hoodie—he cursed but didn't let go. A door opened somewhere below—he moved faster. Another voice echoed—he pulled you into the basement so hard your vision went white.

You hit the wall. Not hard enough to knock you out, but enough to stun you. The air left your lungs in a gasp.

Then the needle came.

You didn't even see it at first. Just a sharp pinch in your neck, a flash of metal. You tried to swat it away, but your hands were sluggish. The world started tilting sideways. Your knees gave out.

Sunghoon caught you before you hit the ground. Held you. Smoothed your hair.

"You'll thank me when you wake up," he murmured.

Your vision blurred. Your body stopped responding.

The last thing you heard was his voice, close to your ear, steady and final.

"No one else deserves you."

___________

You woke up in someone's bed.

Not a mattress on the floor, not a cot in a basement, not a concrete slab in a cell—an actual bed. With dark gray sheets, pressed flat and tucked too neatly. The air smelled clean, faintly antiseptic, but underneath that... something warmer. Male. Familiar.

It took your mind a full five seconds to process what your body already knew. The ache in your neck from the needle. The weight in your limbs. The tight stretch in your throat from screaming.

And then you heard it.

The soft scrape of a chair on tile.

He was sitting across the room, watching. Legs spread, forearms resting on his thighs, hair pushed back carelessly like he'd run wet fingers through it. No mask. No hoodie. Just Sunghoon. Calm. Present. And terrifyingly sure of himself.

"Took you longer than I expected," he said, not unkindly. "You must've fought harder than I thought. Guess I underestimated your pain tolerance."

You sat up too fast and the world tilted—but he didn't move. Just waited for you to find your balance, his eyes never leaving your face.

"Where am I?" you whispered, voice rough.

"Safe."

"Where?"

"My place. Off-campus".

You stared at him, throat burning. "Why?"

He tilted his head, like the question insulted him. "Because I told you I wouldn't let anyone else touch you."

Your stomach turned. "You killed my friends."

"I removed obstacles."

"You kidnapped me."

He leaned back slightly, eyes narrowing. "I brought you home."

You shoved the covers off and scrambled to your feet, ignoring the way your knees trembled. You made it halfway to the door before he was there—grabbing you by the waist, spinning you into the wall. You gasped, the sound sharp in your throat, his hand already closing around your wrist, pinning it high above your head.

"I told you not to run," he said softly, lips brushing your temple. "I gave you a choice. I waited. I begged you to see me. And you left."

You thrashed, trying to shove him back with your free hand. He caught that one too, dragging both arms above you now, pressing his body flush against yours.

"You're not leaving this time," he growled.

You felt the heat of him—solid muscle, breath warm and even, nothing frantic about the way he held you. He wasn't reacting. He was controlling.

"I hate you," you hissed.

"No, you're scared of how much you don't," he said, voice low, deliberate. "You're scared because part of you knew something was wrong with me all along—and you stayed. You let me in. You trusted me. That's why this hurts."

You jerked against his grip. "Let go of me."

"Not until you understand what you are to me."

He pressed in closer now, his thigh between yours, forcing your legs slightly apart. You froze.

"You think I did all this just to look at you?" he murmured. "You think I waited this long just to watch?"

You could barely breathe.

"I could've taken you any time," he whispered, leaning in, lips brushing your jaw. "But I wanted you to want it. To beg. To break. To need me so badly you forget anyone else ever touched you."

His hand slid from your wrist down your arm, slow, fingers trailing fire. He touched your waist. Then your hip. Then lower. Not under clothes—not yet—but enough to make your whole body flinch.

You gasped. "Don't."

He stilled. His lips were at your ear now.

"Don't what?"

You trembled.

"Don't pretend you didn't want this," he said, voice suddenly cold. "You wore my hoodie. You let me in. You never screamed until I told you the truth. That's not fear, baby. That's guilt."

He pulled back just enough to meet your eyes. His gaze was dark. Heavy. Hungry.

"I'm not going to fuck you tonight," he said. "You're not ready."

You blinked, stunned.

"But I am going to teach you how to belong to me," he added. "Bit by bit. Touch by touch. Until the only thing that feels safe is my hands."

He let go of you.

You slid to the floor, knees hitting the wood. Shaking. Silent.

He didn't offer help. Just walked to the door and turned once before leaving.

"Sleep, if you can," he said. "Tomorrow, we start over. And this time, you won't be allowed to lie."

The door locked behind him.

And for the first time since it all began, you cried without knowing if you wanted him to hear it.

___________

The room never changed. Not even after three days.

No windows. One door. A bed made with crisp gray sheets. A dresser, bolted shut. A bathroom with the mirror removed. Everything you needed to survive—but nothing you could use to escape. No phone. No clock. No sharp corners.

Only him.

He came in twice a day. Once in the morning with food. Once at night with silence. He didn't speak unless you did first. He didn't touch you again—not like before. But he always sat close. Close enough that you could smell him, clean and cold, like cedar and sterilized steel. Close enough to feel his eyes on your skin. He watched you eat. Watched you sleep. Watched you flinch every time the door opened.

"You're not a prisoner," he said on the second night, calmly, as he folded a blanket at the foot of the bed. "You're here because this is the only place you won't get hurt."

You didn't answer. You hadn't spoken since he took you. Not a word. Your silence wasn't resistance—it was preservation. If you spoke, you were afraid you'd scream. And if you screamed, you were afraid you'd break.

On the fourth day, he bathed you.

He didn't ask. He walked in just before dusk, holding a shallow silver basin, steam rising from the water. A folded towel. A clean shirt. A soft, white cloth.

You backed into the corner of the room. He didn't flinch.

"You haven't showered," he said.

You pressed your back to the wall, shaking your head. "Get out."

His expression didn't change. He knelt slowly by the bed, dipping the cloth into the basin. His hands were steady.

"I can be gentle," he said. "But I won't let you rot."

You tried to run. You didn't get far. Two steps and he caught you—arms around your waist again, spinning you onto the bed. You kicked, thrashed, tried to bite. He pinned your wrists above your head, panting slightly from the effort. His face was close, too close. You felt his breath.

"You want me to tie you down?" he asked. "I can."

You shook your head, eyes wide. "Please don't."

His gaze darkened, just slightly.

"Then stop fighting."

You stopped. Not because you gave in. Because you knew what came next if you didn't.

He let go. Slowly. Sat back, cloth still in hand.

"I'm going to take off your shirt," he said. "Nothing else. You don't need to be afraid of me."

But you were. Terrified. Of what he'd do. Of what you might start to accept.

He waited. When you didn't move, he did it himself—carefully, methodically. Pulled your shirt over your head, slow enough to give you space to stop him, but firm enough to make it clear you couldn't. His eyes didn't wander. He didn't leer. He watched your face.

The cloth was warm when it touched your collarbone. His hand was colder. He dragged it down your chest in slow circles, washing you like he'd done this before. Like this was normal. Like this was care.

"You've always been so quiet," he murmured. "Even when you're terrified. Even when you're angry. You go still. You hide it. I used to think you were weak for that."

His hand moved lower. Between your ribs. Along the curve of your waist.

"But now I know it's the opposite. You're strong in a way I didn't understand at first. You endure."

His thumb brushed under the swell of your breast. Not enough to grope. Just there.

Your breath hitched.

He paused.

Then he leaned in and kissed your shoulder. Just once. Soft. Reverent.

"I'll make sure you never have to be quiet again," he whispered. "Not here. Not with me."

You turned your head, teeth clenched. "What do you want from me?"

He smiled like it was obvious.

"Everything."

—

He left the room after that, and you sat for hours wrapped in the towel, trembling, heartbeat pounding so loud it hurt.

You hated him.

You hated how careful he was.

How he never rushed.

How he made you wait for whatever came next.

And worst of all—you hated the part of you that wasn't sure what terrified you more: That he'd hurt you.

Or that he wouldn't.

___________

You didn't sleep that night. Not really.

You lay on the bed, back to the wall, knees curled against your chest, heart thudding like it wanted to run without you. The towel had long since fallen away. The room wasn't cold—but your skin felt bare, exposed. As if his touch lingered in the fibers of the sheets.

You told yourself you were waiting for him to come back.

You told yourself it was to fight. To resist.

But when the lock clicked sometime past midnight, your breath caught in your throat—and not because of fear.

He didn't say a word. Just stepped inside, silent as shadow, door closing behind him with a soft finality. His hoodie was gone. Plain black t-shirt. Slacks. He looked like someone you might've passed on the street. Normal. Calm.

But you knew what he really was now.

You sat up slowly, spine stiff, nails digging into the mattress.

"What do you want?" you asked, voice hoarse.

He didn't answer right away. Instead, he walked to the edge of the bed, sat beside you. Not touching. Just near.

Then:

"I've given you time," he said. "I've fed you. Bathed you. Talked to you like a person."

His gaze turned, slow and sharp.

"But you still look at me like I'm a monster."

You swallowed hard. "Because you are."

He smiled faintly. "Then stop pretending you expect mercy."

His hand touched your ankle. Barely. Just a single finger tracing over the bone. You jerked back like it burned—but he only tilted his head, watching you.

"I don't want to hurt you," he said. "I never wanted to. But I'm done waiting for you to understand."

He moved fast then—smooth, practiced, like a switch had flipped behind his eyes. One moment he was seated beside you. The next, he was on top of you, straddling your thighs, your wrists pinned above your head again, body caged beneath his.

"Let me go," you hissed, but it came out too breathy, too weak.

He leaned in, lips brushing your temple.

"I could," he whispered. "But you'd run. And we're past that now."

You struggled, kicking beneath him—but it only made his grip tighten, his body press harder. You could feel him now. Hard. Fully, darkly aroused, and not bothering to hide it.

"I've seen the way you freeze when I touch you," he murmured. "But your body never lies. You're not scared of me. You're scared of what I make you feel."

His thigh slid between yours again. This time, he ground it upward. The pressure hit your core, firm and devastatingly precise. You gasped, body arching involuntarily.

"There it is," he said, low and satisfied. "That little tremble. That warmth."

"Stop—"

"No."

His hands slid lower now, down your arms, to your ribs, then your waist. Every touch calculated. He didn't grope. He learned. Mapped the places you reacted. The places you twitched. The places you trembled.

"You've never let anyone touch you like this, have you?" he asked. "Never let them see how soft you get when you're scared."

You turned your head away, breathing hard, but his hand caught your chin, turning you back to him.

"I want to watch you fall apart," he said. "Right here. Right under me."

Then his mouth was on yours.

Not gentle. Not rough. Just real. Hot, deep, demanding. His tongue slid past your lips before you could stop him, and you hated how easily your mouth opened for him. How natural it felt. How right.

You hated that it made your hips roll into his thigh.

He groaned into the kiss, pulling back just enough to speak against your mouth.

"That's it. Feel it. I want you to feel what I've been holding back."

He shifted lower, mouth trailing down your neck, sucking at the pulse point—slowly, greedily—until your legs parted under him, almost on instinct.

"You're mine now," he growled. "And I'm going to make sure you know it."

His hand slid between your thighs. Over your panties. Pressed down, fingers rubbing through the fabric—circling, pressing, controlling.

You moaned. Not a scream. Not a sob. A raw, broken moan.

"You're already wet for me," he whispered, voice shaking with hunger. "Fuck, you feel so warm through these. I should ruin them. Rip them right off. You'd cry, wouldn't you?"

Your eyes flooded, tears spilling down your cheeks—but you didn't stop him. Couldn't. Your body had betrayed you long before now.

"You'll thank me when you come," he said. "You'll sob and scream and I'll kiss you through it."

He slipped a finger beneath the fabric. Touched you directly.

And you shattered.

Your back arched. Your breath broke. You cried out—not from pain, not from fear—but from the sudden, unbearable rush of pleasure flooding through your nerves. It was fast. Unstoppable. Your first orgasm under him, against him, because of him.

He didn't stop touching. Didn't let up. Just kissed your cheeks where the tears ran.

"That's one," he whispered. "We're going to do this again. And again. Until you forget anyone else ever touched you."

He kissed you again—slow this time. Reverent. Possessive.

You didn't kiss back. But you didn't turn away, either.

Because now, he owned you.

________

His lips trailed lower. Down your throat, past the swell of your collarbone. His breath fanned across your chest—hot, hungry. You were still trembling, still catching your breath, your thighs twitching from the last orgasm, but he didn't give you space to recover.

"I want to see you," he murmured, dragging your panties down your legs slowly. He paused at your knees—lifting one, then the other—and kissed the inside of your thigh before tossing the ruined fabric aside like it meant nothing.

You tried to clamp your legs together again, humiliated by how wet you still were, but his hands held them open. Firm. Patient. Worshipful, almost.

"You're beautiful when you cry," he said. "But this...?" His fingers dragged through your folds again, deliberately slow, slick sounds filling the quiet room. "This is divine."

Your head hit the pillow. Shame curled inside you like acid—but your hips still rocked toward his touch. You couldn't help it. Every stroke of his fingers found that unbearable ache inside you. Every rub and press and curl made your stomach tighten.

"Please," you gasped, unsure if you were begging him to stop or not to stop.

He smiled against your thigh. "Please what?"

You didn't answer fast enough.

His mouth replaced his fingers.

A hot, wet stripe from entrance to clit made you jolt, a half-strangled moan tearing from your throat. You grabbed at the sheets, but he caught your wrists again—pinning them above your head with one hand while the other pushed your thighs wider apart, locking you open for him.

"You taste like sin," he whispered, then sucked your clit between his lips. Firm and focused.

You writhed beneath him, legs shaking, breath breaking in quick, shallow gasps. His tongue circled, licked, flicked—never the same pattern twice. He was learning you too well. Every twitch, every gasp, he followed like a roadmap. You were unraveling in his mouth.

"No—no more—" you choked, overwhelmed.

But he didn't stop.

He moaned into your pussy like it fed him. Like it gave him life. The vibrations shot straight through your core, your spine arching off the bed, tears streaking fresh down your cheeks.

You came again. Harder this time.

It cracked through you like lightning, your body jerking against the mattress, toes curling, thighs trembling violently around his head. You screamed his name without meaning to—raw, desperate, soaked in shame.

He finally pulled back, mouth shiny with you, eyes dark and glazed with lust.

"That's two," he panted. "And I haven't even fucked you yet."

You blinked at him, dazed, ruined. He let go of your wrists then, just long enough to strip his shirt off—revealing lean muscle, sharp lines, and a dark trail of hair leading into the waistband of his pants.

He undid his belt slowly. Purposefully. The faint clink of the buckle felt deafening in the silence.

You turned your face away, heart hammering again—but your legs didn't close.

They stayed open.

He noticed.

And smiled.

"You'll take it," he said softly, climbing between your thighs again. "Every inch. Every drop. You'll beg for it before the end."

He lined himself up. Thick, flushed, leaking.

You whimpered. "No—please—"

But he pressed the tip against your entrance, dragging it through your slick folds, coating himself in you.

"I told you," he said. "No more pretending."

Then he pushed in—slow at first. Just the head. Your walls stretched, seized, clenched instinctively. You cried out, half in pain, half in unbearable fullness. He groaned above you, the sound low and broken.

"Fuck—you're so tight. So warm." He paused, breathing hard. "I should ruin you."

He pulled back—then slammed forward in one brutal thrust.

You screamed.

He held your hips down, panting through gritted teeth as he sank fully inside you, inch by inch, until he bottomed out. Your walls throbbed around him, stretched to the limit, your body burning with too much—too full, too fast, too good.

He leaned over you, face inches from yours.

"This is what you were made for," he whispered. "To be under me. Full of me."

Then he started to move.

Hard. Deep. Unrelenting.

The bed creaked, the headboard hit the wall, your cries turned to gasps, then sobs, then moans that didn't sound like fear anymore. His name slipped from your lips again—soft, wrecked, helpless.

He fucked you like he owned you.

And maybe he did.

You didn't fight anymore.

You just held on. To the sheets. To him.

To whatever this was becoming.

_______

"Not enough," he growled, still buried to the hilt inside you. "That wasn't fucking enough."

You barely had time to breathe—your body limp, your thighs trembling—when he pulled out suddenly, leaving you gasping, empty, your cunt fluttering around nothing.

Then his hands were on your hips.

"Face down."

You didn't move fast enough.

He flipped you.

One harsh tug on your hips and your face was pressed into the mattress, ass in the air, legs spread, body slack and fucked-out. You whimpered into the sheets—but his palm cracked against your ass, making you jolt, arch, clench around nothing.

"Don't you dare hide from me now," he hissed, dragging his cock along your folds from behind, thick and heavy. "You're going to take me again—every drop, every inch—until you forget your own fucking name."

He rammed in from behind—deeper than before, sharper, the angle brutal. You screamed, mouth open against the pillow as he split you wide, hands gripping your hips like handles.

"Listen to that," he groaned, slamming into you. "So wet—so messy—fuck. You were made for this. Look at you dripping down my cock like a little toy."

Your eyes rolled back, the pressure building again so fast it terrified you. You clawed at the sheets, your knees barely holding you up, but he didn't stop. His hips slapped into your ass, fast and unrelenting, balls heavy and tight against your thighs.

"You feel that?" he panted, leaning over your back, hand slipping beneath your stomach to rub your clit in hard, punishing circles. "That fucking gush just waiting to come out?"

You sobbed into the sheets. "N-no—please, I can't—"

"Yes, you can," he growled. "You're going to squirt for me. All over me. You're going to soak my cock like the filthy little thing you are."

He gripped the back of your neck, forced your face deeper into the mattress.

"Let go," he hissed in your ear. "Come for me again. Come all over my cock."

Then he slammed deep—and didn't pull out.

Just grinded.

The pressure broke like a dam.

Your whole body snapped—hips jerking, thighs shaking violently as a hot gush of liquid sprayed from your pussy, soaking his cock, your thighs, the sheets beneath you. You screamed—raw and helpless, the kind of orgasm that left your mind blank and your vision white.

"Fuck yes," he snarled, watching the mess pour out of you. "That's it—fuck yes, baby. So fucking wet. So fucking perfect. You're mine. Mine."

He pulled out, only to ram back in, chasing his own release now, your cunt still fluttering, overstimulated, wet and messy around him.

"I'm gonna fill you," he panted, fucking you through it. "Deep. Full. I want you dripping when I'm done. I want to ruin you for anyone else—mark you so deep no one else could ever touch this pussy again."

You cried out again—overwhelmed, broken, soaking him with another helpless gush as he fucked you past the edge again.

"Oh fuck—" He cursed loud, then slammed in one final time—grinding deep, burying himself to the base.

He came with a guttural groan, hot spurts filling you in thick pulses, his hips jerking as he emptied himself inside.

You lay limp beneath him, soaked, used, utterly wrecked—his cum leaking from your twitching hole, thighs trembling uncontrollably.

He collapsed over your back, panting, pressing wet kisses to your spine.

"You were made for this," he whispered. "For me. For this."

And in that moment—you couldn't remember what it felt like to say no.

You didn't know how long you lay there.

The sheets were soaked. Your thighs sticky, raw. Muscles twitching from overstimulation. You couldn't stop shaking—even though the room was warm, even though you were no longer alone.

Because he hadn't left.

Sunghoon was still behind you.

Still inside you.

Still breathing slow and steady against the nape of your neck.

"You're perfect like this," he murmured. "All ruined and quiet."

You didn't speak. Couldn't. Your voice was gone. Your body felt like it wasn't yours anymore—like he'd carved something out of you and filled it with himself.

He pulled out slowly, groaning at the mess you made together, at the way your body trembled from the loss. His cum leaked out of you in thick drips, pooling down your thighs. You flinched—but he caught your waist and eased you down flat onto your stomach, gentle now, careful with your battered limbs.

Then he climbed in beside you.

And wrapped his arms around your ruined body.

"I'm not going to hurt you," he said softly, lips against your temple. "Not unless you make me."

His hand cupped your breast. Not to grope—just to hold. His other arm curled tight around your waist, locking you against him like you belonged there.

And the worst part?

You didn't fight.

You didn't run.

Because you couldn't.

Because some part of you had stopped trying to tell the difference between his violence and his care.

"Remember this," he whispered, voice low and lethal. "Remember the way I make you feel. No one else will ever see you like this. No one else gets to have you."

He kissed your jaw, your ear, the damp corner of your eye where the last tears hadn't even dried.

"You're mine now," he said.

And maybe he was right.

Because when you finally closed your eyes—exhausted, wrecked, empty—you didn't dream of escape.

You just dreamt of him.

____________

You were declared missing three days later.

Dorm abandoned. Phone off. No forced entry. No blood.

But your roommate's shoes were still by the door.

Your charger was still plugged in.

They searched the forest for weeks.

Put your face on posters, morning news, Instagram memorial pages.

They asked for tips. Leads. Anything.

But no one looked for Sunghoon.

Because no one suspected Sunghoon.

And by then, you weren't screaming anymore.

You were quiet. Obedient.

Changed.

You didn't want this.

But a sick part of you accepted it.

Because he left no one else alive to stop him.

And now—there's no one left but you.

___________

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[lollovern]

- The Garden Left to Rot -

enhypen masterlist

wattpad

inspired by this post

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♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡

groundskeeper!yang jungwon x guest!femreader x cult counselor!kim sunoo | obsessive romance | cult horror | forced devotion | ritualistic sex | jealousy and rivalry | fucked-up love triangle | knife kink | corrupted comfort | you will belong to someone eventually | DARK CONTENT AHEAD!!

wc: 14k

summary: You’re sent to a grief recovery retreat hidden in the mountains. But this isn’t therapy — it’s a cult blooming in blood and rot. Jungwon wants to bury you where no one else can touch you. Sunoo wants to crack you open until you bloom for him. Both say it’s healing. But it’s obsession.

warnings: extreme gore, threesome, cult rituals, body horror (flowers under skin, insect scenes), blood play, forced confinement, psychological manipulation, emotional degradation, knife play, religious delusion, obsessive behavior, toxic romance, dubcon themes, ritualistic sex, hallucinations, violence

♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡

The van climbs until the road forgets how to be a road. Pines crowd close; fog slicks the windshield like breath on glass. By the time the driver kills the engine, your phone has been surrendered, the waiver signed, and your name—your real one—folded into a sealed envelope with your belongings.

A hand-painted sign leans crooked against a stone pillar: THE GARDEN.

Beneath it, smaller script: Let go. Become.

Everyone here is an adult—paperwork made that clear. Still, the cluster of arrivals huddle like freshmen. A woman in a bone-white coat stands at the gate, serene as a photograph. “Welcome,” she says. “I’m Director Seo. You won’t need last names here. You won’t need yesterday.” Her smile doesn’t reach her eyes. “We begin with stillness.”

Stillness smells like damp soil and rosemary. The compound spreads in tiers: a glasshouse ribbed with iron; dormitories with shuttered windows; a refectory where steam fogs the panes; a low clinic painted the color of milk. The greenhouse breathes—a pulse of heavy, sweet air each time the door opens. Inside, rows of lilies lean toward heat lamps; vines net the rafters; something rustles in the loam.

“Orientation,” says the boy who appears at Director Seo’s shoulder. He’s young—early twenties—with paper-clean features and the kind of smile people don’t realize is a blade until it’s already inside them. Kim Sunoo. His name tag says Counselor; the ribbon beneath it says Ritual Lead. “Shoes off in the greenhouse,” he adds lightly. “We keep the floors soft.”

Your shoes leave the ground. Cool boards. Warm mist. A bell rings once. The arrivals form a circle on woven mats; a dozen white-robed staff ghost the edges. A few guests have the shaved look of hospital discharge; others wear expensive emptiness like cologne.

“Here,” Sunoo says gently, “we do not share pasts. Only needs.” His gaze slips over faces and lands on you. Not a leer. A selection. “You may speak or sit in silence. Both are honest.”

“I need to sleep,” says a woman with chewed nails. “Like, three days.”

“I need to stop remembering,” a man answers, voice flat.

The girl beside you—twenty-two, maybe—says nothing. Yejin is stitched on her wristband. Her hands are ink-stained. She draws while people talk: a quick, vicious graphite—faces with petal-mouths; ribs like trellises. When you shift, she tilts her sketchbook so you can see the newest figure: a person kneeling in dirt, throat blooming with something that isn’t a flower.

“Beautiful,” Sunoo murmurs, as if he’s praising a child’s first recital. “You have a keen eye for transformation, Yejin.”

From across the greenhouse, someone drags burlap sacks along iron grates. Soil dark as coffee spills from a split seam and oozes across the floor. The man hauling the bags moves like he’s apologized to gravity and refuses to do it again. Yang Jungwon. Groundskeeper on his tag. Grey work shirt. Forearms nicked white with old cuts. He doesn’t look at the circle—doesn’t look at you—until he does, and then he doesn’t stop. Not curiosity. Assessment, like weighing a seed between finger and thumb and deciding if it will live in his earth.

Director Seo outlines rules in the smooth tone of a stewardess reciting crash procedures:

No personal histories in group.

No contact with family for the first fourteen days.

No unsupervised access to the greenhouse after dusk.

Do not remove plant material from designated zones.

What is given to the soil remains in the soil.

“That includes grief,” Sunoo says, almost playful. “Especially grief.”

Your dorm is clean in the way of hospital corridors and mortuaries. Two metal beds. Two lockers. A copy of a softbound booklet on each pillow: STILLNESS GUIDE. Your roommate arrives with a jangle of bracelets and the brittle cheer of someone who learned to smile as self-defense. Mira, 26, volunteer-turned-resident-mentor.

“Welcome-welcome,” she chirps, then lowers her voice. “Pro tip: keep your head down the first three days. They watch how you watch.”

“Who?”

“Everyone.” She flicks her gaze toward the window, where the greenhouse skeletons against dusk. “Especially him.” She means Sunoo—you can hear it in the soft, reverent way. “And the groundskeeper when it’s dark.” That last part is almost a warning.

The bell rings again. Dinner is broth that tastes like the inside of a leaf and bread dense with seeds. You eat at long tables while staff move among you like shepherds. Across from you, a jittery young man, Taesun—24, scars like cat-scratches up his wrists—piles his crusts and crumbles them methodically. He pockets a handful when he thinks no one sees.

“For the worms,” he whispers to the crumbs. “They get hungry at night.”

Mira nudges your knee under the table. “He feeds them behind the east wall,” she murmurs. “Says they keep the nightmares down if they’re busy.”

In the clinic after dinner, a nurse swabs your fingers where the paper edges of the waiver bit skin. Nurse Min is beautiful in the harsh way of women who have decided their faces are weapons. When she says “this will sting,” the consonants soften strangely; a long surgical scar splits the underside of her tongue. She catches you looking and lifts a brow that says yes, I am aware of my mouth. Then—almost tender—she tapes your knuckle with gauze printed with tiny flowers.

Back in the greenhouse, the first night session is called Surrender. The lamps buzz. Mist beads your eyelashes. Sunoo stands barefoot on the damp boards, sleeves rolled, voice a low waterfall.

“Close your eyes,” he says. “Name the weight you want the earth to hold for you. Don’t say it out loud. Let your body say it.”

Around you, bodies sway. Some cry. Some freeze. When you keep your eyes open, Sunoo notices. Of course he does.

“New sprout,” he says softly, close to your ear, and the nickname feels chosen, not random. “You don’t have to force stillness. It happens when the soil recognizes you.”

“Does it?” Your voice is hoarse from disuse and altitude.

“Always.” He smiles. Not kind. Not unkind. Satisfied. “The Garden knows its own.”

Across the rows, Jungwon kneels in the dirt, wrist-deep in loam, planting something without a label. He doesn’t follow Sunoo’s cadence; he follows his own. When one lamp flickers, he rises and fixes it with the swift, competent movements of someone who builds instead of asks. When he sits back, the soil clings to his fingers like shadow.

You should sleep. Instead you help Mira remake your beds with the stiff white sheets that smell faintly of bleach and rosemary. She keeps talking, because silence makes her hands shake.

“I came as a volunteer,” she says, tucking corners square. “Stayed as a patient. It’s easier when they tell you what to be.”

“What do they tell you?”

She smiles without humor. “A flower.” Her eyes slide to your bandaged hand. “Try not to bleed in the greenhouse. They don’t like that.”

“Why?”

“Because the soil remembers.”

At night the compound changes. Lights dim. The wind strips the pines and combs the glass with needles. You lie awake and count breaths—yours, Mira’s, the building’s—until you can’t bear numbers anymore.

You go out.

The air is colder than the dorm suggests. The greenhouse glows from within, a pulse behind fogged panes. Beyond the east wall, something moves with slow persistence. You follow the ripple of disturbed leaves to a break in the hedgerow and find Taesun kneeling with his pockets turned inside out, sowing crumbs into the leaf litter like a penitent farmer.

“The worms,” he says. “They hate hunger.”

“And if they’re hungry?”

“They crawl into you,” he says simply, and his eyes are not crazy; they’re convinced. “They’re looking for warmth.”

A lantern kindles behind you. “Curfew,” a voice says.

You turn. Jungwon holds the light up so it paints his face in bones and gold. Up close, his features soften—stillness without Sunoo’s practiced grace; a patient animal’s attention. The lantern makes a thicket of his lashes. He looks from you to Taesun to your bare feet on the cold boards.

“You’ll catch a chill,” he says to you, like it’s a personal offense. “Shoes. Now.”

You should resent the command. Instead, you feel the unreasonable urge to obey. You start toward the dorms.

“Not that way,” he says. “West path. Easier. Less slope.” He tips the lantern so the light doesn’t blind you while you pass. It’s a small courtesy. It also marks you—every guard on the walkway can see who broke curfew and who brought them back.

“Do you plant at night?” you ask, because silence around him feels like standing at a cliff’s edge and leaning a little too far.

“Always,” he says. He doesn’t volunteer more. His eyes drag briefly to your bandaged hand. “You left blood in the greenhouse.”

“I didn’t—”

He lifts two fingers, the gesture efficient and final. “The soil remembers.” His mouth twitches—not a smile, exactly; the ghost of one. “Mira talks too much.”

“Is that against the rules?”

“It’s against survival.”

He walks you to the dorm porch and stops at the bottom step like there’s an invisible line he won’t cross. The night carries pine resin and wet metal. You want to ask him what he plants without labels, what grows under lamps that mimic suns, why the staff wear rosaries made of seeds.

He says, low, “Don’t follow sounds you don’t understand.”

“Why?”

“Because some things here answer to being watched.” He tilts the lantern, and for a heartbeat you see something like a tenderness he hides even from himself. “Sleep.”

You try. You fail. When you finally slide under, it’s the shallow kind of rest that hears every hinge complain.

Morning stains the glasshouse pale gold. Breakfast is porridge and a shot glass of bitter green. “Chlorophyll,” Mira grimaces. “For purity. Or the aesthetic.” She scans the refectory like she’s counting exits. “There’ll be a Placement Walk after breakfast. Don’t volunteer. They love volunteers.”

“What is it?”

She cuts her eyes toward the greenhouse. “They take someone to the grove and ‘help them choose a garden name.’ Sometimes they come back with a wreath. Sometimes without their voice for a while.”

Director Seo taps her cup. “Today’s Placement Walk is for… Yejin.”

The graphite girl looks up, startled as a deer. Her pencil stills. Sunoo’s smile brightens by half a watt. “I’ll take her,” he offers, hand already extended. “I’ve seen her drawings. She understands transformation.”

If you didn’t sleep, you are alert now. Jungwon appears in the doorway like the building made him. His gaze flicks over the room, and when it lands on Yejin’s shaking knuckles, something barely visible tightens in his jaw.

“I’ll go with you,” he says to Sunoo without looking away from the girl.

“Of course,” Sunoo replies. Silk over steel. “Two witnesses. Very proper.”

They lead her out between them: the counselor with a palm light on her shoulder; the groundskeeper holding the door open so it doesn’t bite her. The room exhales when the door closes. Mira’s bracelets clink as her hands start to shake again.

“They’ll bring her back,” you say, because logic is a habit.

“Usually,” Mira says.

Taesun folds bread crumbs into his napkin with ritual care. “If the worms are fed.”

“Stop with the worms—”

He looks up, suddenly fiercer than his tremor allows. “This place eats. I just like to decide what it eats.”

You leave your spoon in your bowl. The porridge lurches in your gut like a tide. Through the greenhouse glass, you can’t see the grove, only the suggestion of trunks and a slit of path. Time grows teeth.

When they return, Yejin walks in her body like someone has moved the furniture. A crown of woven reeds presses her hair flat. There’s a smear of green at the corner of her mouth, like she’s chewed a leaf until it bled. She carries her sketchbook close to her chest as if it’s the last piece of herself no one has touched.

“What did you choose?” Director Seo asks.

Yejin’s voice is soft but intact. “Night-blooming cereus.”

“A flower that opens in darkness,” Sunoo says, pleased. “Perfect.”

Jungwon stands behind them, sleeves rolled to the elbow, forearms dirt-streaked. A single thorn scratches the back of his hand, a bright new welt. You don’t know why your chest warms at the proof that something here can still hurt them too.

As the room settles, Nurse Min touches your shoulder. “Consult,” she says, consonants rounded. In the clinic, she peels your bandage, checks the small cut, nods. “Fine.”

“Was the walk… normal?” you ask, too casual. “For Yejin.”

Nurse Min dabs salve with a gentleness that doesn’t fit her knife-edged face. “Normal is a shape you learn,” she says. “Here, it is round.” She taps your knuckle. “Don’t open yourself on purpose. Things may grow inside.”

“Like what?”

Her eyes flick briefly toward the greenhouse. “Names.”

By afternoon the schedule has you shoveling, watering, scrubbing, writing lines. I am ready to be less. You write it a hundred times until the words separate from meaning and become a pattern of stems and loops. Outside, Jungwon clears a new bed along the south wall. His shovel bites; his shoulders move with the reliable rhythm of practiced labor. A boy twice your size steps into his path and mutters something you can’t hear. Jungwon doesn’t raise his voice. He simply looks at the boy until the boy forgets how to stand where he’s standing and moves.

“Don’t stare,” Mira warns from beside you, but she’s staring too. “He notices.”

“He noticed last night,” you say.

Mira goes still. “You went out?”

“For air.”

“Air is how they catch you,” she whispers, and for the first time her cheer fails. “Promise me you won’t go alone again.”

You don’t promise. You also don’t say I don’t know who I am without alone.

At dusk, group again. Sunoo has you sit closer to him than yesterday. When you resist, he laughs softly, as if you’re charming rather than disobedient. “We sit where the light needs us,” he says. You wonder if that’s a rule or a line he likes. While others speak, he doesn’t look at them; he watches their hands, their throats, the wet edge of eyes. When your breath hitches at someone’s story, he turns his head sharply like a wolf hearing snow crack.

“What would you let go of?” he asks you, voice pitched so the rest of the circle hears only the question, not the ownership threaded through it.

You could say: the fire, the last call you ignored, the smell of burning hair. Instead, you say nothing. He accepts your silence as if it were obedience he taught you.

Outside the glass, Jungwon is a darker shape among dark shapes, moving a hose along the rows. When his head turns toward the circle, it isn’t to the whole; it is to you. He holds you there for a breath you feel in your wrists. Then he tips the hose, and water falls like rain on metal bones.

You sleep after midnight because your body ambushes you. You wake to weight. Not on you; in the air, a heaviness like weather. The greenhouse lights are out. The compound holds its breath.

Something is under your pillow.

You slide your hand beneath it and touch paper—the rough tooth of a sketchbook page. You draw it out under the dim nightlight and see yourself. Not flattering. Not cruel. Exact. You kneel on dark soil, mouth open, and something vines out—delicate stems laced with thorns. Hands—two sets—hold your shoulders lightly, possessively: one set with ink stains, one with dirt ground into the half moons of the nails. At the bottom, Yejin’s cramped script: “Some flowers only open when watched.”

Mira stirs. “What is it?”

“Art,” you say, and your voice surprises you with how steady it is.

“What kind?”

“Prophetic,” you answer, because the truth is an animal pacing the edge of the bed and you’re not ready to let it into your ribs yet.

You slide the drawing back under your pillow and close your eyes. Across the compound, the night shifts. In your mind, Sunoo’s smile threads petals through your tongue. In reality, Jungwon’s lantern skates once across the fogged panes, a slow-moving star. Two orbits, caught in the same sky, tightening.

Slow burn, the booklet promised. Healing begins when you stop resisting.

You do not stop.

You breathe. You listen to the soil remembering you.

And you wait.

______

Morning arrives with a whistle under the door and the faint itch of grit in your teeth, as if you’ve been speaking to the ground in your sleep. Breakfast is the same: porridge, a bitter green shot, tea that tastes like boiled bark. Mira counts sips, bracelets clinking like quiet alarms. Taesun crushes his toast to dust and pockets it, eyes bright with purpose. Yejin sits very still, crown of reeds damp against her hair, sketchbook closed for once like a door she’s guarding with her body.

Director Seo taps her cup. “Today begins the Mouth Fast,” she says, voice smooth as tile. “Speech is the first addiction. For twenty-four hours, we practice voicelessness. Carry your stone”—a monk in linen sets a bowl of river stones on each table—“and let it hold your words. Anyone who breaks the fast will do a double shift in the greenhouse trenches. Sunoo will lead stillness. Jungwon will direct labor.”

A murmur rises and dies, mouths pressing shut to prove eagerness. Mira puts a flat, oval stone in your palm. “Don’t lose it,” she whispers, already breaking the rule. “They’ll say the soil took your voice because you were careless.”

You tuck the stone into your sleeve and meet Sunoo’s eyes across the hall. He’s already watching—of course he is. The smile he gives you would be harmless if you hadn’t seen how he moves when he’s pleased: slower, closer, like a candle drawn to oxygen. Jungwon lingers by the service door with a clipboard and a coil of hose on his shoulder, scanning tables the way a shepherd counts sheep by the sound of their breathing.

Chores first. Outside, the air needles your lungs; the mountain wears its cold like a second skin. Jungwon assigns tasks without looking at his list. “Mira, refectory herbs. Taesun, east wall compost. Yejin, with Nurse Min in the clinic.” His gaze slides to you and steadies. “You—paths and drains. Stay out of the grove.” Not a suggestion.

You carry a stiff-bristled broom down stone paths glazed with last night’s dew. The greenhouse ribs glow under weak sun; from inside, lamps hum, and something leafy slaps damply as if it’s learned the shape of applause. By the east wall, Taesun kneels with a small shovel and a reverence that would be holy if it didn’t smell like rot.

He tips crumbs in a neat line, then pauses to show you something cupped in his palm: a white, blind tangle coiling in damp soil. Worms, yes, but too many knotted together, a living thread. He beams, proud. You force your lips into gratitude and keep sweeping. If you stop, you will hear them, and if you hear them, you will dream them.

A shadow falls across your broom. Jungwon holds out a pair of soft-soled garden shoes with the temporary patience of a man who prefers doing to explaining. “Your feet,” he says. “You bruise easily.”

You glance at your bare socks, damp to the ankle. “Is that a rule?”

“It’s a reality,” he says; the word lands like weight. He crouches without asking, sets the shoes on the path, and steps back, gaze down so you can decide if you’ll take his help. You put them on. They’re warm from his hands. He notices the lift of your breath and looks away so the noticing won’t embarrass you. When he straightens, his eyes snag on the river stone tucked in your sleeve. “Don’t drop that,” he says. “The ravens like to steal them.”

You arch a brow—Are you joking?—but he’s already moving, a steady, unshowy force among the clatter of chores.

By mid-morning the Mouth Fast is a taut cord running through the compound. The quiet isn’t peace; it’s suppression, and suppression hums. Sunoo runs stillness from the center of the greenhouse like a maestro conducting silence. He has you sit within his radius; you don’t know how you know that, but you do. When a guest’s shoulders begin to shake, his hand appears at the nape of their neck—just weight, just heat, just enough to persuade the body that obedience feels like care.

He comes to you last, when the lamps have warmed the panes to sweating. He kneels, not quite touching, gaze on your throat. “Your pulse is stubborn,” he says in a voice pitched for you alone. “It hates rhythm. I like that.” He brushes the air near your jawline, not touching, so you feel it anyway. “The stone will teach it obedience. If you’re good at listening.”

You hold his eyes and refuse to nod. He smiles, pleased with your defiance like a trainer who prefers wild animals because they make better trophies. “We’ll work on it,” he whispers, and stands.

After lunch—a bowl of broth filtered until flavor gives up—you’re pulled into the clinic with half a dozen others for “check-ins.” Nurse Min sits you on a stool and unwraps your finger. The cut is a thin mouth now, pink with newness. She touches a gloved finger to the gauze and sniffs it as if the body has a scent that changes when it’s lying.

“Does it itch?” she asks.

You hesitate. The truth is embarrassing. “Everything does,” you admit. “Under the skin. Like… like something wants out.”

“Something wants in,” she corrects mildly. She takes tweezers to the pad of your finger and draws out a hair-fine splinter you didn’t know was there. It isn’t wood—it’s pale and sappy, flexing like a root in the air. She drops it in a jar and screws the lid tight. “Names need medium,” she says. “Don’t let anyone put theirs under your skin.”

“Is that medical advice?”

“It’s survival.” She tapes a fresh bandage printed with tiny leaves, then, softer, “If you start tasting flowers, spit.”

You leave the clinic with your mouth dry as chalk. On the steps, Yejin waits like a shadow that forgot to attach to a body. She presses a folded paper to your palm and flits off before you can unfold it. In the corner of the page, her fast, lethal graphite: you in profile, throat open, something like a stem ghosting up under the jaw. In the negative space behind you, two silhouettes—Sunoo’s soft edges; Jungwon’s blunt solidity—blur toward one another without touching. Underneath, her careful script: Not yet. But soon.

The Mouth Fast bends afternoon into a colder shape. Without words, people show who they are. Mira hums under her breath and taps her stone against her teeth like a bead. Taesun counts breath with his fingers on his ribs. A new arrival—Hana, thirty and jewel-hard—walks like a woman who refuses to ask permission from the air. An older man, Mr. Ko, rows his spoon through soup with the concentration of a man pretending there is a river and a boat that can take him off this mountain.

At dusk, Director Seo calls for the Seed Burial. “We surrender what we’ve hoarded,” she says, and volunteers step forward with small slips of paper seeded with something that will sprout if the soil wants it. They kneel, press the papers into a rectangle of fresh-turned earth, and cover them with a thin skin of loam. The lamps go low. Sunoo stands at their backs. Jungwon stands at their front, shovel grounded like a staff.

You don’t move. You have nothing to bury you can stand to name.

A woman you recognize from orientation—the one who needed three days of sleep—places both palms flat on the soil like it’s someone she loves. Her breath hitches once; she swallows whatever it shook loose. As the last handful of earth covers the names, something beneath the surface shifts. Not the modest swell of seeds drinking. A shove from below.

The crowd stills. You feel it again—a push. The soil flexes and sighs, grains settling. Someone’s hand jerks back as if bitten. Sunoo’s smile does not change, which means it changes. “The ground recognizes an offering,” he says pleasantly. “Stand, flowers. Let the dark do what it’s for.”

Jungwon’s eyes are on the dirt, not the people. His jaw flexes once, twice. You have the sharp, childish thought—He hears it too—and the relief that follows is so naked you almost miss the fear riding it.

Night stitches the compound tight. The Mouth Fast persists: tongues held, little pantomimes replacing argument. In bed, Mira sleeps with her open palm on her stone like it might roll away. You face the wall because the drawing under your pillow is a magnet and your skull is iron.

A scrape wakes you—a quick, purposeful sound under the window. You slide out of bed and ease the latch. Cold breath pours in. On the path below, a lantern moves slow as a planet. You follow, soft-soled shoes silent on the boards, the stone in your sleeve tapping your wrist like a heart that’s climbed too high.

The lantern stops. Jungwon steps into its circle. He doesn’t look surprised to see you. He looks like a man who has laid a trap and found what he baited it for. He lifts the lantern just enough to catch your face without flaying you with light.

He puts a finger to his mouth—quiet—and crooks that same finger: come.

You should run. You go.

He takes you along the west path to a low, fenced plot you haven’t noticed in daylight, because in daylight everything looks like something else. Up close, the boards are stained darker than weather. He stops you with a hand on your sleeve. His grip is gentle; his hand is strong. “Do not speak,” he says, and for the first time today the command lands like care, not control.

He tilts the lantern over the fence. The light stratifies a pit maybe two meters long, maybe one deep, lined with rough timbers and crawling with the industry of decay. You see peels, stems, pot scrapings—normal compost—then catch on something pale threaded through like lace: cartilage? You squint, heart hammering, and in among the skins and stems you see hair—just a clump, just enough to be undeniable. The sour-metal stink under the rot answers a question you didn’t know you were asking until now.

You stagger, mute because the rule still binds your mouth. Jungwon’s hand rises like he planned for your body to try to leave you. He catches your elbow with two fingers and steadies you without pulling you closer. “Breathe,” he says, voice so low the pit swallows it.

You breathe. He watches your lungs move under your shirt as if measuring if they’ll keep their job.

“What is this,” you manage, a whisper that bruises the fast.

“Everything that isn’t needed,” he says. It is both the most honest sentence you’ve heard since you arrived and the worst one. “Don’t come here alone.”

“Why show me?”

His mouth tightens. He weighs the truth and hands you a ration. “Because you will go looking. Better you see what is true than what you can’t live through.”

He lifts the lantern away; the pit dissolves back into darkness. When he looks at you again, the composure you’ve seen him wear like a uniform slips an inch. “Next time,” he says, “wake me.”

“How?” It comes out harder than you intend. “Do I knock on the earth?”

“On my door.” He says it like a correction and a promise. “I’d rather carry you than find you down there with your throat open to the sky.”

You swallow. The stone in your sleeve digs your wrist bone.

He walks you back along the west path, keeping the lantern low so you don’t blind yourself and tumble. At the bottom of the dorm steps, he stops as if a line of salt has been poured between you. “Sleep,” he says. Then, almost grudgingly—no, carefully, like he fears generosity might teach you to expect it—“You did well.”

“You mean quiet,” you say.

“I mean you didn’t lie to yourself while you were looking.” He turns the lantern, and for a heartbeat your faces share a circle of light. It is not intimate, and it is.

Inside, the warm dark smells like bodies and disinfection. Mira turns in her sleep, bracelets whickering. Your hands shake. Not with the adrenaline of the pit—though that remains like a taste at the back of your throat—but with the realization that both men see you. Sunoo sees the mechanism; Jungwon sees the fracture line. You can’t decide which is worse.

The Mouth Fast breaks at dawn with a bell so soft it feels like a secret. Voices resume like a creek finding an old bed; people speak too loudly, then blush, then laugh at their own relief. Director Seo praises “compliance” as if it were a sacrament. In the refectory, mugs clack, spoons scrape. Words return as barter.

You don’t trust yours yet.

Sunoo flows through tables like sunlight convincing itself it’s holy. He catches your empty mug, pours tea, and sets it in front of you with a flourish that makes a few heads turn. “How did the silence fit?” he asks, lazy, interested. It isn’t small talk. It’s a probe shaped like kindness.

“Like wire,” you say.

He smiles, delighted—as if you’ve told him a secret about yourself he can use. “It looks good on you,” he says, and taps your river stone where it sits on the table as if he gave it to you, as if it obeys him too. “We have Talkback today. You and me.”

“Is that optional?”

“In principle,” he says. “In practice, most people prefer to be seen.” He leans in, lower voice. “You certainly do.”

He leaves before you can snap that you preferred to be alive, actually. Across the room, Jungwon stops at the threshold, takes the refectory in at a glance, and chooses a seat with his back to the wall. He eats fast, plain, as if food is fuel and surveillance is dessert. When he lifts his mug, you notice the fresh welt across the back of his hand—a thorn, yesterday, dragging its punctuation.

Talkback is held in a small room off the clinic, windowless, lit by a lamp that chooses flattery over truth. Sunoo sits too close, but because he knows what too close does to bodies, he leaves exactly enough air that you can fool yourself into thinking you could stand if you wanted to. He doesn’t touch you. He rests his forearms on his knees, hands open, posture full of a patience he wears like silk.

“What is the shape of your fear?” he asks, as if fear is polite enough to have geometry.

“Wide,” you say.

“Flat?”

“Deep.”

He grins. “Good. Honesty makes my job easier.” He looks at your mouth, then your hands, then your throat. “Last night you broke curfew.”

It isn’t a question. “I walked.”

“To the west path,” he says, savoring the corridor of it.

“Is that forbidden?”

“Not if you were with someone.”

You hold his gaze. You don’t look away. You don’t nod. You don’t give him Jungwon.

Sunoo’s smile returns, but thinner. “We don’t punish curiosity,” he says silkily. “We shape it.” He nods to your sleeve. “Keep the stone. I like how you sound when you hold it.”

“I didn’t speak.”

“You breathed differently,” he says, and you hate that you believe him. “This afternoon I want you in the greenhouse. We’ll do matching breath. I’ll keep count so you don’t have to.”

Your stomach remembers the pit and rolls. “What if I say no?”

“Then we’ll go slower,” he says, as if you asked him to make it sweeter. “That’s the kind of consent you like, isn’t it? The kind that arrives after your body learns the lesson.”

You stand because sitting feels like agreeing. He doesn’t stop you. He nods as if you’ve completed a task he set in his head.

“Good,” he says. “The roots are listening.”

Outside, the day is too bright in the way of mountains pretending to be gentle. You find Mira tending pots of kitchen herbs—mint, rosemary, a vicious little basil. “You look like you saw a ghost,” she says without looking up.

“I saw the compost,” you say.

She flinches so hard the basil shudders. “You don’t say it out loud,” she hisses, then checks herself, forces her voice calm again. “Names wake things.”

“Whose hair is in it?”

“Everyone’s,” she says. “Eventually.”

By late afternoon your muscles revolt, and stillness becomes a thing you have to hold down with both hands. In the greenhouse, Sunoo runs breath like a metronome. When he kneels behind a girl whose hands won’t stop shaking, he doesn’t touch her skin; he places his palm two inches away from her spine and waits. The girl’s shoulders ease; her breath learns his count. You hate him for it. You hate her relief. You hate that your body pays attention.

Jungwon moves along the rows with a bucket and a dull pruning blade, nicking stems, turning soil, resetting stakes. When a lamp pops and goes dim, he crosses to replace it without being called. On his way back, he passes near your mat—near, not past. The air shifts with him: sweat, iron, soil, a clean note like water running under rock. He doesn’t look down. He scratches the back of his wrist where a thorn welt cross-hatches older scars and says, as if the comment belongs to the room, “Some things only grow when you pretend you can’t see them.”

You don’t know if he means the plants, the people, or you.

Evening comes with teeth. The bell pulls everyone to the refectory; the sky sits heavy, swollen with weather that refuses to begin. Over dinner, Hana spills her tea and swears loudly enough that half the room jumps; then she laughs, tips her chin like she meant to do it, and glares at anyone who looks sorry on her behalf. Mr. Ko tells Taesun to stop feeding the worms like they’re pets; Taesun bares his teeth, half-smile, half warning. Nurse Min pockets a spoon someone bent into a hook. Director Seo watches it all with the small, sated smile of a zookeeper whose animals are thriving.

Night brings the first scream.

Not a long one. Not a movie howl. A single, keening note cut off hard, like a rope being cut. The compound freezes; forks stop halfway to mouths; breath holds. Sunoo is already on his feet, smile sharpened into usefulness. Jungwon’s chair scrapes; he’s moving before you can find your shoes.

They go toward the grove at a measured pace that says they already know what they’ll find. Director Seo lifts her hand. “Stay seated,” she says, and the command lands like weight on your shoulders. Mira’s fingers take yours under the table and squeeze so hard your knuckles grind. You squeeze back. Your mouth tastes like rosemary and fear.

You wait. The greenhouse sweats. The clock you aren’t allowed to see walks itself around the hour by the sound of your blood in your ears. When the door opens again, Sunoo comes in first, serene, coat unwrinkled. Jungwon follows with a bundled shape in his arms—a blanket, a softness of color, too long where a body should bend.

A gasp skips the room. “She fainted,” Sunoo says, which is both intolerably insufficient and the only story you’ll be allowed. “A cleansing reaction. She will rest. We will keep vigil over the names she surrendered.”

He doesn’t say who. Your mind fills the blank with the sleeping woman from breakfast, because that is who you fear for, and fear is a magnet. Jungwon carries the bundle past. You know how much weight that is—your body recognizes the set of his jaw, the economy of his gait. He does not look at you. He doesn’t look anywhere but the door to the clinic, as if any glance could spill what he’s holding.

The dining hall exhales like it’s been underwater too long. Director Seo claps once, neat. “We will not gossip,” she says. “We will not catastrophize. We will practice serenity.”

You don’t sleep. Not because you’re brave—because you’re scared correctly now, and scared correctly people stay awake. When you doze, you wake to the sensation that someone has put a leaf on your tongue and asked you to pray with it in your mouth. You spit into your sheet and find nothing. When you sit up, a shadow peels off the wall near the window and becomes Jungwon.

You nearly fling yourself out of bed. He doesn’t move, as if sudden gestures would spook you. He should not be in the dorms after lights; rules are their own religion here. He breaks this one like he breaks branches: cleanly, without apology.

“You left your shoes,” he says, low. He sets them at the foot of your bed, lined up, laces tucked. His voice is stripped of everything but function. “Don’t go barefoot again.”

“What happened?” you ask, whispering because anything louder might wake the dark.

“Don’t ask me,” he says, and for a breath you think he’s refusing. Then he adds, “Because I’ll tell you.” His gaze drags over your face, cataloging fine tremors, the cracked edge of your mouth, the way one hand fists in the sheet like rope. “Sleep,” he says. “You’ll need it.”

He is out the way he came, the door kissing its jamb like a secret.

You try to obey. The mountain presses its cold face to the window and listens. Somewhere, a lantern moves. Somewhere else, a man like a hymn kneels by a bed that is too light.

You put the river stone back in your sleeve and hold it against your pulse until the beat stops arguing with your bones. You remember the jar in Nurse Min’s clinic with the threadlike root curled at the bottom like a question mark. You picture Yejin’s hand drawing you with something under your skin you didn’t agree to carry.

Stillness was the promise. Obedience was the price. You have paid neither. Now the Garden pays attention.

And you, finally, are afraid.

_________

You wake with the taste of copper and rosemary slicked over your tongue, as if someone pressed a leaf there while you slept and whispered hold it. A welt has risen along your bandaged finger—thin, pale, almost pretty. When you press it, it flexes under the skin like something answering from underneath.

Breakfast is a choreography of clatter and eyes. Mira smiles too hard; her bracelets rattle out a code you can’t read. Taesun tips crumbs into his pocket with priestly concentration. Yejin’s crown of reeds has dried to a brittle halo; she draws with her pencil held like a knife. Hana sits mean and diamond-bright, daring the room to dull her edges. Mr. Ko’s spoon cuts the same path through porridge like a boatman refusing any other shore. Director Seo watches the surface of her tea the way people watch the sea for bodies.

“The Naming Rite will be held at sundown,” she announces, as if she’s asking for the salt. “Those selected have been notified.”

Sunoo lifts his eyes, and that’s your notification.

Mira’s fingers find your knee under the table and clamp. She shakes her head once, small, fast—refuse. You don’t know what refusal looks like here besides a story they will tell about you afterward.

“Drink,” Nurse Min says when you pass through the clinic to turn in your night report—how many hours asleep, how many awake, whether you dreamed of heat, teeth, drowning. She hands you a glass the green of pond water. You smell it, and it smells like lawn and iron. “Chlorophyll with a little hem,” she says, seeing your face. “Calms the heart.”

“Calms or slows?” Your voice scratches.

She cants her head. “Same action, different motive.” She glances at your finger. “Still itching?”

“It… moves,” you say, and the honesty makes your stomach pitch. “Like a thread.”

“Everything alive wants a home,” she replies. She peels the bandage with sure fingers. Underneath, the welt has subdivided into delicate veins, a fine network. Not veins. Veining. It looks like leaf. She presses the back of her glove along it; the pattern darkens, limned green under the skin. “Names need medium,” she repeats. “Keep your mouth closed in the greenhouse today. Even when you want to answer.”

You want to ask answer what, but Sunoo is in the doorway, dusk caught in the lamplight of his hair. He doesn’t knock; he glides in like permission. “Our new sprout,” he says, pleased to find you in a chair. “I’ll take her.”

Nurse Min’s mouth goes a little flatter. “She eats first.”

“Of course.” Sunoo’s smile doesn’t move. “Then we breathe.”

The greenhouse sweats. Heat lamps hum like insects; the glass with its rain of condensation blurs the mountain into a myth. Staff move among the rows with trays of soil sheets—thin paper seeded with something that glitters faintly when the light hits it wrong. “Embedded affirmations,” Sunoo tells the group. “You write what you’ll surrender. The seeds will carry it.”

Hana snorts. “Is the surrender refundable?”

Sunoo’s eyes quicken. “There’s always a transaction,” he says. “We just prefer you know the price.” He looks back to you. “Mat,” he says, and it isn’t a request.

You sit. He kneels behind you, palms hovering two inches from your ribs. No touch—just the sense of touch waiting. “Open your mouth,” he murmurs. The admonition from Nurse Min echoes; you clamp your lips. Sunoo’s pleased noise lands against your neck like breath. “Good. Breathe through your nose. In on four, out on six. I’ll count.”

His voice is a rope you have to grab to keep from slipping. When your breath shudders, he matches it; when it calms, he pursues. On the sixth cycle, something sweet pushes the air—lily, wet earth—and you remember the pit and want to be sick. “Stay,” he says, reading your recoil. “Stay where your body is. Don’t run from it. That’s where people rot.”

Across the rows, Jungwon replaces a cracked lamp with quick, sure hands. He doesn’t look at you until he does, a glance like a hand closing on the back of your neck. The air between you tightens. His forearms are netted with healed cuts, white against brown; a fresh welt crosses them like a red thread. When Sunoo says “out on six,” Jungwon turns the dial and the light hums obedient, and you wonder whether the whole building breathes to his count.

Yejin brings you a tray of seed-paper without being asked. When you reach, her gaze drops to your bandage. She moves the pencil like a blade and sketches the back of your hand: the delicate leaf veining, the suggestion of something wanting to break surface. She writes Not yet over the knuckles and slides the paper into your lap. Her mouth is a thin line; her eyes are large and dry and furious.

The day’s chores are smaller and meaner than yesterday’s. Scrub the condensation gutters. Rake. Haul sacks labeled Bone Meal that smell like old molars. Taesun sings under his breath in a language not meant for mouths and leaves a damp trail of crumbs along the east wall. Mr. Ko fetches and carries with blank efficiency, his face empty as a cleaned plate.

By late afternoon, a woman you know only as Auntie Hye—fiftyish, hair cut short for neatness, eyes that scan like a mother bird’s—begins to cough. At first it is dry and prim; then she hunches, pushes a hand to her chest and coughs wet. A ribbon of something bright pops free onto her palm. Petals. White. Tissue-thin and slick with saliva. A few guests laugh—nerves, delight, cruelty. Nurse Min is there before the room decides what to feel, hand under Auntie Hye’s chin, tissues ready. Hye coughs again, harder, and a clot of petals spills: red-tipped now, streaked. She hacks out a final cluster and sags. The tissues are sodden. The petals look like tongues.

“Pollination,” Sunoo says calmly. “Sometimes the body rehearses letting go by practicing bloom.”

Auntie Hye shakes her head, breath hitching. “I didn’t—” she starts.

Sunoo presses two fingers lightly to her throat. “You did.”

She closes her mouth.

Jungwon comes with a bucket and a flat spade; he scoops the petals into the bucket without expression. Your stomach tilts; you grip the bench until the wood prints itself into your palm. He doesn’t look at anyone. He takes the bucket toward the compost. You see his jawclench once when he passes the pit door and files that, like a photographed crime scene.

After the petals, other small horrors follow as if emboldened. A boy pulls his sleeve up to scratch and reveals a faint green tracery along his inner arm; when he scrubs at it, the skin reddens and puffs and the pattern brightens like a pressed leaf held to light. Mira slices a basil stem and it bleeds thin, clean sap; she runs her thumb along the cut and licks it without thinking, then startles at the taste and laughs too loudly. Taesun tips a paper cup into a drain, and a pale, slick worm writhes against the grate and splits into two thinner threads that both crawl the wrong way, toward his fingers. He coos like they’re babies and tucks them back into mud.

“Don’t feed your nightmares,” Nurse Min says without looking up from the woman whose mouth she swabs. “They grow fine on their own.”

By evening, the heat in the greenhouse feels like a hand that won’t lift. The lamps go low. Director Seo stands by the iron ribs with her clipboard like a prayerbook. “For the Naming Rite,” she says, “we welcome Sunoo as Voice and Jungwon as Hands.”

Voice and Hands. A division of power simple enough to live inside.

You are led—gently, unmistakably—toward the central bed, a rectangle of fresh loam bordered by smooth stones. Yejin edges after you, sketchbook clutched to her chest; Nurse Min blocks her with just a glance. “Not this,” Min murmurs. “Later.”

Mira steps forward—too fast—“I can go instead,” she says, smile like a knife wrapped in tissue.

Sunoo’s smile is silk on a nail. “We don’t barter names,” he says. “We harvest them.”

Your knees give. Not dramatic; a small buckling, the body remembering the ground. Sunoo’s hand is there without touching you, a near-weight at your shoulder. “Kneel,” he says, as if reminding you what your body already decided. “Head up. We face what we bring.”

Jungwon stands at the foot of the bed, shovel grounded. Close, his expression is the same flat steel as his blade. He looks at your throat the way carpenters look at walls: not hunger—assessment. When he speaks, his voice is small enough to belong only to the three of you. “Do you know what you’re giving?” he asks.

You try to say No. What comes out is “Something I can’t carry.”

“Good,” he says, and the word is not kindness. It’s calibration.

Sunoo’s fingers hover at your jaw, turning your face by the gravity of proximity. “Open,” he tells you, and your mouth obeys because your body recognizes a doctor’s tone even when it comes from someone who would rather be a priest. He places a petal on your tongue. It tastes like cold tea and a coin. “Hold,” he says. He waits. When you swallow despite yourself, his smile flares. “You see? The body knows ceremony even when the mind resists.”

He steps behind you. You feel his presence like a heat lamp. Jungwon moves to your side and holds out his hand. On his palm: a knife. Not sharp—its edge has been blunted until it’s a tongue of metal—but its point is honest. He waits until you meet his eyes; only then does he set the flat of the blade against your sternum. The steel is cool. Your skin fists under it.

“This is how we write it,” Sunoo says, and his breath touches the shell of your ear like a whispering moth. “Not deep. Not cruel. Not yet.”

The blade slides up without breaking skin, tracing between ribs, across the slow bell of breath—sternum, clavicle, the notch at your throat. The metal leaves a trail of gooseflesh; your pulse hammers against it like an animal trapped under the lid of a box. Jungwon’s other hand is steady at your shoulder, not pushing, not holding, just there, a second horizon the body can measure itself against.

“Name what cannot follow you,” Sunoo murmurs. It could be a real question. It could be a spell. Your mouth fills with the taste of flower and iron; words gather behind it like flies at meat.

You can’t say the fire; to say it would open something that the soil will keep. You say, “The last night.”

“Again,” Sunoo purrs.

“The last night,” you repeat, and the room tilts like a field under wind.

The congregation—guests in white, staff in linen—sways. Mira has both hands pressed to her lips. Taesun rocks in small, violent arcs. Yejin’s pencil moves; she draws you kneeling, two sets of hands marking you; she smudges the graphite so the air around you looks like breath or smoke.

The blade dips, lifts, comes to rest against your throat’s right side. You feel the exact spot where it would enter if it wanted to. Jungwon’s pulse is visible in his wrist; steady, heavier than yours. He moves the flat in a small crescent along the tendon, and your voice leaves you for a moment—pure reflex. A small, unpretty sound. Sunoo shivers behind you, pleased as if you performed a note he’d been coaching you toward.

“Do you understand the price?” Sunoo asks softly.

“No,” you say honestly.

“Beautiful,” he says, delighted. “No one ever does until after.”

He lifts the petal from your mouth with two fingers and lays it on your tongue again like communion. You hold it. Jungwon takes your left hand. His palm is rough and warm; soil lives in the whorls of his fingerprints. He pricks the pad of your finger with the very tip of the blunted knife, as if he wants to remind the blade of its older religion. A bead of blood swells, bright, neat. He turns your hand and presses that red to the seed-paper waiting in a shallow trench at the bed’s edge. Your blood bleeds into the paper like water into thirst.

“Now,” Sunoo says, voice dropped low enough to live in your bones, “we plant what you are not. So what you are can grow.”

Jungwon folds loam over the paper. The soil is cool even in this hothouse weather. It sucks at your finger when he presses your hand flat to it. Something moves underneath—something too quick for roots. Your stomach rocks. You try to pull back. Jungwon’s hand covers yours, firm as a yoke; Sunoo’s hand wraps your throat—not squeezing, just holding the column steady. You are pinned in two places that translate directly to obedience.

“Breathe,” Sunoo says.

You do. The soil under your hand warms like a mouth.

The congregation murmurs. Not words; the sound bodies make when they agree to a script. Director Seo watches like a reader flipping to the end to be sure it comes out as written. Nurse Min’s face has the set of a woman who’s decided to count a vein until morning.

The thing under the soil stills.

Jungwon lifts your hand and wipes the loam away with his thumb. The smear looks like war paint. Sunoo releases your throat and smooths his palm down the line his fingers left, a correction, an apology, a brand. He bends and whispers against your ear, “You belong to the ground,” and then, after a heartbeat, “and to us while you’re learning.”

His mouth never touches skin. The idea of it does.

The Rite closes with a bell that tastes like copper in your teeth. People file out as if stepping around a sleeping animal. Mira gets to you first, palms hot where she holds your face. “Drink water,” she hisses. “Don’t go to sleep. If you dream the name, it sticks.”

“I didn’t give it,” you say.

She laughs, a small animal sound. “You bled. That’s enough.”

Mr. Ko offers a clean handkerchief without meeting your eyes. Hana watches from a distance like a hawk deciding if a rabbit is worth stooping for when the field is full of easier meat. Taesun beams, mud on his lip, as if he’s just watched a very good wedding.

Yejin presses a drawing into your hand and vanishes. It’s you kneeling, hands marked, a line along your throat that is not a cut but knows where one would go. Over your shoulder, two shadows bend—one a heat-halo, one a blunt storm. Soon, she’s written. Don’t say yes with your mouth.

Night. The mountain holds its breath. The lamps in the greenhouse go black one by one until the glass is only a shape. You sit on your dorm bed and watch your hands not shake. Mira sleeps curled like a comma with her stone under her cheek. The drawing under your pillow warms to your scalp as if it wants to crawl into you.

A knock—not on the door. On the window, one knuckle, once. When you slide the frame, cold air pours in, and you think of Nurse Min’s keep your mouth closed in the greenhouse and keep it shut.

Jungwon stands below, lantern hooded, face lit just enough to make eyes and jaw. He tilts his head—come—and you go because your legs have learned this path. Out the back, down the steps, across the boards to the west path. He waits in the shadow of the shed where spades hang like a rack of tongues.

“Any dizziness? Nausea?” he asks, clinic-plain.

“Just… aware.” The word feels too small for your body’s rattled hum.

He grunts—approval. He reaches for your hand and turns the palm up. The loam under your nails has dried to fine grit. He rubs it away with his thumb, slow, methodical. It’s almost tender until you realize he is checking for changes—for the leaf-vein under your skin brightening, for anything moving that shouldn’t. When his thumb passes over the edge of your pulse, it jumps. He looks up sharply. You look away.

“You shouldn’t stay in the dorm tonight.” Matter-of-fact. “You’ll hear things like your name, and some of them will be for you and some won’t. You’re still soft. Soft things take impressions.”

“Where do I go?”

“My room.” Flat. Then, as if he heard how it sounds: “It’s safer. There are no plants there.”

“Is that true?”

“It��s true enough.” He waits. “Or go to the clinic and sit under Min’s lamp and let her count your breaths until morning.”

“Which would you pick,” you ask, because some part of you refuses to let him stand there and decide your body in his head without you in the room.

He takes too long to answer, then says, “The clinic is gentle.” A beat. “I am not.”

Wind combs the pines; the greenhouse ticks as it cools. Somewhere a raven laughs like a woman who knows your secrets and isn’t impressed.

“Choose,” he says quietly.

Sunoo’s shadow falls across the path before you can. He steps into the lantern’s circle like a storybook: pale wrists, clean hands, a smile that tells you exactly how he will use it. “Ah,” he says, soft delight. “My flower and my hands. I wondered where the night would put you.”

Jungwon does not step back. He also does not step forward. The lantern holds the three of you in a tight Venn where your breaths overlap. Sunoo tips his head, curious. “You can take her,” he says to Jungwon, which is to say I will let you. “But she’ll come back to me tasting like soil and fear, and we’ll start again from below.” He turns to you, voice honeyed and mean. “Or you can come with me and I’ll teach your body what calm feels like so you know when you’ve lost it.”

The polite violence of the options makes your stomach liquefy.

“Stop,” Jungwon says, and the word is a tool, not a plea.

Sunoo laughs softly. “The earth doesn’t stop growing just because you ask it gently.” He reaches, very slowly, and lifts your jaw with two fingers—not touching skin; his hand floats a whisper below it and your head lifts anyway, obedient to suggestion. “Show me your throat,” he says, and your body almost does it because it learned tonight and bodies like to repeat lessons. You hold yourself still out of spite. His smile warms. “Good girl.”

The words hit like a hand under your ribs. Jungwon’s breath changes. It darkens the air.

“Enough,” Jungwon says again, and hooks a finger in the lantern hood. He pulls it open. Light flares, pot-bright, brutal. The three of you blink; the world loses its beautiful edges and shows its seams. “Clinic,” he tells you.

Sunoo’s smile fades pixel by pixel until only his eyes shine. “For now,” he agrees. He steps in closer so there is no air between the three bodies but what breath can claim. He looks at Jungwon and speaks to you. “You’ll end up between us anyway,” he says, the prophecy flat, not cruel. “Why not learn the shape early.”

You should move. You should walk yourself to the nurse and let her count your lungs like prayer beads. Instead you stand very still while two men who have learned your pulse by different languages consider the currency of your fear.

Sunoo lifts his hand and stops a breath from your mouth. You feel the heat of him without the permission of touch. “I won’t kiss you,” he says, velvet and wicked. “Not yet.” He turns his palm and hovers over your throat, reading the rush there like a favorite book. “See what your body does with almost.”

Jungwon moves behind you so quietly the night forgets to mark his steps. He doesn’t touch you. His presence is so large it reads like contact anyway—the shape of him corralling air. You have the dizzy thought that if you leaned back, he would catch you, and if you leaned forward, Sunoo would open like a mouth.

“Breathe,” Sunoo whispers, and it isn’t instruction now; it’s a dare.

You do. The air leans with you. The world tightens to a triangle: lantern glare, the line of a blunted blade tucked into Jungwon’s belt, the faint copper on Sunoo’s knuckle where he touched your lip earlier with the petal.

“I said clinic,” Jungwon repeats, low enough to live at your spine.

“Make her say please,” Sunoo counters, amusement sweet as rot. “Our girl loves a ritual.”

“Don’t—” you start, and then stop, because the word tastes like surrender and you haven’t decided whose hands deserve it.

“Not tonight,” Jungwon says, and you understand: it isn’t mercy. It’s control deferred. He steps to your side, inserts a palm—warm, heavy—at your waist, not pulling, not pushing, just a point you can move along. Sunoo mirrors the motion on your other side without touching, an echo your nerves misread as contact. Together they guide you three steps, five, toward the clinic’s dim window—two gravities that agree for once.

At the threshold, Sunoo bends so close your ear warms. “Sleep,” he murmurs, the same command Jungwon uses like a blessing. “Dream of hands.” He smiles against the air where your skin ends. “Next time I’ll count for you while he holds you still.”

Jungwon’s hand tightens one notch at your waist, a warning, a promise, a brand pressed through clothes. “Next time,” he says, to Sunoo, to you, to the night that will keep at this until you’re rewritten, “I’ll decide who goes first.”

Nurse Min opens the clinic door before anyone knocks, lamp bright behind her like a little square sun. She takes in the triangle of bodies, the glint of the knife, the feral set of Sunoo’s mouth, the obedient steadiness of Jungwon’s hand at your side.

“Inside,” she says, and steps aside.

You pass between them—Sunoo’s almost-touch a heat across your throat; Jungwon’s real touch a line at your hip you could follow with your eyes closed—and cross into the light.

You do not kiss anyone. No one kisses you.

But as the door shuts and the mountain presses its ear to the glass to listen, you know it: your body already understands the shape they promised. It will remember. It will hunger.

And when it happens—when it really happens—it will not be an accident.

________

The clinic smelled of metal and mint. Nurse Min left you in a chair under her lamp until the feverish hum in your body dulled to a bearable pitch. She made you drink water, bitter and green as ditch weed, and held your wrist while your pulse rattled beneath her thumb. When you asked her if you were safe, she only said, “Nothing in a place like this is safe. At best, some things are safer than others.”

By the time she dismissed you, the compound had already gone to sleep. Mira was curled on her side in the dorm, bracelets stilled. You should have slept too. Instead you lay awake, tasting the memory of a petal pressed against your tongue, feeling the phantom weight of Jungwon’s hand steady at your waist, the ghost of Sunoo’s fingers just shy of your throat.

Your body remembered. It remembered too well.

When you finally slipped into the corridor, your bare feet soundless on the boards, it wasn’t to find air. It was because something in you had already decided that the ache would not stop on its own.

The greenhouse loomed against the night, ribs of iron and glass sweating mist. The lock had never been for people who wanted to stay out. You pushed the door and it sighed open, warm air rushing at you like a mouth.

He was waiting. Of course he was.

Sunoo leaned against a bench, sleeves rolled, pale wrists glowing under the lamps. His expression was the same one he’d worn when he laid the petal on your tongue earlier—delighted, expectant, like he had always known your body would come back to him.

“You breathe too loud when you lie down,” he murmured. “I could hear you from the other side of the hall.”

You should have left. You stepped closer instead.

Sunoo reached for you without touching, fingers tracing the air beside your cheek. That almost-contact burned hotter than heat itself. Your breath caught, and his smile sharpened. “See? Your body tells the truth. It remembers me already.”

His hand hovered down, stopping at the hollow of your throat. “Here,” he whispered. “Where the pulse lives.” He bent, mouth a whisper away from your skin, never quite sealing it. Your nerves screamed as if he’d kissed you. “You want me to touch you. That’s why you came.”

Your denial scraped your teeth but never left your tongue.

“Good girl,” he said, pleased at your silence. He turned you, pressing between your shoulder blades until your knees bent and you landed on the warm boards of the floor. “Stay open. Stay soft.”

His hands came at last—sliding along your thighs, parting them without rush, without doubt. He dragged his thumb along the cotton of your thin shorts, pressing until the damp there gave you away. “Blooming,” he said reverently, as if the word itself could coax you wider.

You gasped when he pressed harder, the friction maddening. He laughed low in his throat, pleased. “You’ve been waiting since the Rite, haven’t you? You swallowed the petal and your body begged for more.”

He tugged fabric aside with clinical precision, exposing you to the humid air. His fingers slicked easily through the wetness already gathered, and he made a sound of satisfaction that went straight to your gut. “So ready,” he crooned. “So obedient.”

Two fingers circled, teased, pressed—but never where you needed. He watched your hips shift, your breath stutter. “Say please,” he murmured.

“I—”

“Shh.” His free hand covered your mouth lightly, thumb grazing your lower lip. “Not with words. With your body.”

Your thighs trembled. You pushed into his hand, desperate. His smile widened. “There it is. Begging without speech.”

He slipped two fingers inside, slow, deliberate. Your back arched, a strangled sound caught behind his palm. He curled them just right, hitting the place that made you shiver, made your eyes roll back. “Yes,” he whispered against your ear. “That’s it. That’s how you bloom.”

His palm pressed harder over your mouth as your moans broke free. His rhythm quickened, fingers thrusting, scissoring, spreading you open as if he meant to plant something inside. Every push forced slick sounds into the greenhouse air. He bent low, lips brushing your temple, murmuring praises between each thrust: “Perfect. My good flower. Opening just for me. No one else will see you like this.”

Your orgasm came sudden, brutal—your whole body snapping tight around his hand, shuddering against him. He kept moving, dragging it out until you were gasping into his palm, thighs twitching.

When at last he withdrew, his fingers glistened. He lifted them to your lips, smearing wetness across them before pushing between. “Taste yourself,” he ordered softly. “Know what you are to me.”

Shame and hunger tangled in your chest. You sucked his fingers clean, and his eyes darkened, mouth parting as if he might finally kiss you. He didn’t. He pulled back just enough to leave you desperate, to make absence itself a cruelty.

“Blooming,” he whispered again, satisfied. “And tomorrow, you’ll be ready for the soil.”

The greenhouse door creaked. You jerked, Sunoo still crouched over you, his slick fingers withdrawing with deliberate slowness.

Jungwon stood in the doorway, lantern spilling gold over his dirt-streaked arms. His jaw tightened as his eyes tracked the wet shine on your lips, the way your legs trembled, the smug curve of Sunoo’s smile.

For a long, brutal moment, no one spoke. Then Jungwon stepped forward, shovel still in one hand, and his voice came out rough, dangerous.

“She’s mine next.”

The lamps hummed. The soil smelled of iron. Your heart beat against your throat like a trapped bird as the two men stared across you, and you realized the next time you were touched, it would be by both.

And you would not escape it.

______

The night you tried to run, the mountain gave you away.

The boards beneath your feet creaked, wet leaves clung to your calves, and the fog was a hand on your throat. You ran anyway. Past the dorms, past the glasshouse ribs glowing faintly from their lamps, down the west path where the ravens laughed like women who knew your secrets.

You thought the dark would cover you.

But the dark belonged to him.

A hand caught your wrist so hard you nearly went down. The lantern flared, and Jungwon’s face came out of the mist—eyes black, jaw locked, the muscle jumping with rage he didn’t bother to soften. He dragged you against him, chest heaving like you’d run into a wall that had learned how to breathe.

“Running,” he said, voice low and sharp as a spade. “After I told you not to.”

“I—”

“Quiet.” His grip on your wrist tightened until your bones ached. “Do you know what he did to you in there? Do you know what you smell like? Soil and him.” His other hand closed hard around your chin, forcing you to meet his eyes. His breath came hot, furious. “I told you not to let him touch you.”

Your protest was thin. “I didn’t—”

“You did.” He shoved you back against the rough bark of a pine. The trunk dug into your spine; his body crowded yours, heat and dirt and something mean. “You opened your mouth. You let him put his fingers in you.” His hand slid down your throat, pressing just enough to make your pulse throb under his palm. “Do you think that makes you his?”

“No—”

“No,” he repeated, mocking and brutal, pressing harder until your words broke into breath. His eyes raked you up and down like he was reading your body for lies. “You’re mine. If you’re soil, then I’m the one who plants.”

The knife appeared from his belt—not sharp, its edge long since blunted, but the point still honest. He held it flat against your belly, dragging it up under your shirt until the cold metal kissed the underside of your breast. You shivered, body jerking against the bark. His mouth twisted, equal parts fury and hunger.

“Scared?” he murmured. “Good. Fear makes roots dig deeper.”

He hooked the blade under the band of your shorts, pulling until the fabric stretched and then snapped. His hand shoved inside without pause, fingers rough, pushing into you like he meant to stake a claim. You gasped, the sound choking against the hand still at your throat.

“Wet,” he said, voice a growl, face close enough you could feel every word on your skin. “You’re soaked for me already. Even after him. Especially after him.” His fingers thrust harder, curling, relentless, forcing your body to answer him. “Say it. Say whose you are.”

You shook your head, too proud, too broken to give it.

His mouth curved cruel. “Then I’ll fuck it into you.”

He yanked your shorts down to your thighs, lifted you bodily against the tree, and shoved his hips between your legs. You clawed at his shoulders, half to push, half to hold on, but he pinned you easy, the knife’s flat pressed to your throat now like a brand. His cock pressed hot and thick against your entrance, grinding through the slick he’d found there, rubbing until you whined.

“You hear that?” he hissed, rolling his hips, dragging the head over your folds until obscene wet sounds filled the air. “Your body begging me in front of the whole fucking mountain.” He pushed in one brutal stroke, burying himself deep, forcing a cry from your throat. His teeth bared at the sound, savage triumph. “That’s it. Open up. Take me.”

He fucked you hard against the tree, every thrust jarring bark into your spine, every shove brutal and unrelenting. The knife never left your throat—flat, cold, reminding you what he could do if he wanted. His free hand gripped your hip so hard you knew you’d bruise, dragging you down onto him, using your body like it was already his.

“Mine,” he snarled against your ear, hips slamming. “Not his. Not anyone’s. Mine to fuck. Mine to plant. Mine to keep.” His pace grew rougher, desperate, jealousy bleeding into possession. “You’ll carry me. You’ll take my seed. You’ll remember whose cock fucked you open like this.”

Your moans tore free, high and broken, every thrust forcing them out. He laughed, breathless, mean. “Good little soil. Look at you—taking it. Clenching so tight you’ll never forget.”

When you came, it was with your whole body jerking, nails raking his back, his name spilling without permission. He fucked you through it, ruthless, using your climax to milk himself. With a final, brutal thrust, he came inside you, grinding deep, growling your name like a curse and a prayer.

He stayed pressed to you, chest heaving, the knife slipping down to rest against your collarbone. He didn’t soften. He didn’t let go. His mouth found your jaw, biting hard enough to leave a mark.

When he finally pulled out, slick running down your thighs, he yanked your shorts back up roughly, like covering you was a punishment. He grabbed your wrist again, dragging you toward the compound.

“You’re not sleeping in the dorms,” he said, voice iron. “You’re mine now. My room. My bed. No one else touches you.”

The lantern swung, throwing gold across the path. His grip never loosened. You stumbled after him, body raw, used, filled, the echo of his thrusts still beating through you.

And you knew he wasn’t bluffing.

______

Jungwon’s grip on your wrist was iron, dragging you through the silent hallways until the greenhouse lamps and dorm windows disappeared. His door slammed behind you, the bolt driven home with the finality of a lock on a coffin. His room was small, spare, stripped bare of comfort—just a bed, a chair, his tools. No flowers, no soil. Only him.

He shoved you onto the mattress like you weighed nothing. Your body jolted, still slick, still aching from what he’d already done. He stood over you, chest rising and falling hard, sweat at his temples, jaw clenched like a vice.

“You don’t go back to them,” he growled. “Not Mira, not Seo, and never him.” His eyes burned. “You’re mine.”

Your breath hitched; the word stuck in your throat.

A voice cut through the dark. “You’re wrong.”

The lantern on the desk flared, spilling its glow across pale wrists, white robes loosened at the chest, a mouth curved in that familiar, cruel delight. Sunoo. Already inside. Already waiting.

Jungwon stiffened, shoulders tensing like a predator finding another in his territory. “Get out.”

Sunoo ignored him. He stepped closer, his smile syrup-sweet but eyes sharp. “She doesn’t belong to you alone. Look at her.” His gaze slid over you where you trembled on the bed, your thighs pressed together, your lips parted from shallow breaths. “She’s terrified. She’s confused. She needs gentleness.” His tone softened, dripping like honey. “And you can’t give her that.”

“Gentle doesn’t keep her alive,” Jungwon snapped, stepping between you and him, shovel-callused fists at his sides. “Gentle lets her rot.”

“Alive?” Sunoo laughed, low and dangerous. “She’s not alive. She’s blooming. That’s what I make her.”

“Blooming,” Jungwon spat, “is just another word for open. And I’m the one inside her.”

The words made your stomach twist; heat and fear tangled until you couldn’t tell the difference. You tried to speak—stop, please stop—but your throat locked.

Sunoo’s gaze darted back to you, softening. He crouched, ignoring the way Jungwon loomed above him. His hand hovered just shy of your ankle, not touching—never touching—but the heat of him crawled up your skin. “Petal,” he whispered, “don’t be afraid. I’ll take care of you. I’ll show you how it feels to be cherished.” His lips parted, almost grazing your skin as he breathed you in. “Let me taste you.”

Jungwon’s growl shook the air. He seized your arm, yanking you back against his chest, his hand spread possessive across your stomach. His cock, still half-hard, pressed against your spine. “She’s mine. Mine to fuck. Mine to plant. Mine to keep.”

Your body shuddered. Fear, yes—but deeper, darker: want, shame, hunger you couldn’t smother.

Sunoo’s smile only widened. “Then let’s see who she opens for first.” He slid closer, slipping between your knees before Jungwon could stop him. His breath fanned over your thighs, hot and wet, and you gasped when he finally touched you—soft, reverent, his hands parting you like something fragile.

The contrast made you dizzy. Jungwon’s grip bruised; Sunoo’s mouth pressed feather-light kisses along the inside of your thigh, slow, teasing, as if every touch was worship. “Sweet,” he murmured, nose brushing close to the heat of you. “So sweet. I’ll make her sing.”

“Don’t you dare—” Jungwon started, but your body betrayed you, hips twitching toward Sunoo’s mouth, a whimper breaking past your lips.

That sound changed everything.

Jungwon froze, then snarled, shoving you down into the mattress, caging you with his body. One hand pinned your wrists above your head; the other tore your shirt open down the middle, fabric splitting under his strength. His mouth crashed to your throat, biting, marking, sucking bruises into your skin with furious precision.

Sunoo groaned at the sight, as if Jungwon’s violence only made you more beautiful. He leaned in, finally sealing his lips over your cunt, sucking hard, tongue lapping deep through your folds. The wet sounds filled the room, obscene, echoing against the bare walls.

You cried out, the noise muffled against Jungwon’s hand when he clapped it over your mouth. “Quiet,” he hissed, teeth at your jaw. “Don’t give him the satisfaction of hearing how much you love it.”

But Sunoo knew anyway. He moaned against you, tongue flicking your clit, fingers sliding inside with practiced ease, curling just right. He fed off every twitch, every muffled scream, every desperate roll of your hips. “See?” he said between licks, voice thick with arousal. “She opens for me. She’s blooming already.”

Jungwon pressed harder, grinding his cock against your hip through his pants, furious at your body’s betrayal, at the way your thighs trembled around Sunoo’s head. “She’s dripping because I fucked her raw,” he snarled. “All you’re doing is licking up what I left in her.”

The words made your body jerk, shame and desire hitting like lightning.

Sunoo pulled back just enough to look up at you, his mouth shining with your wetness, his eyes dark and soft. “You taste like need,” he whispered. He dragged his tongue slowly over your clit, savoring the way you cried out under Jungwon’s palm. “And you’ll remember I was the first one who made you come with his mouth.”

“Shut up,” Jungwon snapped. But his own hips rolled against you, his cock throbbing, desperate. His jealousy only sharpened his need.

You couldn’t fight it. You came hard, body arching, Sunoo’s mouth sucking your clit, Jungwon’s hand holding you down, his teeth biting at your throat. Your orgasm tore through you like the roots of something invasive, clawing deep, unstoppable.

They didn’t stop.

Sunoo licked you clean, gentle as a lover, humming like he was savoring wine. Jungwon bit harder, grinded rougher, his hand forcing your wrists deeper into the mattress. Both of them on you—one soft, one brutal—until you didn’t know whose name to scream.

And you understood, with raw clarity, that they weren’t fighting for you.

They were fighting through you.

When the shudders finally broke, you collapsed back, gasping, throat raw. Jungwon leaned down, lips brushing your ear, his voice a growl. “This is just the beginning. Next time I’m inside you while he’s in your mouth. We’ll see who you really belong to.”

Sunoo laughed softly, licking his lips clean of you. “She’ll belong to both.”

And for the first time, you realized he was right.

_____

Your body was still shaking when Jungwon yanked you upright, dragging you into his lap as if the bed belonged only to him. His thighs were iron beneath you, his chest hard against your spine. One arm locked around your waist, the other snared your throat, thick fingers spreading wide until his grip owned the column of your neck. He forced your head back, baring your mouth to him.

“You’ll taste me now,” he snarled, lips crashing into yours.

The kiss was brutal—teeth knocking, spit spilling. He shoved his tongue deep, choking you with it, swallowing every noise you tried to make. His palm pressed tighter at your throat until your pulse roared in your ears, until breath itself became something you had to beg him for. Drool slicked your chin, his tongue forcing yours down, his grip refusing to let you turn away. It was less a kiss than a violent claiming, his mouth fucking yours the way his cock had already fucked your body raw.

You gasped when he pulled back just enough to let air in, a string of spit hanging obscenely between your mouths. He licked it off your bottom lip, then spat into your mouth deliberately, cruelly, watching you swallow because you had no choice.

“Open,” he growled, forcing your jaw wider with his hand at your throat. “Good. That’s mine too. Every sound. Every swallow.”

Your vision blurred; your thighs squeezed together involuntarily. Terror and heat tangled until you couldn’t breathe for either.

And then Sunoo was there.

He crouched in front of you, hands sliding up your knees to part them wider, his smile infuriatingly calm even in violence. “My turn.”

“No,” Jungwon bit out, but Sunoo was already moving. He grabbed your chin, fingers digging in hard enough to bruise, and wrenched your head away from Jungwon’s mouth. Your neck snapped to the side, and before you could gasp, Sunoo’s lips were on yours.

It wasn’t tender. It was vicious. He sucked your bottom lip until it split, teeth biting down until pain shot bright, then licked the blood from your mouth as if it belonged to him. His tongue drove past your teeth, tasting everything Jungwon had left there, devouring it with obscene relish.

You moaned helplessly, the sound muffled between them.

Jungwon’s grip on your throat tightened, forcing your head back further, rage pouring off him like heat. “She’s mine.”

Sunoo broke the kiss just long enough to sneer against your wet mouth. “Then why is she kissing me back?” He pressed his tongue to yours again, slow and filthy, sucking until spit ran down your chin. Then he pulled back, wiped it with his thumb, and shoved the slick digit back between your lips. “Lick it clean. That’s mine now.”

Your mouth obeyed before your brain caught up.

Jungwon’s chest vibrated with a growl. He bent and bit your jaw, then your throat, leaving purple marks against Sunoo’s fingerprints. His hand clamped your neck harder, forcing you to gasp around Sunoo’s thumb.

“She’s choking on me,” Jungwon snarled. “Not you.”

Sunoo laughed low, mean. He leaned closer, his forehead pressing to yours, his other hand grabbing Jungwon’s wrist on your throat, not to stop it, but to squeeze it tighter. “Then let’s choke her together.”

The pressure doubled. Your eyes watered, spit pooling at the corner of your mouth, drooling down your chin as both of them held you, forced you open, forced you to take them. One mouth kissed you, sucked you, spat into you; the other bit, bruised, pressed your throat until stars danced.

You weren’t kissing anymore. You were being consumed.

And God help you—your body wanted more.

_______

They had you caged between them—Jungwon at your back, Sunoo at your front—two sets of hands closing every door your body might have tried to escape through.

Your pulse beat frantically against Jungwon’s palm at your throat. Sunoo’s fingers dug into your chin, keeping your face tipped up so you couldn’t hide. Their mouths had already ruined you, spit running down your jaw, bruises blooming on your throat and collarbone like dark flowers. Your chest rose too fast, every breath their permission, every sound something they stole from you.

“You see?” Sunoo whispered, voice as sweet as it was cruel. “She’s ready. She’s shaking for us.” His hand slid down, brushing your stomach, spreading lower. “The soil is wet.”

“She’s wet because I fucked her open,” Jungwon snapped against your ear, his breath harsh. “She’s mine to fill.” He ground his cock against your ass through his pants, thick and hard, a promise of what was coming. His teeth found your neck again, biting until your body arched despite yourself.

The two of them moved you as if you were theirs to arrange. Your thighs were forced wide over Sunoo’s lap, your back crushed to Jungwon’s chest. Rough hands tugged your ruined shorts away; cool air hit the slick heat between your legs. Sunoo hummed like a priest receiving an offering.

“Let me taste again.” He didn’t wait for permission. His mouth descended, sucking your clit into his mouth, tongue lapping at you until your eyes rolled back. His hands locked on your thighs, holding you open for him, his moans vibrating into your cunt.

Jungwon shoved your wrists down into the mattress, his cock rutting against you through fabric, his fury pressed into every grind. “Listen to her,” he growled. “Dripping for us. Begging without words.” He yanked his pants open, the blunt head of his cock dragging along your ass, smearing precum. “She’s going to take both. Right now.”

You sobbed, terror and need colliding until you couldn’t tell them apart. “I can’t—”

“You can,” Sunoo cut in smoothly, lifting his head, chin wet with your slick. He stroked your trembling thighs with a mockery of gentleness. “Your body’s already opening. We’ll guide you.” His eyes glimmered, half-devotion, half-madness. “You’ll bloom for us together.”

Jungwon spat into his palm, gripped his cock, and shoved it between your cheeks, rubbing the head against your tight hole until you whined. “Scared?” he hissed, his hand tightening at your throat. “Good. Fear makes you clench tighter.”

Sunoo’s fingers slid inside your cunt again, curling, coaxing, slicking you up for him. He looked up at you, his smile soft even as he stretched you ruthlessly. “Breathe, petal. I’ll be inside you soon. You’ll be so full you won’t remember how to be empty.”

When Sunoo lined himself up, pressing the head of his cock against your soaked entrance, Jungwon shoved his tip harder at your ass, both of them pushing at once. Your cry ripped the air as your body was forced to split, one cock stretching your cunt, the other pressing past the tight ring of muscle until you thought you’d break.

“Fuck,” Jungwon groaned, voice raw. “So tight. Gripping me like a fist.”

“She’s perfect,” Sunoo sighed, already sinking deeper, your walls convulsing around him. “Taking both of us. Our flower.”

It was too much. The stretch burned, overwhelming, obscene. You clawed at the sheets, eyes rolling back as both of them bottomed out, your body trembling violently with the force of being split in two. They didn’t give you time. Jungwon’s hips snapped forward first, brutal, pounding into your ass with the fury of jealousy. Sunoo met him stroke for stroke, slower, deeper, angling until every thrust speared your cunt exactly where it made you scream.

Pinned, stuffed, broken open—you were nothing but their vessel.

“Say it,” Jungwon snarled, hand squeezing your throat until your vision blurred. “Say you’re mine.”

“She’s ours,” Sunoo countered, kissing you, sucking the spit from your mouth, swallowing your gasps. “Tell us, petal. Tell us who you bloom for.”

Your answer was a sob, a whimper, a strangled cry as their cocks moved inside you, filling every inch, grinding against each other through the thin wall of your body until the sensation drove you half-mad.

“Fuck, I can feel him through you,” Jungwon groaned, rutting harder, holding you down as if you might try to run again. “But you’re squeezing me tighter. That’s how I know you’re mine.”

Sunoo’s tongue licked the tears from your cheeks. “She’s crying for me. Look at her. Look how she wants to be saved even while we ruin her.”

Your body convulsed around them, slick gushing down your thighs, every nerve alight. The pain blurred into pleasure until you were begging without words, your nails tearing the sheets, your cries spilling into their mouths as they fought to own your climax.

When you came, it was devastating—your cunt and ass clenching around them both, milking them, dragging them deeper. Jungwon groaned, teeth sinking into your shoulder as he spilled inside you, hot and overwhelming. Sunoo followed seconds later, filling your cunt until you were overflowing, cum dripping down your thighs, both of them holding you so tightly you couldn’t breathe.

They didn’t pull out. They stayed locked inside, cocks twitching, their breaths harsh against your skin.

Jungwon’s hand squeezed your throat one last time, forcing your eyes to his. “Say it,” he demanded, voice hoarse. “Say you’re planted in me.”

Sunoo kissed your cheek, softer but no less cruel. “Say you’ll bloom for us both.”

And you, too full to think, too wrecked to fight, whispered the only truth left in you:

“I can’t belong to just one.”

They smiled—different smiles, but the same hunger.

And you knew you’d never escape again.

_______

woah this was so diffecult to write SO IM SORRY IF IT ISNT THE BEST

THANK YOU FOR READING!!

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[lollovern]

- The Garden Left to Rot -

enhypen masterlist

wattpad

inspired by this post

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groundskeeper!yang jungwon x guest!femreader x cult counselor!kim sunoo | obsessive romance | cult horror | forced devotion | ritualistic sex | jealousy and rivalry | fucked-up love triangle | knife kink | corrupted comfort | you will belong to someone eventually | DARK CONTENT AHEAD!!

wc: 14k

summary: You’re sent to a grief recovery retreat hidden in the mountains. But this isn’t therapy — it’s a cult blooming in blood and rot. Jungwon wants to bury you where no one else can touch you. Sunoo wants to crack you open until you bloom for him. Both say it’s healing. But it’s obsession.

warnings: extreme gore, threesome, cult rituals, body horror (flowers under skin, insect scenes), blood play, forced confinement, psychological manipulation, emotional degradation, knife play, religious delusion, obsessive behavior, toxic romance, dubcon themes, ritualistic sex, hallucinations, violence

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The van climbs until the road forgets how to be a road. Pines crowd close; fog slicks the windshield like breath on glass. By the time the driver kills the engine, your phone has been surrendered, the waiver signed, and your name—your real one—folded into a sealed envelope with your belongings.

A hand-painted sign leans crooked against a stone pillar: THE GARDEN.

Beneath it, smaller script: Let go. Become.

Everyone here is an adult—paperwork made that clear. Still, the cluster of arrivals huddle like freshmen. A woman in a bone-white coat stands at the gate, serene as a photograph. “Welcome,” she says. “I’m Director Seo. You won’t need last names here. You won’t need yesterday.” Her smile doesn’t reach her eyes. “We begin with stillness.”

Stillness smells like damp soil and rosemary. The compound spreads in tiers: a glasshouse ribbed with iron; dormitories with shuttered windows; a refectory where steam fogs the panes; a low clinic painted the color of milk. The greenhouse breathes—a pulse of heavy, sweet air each time the door opens. Inside, rows of lilies lean toward heat lamps; vines net the rafters; something rustles in the loam.

“Orientation,” says the boy who appears at Director Seo’s shoulder. He’s young—early twenties—with paper-clean features and the kind of smile people don’t realize is a blade until it’s already inside them. Kim Sunoo. His name tag says Counselor; the ribbon beneath it says Ritual Lead. “Shoes off in the greenhouse,” he adds lightly. “We keep the floors soft.”

Your shoes leave the ground. Cool boards. Warm mist. A bell rings once. The arrivals form a circle on woven mats; a dozen white-robed staff ghost the edges. A few guests have the shaved look of hospital discharge; others wear expensive emptiness like cologne.

“Here,” Sunoo says gently, “we do not share pasts. Only needs.” His gaze slips over faces and lands on you. Not a leer. A selection. “You may speak or sit in silence. Both are honest.”

“I need to sleep,” says a woman with chewed nails. “Like, three days.”

“I need to stop remembering,” a man answers, voice flat.

The girl beside you—twenty-two, maybe—says nothing. Yejin is stitched on her wristband. Her hands are ink-stained. She draws while people talk: a quick, vicious graphite—faces with petal-mouths; ribs like trellises. When you shift, she tilts her sketchbook so you can see the newest figure: a person kneeling in dirt, throat blooming with something that isn’t a flower.

“Beautiful,” Sunoo murmurs, as if he’s praising a child’s first recital. “You have a keen eye for transformation, Yejin.”

From across the greenhouse, someone drags burlap sacks along iron grates. Soil dark as coffee spills from a split seam and oozes across the floor. The man hauling the bags moves like he’s apologized to gravity and refuses to do it again. Yang Jungwon. Groundskeeper on his tag. Grey work shirt. Forearms nicked white with old cuts. He doesn’t look at the circle—doesn’t look at you—until he does, and then he doesn’t stop. Not curiosity. Assessment, like weighing a seed between finger and thumb and deciding if it will live in his earth.

Director Seo outlines rules in the smooth tone of a stewardess reciting crash procedures:

No personal histories in group.

No contact with family for the first fourteen days.

No unsupervised access to the greenhouse after dusk.

Do not remove plant material from designated zones.

What is given to the soil remains in the soil.

“That includes grief,” Sunoo says, almost playful. “Especially grief.”

Your dorm is clean in the way of hospital corridors and mortuaries. Two metal beds. Two lockers. A copy of a softbound booklet on each pillow: STILLNESS GUIDE. Your roommate arrives with a jangle of bracelets and the brittle cheer of someone who learned to smile as self-defense. Mira, 26, volunteer-turned-resident-mentor.

“Welcome-welcome,” she chirps, then lowers her voice. “Pro tip: keep your head down the first three days. They watch how you watch.”

“Who?”

“Everyone.” She flicks her gaze toward the window, where the greenhouse skeletons against dusk. “Especially him.” She means Sunoo—you can hear it in the soft, reverent way. “And the groundskeeper when it’s dark.” That last part is almost a warning.

The bell rings again. Dinner is broth that tastes like the inside of a leaf and bread dense with seeds. You eat at long tables while staff move among you like shepherds. Across from you, a jittery young man, Taesun—24, scars like cat-scratches up his wrists—piles his crusts and crumbles them methodically. He pockets a handful when he thinks no one sees.

“For the worms,” he whispers to the crumbs. “They get hungry at night.”

Mira nudges your knee under the table. “He feeds them behind the east wall,” she murmurs. “Says they keep the nightmares down if they’re busy.”

In the clinic after dinner, a nurse swabs your fingers where the paper edges of the waiver bit skin. Nurse Min is beautiful in the harsh way of women who have decided their faces are weapons. When she says “this will sting,” the consonants soften strangely; a long surgical scar splits the underside of her tongue. She catches you looking and lifts a brow that says yes, I am aware of my mouth. Then—almost tender—she tapes your knuckle with gauze printed with tiny flowers.

Back in the greenhouse, the first night session is called Surrender. The lamps buzz. Mist beads your eyelashes. Sunoo stands barefoot on the damp boards, sleeves rolled, voice a low waterfall.

“Close your eyes,” he says. “Name the weight you want the earth to hold for you. Don’t say it out loud. Let your body say it.”

Around you, bodies sway. Some cry. Some freeze. When you keep your eyes open, Sunoo notices. Of course he does.

“New sprout,” he says softly, close to your ear, and the nickname feels chosen, not random. “You don’t have to force stillness. It happens when the soil recognizes you.”

“Does it?” Your voice is hoarse from disuse and altitude.

“Always.” He smiles. Not kind. Not unkind. Satisfied. “The Garden knows its own.”

Across the rows, Jungwon kneels in the dirt, wrist-deep in loam, planting something without a label. He doesn’t follow Sunoo’s cadence; he follows his own. When one lamp flickers, he rises and fixes it with the swift, competent movements of someone who builds instead of asks. When he sits back, the soil clings to his fingers like shadow.

You should sleep. Instead you help Mira remake your beds with the stiff white sheets that smell faintly of bleach and rosemary. She keeps talking, because silence makes her hands shake.

“I came as a volunteer,” she says, tucking corners square. “Stayed as a patient. It’s easier when they tell you what to be.”

“What do they tell you?”

She smiles without humor. “A flower.” Her eyes slide to your bandaged hand. “Try not to bleed in the greenhouse. They don’t like that.”

“Why?”

“Because the soil remembers.”

At night the compound changes. Lights dim. The wind strips the pines and combs the glass with needles. You lie awake and count breaths—yours, Mira’s, the building’s—until you can’t bear numbers anymore.

You go out.

The air is colder than the dorm suggests. The greenhouse glows from within, a pulse behind fogged panes. Beyond the east wall, something moves with slow persistence. You follow the ripple of disturbed leaves to a break in the hedgerow and find Taesun kneeling with his pockets turned inside out, sowing crumbs into the leaf litter like a penitent farmer.

“The worms,” he says. “They hate hunger.”

“And if they’re hungry?”

“They crawl into you,” he says simply, and his eyes are not crazy; they’re convinced. “They’re looking for warmth.”

A lantern kindles behind you. “Curfew,” a voice says.

You turn. Jungwon holds the light up so it paints his face in bones and gold. Up close, his features soften—stillness without Sunoo’s practiced grace; a patient animal’s attention. The lantern makes a thicket of his lashes. He looks from you to Taesun to your bare feet on the cold boards.

“You’ll catch a chill,” he says to you, like it’s a personal offense. “Shoes. Now.”

You should resent the command. Instead, you feel the unreasonable urge to obey. You start toward the dorms.

“Not that way,” he says. “West path. Easier. Less slope.” He tips the lantern so the light doesn’t blind you while you pass. It’s a small courtesy. It also marks you—every guard on the walkway can see who broke curfew and who brought them back.

“Do you plant at night?” you ask, because silence around him feels like standing at a cliff’s edge and leaning a little too far.

“Always,” he says. He doesn’t volunteer more. His eyes drag briefly to your bandaged hand. “You left blood in the greenhouse.”

“I didn’t—”

He lifts two fingers, the gesture efficient and final. “The soil remembers.” His mouth twitches—not a smile, exactly; the ghost of one. “Mira talks too much.”

“Is that against the rules?”

“It’s against survival.”

He walks you to the dorm porch and stops at the bottom step like there’s an invisible line he won’t cross. The night carries pine resin and wet metal. You want to ask him what he plants without labels, what grows under lamps that mimic suns, why the staff wear rosaries made of seeds.

He says, low, “Don’t follow sounds you don’t understand.”

“Why?”

“Because some things here answer to being watched.” He tilts the lantern, and for a heartbeat you see something like a tenderness he hides even from himself. “Sleep.”

You try. You fail. When you finally slide under, it’s the shallow kind of rest that hears every hinge complain.

Morning stains the glasshouse pale gold. Breakfast is porridge and a shot glass of bitter green. “Chlorophyll,” Mira grimaces. “For purity. Or the aesthetic.” She scans the refectory like she’s counting exits. “There’ll be a Placement Walk after breakfast. Don’t volunteer. They love volunteers.”

“What is it?”

She cuts her eyes toward the greenhouse. “They take someone to the grove and ‘help them choose a garden name.’ Sometimes they come back with a wreath. Sometimes without their voice for a while.”

Director Seo taps her cup. “Today’s Placement Walk is for… Yejin.”

The graphite girl looks up, startled as a deer. Her pencil stills. Sunoo’s smile brightens by half a watt. “I’ll take her,” he offers, hand already extended. “I’ve seen her drawings. She understands transformation.”

If you didn’t sleep, you are alert now. Jungwon appears in the doorway like the building made him. His gaze flicks over the room, and when it lands on Yejin’s shaking knuckles, something barely visible tightens in his jaw.

“I’ll go with you,” he says to Sunoo without looking away from the girl.

“Of course,” Sunoo replies. Silk over steel. “Two witnesses. Very proper.”

They lead her out between them: the counselor with a palm light on her shoulder; the groundskeeper holding the door open so it doesn’t bite her. The room exhales when the door closes. Mira’s bracelets clink as her hands start to shake again.

“They’ll bring her back,” you say, because logic is a habit.

“Usually,” Mira says.

Taesun folds bread crumbs into his napkin with ritual care. “If the worms are fed.”

“Stop with the worms—”

He looks up, suddenly fiercer than his tremor allows. “This place eats. I just like to decide what it eats.”

You leave your spoon in your bowl. The porridge lurches in your gut like a tide. Through the greenhouse glass, you can’t see the grove, only the suggestion of trunks and a slit of path. Time grows teeth.

When they return, Yejin walks in her body like someone has moved the furniture. A crown of woven reeds presses her hair flat. There’s a smear of green at the corner of her mouth, like she’s chewed a leaf until it bled. She carries her sketchbook close to her chest as if it’s the last piece of herself no one has touched.

“What did you choose?” Director Seo asks.

Yejin’s voice is soft but intact. “Night-blooming cereus.”

“A flower that opens in darkness,” Sunoo says, pleased. “Perfect.”

Jungwon stands behind them, sleeves rolled to the elbow, forearms dirt-streaked. A single thorn scratches the back of his hand, a bright new welt. You don’t know why your chest warms at the proof that something here can still hurt them too.

As the room settles, Nurse Min touches your shoulder. “Consult,” she says, consonants rounded. In the clinic, she peels your bandage, checks the small cut, nods. “Fine.”

“Was the walk… normal?” you ask, too casual. “For Yejin.”

Nurse Min dabs salve with a gentleness that doesn’t fit her knife-edged face. “Normal is a shape you learn,” she says. “Here, it is round.” She taps your knuckle. “Don’t open yourself on purpose. Things may grow inside.”

“Like what?”

Her eyes flick briefly toward the greenhouse. “Names.”

By afternoon the schedule has you shoveling, watering, scrubbing, writing lines. I am ready to be less. You write it a hundred times until the words separate from meaning and become a pattern of stems and loops. Outside, Jungwon clears a new bed along the south wall. His shovel bites; his shoulders move with the reliable rhythm of practiced labor. A boy twice your size steps into his path and mutters something you can’t hear. Jungwon doesn’t raise his voice. He simply looks at the boy until the boy forgets how to stand where he’s standing and moves.

“Don’t stare,” Mira warns from beside you, but she’s staring too. “He notices.”

“He noticed last night,” you say.

Mira goes still. “You went out?”

“For air.”

“Air is how they catch you,” she whispers, and for the first time her cheer fails. “Promise me you won’t go alone again.”

You don’t promise. You also don’t say I don’t know who I am without alone.

At dusk, group again. Sunoo has you sit closer to him than yesterday. When you resist, he laughs softly, as if you’re charming rather than disobedient. “We sit where the light needs us,” he says. You wonder if that’s a rule or a line he likes. While others speak, he doesn’t look at them; he watches their hands, their throats, the wet edge of eyes. When your breath hitches at someone’s story, he turns his head sharply like a wolf hearing snow crack.

“What would you let go of?” he asks you, voice pitched so the rest of the circle hears only the question, not the ownership threaded through it.

You could say: the fire, the last call you ignored, the smell of burning hair. Instead, you say nothing. He accepts your silence as if it were obedience he taught you.

Outside the glass, Jungwon is a darker shape among dark shapes, moving a hose along the rows. When his head turns toward the circle, it isn’t to the whole; it is to you. He holds you there for a breath you feel in your wrists. Then he tips the hose, and water falls like rain on metal bones.

You sleep after midnight because your body ambushes you. You wake to weight. Not on you; in the air, a heaviness like weather. The greenhouse lights are out. The compound holds its breath.

Something is under your pillow.

You slide your hand beneath it and touch paper—the rough tooth of a sketchbook page. You draw it out under the dim nightlight and see yourself. Not flattering. Not cruel. Exact. You kneel on dark soil, mouth open, and something vines out—delicate stems laced with thorns. Hands—two sets—hold your shoulders lightly, possessively: one set with ink stains, one with dirt ground into the half moons of the nails. At the bottom, Yejin’s cramped script: “Some flowers only open when watched.”

Mira stirs. “What is it?”

“Art,” you say, and your voice surprises you with how steady it is.

“What kind?”

“Prophetic,” you answer, because the truth is an animal pacing the edge of the bed and you’re not ready to let it into your ribs yet.

You slide the drawing back under your pillow and close your eyes. Across the compound, the night shifts. In your mind, Sunoo’s smile threads petals through your tongue. In reality, Jungwon’s lantern skates once across the fogged panes, a slow-moving star. Two orbits, caught in the same sky, tightening.

Slow burn, the booklet promised. Healing begins when you stop resisting.

You do not stop.

You breathe. You listen to the soil remembering you.

And you wait.

______

Morning arrives with a whistle under the door and the faint itch of grit in your teeth, as if you’ve been speaking to the ground in your sleep. Breakfast is the same: porridge, a bitter green shot, tea that tastes like boiled bark. Mira counts sips, bracelets clinking like quiet alarms. Taesun crushes his toast to dust and pockets it, eyes bright with purpose. Yejin sits very still, crown of reeds damp against her hair, sketchbook closed for once like a door she’s guarding with her body.

Director Seo taps her cup. “Today begins the Mouth Fast,” she says, voice smooth as tile. “Speech is the first addiction. For twenty-four hours, we practice voicelessness. Carry your stone”—a monk in linen sets a bowl of river stones on each table—“and let it hold your words. Anyone who breaks the fast will do a double shift in the greenhouse trenches. Sunoo will lead stillness. Jungwon will direct labor.”

A murmur rises and dies, mouths pressing shut to prove eagerness. Mira puts a flat, oval stone in your palm. “Don’t lose it,” she whispers, already breaking the rule. “They’ll say the soil took your voice because you were careless.”

You tuck the stone into your sleeve and meet Sunoo’s eyes across the hall. He’s already watching—of course he is. The smile he gives you would be harmless if you hadn’t seen how he moves when he’s pleased: slower, closer, like a candle drawn to oxygen. Jungwon lingers by the service door with a clipboard and a coil of hose on his shoulder, scanning tables the way a shepherd counts sheep by the sound of their breathing.

Chores first. Outside, the air needles your lungs; the mountain wears its cold like a second skin. Jungwon assigns tasks without looking at his list. “Mira, refectory herbs. Taesun, east wall compost. Yejin, with Nurse Min in the clinic.” His gaze slides to you and steadies. “You—paths and drains. Stay out of the grove.” Not a suggestion.

You carry a stiff-bristled broom down stone paths glazed with last night’s dew. The greenhouse ribs glow under weak sun; from inside, lamps hum, and something leafy slaps damply as if it’s learned the shape of applause. By the east wall, Taesun kneels with a small shovel and a reverence that would be holy if it didn’t smell like rot.

He tips crumbs in a neat line, then pauses to show you something cupped in his palm: a white, blind tangle coiling in damp soil. Worms, yes, but too many knotted together, a living thread. He beams, proud. You force your lips into gratitude and keep sweeping. If you stop, you will hear them, and if you hear them, you will dream them.

A shadow falls across your broom. Jungwon holds out a pair of soft-soled garden shoes with the temporary patience of a man who prefers doing to explaining. “Your feet,” he says. “You bruise easily.”

You glance at your bare socks, damp to the ankle. “Is that a rule?”

“It’s a reality,” he says; the word lands like weight. He crouches without asking, sets the shoes on the path, and steps back, gaze down so you can decide if you’ll take his help. You put them on. They’re warm from his hands. He notices the lift of your breath and looks away so the noticing won’t embarrass you. When he straightens, his eyes snag on the river stone tucked in your sleeve. “Don’t drop that,” he says. “The ravens like to steal them.”

You arch a brow—Are you joking?—but he’s already moving, a steady, unshowy force among the clatter of chores.

By mid-morning the Mouth Fast is a taut cord running through the compound. The quiet isn’t peace; it’s suppression, and suppression hums. Sunoo runs stillness from the center of the greenhouse like a maestro conducting silence. He has you sit within his radius; you don’t know how you know that, but you do. When a guest’s shoulders begin to shake, his hand appears at the nape of their neck—just weight, just heat, just enough to persuade the body that obedience feels like care.

He comes to you last, when the lamps have warmed the panes to sweating. He kneels, not quite touching, gaze on your throat. “Your pulse is stubborn,” he says in a voice pitched for you alone. “It hates rhythm. I like that.” He brushes the air near your jawline, not touching, so you feel it anyway. “The stone will teach it obedience. If you’re good at listening.”

You hold his eyes and refuse to nod. He smiles, pleased with your defiance like a trainer who prefers wild animals because they make better trophies. “We’ll work on it,” he whispers, and stands.

After lunch—a bowl of broth filtered until flavor gives up—you’re pulled into the clinic with half a dozen others for “check-ins.” Nurse Min sits you on a stool and unwraps your finger. The cut is a thin mouth now, pink with newness. She touches a gloved finger to the gauze and sniffs it as if the body has a scent that changes when it’s lying.

“Does it itch?” she asks.

You hesitate. The truth is embarrassing. “Everything does,” you admit. “Under the skin. Like… like something wants out.”

“Something wants in,” she corrects mildly. She takes tweezers to the pad of your finger and draws out a hair-fine splinter you didn’t know was there. It isn’t wood—it’s pale and sappy, flexing like a root in the air. She drops it in a jar and screws the lid tight. “Names need medium,” she says. “Don’t let anyone put theirs under your skin.”

“Is that medical advice?”

“It’s survival.” She tapes a fresh bandage printed with tiny leaves, then, softer, “If you start tasting flowers, spit.”

You leave the clinic with your mouth dry as chalk. On the steps, Yejin waits like a shadow that forgot to attach to a body. She presses a folded paper to your palm and flits off before you can unfold it. In the corner of the page, her fast, lethal graphite: you in profile, throat open, something like a stem ghosting up under the jaw. In the negative space behind you, two silhouettes—Sunoo’s soft edges; Jungwon’s blunt solidity—blur toward one another without touching. Underneath, her careful script: Not yet. But soon.

The Mouth Fast bends afternoon into a colder shape. Without words, people show who they are. Mira hums under her breath and taps her stone against her teeth like a bead. Taesun counts breath with his fingers on his ribs. A new arrival—Hana, thirty and jewel-hard—walks like a woman who refuses to ask permission from the air. An older man, Mr. Ko, rows his spoon through soup with the concentration of a man pretending there is a river and a boat that can take him off this mountain.

At dusk, Director Seo calls for the Seed Burial. “We surrender what we’ve hoarded,” she says, and volunteers step forward with small slips of paper seeded with something that will sprout if the soil wants it. They kneel, press the papers into a rectangle of fresh-turned earth, and cover them with a thin skin of loam. The lamps go low. Sunoo stands at their backs. Jungwon stands at their front, shovel grounded like a staff.

You don’t move. You have nothing to bury you can stand to name.

A woman you recognize from orientation—the one who needed three days of sleep—places both palms flat on the soil like it’s someone she loves. Her breath hitches once; she swallows whatever it shook loose. As the last handful of earth covers the names, something beneath the surface shifts. Not the modest swell of seeds drinking. A shove from below.

The crowd stills. You feel it again—a push. The soil flexes and sighs, grains settling. Someone’s hand jerks back as if bitten. Sunoo’s smile does not change, which means it changes. “The ground recognizes an offering,” he says pleasantly. “Stand, flowers. Let the dark do what it’s for.”

Jungwon’s eyes are on the dirt, not the people. His jaw flexes once, twice. You have the sharp, childish thought—He hears it too—and the relief that follows is so naked you almost miss the fear riding it.

Night stitches the compound tight. The Mouth Fast persists: tongues held, little pantomimes replacing argument. In bed, Mira sleeps with her open palm on her stone like it might roll away. You face the wall because the drawing under your pillow is a magnet and your skull is iron.

A scrape wakes you—a quick, purposeful sound under the window. You slide out of bed and ease the latch. Cold breath pours in. On the path below, a lantern moves slow as a planet. You follow, soft-soled shoes silent on the boards, the stone in your sleeve tapping your wrist like a heart that’s climbed too high.

The lantern stops. Jungwon steps into its circle. He doesn’t look surprised to see you. He looks like a man who has laid a trap and found what he baited it for. He lifts the lantern just enough to catch your face without flaying you with light.

He puts a finger to his mouth—quiet—and crooks that same finger: come.

You should run. You go.

He takes you along the west path to a low, fenced plot you haven’t noticed in daylight, because in daylight everything looks like something else. Up close, the boards are stained darker than weather. He stops you with a hand on your sleeve. His grip is gentle; his hand is strong. “Do not speak,” he says, and for the first time today the command lands like care, not control.

He tilts the lantern over the fence. The light stratifies a pit maybe two meters long, maybe one deep, lined with rough timbers and crawling with the industry of decay. You see peels, stems, pot scrapings—normal compost—then catch on something pale threaded through like lace: cartilage? You squint, heart hammering, and in among the skins and stems you see hair—just a clump, just enough to be undeniable. The sour-metal stink under the rot answers a question you didn’t know you were asking until now.

You stagger, mute because the rule still binds your mouth. Jungwon’s hand rises like he planned for your body to try to leave you. He catches your elbow with two fingers and steadies you without pulling you closer. “Breathe,” he says, voice so low the pit swallows it.

You breathe. He watches your lungs move under your shirt as if measuring if they’ll keep their job.

“What is this,” you manage, a whisper that bruises the fast.

“Everything that isn’t needed,” he says. It is both the most honest sentence you’ve heard since you arrived and the worst one. “Don’t come here alone.”

“Why show me?”

His mouth tightens. He weighs the truth and hands you a ration. “Because you will go looking. Better you see what is true than what you can’t live through.”

He lifts the lantern away; the pit dissolves back into darkness. When he looks at you again, the composure you’ve seen him wear like a uniform slips an inch. “Next time,” he says, “wake me.”

“How?” It comes out harder than you intend. “Do I knock on the earth?”

“On my door.” He says it like a correction and a promise. “I’d rather carry you than find you down there with your throat open to the sky.”

You swallow. The stone in your sleeve digs your wrist bone.

He walks you back along the west path, keeping the lantern low so you don’t blind yourself and tumble. At the bottom of the dorm steps, he stops as if a line of salt has been poured between you. “Sleep,” he says. Then, almost grudgingly—no, carefully, like he fears generosity might teach you to expect it—“You did well.”

“You mean quiet,” you say.

“I mean you didn’t lie to yourself while you were looking.” He turns the lantern, and for a heartbeat your faces share a circle of light. It is not intimate, and it is.

Inside, the warm dark smells like bodies and disinfection. Mira turns in her sleep, bracelets whickering. Your hands shake. Not with the adrenaline of the pit—though that remains like a taste at the back of your throat—but with the realization that both men see you. Sunoo sees the mechanism; Jungwon sees the fracture line. You can’t decide which is worse.

The Mouth Fast breaks at dawn with a bell so soft it feels like a secret. Voices resume like a creek finding an old bed; people speak too loudly, then blush, then laugh at their own relief. Director Seo praises “compliance” as if it were a sacrament. In the refectory, mugs clack, spoons scrape. Words return as barter.

You don’t trust yours yet.

Sunoo flows through tables like sunlight convincing itself it’s holy. He catches your empty mug, pours tea, and sets it in front of you with a flourish that makes a few heads turn. “How did the silence fit?” he asks, lazy, interested. It isn’t small talk. It’s a probe shaped like kindness.

“Like wire,” you say.

He smiles, delighted—as if you’ve told him a secret about yourself he can use. “It looks good on you,” he says, and taps your river stone where it sits on the table as if he gave it to you, as if it obeys him too. “We have Talkback today. You and me.”

“Is that optional?”

“In principle,” he says. “In practice, most people prefer to be seen.” He leans in, lower voice. “You certainly do.”

He leaves before you can snap that you preferred to be alive, actually. Across the room, Jungwon stops at the threshold, takes the refectory in at a glance, and chooses a seat with his back to the wall. He eats fast, plain, as if food is fuel and surveillance is dessert. When he lifts his mug, you notice the fresh welt across the back of his hand—a thorn, yesterday, dragging its punctuation.

Talkback is held in a small room off the clinic, windowless, lit by a lamp that chooses flattery over truth. Sunoo sits too close, but because he knows what too close does to bodies, he leaves exactly enough air that you can fool yourself into thinking you could stand if you wanted to. He doesn’t touch you. He rests his forearms on his knees, hands open, posture full of a patience he wears like silk.

“What is the shape of your fear?” he asks, as if fear is polite enough to have geometry.

“Wide,” you say.

“Flat?”

“Deep.”

He grins. “Good. Honesty makes my job easier.” He looks at your mouth, then your hands, then your throat. “Last night you broke curfew.”

It isn’t a question. “I walked.”

“To the west path,” he says, savoring the corridor of it.

“Is that forbidden?”

“Not if you were with someone.”

You hold his gaze. You don’t look away. You don’t nod. You don’t give him Jungwon.

Sunoo’s smile returns, but thinner. “We don’t punish curiosity,” he says silkily. “We shape it.” He nods to your sleeve. “Keep the stone. I like how you sound when you hold it.”

“I didn’t speak.”

“You breathed differently,” he says, and you hate that you believe him. “This afternoon I want you in the greenhouse. We’ll do matching breath. I’ll keep count so you don’t have to.”

Your stomach remembers the pit and rolls. “What if I say no?”

“Then we’ll go slower,” he says, as if you asked him to make it sweeter. “That’s the kind of consent you like, isn’t it? The kind that arrives after your body learns the lesson.”

You stand because sitting feels like agreeing. He doesn’t stop you. He nods as if you’ve completed a task he set in his head.

“Good,” he says. “The roots are listening.”

Outside, the day is too bright in the way of mountains pretending to be gentle. You find Mira tending pots of kitchen herbs—mint, rosemary, a vicious little basil. “You look like you saw a ghost,” she says without looking up.

“I saw the compost,” you say.

She flinches so hard the basil shudders. “You don’t say it out loud,” she hisses, then checks herself, forces her voice calm again. “Names wake things.”

“Whose hair is in it?”

“Everyone’s,” she says. “Eventually.”

By late afternoon your muscles revolt, and stillness becomes a thing you have to hold down with both hands. In the greenhouse, Sunoo runs breath like a metronome. When he kneels behind a girl whose hands won’t stop shaking, he doesn’t touch her skin; he places his palm two inches away from her spine and waits. The girl’s shoulders ease; her breath learns his count. You hate him for it. You hate her relief. You hate that your body pays attention.

Jungwon moves along the rows with a bucket and a dull pruning blade, nicking stems, turning soil, resetting stakes. When a lamp pops and goes dim, he crosses to replace it without being called. On his way back, he passes near your mat—near, not past. The air shifts with him: sweat, iron, soil, a clean note like water running under rock. He doesn’t look down. He scratches the back of his wrist where a thorn welt cross-hatches older scars and says, as if the comment belongs to the room, “Some things only grow when you pretend you can’t see them.”

You don’t know if he means the plants, the people, or you.

Evening comes with teeth. The bell pulls everyone to the refectory; the sky sits heavy, swollen with weather that refuses to begin. Over dinner, Hana spills her tea and swears loudly enough that half the room jumps; then she laughs, tips her chin like she meant to do it, and glares at anyone who looks sorry on her behalf. Mr. Ko tells Taesun to stop feeding the worms like they’re pets; Taesun bares his teeth, half-smile, half warning. Nurse Min pockets a spoon someone bent into a hook. Director Seo watches it all with the small, sated smile of a zookeeper whose animals are thriving.

Night brings the first scream.

Not a long one. Not a movie howl. A single, keening note cut off hard, like a rope being cut. The compound freezes; forks stop halfway to mouths; breath holds. Sunoo is already on his feet, smile sharpened into usefulness. Jungwon’s chair scrapes; he’s moving before you can find your shoes.

They go toward the grove at a measured pace that says they already know what they’ll find. Director Seo lifts her hand. “Stay seated,” she says, and the command lands like weight on your shoulders. Mira’s fingers take yours under the table and squeeze so hard your knuckles grind. You squeeze back. Your mouth tastes like rosemary and fear.

You wait. The greenhouse sweats. The clock you aren’t allowed to see walks itself around the hour by the sound of your blood in your ears. When the door opens again, Sunoo comes in first, serene, coat unwrinkled. Jungwon follows with a bundled shape in his arms—a blanket, a softness of color, too long where a body should bend.

A gasp skips the room. “She fainted,” Sunoo says, which is both intolerably insufficient and the only story you’ll be allowed. “A cleansing reaction. She will rest. We will keep vigil over the names she surrendered.”

He doesn’t say who. Your mind fills the blank with the sleeping woman from breakfast, because that is who you fear for, and fear is a magnet. Jungwon carries the bundle past. You know how much weight that is—your body recognizes the set of his jaw, the economy of his gait. He does not look at you. He doesn’t look anywhere but the door to the clinic, as if any glance could spill what he’s holding.

The dining hall exhales like it’s been underwater too long. Director Seo claps once, neat. “We will not gossip,” she says. “We will not catastrophize. We will practice serenity.”

You don’t sleep. Not because you’re brave—because you’re scared correctly now, and scared correctly people stay awake. When you doze, you wake to the sensation that someone has put a leaf on your tongue and asked you to pray with it in your mouth. You spit into your sheet and find nothing. When you sit up, a shadow peels off the wall near the window and becomes Jungwon.

You nearly fling yourself out of bed. He doesn’t move, as if sudden gestures would spook you. He should not be in the dorms after lights; rules are their own religion here. He breaks this one like he breaks branches: cleanly, without apology.

“You left your shoes,” he says, low. He sets them at the foot of your bed, lined up, laces tucked. His voice is stripped of everything but function. “Don’t go barefoot again.”

“What happened?” you ask, whispering because anything louder might wake the dark.

“Don’t ask me,” he says, and for a breath you think he’s refusing. Then he adds, “Because I’ll tell you.” His gaze drags over your face, cataloging fine tremors, the cracked edge of your mouth, the way one hand fists in the sheet like rope. “Sleep,” he says. “You’ll need it.”

He is out the way he came, the door kissing its jamb like a secret.

You try to obey. The mountain presses its cold face to the window and listens. Somewhere, a lantern moves. Somewhere else, a man like a hymn kneels by a bed that is too light.

You put the river stone back in your sleeve and hold it against your pulse until the beat stops arguing with your bones. You remember the jar in Nurse Min’s clinic with the threadlike root curled at the bottom like a question mark. You picture Yejin’s hand drawing you with something under your skin you didn’t agree to carry.

Stillness was the promise. Obedience was the price. You have paid neither. Now the Garden pays attention.

And you, finally, are afraid.

_________

You wake with the taste of copper and rosemary slicked over your tongue, as if someone pressed a leaf there while you slept and whispered hold it. A welt has risen along your bandaged finger—thin, pale, almost pretty. When you press it, it flexes under the skin like something answering from underneath.

Breakfast is a choreography of clatter and eyes. Mira smiles too hard; her bracelets rattle out a code you can’t read. Taesun tips crumbs into his pocket with priestly concentration. Yejin’s crown of reeds has dried to a brittle halo; she draws with her pencil held like a knife. Hana sits mean and diamond-bright, daring the room to dull her edges. Mr. Ko’s spoon cuts the same path through porridge like a boatman refusing any other shore. Director Seo watches the surface of her tea the way people watch the sea for bodies.

“The Naming Rite will be held at sundown,” she announces, as if she’s asking for the salt. “Those selected have been notified.”

Sunoo lifts his eyes, and that’s your notification.

Mira’s fingers find your knee under the table and clamp. She shakes her head once, small, fast—refuse. You don’t know what refusal looks like here besides a story they will tell about you afterward.

“Drink,” Nurse Min says when you pass through the clinic to turn in your night report—how many hours asleep, how many awake, whether you dreamed of heat, teeth, drowning. She hands you a glass the green of pond water. You smell it, and it smells like lawn and iron. “Chlorophyll with a little hem,” she says, seeing your face. “Calms the heart.”

“Calms or slows?” Your voice scratches.

She cants her head. “Same action, different motive.” She glances at your finger. “Still itching?”

“It… moves,” you say, and the honesty makes your stomach pitch. “Like a thread.”

“Everything alive wants a home,” she replies. She peels the bandage with sure fingers. Underneath, the welt has subdivided into delicate veins, a fine network. Not veins. Veining. It looks like leaf. She presses the back of her glove along it; the pattern darkens, limned green under the skin. “Names need medium,” she repeats. “Keep your mouth closed in the greenhouse today. Even when you want to answer.”

You want to ask answer what, but Sunoo is in the doorway, dusk caught in the lamplight of his hair. He doesn’t knock; he glides in like permission. “Our new sprout,” he says, pleased to find you in a chair. “I’ll take her.”

Nurse Min’s mouth goes a little flatter. “She eats first.”

“Of course.” Sunoo’s smile doesn’t move. “Then we breathe.”

The greenhouse sweats. Heat lamps hum like insects; the glass with its rain of condensation blurs the mountain into a myth. Staff move among the rows with trays of soil sheets—thin paper seeded with something that glitters faintly when the light hits it wrong. “Embedded affirmations,” Sunoo tells the group. “You write what you’ll surrender. The seeds will carry it.”

Hana snorts. “Is the surrender refundable?”

Sunoo’s eyes quicken. “There’s always a transaction,” he says. “We just prefer you know the price.” He looks back to you. “Mat,” he says, and it isn’t a request.

You sit. He kneels behind you, palms hovering two inches from your ribs. No touch—just the sense of touch waiting. “Open your mouth,” he murmurs. The admonition from Nurse Min echoes; you clamp your lips. Sunoo’s pleased noise lands against your neck like breath. “Good. Breathe through your nose. In on four, out on six. I’ll count.”

His voice is a rope you have to grab to keep from slipping. When your breath shudders, he matches it; when it calms, he pursues. On the sixth cycle, something sweet pushes the air—lily, wet earth—and you remember the pit and want to be sick. “Stay,” he says, reading your recoil. “Stay where your body is. Don’t run from it. That’s where people rot.”

Across the rows, Jungwon replaces a cracked lamp with quick, sure hands. He doesn’t look at you until he does, a glance like a hand closing on the back of your neck. The air between you tightens. His forearms are netted with healed cuts, white against brown; a fresh welt crosses them like a red thread. When Sunoo says “out on six,” Jungwon turns the dial and the light hums obedient, and you wonder whether the whole building breathes to his count.

Yejin brings you a tray of seed-paper without being asked. When you reach, her gaze drops to your bandage. She moves the pencil like a blade and sketches the back of your hand: the delicate leaf veining, the suggestion of something wanting to break surface. She writes Not yet over the knuckles and slides the paper into your lap. Her mouth is a thin line; her eyes are large and dry and furious.

The day’s chores are smaller and meaner than yesterday’s. Scrub the condensation gutters. Rake. Haul sacks labeled Bone Meal that smell like old molars. Taesun sings under his breath in a language not meant for mouths and leaves a damp trail of crumbs along the east wall. Mr. Ko fetches and carries with blank efficiency, his face empty as a cleaned plate.

By late afternoon, a woman you know only as Auntie Hye—fiftyish, hair cut short for neatness, eyes that scan like a mother bird’s—begins to cough. At first it is dry and prim; then she hunches, pushes a hand to her chest and coughs wet. A ribbon of something bright pops free onto her palm. Petals. White. Tissue-thin and slick with saliva. A few guests laugh—nerves, delight, cruelty. Nurse Min is there before the room decides what to feel, hand under Auntie Hye’s chin, tissues ready. Hye coughs again, harder, and a clot of petals spills: red-tipped now, streaked. She hacks out a final cluster and sags. The tissues are sodden. The petals look like tongues.

“Pollination,” Sunoo says calmly. “Sometimes the body rehearses letting go by practicing bloom.”

Auntie Hye shakes her head, breath hitching. “I didn’t—” she starts.

Sunoo presses two fingers lightly to her throat. “You did.”

She closes her mouth.

Jungwon comes with a bucket and a flat spade; he scoops the petals into the bucket without expression. Your stomach tilts; you grip the bench until the wood prints itself into your palm. He doesn’t look at anyone. He takes the bucket toward the compost. You see his jawclench once when he passes the pit door and files that, like a photographed crime scene.

After the petals, other small horrors follow as if emboldened. A boy pulls his sleeve up to scratch and reveals a faint green tracery along his inner arm; when he scrubs at it, the skin reddens and puffs and the pattern brightens like a pressed leaf held to light. Mira slices a basil stem and it bleeds thin, clean sap; she runs her thumb along the cut and licks it without thinking, then startles at the taste and laughs too loudly. Taesun tips a paper cup into a drain, and a pale, slick worm writhes against the grate and splits into two thinner threads that both crawl the wrong way, toward his fingers. He coos like they’re babies and tucks them back into mud.

“Don’t feed your nightmares,” Nurse Min says without looking up from the woman whose mouth she swabs. “They grow fine on their own.”

By evening, the heat in the greenhouse feels like a hand that won’t lift. The lamps go low. Director Seo stands by the iron ribs with her clipboard like a prayerbook. “For the Naming Rite,” she says, “we welcome Sunoo as Voice and Jungwon as Hands.”

Voice and Hands. A division of power simple enough to live inside.

You are led—gently, unmistakably—toward the central bed, a rectangle of fresh loam bordered by smooth stones. Yejin edges after you, sketchbook clutched to her chest; Nurse Min blocks her with just a glance. “Not this,” Min murmurs. “Later.”

Mira steps forward—too fast—“I can go instead,” she says, smile like a knife wrapped in tissue.

Sunoo’s smile is silk on a nail. “We don’t barter names,” he says. “We harvest them.”

Your knees give. Not dramatic; a small buckling, the body remembering the ground. Sunoo’s hand is there without touching you, a near-weight at your shoulder. “Kneel,” he says, as if reminding you what your body already decided. “Head up. We face what we bring.”

Jungwon stands at the foot of the bed, shovel grounded. Close, his expression is the same flat steel as his blade. He looks at your throat the way carpenters look at walls: not hunger—assessment. When he speaks, his voice is small enough to belong only to the three of you. “Do you know what you’re giving?” he asks.

You try to say No. What comes out is “Something I can’t carry.”

“Good,” he says, and the word is not kindness. It’s calibration.

Sunoo’s fingers hover at your jaw, turning your face by the gravity of proximity. “Open,” he tells you, and your mouth obeys because your body recognizes a doctor’s tone even when it comes from someone who would rather be a priest. He places a petal on your tongue. It tastes like cold tea and a coin. “Hold,” he says. He waits. When you swallow despite yourself, his smile flares. “You see? The body knows ceremony even when the mind resists.”

He steps behind you. You feel his presence like a heat lamp. Jungwon moves to your side and holds out his hand. On his palm: a knife. Not sharp—its edge has been blunted until it’s a tongue of metal—but its point is honest. He waits until you meet his eyes; only then does he set the flat of the blade against your sternum. The steel is cool. Your skin fists under it.

“This is how we write it,” Sunoo says, and his breath touches the shell of your ear like a whispering moth. “Not deep. Not cruel. Not yet.”

The blade slides up without breaking skin, tracing between ribs, across the slow bell of breath—sternum, clavicle, the notch at your throat. The metal leaves a trail of gooseflesh; your pulse hammers against it like an animal trapped under the lid of a box. Jungwon’s other hand is steady at your shoulder, not pushing, not holding, just there, a second horizon the body can measure itself against.

“Name what cannot follow you,” Sunoo murmurs. It could be a real question. It could be a spell. Your mouth fills with the taste of flower and iron; words gather behind it like flies at meat.

You can’t say the fire; to say it would open something that the soil will keep. You say, “The last night.”

“Again,” Sunoo purrs.

“The last night,” you repeat, and the room tilts like a field under wind.

The congregation—guests in white, staff in linen—sways. Mira has both hands pressed to her lips. Taesun rocks in small, violent arcs. Yejin’s pencil moves; she draws you kneeling, two sets of hands marking you; she smudges the graphite so the air around you looks like breath or smoke.

The blade dips, lifts, comes to rest against your throat’s right side. You feel the exact spot where it would enter if it wanted to. Jungwon’s pulse is visible in his wrist; steady, heavier than yours. He moves the flat in a small crescent along the tendon, and your voice leaves you for a moment—pure reflex. A small, unpretty sound. Sunoo shivers behind you, pleased as if you performed a note he’d been coaching you toward.

“Do you understand the price?” Sunoo asks softly.

“No,” you say honestly.

“Beautiful,” he says, delighted. “No one ever does until after.”

He lifts the petal from your mouth with two fingers and lays it on your tongue again like communion. You hold it. Jungwon takes your left hand. His palm is rough and warm; soil lives in the whorls of his fingerprints. He pricks the pad of your finger with the very tip of the blunted knife, as if he wants to remind the blade of its older religion. A bead of blood swells, bright, neat. He turns your hand and presses that red to the seed-paper waiting in a shallow trench at the bed’s edge. Your blood bleeds into the paper like water into thirst.

“Now,” Sunoo says, voice dropped low enough to live in your bones, “we plant what you are not. So what you are can grow.”

Jungwon folds loam over the paper. The soil is cool even in this hothouse weather. It sucks at your finger when he presses your hand flat to it. Something moves underneath—something too quick for roots. Your stomach rocks. You try to pull back. Jungwon’s hand covers yours, firm as a yoke; Sunoo’s hand wraps your throat—not squeezing, just holding the column steady. You are pinned in two places that translate directly to obedience.

“Breathe,” Sunoo says.

You do. The soil under your hand warms like a mouth.

The congregation murmurs. Not words; the sound bodies make when they agree to a script. Director Seo watches like a reader flipping to the end to be sure it comes out as written. Nurse Min’s face has the set of a woman who’s decided to count a vein until morning.

The thing under the soil stills.

Jungwon lifts your hand and wipes the loam away with his thumb. The smear looks like war paint. Sunoo releases your throat and smooths his palm down the line his fingers left, a correction, an apology, a brand. He bends and whispers against your ear, “You belong to the ground,” and then, after a heartbeat, “and to us while you’re learning.”

His mouth never touches skin. The idea of it does.

The Rite closes with a bell that tastes like copper in your teeth. People file out as if stepping around a sleeping animal. Mira gets to you first, palms hot where she holds your face. “Drink water,” she hisses. “Don’t go to sleep. If you dream the name, it sticks.”

“I didn’t give it,” you say.

She laughs, a small animal sound. “You bled. That’s enough.”

Mr. Ko offers a clean handkerchief without meeting your eyes. Hana watches from a distance like a hawk deciding if a rabbit is worth stooping for when the field is full of easier meat. Taesun beams, mud on his lip, as if he’s just watched a very good wedding.

Yejin presses a drawing into your hand and vanishes. It’s you kneeling, hands marked, a line along your throat that is not a cut but knows where one would go. Over your shoulder, two shadows bend—one a heat-halo, one a blunt storm. Soon, she’s written. Don’t say yes with your mouth.

Night. The mountain holds its breath. The lamps in the greenhouse go black one by one until the glass is only a shape. You sit on your dorm bed and watch your hands not shake. Mira sleeps curled like a comma with her stone under her cheek. The drawing under your pillow warms to your scalp as if it wants to crawl into you.

A knock—not on the door. On the window, one knuckle, once. When you slide the frame, cold air pours in, and you think of Nurse Min’s keep your mouth closed in the greenhouse and keep it shut.

Jungwon stands below, lantern hooded, face lit just enough to make eyes and jaw. He tilts his head—come—and you go because your legs have learned this path. Out the back, down the steps, across the boards to the west path. He waits in the shadow of the shed where spades hang like a rack of tongues.

“Any dizziness? Nausea?” he asks, clinic-plain.

“Just… aware.” The word feels too small for your body’s rattled hum.

He grunts—approval. He reaches for your hand and turns the palm up. The loam under your nails has dried to fine grit. He rubs it away with his thumb, slow, methodical. It’s almost tender until you realize he is checking for changes—for the leaf-vein under your skin brightening, for anything moving that shouldn’t. When his thumb passes over the edge of your pulse, it jumps. He looks up sharply. You look away.

“You shouldn’t stay in the dorm tonight.” Matter-of-fact. “You’ll hear things like your name, and some of them will be for you and some won’t. You’re still soft. Soft things take impressions.”

“Where do I go?”

“My room.” Flat. Then, as if he heard how it sounds: “It’s safer. There are no plants there.”

“Is that true?”

“It’s true enough.” He waits. “Or go to the clinic and sit under Min’s lamp and let her count your breaths until morning.”

“Which would you pick,” you ask, because some part of you refuses to let him stand there and decide your body in his head without you in the room.

He takes too long to answer, then says, “The clinic is gentle.” A beat. “I am not.”

Wind combs the pines; the greenhouse ticks as it cools. Somewhere a raven laughs like a woman who knows your secrets and isn’t impressed.

“Choose,” he says quietly.

Sunoo’s shadow falls across the path before you can. He steps into the lantern’s circle like a storybook: pale wrists, clean hands, a smile that tells you exactly how he will use it. “Ah,” he says, soft delight. “My flower and my hands. I wondered where the night would put you.”

Jungwon does not step back. He also does not step forward. The lantern holds the three of you in a tight Venn where your breaths overlap. Sunoo tips his head, curious. “You can take her,” he says to Jungwon, which is to say I will let you. “But she’ll come back to me tasting like soil and fear, and we’ll start again from below.” He turns to you, voice honeyed and mean. “Or you can come with me and I’ll teach your body what calm feels like so you know when you’ve lost it.”

The polite violence of the options makes your stomach liquefy.

“Stop,” Jungwon says, and the word is a tool, not a plea.

Sunoo laughs softly. “The earth doesn’t stop growing just because you ask it gently.” He reaches, very slowly, and lifts your jaw with two fingers—not touching skin; his hand floats a whisper below it and your head lifts anyway, obedient to suggestion. “Show me your throat,” he says, and your body almost does it because it learned tonight and bodies like to repeat lessons. You hold yourself still out of spite. His smile warms. “Good girl.”

The words hit like a hand under your ribs. Jungwon’s breath changes. It darkens the air.

“Enough,” Jungwon says again, and hooks a finger in the lantern hood. He pulls it open. Light flares, pot-bright, brutal. The three of you blink; the world loses its beautiful edges and shows its seams. “Clinic,” he tells you.

Sunoo’s smile fades pixel by pixel until only his eyes shine. “For now,” he agrees. He steps in closer so there is no air between the three bodies but what breath can claim. He looks at Jungwon and speaks to you. “You’ll end up between us anyway,” he says, the prophecy flat, not cruel. “Why not learn the shape early.”

You should move. You should walk yourself to the nurse and let her count your lungs like prayer beads. Instead you stand very still while two men who have learned your pulse by different languages consider the currency of your fear.

Sunoo lifts his hand and stops a breath from your mouth. You feel the heat of him without the permission of touch. “I won’t kiss you,” he says, velvet and wicked. “Not yet.” He turns his palm and hovers over your throat, reading the rush there like a favorite book. “See what your body does with almost.”

Jungwon moves behind you so quietly the night forgets to mark his steps. He doesn’t touch you. His presence is so large it reads like contact anyway—the shape of him corralling air. You have the dizzy thought that if you leaned back, he would catch you, and if you leaned forward, Sunoo would open like a mouth.

“Breathe,” Sunoo whispers, and it isn’t instruction now; it’s a dare.

You do. The air leans with you. The world tightens to a triangle: lantern glare, the line of a blunted blade tucked into Jungwon’s belt, the faint copper on Sunoo’s knuckle where he touched your lip earlier with the petal.

“I said clinic,” Jungwon repeats, low enough to live at your spine.

“Make her say please,” Sunoo counters, amusement sweet as rot. “Our girl loves a ritual.”

“Don’t—” you start, and then stop, because the word tastes like surrender and you haven’t decided whose hands deserve it.

“Not tonight,” Jungwon says, and you understand: it isn’t mercy. It’s control deferred. He steps to your side, inserts a palm—warm, heavy—at your waist, not pulling, not pushing, just a point you can move along. Sunoo mirrors the motion on your other side without touching, an echo your nerves misread as contact. Together they guide you three steps, five, toward the clinic’s dim window—two gravities that agree for once.

At the threshold, Sunoo bends so close your ear warms. “Sleep,” he murmurs, the same command Jungwon uses like a blessing. “Dream of hands.” He smiles against the air where your skin ends. “Next time I’ll count for you while he holds you still.”

Jungwon’s hand tightens one notch at your waist, a warning, a promise, a brand pressed through clothes. “Next time,” he says, to Sunoo, to you, to the night that will keep at this until you’re rewritten, “I’ll decide who goes first.”

Nurse Min opens the clinic door before anyone knocks, lamp bright behind her like a little square sun. She takes in the triangle of bodies, the glint of the knife, the feral set of Sunoo’s mouth, the obedient steadiness of Jungwon’s hand at your side.

“Inside,” she says, and steps aside.

You pass between them—Sunoo’s almost-touch a heat across your throat; Jungwon’s real touch a line at your hip you could follow with your eyes closed—and cross into the light.

You do not kiss anyone. No one kisses you.

But as the door shuts and the mountain presses its ear to the glass to listen, you know it: your body already understands the shape they promised. It will remember. It will hunger.

And when it happens—when it really happens—it will not be an accident.

________

The clinic smelled of metal and mint. Nurse Min left you in a chair under her lamp until the feverish hum in your body dulled to a bearable pitch. She made you drink water, bitter and green as ditch weed, and held your wrist while your pulse rattled beneath her thumb. When you asked her if you were safe, she only said, “Nothing in a place like this is safe. At best, some things are safer than others.”

By the time she dismissed you, the compound had already gone to sleep. Mira was curled on her side in the dorm, bracelets stilled. You should have slept too. Instead you lay awake, tasting the memory of a petal pressed against your tongue, feeling the phantom weight of Jungwon’s hand steady at your waist, the ghost of Sunoo’s fingers just shy of your throat.

Your body remembered. It remembered too well.

When you finally slipped into the corridor, your bare feet soundless on the boards, it wasn’t to find air. It was because something in you had already decided that the ache would not stop on its own.

The greenhouse loomed against the night, ribs of iron and glass sweating mist. The lock had never been for people who wanted to stay out. You pushed the door and it sighed open, warm air rushing at you like a mouth.

He was waiting. Of course he was.

Sunoo leaned against a bench, sleeves rolled, pale wrists glowing under the lamps. His expression was the same one he’d worn when he laid the petal on your tongue earlier—delighted, expectant, like he had always known your body would come back to him.

“You breathe too loud when you lie down,” he murmured. “I could hear you from the other side of the hall.”

You should have left. You stepped closer instead.

Sunoo reached for you without touching, fingers tracing the air beside your cheek. That almost-contact burned hotter than heat itself. Your breath caught, and his smile sharpened. “See? Your body tells the truth. It remembers me already.”

His hand hovered down, stopping at the hollow of your throat. “Here,” he whispered. “Where the pulse lives.” He bent, mouth a whisper away from your skin, never quite sealing it. Your nerves screamed as if he’d kissed you. “You want me to touch you. That’s why you came.”

Your denial scraped your teeth but never left your tongue.

“Good girl,” he said, pleased at your silence. He turned you, pressing between your shoulder blades until your knees bent and you landed on the warm boards of the floor. “Stay open. Stay soft.”

His hands came at last—sliding along your thighs, parting them without rush, without doubt. He dragged his thumb along the cotton of your thin shorts, pressing until the damp there gave you away. “Blooming,” he said reverently, as if the word itself could coax you wider.

You gasped when he pressed harder, the friction maddening. He laughed low in his throat, pleased. “You’ve been waiting since the Rite, haven’t you? You swallowed the petal and your body begged for more.”

He tugged fabric aside with clinical precision, exposing you to the humid air. His fingers slicked easily through the wetness already gathered, and he made a sound of satisfaction that went straight to your gut. “So ready,” he crooned. “So obedient.”

Two fingers circled, teased, pressed—but never where you needed. He watched your hips shift, your breath stutter. “Say please,” he murmured.

“I—”

“Shh.” His free hand covered your mouth lightly, thumb grazing your lower lip. “Not with words. With your body.”

Your thighs trembled. You pushed into his hand, desperate. His smile widened. “There it is. Begging without speech.”

He slipped two fingers inside, slow, deliberate. Your back arched, a strangled sound caught behind his palm. He curled them just right, hitting the place that made you shiver, made your eyes roll back. “Yes,” he whispered against your ear. “That’s it. That’s how you bloom.”

His palm pressed harder over your mouth as your moans broke free. His rhythm quickened, fingers thrusting, scissoring, spreading you open as if he meant to plant something inside. Every push forced slick sounds into the greenhouse air. He bent low, lips brushing your temple, murmuring praises between each thrust: “Perfect. My good flower. Opening just for me. No one else will see you like this.”

Your orgasm came sudden, brutal—your whole body snapping tight around his hand, shuddering against him. He kept moving, dragging it out until you were gasping into his palm, thighs twitching.

When at last he withdrew, his fingers glistened. He lifted them to your lips, smearing wetness across them before pushing between. “Taste yourself,” he ordered softly. “Know what you are to me.”

Shame and hunger tangled in your chest. You sucked his fingers clean, and his eyes darkened, mouth parting as if he might finally kiss you. He didn’t. He pulled back just enough to leave you desperate, to make absence itself a cruelty.

“Blooming,” he whispered again, satisfied. “And tomorrow, you’ll be ready for the soil.”

The greenhouse door creaked. You jerked, Sunoo still crouched over you, his slick fingers withdrawing with deliberate slowness.

Jungwon stood in the doorway, lantern spilling gold over his dirt-streaked arms. His jaw tightened as his eyes tracked the wet shine on your lips, the way your legs trembled, the smug curve of Sunoo’s smile.

For a long, brutal moment, no one spoke. Then Jungwon stepped forward, shovel still in one hand, and his voice came out rough, dangerous.

“She’s mine next.”

The lamps hummed. The soil smelled of iron. Your heart beat against your throat like a trapped bird as the two men stared across you, and you realized the next time you were touched, it would be by both.

And you would not escape it.

______

The night you tried to run, the mountain gave you away.

The boards beneath your feet creaked, wet leaves clung to your calves, and the fog was a hand on your throat. You ran anyway. Past the dorms, past the glasshouse ribs glowing faintly from their lamps, down the west path where the ravens laughed like women who knew your secrets.

You thought the dark would cover you.

But the dark belonged to him.

A hand caught your wrist so hard you nearly went down. The lantern flared, and Jungwon’s face came out of the mist—eyes black, jaw locked, the muscle jumping with rage he didn’t bother to soften. He dragged you against him, chest heaving like you’d run into a wall that had learned how to breathe.

“Running,” he said, voice low and sharp as a spade. “After I told you not to.”

“I—”

“Quiet.” His grip on your wrist tightened until your bones ached. “Do you know what he did to you in there? Do you know what you smell like? Soil and him.” His other hand closed hard around your chin, forcing you to meet his eyes. His breath came hot, furious. “I told you not to let him touch you.”

Your protest was thin. “I didn’t—”

“You did.” He shoved you back against the rough bark of a pine. The trunk dug into your spine; his body crowded yours, heat and dirt and something mean. “You opened your mouth. You let him put his fingers in you.” His hand slid down your throat, pressing just enough to make your pulse throb under his palm. “Do you think that makes you his?”

“No—”

“No,” he repeated, mocking and brutal, pressing harder until your words broke into breath. His eyes raked you up and down like he was reading your body for lies. “You’re mine. If you’re soil, then I’m the one who plants.”

The knife appeared from his belt—not sharp, its edge long since blunted, but the point still honest. He held it flat against your belly, dragging it up under your shirt until the cold metal kissed the underside of your breast. You shivered, body jerking against the bark. His mouth twisted, equal parts fury and hunger.

“Scared?” he murmured. “Good. Fear makes roots dig deeper.”

He hooked the blade under the band of your shorts, pulling until the fabric stretched and then snapped. His hand shoved inside without pause, fingers rough, pushing into you like he meant to stake a claim. You gasped, the sound choking against the hand still at your throat.

“Wet,” he said, voice a growl, face close enough you could feel every word on your skin. “You’re soaked for me already. Even after him. Especially after him.” His fingers thrust harder, curling, relentless, forcing your body to answer him. “Say it. Say whose you are.”

You shook your head, too proud, too broken to give it.

His mouth curved cruel. “Then I’ll fuck it into you.”

He yanked your shorts down to your thighs, lifted you bodily against the tree, and shoved his hips between your legs. You clawed at his shoulders, half to push, half to hold on, but he pinned you easy, the knife’s flat pressed to your throat now like a brand. His cock pressed hot and thick against your entrance, grinding through the slick he’d found there, rubbing until you whined.

“You hear that?” he hissed, rolling his hips, dragging the head over your folds until obscene wet sounds filled the air. “Your body begging me in front of the whole fucking mountain.” He pushed in one brutal stroke, burying himself deep, forcing a cry from your throat. His teeth bared at the sound, savage triumph. “That’s it. Open up. Take me.”

He fucked you hard against the tree, every thrust jarring bark into your spine, every shove brutal and unrelenting. The knife never left your throat—flat, cold, reminding you what he could do if he wanted. His free hand gripped your hip so hard you knew you’d bruise, dragging you down onto him, using your body like it was already his.

“Mine,” he snarled against your ear, hips slamming. “Not his. Not anyone’s. Mine to fuck. Mine to plant. Mine to keep.” His pace grew rougher, desperate, jealousy bleeding into possession. “You’ll carry me. You’ll take my seed. You’ll remember whose cock fucked you open like this.”

Your moans tore free, high and broken, every thrust forcing them out. He laughed, breathless, mean. “Good little soil. Look at you—taking it. Clenching so tight you’ll never forget.”

When you came, it was with your whole body jerking, nails raking his back, his name spilling without permission. He fucked you through it, ruthless, using your climax to milk himself. With a final, brutal thrust, he came inside you, grinding deep, growling your name like a curse and a prayer.

He stayed pressed to you, chest heaving, the knife slipping down to rest against your collarbone. He didn’t soften. He didn’t let go. His mouth found your jaw, biting hard enough to leave a mark.

When he finally pulled out, slick running down your thighs, he yanked your shorts back up roughly, like covering you was a punishment. He grabbed your wrist again, dragging you toward the compound.

“You’re not sleeping in the dorms,” he said, voice iron. “You’re mine now. My room. My bed. No one else touches you.”

The lantern swung, throwing gold across the path. His grip never loosened. You stumbled after him, body raw, used, filled, the echo of his thrusts still beating through you.

And you knew he wasn’t bluffing.

______

Jungwon’s grip on your wrist was iron, dragging you through the silent hallways until the greenhouse lamps and dorm windows disappeared. His door slammed behind you, the bolt driven home with the finality of a lock on a coffin. His room was small, spare, stripped bare of comfort—just a bed, a chair, his tools. No flowers, no soil. Only him.

He shoved you onto the mattress like you weighed nothing. Your body jolted, still slick, still aching from what he’d already done. He stood over you, chest rising and falling hard, sweat at his temples, jaw clenched like a vice.

“You don’t go back to them,” he growled. “Not Mira, not Seo, and never him.” His eyes burned. “You’re mine.”

Your breath hitched; the word stuck in your throat.

A voice cut through the dark. “You’re wrong.”

The lantern on the desk flared, spilling its glow across pale wrists, white robes loosened at the chest, a mouth curved in that familiar, cruel delight. Sunoo. Already inside. Already waiting.

Jungwon stiffened, shoulders tensing like a predator finding another in his territory. “Get out.”

Sunoo ignored him. He stepped closer, his smile syrup-sweet but eyes sharp. “She doesn’t belong to you alone. Look at her.” His gaze slid over you where you trembled on the bed, your thighs pressed together, your lips parted from shallow breaths. “She’s terrified. She’s confused. She needs gentleness.” His tone softened, dripping like honey. “And you can’t give her that.”

“Gentle doesn’t keep her alive,” Jungwon snapped, stepping between you and him, shovel-callused fists at his sides. “Gentle lets her rot.”

“Alive?” Sunoo laughed, low and dangerous. “She’s not alive. She’s blooming. That’s what I make her.”

“Blooming,” Jungwon spat, “is just another word for open. And I’m the one inside her.”

The words made your stomach twist; heat and fear tangled until you couldn’t tell the difference. You tried to speak—stop, please stop—but your throat locked.

Sunoo’s gaze darted back to you, softening. He crouched, ignoring the way Jungwon loomed above him. His hand hovered just shy of your ankle, not touching—never touching—but the heat of him crawled up your skin. “Petal,” he whispered, “don’t be afraid. I’ll take care of you. I’ll show you how it feels to be cherished.” His lips parted, almost grazing your skin as he breathed you in. “Let me taste you.”

Jungwon’s growl shook the air. He seized your arm, yanking you back against his chest, his hand spread possessive across your stomach. His cock, still half-hard, pressed against your spine. “She’s mine. Mine to fuck. Mine to plant. Mine to keep.”

Your body shuddered. Fear, yes—but deeper, darker: want, shame, hunger you couldn’t smother.

Sunoo’s smile only widened. “Then let’s see who she opens for first.” He slid closer, slipping between your knees before Jungwon could stop him. His breath fanned over your thighs, hot and wet, and you gasped when he finally touched you—soft, reverent, his hands parting you like something fragile.

The contrast made you dizzy. Jungwon’s grip bruised; Sunoo’s mouth pressed feather-light kisses along the inside of your thigh, slow, teasing, as if every touch was worship. “Sweet,” he murmured, nose brushing close to the heat of you. “So sweet. I’ll make her sing.”

“Don’t you dare—” Jungwon started, but your body betrayed you, hips twitching toward Sunoo’s mouth, a whimper breaking past your lips.

That sound changed everything.

Jungwon froze, then snarled, shoving you down into the mattress, caging you with his body. One hand pinned your wrists above your head; the other tore your shirt open down the middle, fabric splitting under his strength. His mouth crashed to your throat, biting, marking, sucking bruises into your skin with furious precision.

Sunoo groaned at the sight, as if Jungwon’s violence only made you more beautiful. He leaned in, finally sealing his lips over your cunt, sucking hard, tongue lapping deep through your folds. The wet sounds filled the room, obscene, echoing against the bare walls.

You cried out, the noise muffled against Jungwon’s hand when he clapped it over your mouth. “Quiet,” he hissed, teeth at your jaw. “Don’t give him the satisfaction of hearing how much you love it.”

But Sunoo knew anyway. He moaned against you, tongue flicking your clit, fingers sliding inside with practiced ease, curling just right. He fed off every twitch, every muffled scream, every desperate roll of your hips. “See?” he said between licks, voice thick with arousal. “She opens for me. She’s blooming already.”

Jungwon pressed harder, grinding his cock against your hip through his pants, furious at your body’s betrayal, at the way your thighs trembled around Sunoo’s head. “She’s dripping because I fucked her raw,” he snarled. “All you’re doing is licking up what I left in her.”

The words made your body jerk, shame and desire hitting like lightning.

Sunoo pulled back just enough to look up at you, his mouth shining with your wetness, his eyes dark and soft. “You taste like need,” he whispered. He dragged his tongue slowly over your clit, savoring the way you cried out under Jungwon’s palm. “And you’ll remember I was the first one who made you come with his mouth.”

“Shut up,” Jungwon snapped. But his own hips rolled against you, his cock throbbing, desperate. His jealousy only sharpened his need.

You couldn’t fight it. You came hard, body arching, Sunoo’s mouth sucking your clit, Jungwon’s hand holding you down, his teeth biting at your throat. Your orgasm tore through you like the roots of something invasive, clawing deep, unstoppable.

They didn’t stop.

Sunoo licked you clean, gentle as a lover, humming like he was savoring wine. Jungwon bit harder, grinded rougher, his hand forcing your wrists deeper into the mattress. Both of them on you—one soft, one brutal—until you didn’t know whose name to scream.

And you understood, with raw clarity, that they weren’t fighting for you.

They were fighting through you.

When the shudders finally broke, you collapsed back, gasping, throat raw. Jungwon leaned down, lips brushing your ear, his voice a growl. “This is just the beginning. Next time I’m inside you while he’s in your mouth. We’ll see who you really belong to.”

Sunoo laughed softly, licking his lips clean of you. “She’ll belong to both.”

And for the first time, you realized he was right.

_____

Your body was still shaking when Jungwon yanked you upright, dragging you into his lap as if the bed belonged only to him. His thighs were iron beneath you, his chest hard against your spine. One arm locked around your waist, the other snared your throat, thick fingers spreading wide until his grip owned the column of your neck. He forced your head back, baring your mouth to him.

“You’ll taste me now,” he snarled, lips crashing into yours.

The kiss was brutal—teeth knocking, spit spilling. He shoved his tongue deep, choking you with it, swallowing every noise you tried to make. His palm pressed tighter at your throat until your pulse roared in your ears, until breath itself became something you had to beg him for. Drool slicked your chin, his tongue forcing yours down, his grip refusing to let you turn away. It was less a kiss than a violent claiming, his mouth fucking yours the way his cock had already fucked your body raw.

You gasped when he pulled back just enough to let air in, a string of spit hanging obscenely between your mouths. He licked it off your bottom lip, then spat into your mouth deliberately, cruelly, watching you swallow because you had no choice.

“Open,” he growled, forcing your jaw wider with his hand at your throat. “Good. That’s mine too. Every sound. Every swallow.”

Your vision blurred; your thighs squeezed together involuntarily. Terror and heat tangled until you couldn’t breathe for either.

And then Sunoo was there.

He crouched in front of you, hands sliding up your knees to part them wider, his smile infuriatingly calm even in violence. “My turn.”

“No,” Jungwon bit out, but Sunoo was already moving. He grabbed your chin, fingers digging in hard enough to bruise, and wrenched your head away from Jungwon’s mouth. Your neck snapped to the side, and before you could gasp, Sunoo’s lips were on yours.

It wasn’t tender. It was vicious. He sucked your bottom lip until it split, teeth biting down until pain shot bright, then licked the blood from your mouth as if it belonged to him. His tongue drove past your teeth, tasting everything Jungwon had left there, devouring it with obscene relish.

You moaned helplessly, the sound muffled between them.

Jungwon’s grip on your throat tightened, forcing your head back further, rage pouring off him like heat. “She’s mine.”

Sunoo broke the kiss just long enough to sneer against your wet mouth. “Then why is she kissing me back?” He pressed his tongue to yours again, slow and filthy, sucking until spit ran down your chin. Then he pulled back, wiped it with his thumb, and shoved the slick digit back between your lips. “Lick it clean. That’s mine now.”

Your mouth obeyed before your brain caught up.

Jungwon’s chest vibrated with a growl. He bent and bit your jaw, then your throat, leaving purple marks against Sunoo’s fingerprints. His hand clamped your neck harder, forcing you to gasp around Sunoo’s thumb.

“She’s choking on me,” Jungwon snarled. “Not you.”

Sunoo laughed low, mean. He leaned closer, his forehead pressing to yours, his other hand grabbing Jungwon’s wrist on your throat, not to stop it, but to squeeze it tighter. “Then let’s choke her together.”

The pressure doubled. Your eyes watered, spit pooling at the corner of your mouth, drooling down your chin as both of them held you, forced you open, forced you to take them. One mouth kissed you, sucked you, spat into you; the other bit, bruised, pressed your throat until stars danced.

You weren’t kissing anymore. You were being consumed.

And God help you—your body wanted more.

_______

They had you caged between them—Jungwon at your back, Sunoo at your front—two sets of hands closing every door your body might have tried to escape through.

Your pulse beat frantically against Jungwon’s palm at your throat. Sunoo’s fingers dug into your chin, keeping your face tipped up so you couldn’t hide. Their mouths had already ruined you, spit running down your jaw, bruises blooming on your throat and collarbone like dark flowers. Your chest rose too fast, every breath their permission, every sound something they stole from you.

“You see?” Sunoo whispered, voice as sweet as it was cruel. “She’s ready. She’s shaking for us.” His hand slid down, brushing your stomach, spreading lower. “The soil is wet.”

“She’s wet because I fucked her open,” Jungwon snapped against your ear, his breath harsh. “She’s mine to fill.” He ground his cock against your ass through his pants, thick and hard, a promise of what was coming. His teeth found your neck again, biting until your body arched despite yourself.

The two of them moved you as if you were theirs to arrange. Your thighs were forced wide over Sunoo’s lap, your back crushed to Jungwon’s chest. Rough hands tugged your ruined shorts away; cool air hit the slick heat between your legs. Sunoo hummed like a priest receiving an offering.

“Let me taste again.” He didn’t wait for permission. His mouth descended, sucking your clit into his mouth, tongue lapping at you until your eyes rolled back. His hands locked on your thighs, holding you open for him, his moans vibrating into your cunt.

Jungwon shoved your wrists down into the mattress, his cock rutting against you through fabric, his fury pressed into every grind. “Listen to her,” he growled. “Dripping for us. Begging without words.” He yanked his pants open, the blunt head of his cock dragging along your ass, smearing precum. “She’s going to take both. Right now.”

You sobbed, terror and need colliding until you couldn’t tell them apart. “I can’t—”

“You can,” Sunoo cut in smoothly, lifting his head, chin wet with your slick. He stroked your trembling thighs with a mockery of gentleness. “Your body’s already opening. We’ll guide you.” His eyes glimmered, half-devotion, half-madness. “You’ll bloom for us together.”

Jungwon spat into his palm, gripped his cock, and shoved it between your cheeks, rubbing the head against your tight hole until you whined. “Scared?” he hissed, his hand tightening at your throat. “Good. Fear makes you clench tighter.”

Sunoo’s fingers slid inside your cunt again, curling, coaxing, slicking you up for him. He looked up at you, his smile soft even as he stretched you ruthlessly. “Breathe, petal. I’ll be inside you soon. You’ll be so full you won’t remember how to be empty.”

When Sunoo lined himself up, pressing the head of his cock against your soaked entrance, Jungwon shoved his tip harder at your ass, both of them pushing at once. Your cry ripped the air as your body was forced to split, one cock stretching your cunt, the other pressing past the tight ring of muscle until you thought you’d break.

“Fuck,” Jungwon groaned, voice raw. “So tight. Gripping me like a fist.”

“She’s perfect,” Sunoo sighed, already sinking deeper, your walls convulsing around him. “Taking both of us. Our flower.”

It was too much. The stretch burned, overwhelming, obscene. You clawed at the sheets, eyes rolling back as both of them bottomed out, your body trembling violently with the force of being split in two. They didn’t give you time. Jungwon’s hips snapped forward first, brutal, pounding into your ass with the fury of jealousy. Sunoo met him stroke for stroke, slower, deeper, angling until every thrust speared your cunt exactly where it made you scream.

Pinned, stuffed, broken open—you were nothing but their vessel.

“Say it,” Jungwon snarled, hand squeezing your throat until your vision blurred. “Say you’re mine.”

“She’s ours,” Sunoo countered, kissing you, sucking the spit from your mouth, swallowing your gasps. “Tell us, petal. Tell us who you bloom for.”

Your answer was a sob, a whimper, a strangled cry as their cocks moved inside you, filling every inch, grinding against each other through the thin wall of your body until the sensation drove you half-mad.

“Fuck, I can feel him through you,” Jungwon groaned, rutting harder, holding you down as if you might try to run again. “But you’re squeezing me tighter. That’s how I know you’re mine.”

Sunoo’s tongue licked the tears from your cheeks. “She’s crying for me. Look at her. Look how she wants to be saved even while we ruin her.”

Your body convulsed around them, slick gushing down your thighs, every nerve alight. The pain blurred into pleasure until you were begging without words, your nails tearing the sheets, your cries spilling into their mouths as they fought to own your climax.

When you came, it was devastating—your cunt and ass clenching around them both, milking them, dragging them deeper. Jungwon groaned, teeth sinking into your shoulder as he spilled inside you, hot and overwhelming. Sunoo followed seconds later, filling your cunt until you were overflowing, cum dripping down your thighs, both of them holding you so tightly you couldn’t breathe.

They didn’t pull out. They stayed locked inside, cocks twitching, their breaths harsh against your skin.

Jungwon’s hand squeezed your throat one last time, forcing your eyes to his. “Say it,” he demanded, voice hoarse. “Say you’re planted in me.”

Sunoo kissed your cheek, softer but no less cruel. “Say you’ll bloom for us both.”

And you, too full to think, too wrecked to fight, whispered the only truth left in you:

“I can’t belong to just one.”

They smiled—different smiles, but the same hunger.

And you knew you’d never escape again.

_______

woah this was so diffecult to write SO IM SORRY IF IT ISNT THE BEST

THANK YOU FOR READING!!

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groundskeeper!yang jungwon x guest!femreader x cult counselor!kim sunoo | obsessive romance | cult horror | forced devotion | ritualistic sex | jealousy and rivalry | fucked-up love triangle | knife kink | corrupted comfort | you will belong to someone eventually | DARK CONTENT AHEAD!!

wc: 14k

summary: You’re sent to a grief recovery retreat hidden in the mountains. But this isn’t therapy — it’s a cult blooming in blood and rot. Jungwon wants to bury you where no one else can touch you. Sunoo wants to crack you open until you bloom for him. Both say it’s healing. But it’s obsession.

warnings: extreme gore, threesome, cult rituals, body horror (flowers under skin, insect scenes), blood play, forced confinement, psychological manipulation, emotional degradation, knife play, religious delusion, obsessive behavior, toxic romance, dubcon themes, ritualistic sex, hallucinations, violence

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The van climbs until the road forgets how to be a road. Pines crowd close; fog slicks the windshield like breath on glass. By the time the driver kills the engine, your phone has been surrendered, the waiver signed, and your name—your real one—folded into a sealed envelope with your belongings.

A hand-painted sign leans crooked against a stone pillar: THE GARDEN.

Beneath it, smaller script: Let go. Become.

Everyone here is an adult—paperwork made that clear. Still, the cluster of arrivals huddle like freshmen. A woman in a bone-white coat stands at the gate, serene as a photograph. “Welcome,” she says. “I’m Director Seo. You won’t need last names here. You won’t need yesterday.” Her smile doesn’t reach her eyes. “We begin with stillness.”

Stillness smells like damp soil and rosemary. The compound spreads in tiers: a glasshouse ribbed with iron; dormitories with shuttered windows; a refectory where steam fogs the panes; a low clinic painted the color of milk. The greenhouse breathes—a pulse of heavy, sweet air each time the door opens. Inside, rows of lilies lean toward heat lamps; vines net the rafters; something rustles in the loam.

“Orientation,” says the boy who appears at Director Seo’s shoulder. He’s young—early twenties—with paper-clean features and the kind of smile people don’t realize is a blade until it’s already inside them. Kim Sunoo. His name tag says Counselor; the ribbon beneath it says Ritual Lead. “Shoes off in the greenhouse,” he adds lightly. “We keep the floors soft.”

Your shoes leave the ground. Cool boards. Warm mist. A bell rings once. The arrivals form a circle on woven mats; a dozen white-robed staff ghost the edges. A few guests have the shaved look of hospital discharge; others wear expensive emptiness like cologne.

“Here,” Sunoo says gently, “we do not share pasts. Only needs.” His gaze slips over faces and lands on you. Not a leer. A selection. “You may speak or sit in silence. Both are honest.”

“I need to sleep,” says a woman with chewed nails. “Like, three days.”

“I need to stop remembering,” a man answers, voice flat.

The girl beside you—twenty-two, maybe—says nothing. Yejin is stitched on her wristband. Her hands are ink-stained. She draws while people talk: a quick, vicious graphite—faces with petal-mouths; ribs like trellises. When you shift, she tilts her sketchbook so you can see the newest figure: a person kneeling in dirt, throat blooming with something that isn’t a flower.

“Beautiful,” Sunoo murmurs, as if he’s praising a child’s first recital. “You have a keen eye for transformation, Yejin.”

From across the greenhouse, someone drags burlap sacks along iron grates. Soil dark as coffee spills from a split seam and oozes across the floor. The man hauling the bags moves like he’s apologized to gravity and refuses to do it again. Yang Jungwon. Groundskeeper on his tag. Grey work shirt. Forearms nicked white with old cuts. He doesn’t look at the circle—doesn’t look at you—until he does, and then he doesn’t stop. Not curiosity. Assessment, like weighing a seed between finger and thumb and deciding if it will live in his earth.

Director Seo outlines rules in the smooth tone of a stewardess reciting crash procedures:

No personal histories in group.

No contact with family for the first fourteen days.

No unsupervised access to the greenhouse after dusk.

Do not remove plant material from designated zones.

What is given to the soil remains in the soil.

“That includes grief,” Sunoo says, almost playful. “Especially grief.”

Your dorm is clean in the way of hospital corridors and mortuaries. Two metal beds. Two lockers. A copy of a softbound booklet on each pillow: STILLNESS GUIDE. Your roommate arrives with a jangle of bracelets and the brittle cheer of someone who learned to smile as self-defense. Mira, 26, volunteer-turned-resident-mentor.

“Welcome-welcome,” she chirps, then lowers her voice. “Pro tip: keep your head down the first three days. They watch how you watch.”

“Who?”

“Everyone.” She flicks her gaze toward the window, where the greenhouse skeletons against dusk. “Especially him.” She means Sunoo—you can hear it in the soft, reverent way. “And the groundskeeper when it’s dark.” That last part is almost a warning.

The bell rings again. Dinner is broth that tastes like the inside of a leaf and bread dense with seeds. You eat at long tables while staff move among you like shepherds. Across from you, a jittery young man, Taesun—24, scars like cat-scratches up his wrists—piles his crusts and crumbles them methodically. He pockets a handful when he thinks no one sees.

“For the worms,” he whispers to the crumbs. “They get hungry at night.”

Mira nudges your knee under the table. “He feeds them behind the east wall,” she murmurs. “Says they keep the nightmares down if they’re busy.”

In the clinic after dinner, a nurse swabs your fingers where the paper edges of the waiver bit skin. Nurse Min is beautiful in the harsh way of women who have decided their faces are weapons. When she says “this will sting,” the consonants soften strangely; a long surgical scar splits the underside of her tongue. She catches you looking and lifts a brow that says yes, I am aware of my mouth. Then—almost tender—she tapes your knuckle with gauze printed with tiny flowers.

Back in the greenhouse, the first night session is called Surrender. The lamps buzz. Mist beads your eyelashes. Sunoo stands barefoot on the damp boards, sleeves rolled, voice a low waterfall.

“Close your eyes,” he says. “Name the weight you want the earth to hold for you. Don’t say it out loud. Let your body say it.”

Around you, bodies sway. Some cry. Some freeze. When you keep your eyes open, Sunoo notices. Of course he does.

“New sprout,” he says softly, close to your ear, and the nickname feels chosen, not random. “You don’t have to force stillness. It happens when the soil recognizes you.”

“Does it?” Your voice is hoarse from disuse and altitude.

“Always.” He smiles. Not kind. Not unkind. Satisfied. “The Garden knows its own.”

Across the rows, Jungwon kneels in the dirt, wrist-deep in loam, planting something without a label. He doesn’t follow Sunoo’s cadence; he follows his own. When one lamp flickers, he rises and fixes it with the swift, competent movements of someone who builds instead of asks. When he sits back, the soil clings to his fingers like shadow.

You should sleep. Instead you help Mira remake your beds with the stiff white sheets that smell faintly of bleach and rosemary. She keeps talking, because silence makes her hands shake.

“I came as a volunteer,” she says, tucking corners square. “Stayed as a patient. It’s easier when they tell you what to be.”

“What do they tell you?”

She smiles without humor. “A flower.” Her eyes slide to your bandaged hand. “Try not to bleed in the greenhouse. They don’t like that.”

“Why?”

“Because the soil remembers.”

At night the compound changes. Lights dim. The wind strips the pines and combs the glass with needles. You lie awake and count breaths—yours, Mira’s, the building’s—until you can’t bear numbers anymore.

You go out.

The air is colder than the dorm suggests. The greenhouse glows from within, a pulse behind fogged panes. Beyond the east wall, something moves with slow persistence. You follow the ripple of disturbed leaves to a break in the hedgerow and find Taesun kneeling with his pockets turned inside out, sowing crumbs into the leaf litter like a penitent farmer.

“The worms,” he says. “They hate hunger.”

“And if they’re hungry?”

“They crawl into you,” he says simply, and his eyes are not crazy; they’re convinced. “They’re looking for warmth.”

A lantern kindles behind you. “Curfew,” a voice says.

You turn. Jungwon holds the light up so it paints his face in bones and gold. Up close, his features soften—stillness without Sunoo’s practiced grace; a patient animal’s attention. The lantern makes a thicket of his lashes. He looks from you to Taesun to your bare feet on the cold boards.

“You’ll catch a chill,” he says to you, like it’s a personal offense. “Shoes. Now.”

You should resent the command. Instead, you feel the unreasonable urge to obey. You start toward the dorms.

“Not that way,” he says. “West path. Easier. Less slope.” He tips the lantern so the light doesn’t blind you while you pass. It’s a small courtesy. It also marks you—every guard on the walkway can see who broke curfew and who brought them back.

“Do you plant at night?” you ask, because silence around him feels like standing at a cliff’s edge and leaning a little too far.

“Always,” he says. He doesn’t volunteer more. His eyes drag briefly to your bandaged hand. “You left blood in the greenhouse.”

“I didn’t—”

He lifts two fingers, the gesture efficient and final. “The soil remembers.” His mouth twitches—not a smile, exactly; the ghost of one. “Mira talks too much.”

“Is that against the rules?”

“It’s against survival.”

He walks you to the dorm porch and stops at the bottom step like there’s an invisible line he won’t cross. The night carries pine resin and wet metal. You want to ask him what he plants without labels, what grows under lamps that mimic suns, why the staff wear rosaries made of seeds.

He says, low, “Don’t follow sounds you don’t understand.”

“Why?”

“Because some things here answer to being watched.” He tilts the lantern, and for a heartbeat you see something like a tenderness he hides even from himself. “Sleep.”

You try. You fail. When you finally slide under, it’s the shallow kind of rest that hears every hinge complain.

Morning stains the glasshouse pale gold. Breakfast is porridge and a shot glass of bitter green. “Chlorophyll,” Mira grimaces. “For purity. Or the aesthetic.” She scans the refectory like she’s counting exits. “There’ll be a Placement Walk after breakfast. Don’t volunteer. They love volunteers.”

“What is it?”

She cuts her eyes toward the greenhouse. “They take someone to the grove and ‘help them choose a garden name.’ Sometimes they come back with a wreath. Sometimes without their voice for a while.”

Director Seo taps her cup. “Today’s Placement Walk is for… Yejin.”

The graphite girl looks up, startled as a deer. Her pencil stills. Sunoo’s smile brightens by half a watt. “I’ll take her,” he offers, hand already extended. “I’ve seen her drawings. She understands transformation.”

If you didn’t sleep, you are alert now. Jungwon appears in the doorway like the building made him. His gaze flicks over the room, and when it lands on Yejin’s shaking knuckles, something barely visible tightens in his jaw.

“I’ll go with you,” he says to Sunoo without looking away from the girl.

“Of course,” Sunoo replies. Silk over steel. “Two witnesses. Very proper.”

They lead her out between them: the counselor with a palm light on her shoulder; the groundskeeper holding the door open so it doesn’t bite her. The room exhales when the door closes. Mira’s bracelets clink as her hands start to shake again.

“They’ll bring her back,” you say, because logic is a habit.

“Usually,” Mira says.

Taesun folds bread crumbs into his napkin with ritual care. “If the worms are fed.”

“Stop with the worms—”

He looks up, suddenly fiercer than his tremor allows. “This place eats. I just like to decide what it eats.”

You leave your spoon in your bowl. The porridge lurches in your gut like a tide. Through the greenhouse glass, you can’t see the grove, only the suggestion of trunks and a slit of path. Time grows teeth.

When they return, Yejin walks in her body like someone has moved the furniture. A crown of woven reeds presses her hair flat. There’s a smear of green at the corner of her mouth, like she’s chewed a leaf until it bled. She carries her sketchbook close to her chest as if it’s the last piece of herself no one has touched.

“What did you choose?” Director Seo asks.

Yejin’s voice is soft but intact. “Night-blooming cereus.”

“A flower that opens in darkness,” Sunoo says, pleased. “Perfect.”

Jungwon stands behind them, sleeves rolled to the elbow, forearms dirt-streaked. A single thorn scratches the back of his hand, a bright new welt. You don’t know why your chest warms at the proof that something here can still hurt them too.

As the room settles, Nurse Min touches your shoulder. “Consult,” she says, consonants rounded. In the clinic, she peels your bandage, checks the small cut, nods. “Fine.”

“Was the walk… normal?” you ask, too casual. “For Yejin.”

Nurse Min dabs salve with a gentleness that doesn’t fit her knife-edged face. “Normal is a shape you learn,” she says. “Here, it is round.” She taps your knuckle. “Don’t open yourself on purpose. Things may grow inside.”

“Like what?”

Her eyes flick briefly toward the greenhouse. “Names.”

By afternoon the schedule has you shoveling, watering, scrubbing, writing lines. I am ready to be less. You write it a hundred times until the words separate from meaning and become a pattern of stems and loops. Outside, Jungwon clears a new bed along the south wall. His shovel bites; his shoulders move with the reliable rhythm of practiced labor. A boy twice your size steps into his path and mutters something you can’t hear. Jungwon doesn’t raise his voice. He simply looks at the boy until the boy forgets how to stand where he’s standing and moves.

“Don’t stare,” Mira warns from beside you, but she’s staring too. “He notices.”

“He noticed last night,” you say.

Mira goes still. “You went out?”

“For air.”

“Air is how they catch you,” she whispers, and for the first time her cheer fails. “Promise me you won’t go alone again.”

You don’t promise. You also don’t say I don’t know who I am without alone.

At dusk, group again. Sunoo has you sit closer to him than yesterday. When you resist, he laughs softly, as if you’re charming rather than disobedient. “We sit where the light needs us,” he says. You wonder if that’s a rule or a line he likes. While others speak, he doesn’t look at them; he watches their hands, their throats, the wet edge of eyes. When your breath hitches at someone’s story, he turns his head sharply like a wolf hearing snow crack.

“What would you let go of?” he asks you, voice pitched so the rest of the circle hears only the question, not the ownership threaded through it.

You could say: the fire, the last call you ignored, the smell of burning hair. Instead, you say nothing. He accepts your silence as if it were obedience he taught you.

Outside the glass, Jungwon is a darker shape among dark shapes, moving a hose along the rows. When his head turns toward the circle, it isn’t to the whole; it is to you. He holds you there for a breath you feel in your wrists. Then he tips the hose, and water falls like rain on metal bones.

You sleep after midnight because your body ambushes you. You wake to weight. Not on you; in the air, a heaviness like weather. The greenhouse lights are out. The compound holds its breath.

Something is under your pillow.

You slide your hand beneath it and touch paper—the rough tooth of a sketchbook page. You draw it out under the dim nightlight and see yourself. Not flattering. Not cruel. Exact. You kneel on dark soil, mouth open, and something vines out—delicate stems laced with thorns. Hands—two sets—hold your shoulders lightly, possessively: one set with ink stains, one with dirt ground into the half moons of the nails. At the bottom, Yejin’s cramped script: “Some flowers only open when watched.”

Mira stirs. “What is it?”

“Art,” you say, and your voice surprises you with how steady it is.

“What kind?”

“Prophetic,” you answer, because the truth is an animal pacing the edge of the bed and you’re not ready to let it into your ribs yet.

You slide the drawing back under your pillow and close your eyes. Across the compound, the night shifts. In your mind, Sunoo’s smile threads petals through your tongue. In reality, Jungwon’s lantern skates once across the fogged panes, a slow-moving star. Two orbits, caught in the same sky, tightening.

Slow burn, the booklet promised. Healing begins when you stop resisting.

You do not stop.

You breathe. You listen to the soil remembering you.

And you wait.

______

Morning arrives with a whistle under the door and the faint itch of grit in your teeth, as if you’ve been speaking to the ground in your sleep. Breakfast is the same: porridge, a bitter green shot, tea that tastes like boiled bark. Mira counts sips, bracelets clinking like quiet alarms. Taesun crushes his toast to dust and pockets it, eyes bright with purpose. Yejin sits very still, crown of reeds damp against her hair, sketchbook closed for once like a door she’s guarding with her body.

Director Seo taps her cup. “Today begins the Mouth Fast,” she says, voice smooth as tile. “Speech is the first addiction. For twenty-four hours, we practice voicelessness. Carry your stone”—a monk in linen sets a bowl of river stones on each table—“and let it hold your words. Anyone who breaks the fast will do a double shift in the greenhouse trenches. Sunoo will lead stillness. Jungwon will direct labor.”

A murmur rises and dies, mouths pressing shut to prove eagerness. Mira puts a flat, oval stone in your palm. “Don’t lose it,” she whispers, already breaking the rule. “They’ll say the soil took your voice because you were careless.”

You tuck the stone into your sleeve and meet Sunoo’s eyes across the hall. He’s already watching—of course he is. The smile he gives you would be harmless if you hadn’t seen how he moves when he’s pleased: slower, closer, like a candle drawn to oxygen. Jungwon lingers by the service door with a clipboard and a coil of hose on his shoulder, scanning tables the way a shepherd counts sheep by the sound of their breathing.

Chores first. Outside, the air needles your lungs; the mountain wears its cold like a second skin. Jungwon assigns tasks without looking at his list. “Mira, refectory herbs. Taesun, east wall compost. Yejin, with Nurse Min in the clinic.” His gaze slides to you and steadies. “You—paths and drains. Stay out of the grove.” Not a suggestion.

You carry a stiff-bristled broom down stone paths glazed with last night’s dew. The greenhouse ribs glow under weak sun; from inside, lamps hum, and something leafy slaps damply as if it’s learned the shape of applause. By the east wall, Taesun kneels with a small shovel and a reverence that would be holy if it didn’t smell like rot.

He tips crumbs in a neat line, then pauses to show you something cupped in his palm: a white, blind tangle coiling in damp soil. Worms, yes, but too many knotted together, a living thread. He beams, proud. You force your lips into gratitude and keep sweeping. If you stop, you will hear them, and if you hear them, you will dream them.

A shadow falls across your broom. Jungwon holds out a pair of soft-soled garden shoes with the temporary patience of a man who prefers doing to explaining. “Your feet,” he says. “You bruise easily.”

You glance at your bare socks, damp to the ankle. “Is that a rule?”

“It’s a reality,” he says; the word lands like weight. He crouches without asking, sets the shoes on the path, and steps back, gaze down so you can decide if you’ll take his help. You put them on. They’re warm from his hands. He notices the lift of your breath and looks away so the noticing won’t embarrass you. When he straightens, his eyes snag on the river stone tucked in your sleeve. “Don’t drop that,” he says. “The ravens like to steal them.”

You arch a brow—Are you joking?—but he’s already moving, a steady, unshowy force among the clatter of chores.

By mid-morning the Mouth Fast is a taut cord running through the compound. The quiet isn’t peace; it’s suppression, and suppression hums. Sunoo runs stillness from the center of the greenhouse like a maestro conducting silence. He has you sit within his radius; you don’t know how you know that, but you do. When a guest’s shoulders begin to shake, his hand appears at the nape of their neck—just weight, just heat, just enough to persuade the body that obedience feels like care.

He comes to you last, when the lamps have warmed the panes to sweating. He kneels, not quite touching, gaze on your throat. “Your pulse is stubborn,” he says in a voice pitched for you alone. “It hates rhythm. I like that.” He brushes the air near your jawline, not touching, so you feel it anyway. “The stone will teach it obedience. If you’re good at listening.”

You hold his eyes and refuse to nod. He smiles, pleased with your defiance like a trainer who prefers wild animals because they make better trophies. “We’ll work on it,” he whispers, and stands.

After lunch—a bowl of broth filtered until flavor gives up—you’re pulled into the clinic with half a dozen others for “check-ins.” Nurse Min sits you on a stool and unwraps your finger. The cut is a thin mouth now, pink with newness. She touches a gloved finger to the gauze and sniffs it as if the body has a scent that changes when it’s lying.

“Does it itch?” she asks.

You hesitate. The truth is embarrassing. “Everything does,” you admit. “Under the skin. Like… like something wants out.”

“Something wants in,” she corrects mildly. She takes tweezers to the pad of your finger and draws out a hair-fine splinter you didn’t know was there. It isn’t wood—it’s pale and sappy, flexing like a root in the air. She drops it in a jar and screws the lid tight. “Names need medium,” she says. “Don’t let anyone put theirs under your skin.”

“Is that medical advice?”

“It’s survival.” She tapes a fresh bandage printed with tiny leaves, then, softer, “If you start tasting flowers, spit.”

You leave the clinic with your mouth dry as chalk. On the steps, Yejin waits like a shadow that forgot to attach to a body. She presses a folded paper to your palm and flits off before you can unfold it. In the corner of the page, her fast, lethal graphite: you in profile, throat open, something like a stem ghosting up under the jaw. In the negative space behind you, two silhouettes—Sunoo’s soft edges; Jungwon’s blunt solidity—blur toward one another without touching. Underneath, her careful script: Not yet. But soon.

The Mouth Fast bends afternoon into a colder shape. Without words, people show who they are. Mira hums under her breath and taps her stone against her teeth like a bead. Taesun counts breath with his fingers on his ribs. A new arrival—Hana, thirty and jewel-hard—walks like a woman who refuses to ask permission from the air. An older man, Mr. Ko, rows his spoon through soup with the concentration of a man pretending there is a river and a boat that can take him off this mountain.

At dusk, Director Seo calls for the Seed Burial. “We surrender what we’ve hoarded,” she says, and volunteers step forward with small slips of paper seeded with something that will sprout if the soil wants it. They kneel, press the papers into a rectangle of fresh-turned earth, and cover them with a thin skin of loam. The lamps go low. Sunoo stands at their backs. Jungwon stands at their front, shovel grounded like a staff.

You don’t move. You have nothing to bury you can stand to name.

A woman you recognize from orientation—the one who needed three days of sleep—places both palms flat on the soil like it’s someone she loves. Her breath hitches once; she swallows whatever it shook loose. As the last handful of earth covers the names, something beneath the surface shifts. Not the modest swell of seeds drinking. A shove from below.

The crowd stills. You feel it again—a push. The soil flexes and sighs, grains settling. Someone’s hand jerks back as if bitten. Sunoo’s smile does not change, which means it changes. “The ground recognizes an offering,” he says pleasantly. “Stand, flowers. Let the dark do what it’s for.”

Jungwon’s eyes are on the dirt, not the people. His jaw flexes once, twice. You have the sharp, childish thought—He hears it too—and the relief that follows is so naked you almost miss the fear riding it.

Night stitches the compound tight. The Mouth Fast persists: tongues held, little pantomimes replacing argument. In bed, Mira sleeps with her open palm on her stone like it might roll away. You face the wall because the drawing under your pillow is a magnet and your skull is iron.

A scrape wakes you—a quick, purposeful sound under the window. You slide out of bed and ease the latch. Cold breath pours in. On the path below, a lantern moves slow as a planet. You follow, soft-soled shoes silent on the boards, the stone in your sleeve tapping your wrist like a heart that’s climbed too high.

The lantern stops. Jungwon steps into its circle. He doesn’t look surprised to see you. He looks like a man who has laid a trap and found what he baited it for. He lifts the lantern just enough to catch your face without flaying you with light.

He puts a finger to his mouth—quiet—and crooks that same finger: come.

You should run. You go.

He takes you along the west path to a low, fenced plot you haven’t noticed in daylight, because in daylight everything looks like something else. Up close, the boards are stained darker than weather. He stops you with a hand on your sleeve. His grip is gentle; his hand is strong. “Do not speak,” he says, and for the first time today the command lands like care, not control.

He tilts the lantern over the fence. The light stratifies a pit maybe two meters long, maybe one deep, lined with rough timbers and crawling with the industry of decay. You see peels, stems, pot scrapings—normal compost—then catch on something pale threaded through like lace: cartilage? You squint, heart hammering, and in among the skins and stems you see hair—just a clump, just enough to be undeniable. The sour-metal stink under the rot answers a question you didn’t know you were asking until now.

You stagger, mute because the rule still binds your mouth. Jungwon’s hand rises like he planned for your body to try to leave you. He catches your elbow with two fingers and steadies you without pulling you closer. “Breathe,” he says, voice so low the pit swallows it.

You breathe. He watches your lungs move under your shirt as if measuring if they’ll keep their job.

“What is this,” you manage, a whisper that bruises the fast.

“Everything that isn’t needed,” he says. It is both the most honest sentence you’ve heard since you arrived and the worst one. “Don’t come here alone.”

“Why show me?”

His mouth tightens. He weighs the truth and hands you a ration. “Because you will go looking. Better you see what is true than what you can’t live through.”

He lifts the lantern away; the pit dissolves back into darkness. When he looks at you again, the composure you’ve seen him wear like a uniform slips an inch. “Next time,” he says, “wake me.”

“How?” It comes out harder than you intend. “Do I knock on the earth?”

“On my door.” He says it like a correction and a promise. “I’d rather carry you than find you down there with your throat open to the sky.”

You swallow. The stone in your sleeve digs your wrist bone.

He walks you back along the west path, keeping the lantern low so you don’t blind yourself and tumble. At the bottom of the dorm steps, he stops as if a line of salt has been poured between you. “Sleep,” he says. Then, almost grudgingly—no, carefully, like he fears generosity might teach you to expect it—���You did well.”

“You mean quiet,” you say.

“I mean you didn’t lie to yourself while you were looking.” He turns the lantern, and for a heartbeat your faces share a circle of light. It is not intimate, and it is.

Inside, the warm dark smells like bodies and disinfection. Mira turns in her sleep, bracelets whickering. Your hands shake. Not with the adrenaline of the pit—though that remains like a taste at the back of your throat—but with the realization that both men see you. Sunoo sees the mechanism; Jungwon sees the fracture line. You can’t decide which is worse.

The Mouth Fast breaks at dawn with a bell so soft it feels like a secret. Voices resume like a creek finding an old bed; people speak too loudly, then blush, then laugh at their own relief. Director Seo praises “compliance” as if it were a sacrament. In the refectory, mugs clack, spoons scrape. Words return as barter.

You don’t trust yours yet.

Sunoo flows through tables like sunlight convincing itself it’s holy. He catches your empty mug, pours tea, and sets it in front of you with a flourish that makes a few heads turn. “How did the silence fit?” he asks, lazy, interested. It isn’t small talk. It’s a probe shaped like kindness.

“Like wire,” you say.

He smiles, delighted—as if you’ve told him a secret about yourself he can use. “It looks good on you,” he says, and taps your river stone where it sits on the table as if he gave it to you, as if it obeys him too. “We have Talkback today. You and me.”

“Is that optional?”

“In principle,” he says. “In practice, most people prefer to be seen.” He leans in, lower voice. “You certainly do.”

He leaves before you can snap that you preferred to be alive, actually. Across the room, Jungwon stops at the threshold, takes the refectory in at a glance, and chooses a seat with his back to the wall. He eats fast, plain, as if food is fuel and surveillance is dessert. When he lifts his mug, you notice the fresh welt across the back of his hand—a thorn, yesterday, dragging its punctuation.

Talkback is held in a small room off the clinic, windowless, lit by a lamp that chooses flattery over truth. Sunoo sits too close, but because he knows what too close does to bodies, he leaves exactly enough air that you can fool yourself into thinking you could stand if you wanted to. He doesn’t touch you. He rests his forearms on his knees, hands open, posture full of a patience he wears like silk.

“What is the shape of your fear?” he asks, as if fear is polite enough to have geometry.

“Wide,” you say.

“Flat?”

“Deep.”

He grins. “Good. Honesty makes my job easier.” He looks at your mouth, then your hands, then your throat. “Last night you broke curfew.”

It isn’t a question. “I walked.”

“To the west path,” he says, savoring the corridor of it.

“Is that forbidden?”

“Not if you were with someone.”

You hold his gaze. You don’t look away. You don’t nod. You don’t give him Jungwon.

Sunoo’s smile returns, but thinner. “We don’t punish curiosity,” he says silkily. “We shape it.” He nods to your sleeve. “Keep the stone. I like how you sound when you hold it.”

“I didn’t speak.”

“You breathed differently,” he says, and you hate that you believe him. “This afternoon I want you in the greenhouse. We’ll do matching breath. I’ll keep count so you don’t have to.”

Your stomach remembers the pit and rolls. “What if I say no?”

“Then we’ll go slower,” he says, as if you asked him to make it sweeter. “That’s the kind of consent you like, isn’t it? The kind that arrives after your body learns the lesson.”

You stand because sitting feels like agreeing. He doesn’t stop you. He nods as if you’ve completed a task he set in his head.

“Good,” he says. “The roots are listening.”

Outside, the day is too bright in the way of mountains pretending to be gentle. You find Mira tending pots of kitchen herbs—mint, rosemary, a vicious little basil. “You look like you saw a ghost,” she says without looking up.

“I saw the compost,” you say.

She flinches so hard the basil shudders. “You don’t say it out loud,” she hisses, then checks herself, forces her voice calm again. “Names wake things.”

“Whose hair is in it?”

“Everyone’s,” she says. “Eventually.”

By late afternoon your muscles revolt, and stillness becomes a thing you have to hold down with both hands. In the greenhouse, Sunoo runs breath like a metronome. When he kneels behind a girl whose hands won’t stop shaking, he doesn’t touch her skin; he places his palm two inches away from her spine and waits. The girl’s shoulders ease; her breath learns his count. You hate him for it. You hate her relief. You hate that your body pays attention.

Jungwon moves along the rows with a bucket and a dull pruning blade, nicking stems, turning soil, resetting stakes. When a lamp pops and goes dim, he crosses to replace it without being called. On his way back, he passes near your mat—near, not past. The air shifts with him: sweat, iron, soil, a clean note like water running under rock. He doesn’t look down. He scratches the back of his wrist where a thorn welt cross-hatches older scars and says, as if the comment belongs to the room, “Some things only grow when you pretend you can’t see them.”

You don’t know if he means the plants, the people, or you.

Evening comes with teeth. The bell pulls everyone to the refectory; the sky sits heavy, swollen with weather that refuses to begin. Over dinner, Hana spills her tea and swears loudly enough that half the room jumps; then she laughs, tips her chin like she meant to do it, and glares at anyone who looks sorry on her behalf. Mr. Ko tells Taesun to stop feeding the worms like they’re pets; Taesun bares his teeth, half-smile, half warning. Nurse Min pockets a spoon someone bent into a hook. Director Seo watches it all with the small, sated smile of a zookeeper whose animals are thriving.

Night brings the first scream.

Not a long one. Not a movie howl. A single, keening note cut off hard, like a rope being cut. The compound freezes; forks stop halfway to mouths; breath holds. Sunoo is already on his feet, smile sharpened into usefulness. Jungwon’s chair scrapes; he’s moving before you can find your shoes.

They go toward the grove at a measured pace that says they already know what they’ll find. Director Seo lifts her hand. “Stay seated,” she says, and the command lands like weight on your shoulders. Mira’s fingers take yours under the table and squeeze so hard your knuckles grind. You squeeze back. Your mouth tastes like rosemary and fear.

You wait. The greenhouse sweats. The clock you aren’t allowed to see walks itself around the hour by the sound of your blood in your ears. When the door opens again, Sunoo comes in first, serene, coat unwrinkled. Jungwon follows with a bundled shape in his arms—a blanket, a softness of color, too long where a body should bend.

A gasp skips the room. “She fainted,” Sunoo says, which is both intolerably insufficient and the only story you’ll be allowed. “A cleansing reaction. She will rest. We will keep vigil over the names she surrendered.”

He doesn’t say who. Your mind fills the blank with the sleeping woman from breakfast, because that is who you fear for, and fear is a magnet. Jungwon carries the bundle past. You know how much weight that is—your body recognizes the set of his jaw, the economy of his gait. He does not look at you. He doesn’t look anywhere but the door to the clinic, as if any glance could spill what he’s holding.

The dining hall exhales like it’s been underwater too long. Director Seo claps once, neat. “We will not gossip,” she says. “We will not catastrophize. We will practice serenity.”

You don’t sleep. Not because you’re brave—because you’re scared correctly now, and scared correctly people stay awake. When you doze, you wake to the sensation that someone has put a leaf on your tongue and asked you to pray with it in your mouth. You spit into your sheet and find nothing. When you sit up, a shadow peels off the wall near the window and becomes Jungwon.

You nearly fling yourself out of bed. He doesn’t move, as if sudden gestures would spook you. He should not be in the dorms after lights; rules are their own religion here. He breaks this one like he breaks branches: cleanly, without apology.

“You left your shoes,” he says, low. He sets them at the foot of your bed, lined up, laces tucked. His voice is stripped of everything but function. “Don’t go barefoot again.”

“What happened?” you ask, whispering because anything louder might wake the dark.

“Don’t ask me,” he says, and for a breath you think he’s refusing. Then he adds, “Because I’ll tell you.” His gaze drags over your face, cataloging fine tremors, the cracked edge of your mouth, the way one hand fists in the sheet like rope. “Sleep,” he says. “You’ll need it.”

He is out the way he came, the door kissing its jamb like a secret.

You try to obey. The mountain presses its cold face to the window and listens. Somewhere, a lantern moves. Somewhere else, a man like a hymn kneels by a bed that is too light.

You put the river stone back in your sleeve and hold it against your pulse until the beat stops arguing with your bones. You remember the jar in Nurse Min’s clinic with the threadlike root curled at the bottom like a question mark. You picture Yejin’s hand drawing you with something under your skin you didn’t agree to carry.

Stillness was the promise. Obedience was the price. You have paid neither. Now the Garden pays attention.

And you, finally, are afraid.

_________

You wake with the taste of copper and rosemary slicked over your tongue, as if someone pressed a leaf there while you slept and whispered hold it. A welt has risen along your bandaged finger—thin, pale, almost pretty. When you press it, it flexes under the skin like something answering from underneath.

Breakfast is a choreography of clatter and eyes. Mira smiles too hard; her bracelets rattle out a code you can’t read. Taesun tips crumbs into his pocket with priestly concentration. Yejin’s crown of reeds has dried to a brittle halo; she draws with her pencil held like a knife. Hana sits mean and diamond-bright, daring the room to dull her edges. Mr. Ko’s spoon cuts the same path through porridge like a boatman refusing any other shore. Director Seo watches the surface of her tea the way people watch the sea for bodies.

“The Naming Rite will be held at sundown,” she announces, as if she’s asking for the salt. “Those selected have been notified.”

Sunoo lifts his eyes, and that’s your notification.

Mira’s fingers find your knee under the table and clamp. She shakes her head once, small, fast—refuse. You don’t know what refusal looks like here besides a story they will tell about you afterward.

“Drink,” Nurse Min says when you pass through the clinic to turn in your night report—how many hours asleep, how many awake, whether you dreamed of heat, teeth, drowning. She hands you a glass the green of pond water. You smell it, and it smells like lawn and iron. “Chlorophyll with a little hem,” she says, seeing your face. “Calms the heart.”

“Calms or slows?” Your voice scratches.

She cants her head. “Same action, different motive.” She glances at your finger. “Still itching?”

“It… moves,” you say, and the honesty makes your stomach pitch. “Like a thread.”

“Everything alive wants a home,” she replies. She peels the bandage with sure fingers. Underneath, the welt has subdivided into delicate veins, a fine network. Not veins. Veining. It looks like leaf. She presses the back of her glove along it; the pattern darkens, limned green under the skin. “Names need medium,” she repeats. “Keep your mouth closed in the greenhouse today. Even when you want to answer.”

You want to ask answer what, but Sunoo is in the doorway, dusk caught in the lamplight of his hair. He doesn’t knock; he glides in like permission. “Our new sprout,” he says, pleased to find you in a chair. “I’ll take her.”

Nurse Min’s mouth goes a little flatter. “She eats first.”

“Of course.” Sunoo’s smile doesn’t move. “Then we breathe.”

The greenhouse sweats. Heat lamps hum like insects; the glass with its rain of condensation blurs the mountain into a myth. Staff move among the rows with trays of soil sheets—thin paper seeded with something that glitters faintly when the light hits it wrong. “Embedded affirmations,” Sunoo tells the group. “You write what you’ll surrender. The seeds will carry it.”

Hana snorts. “Is the surrender refundable?”

Sunoo’s eyes quicken. “There’s always a transaction,” he says. “We just prefer you know the price.” He looks back to you. “Mat,” he says, and it isn’t a request.

You sit. He kneels behind you, palms hovering two inches from your ribs. No touch—just the sense of touch waiting. “Open your mouth,” he murmurs. The admonition from Nurse Min echoes; you clamp your lips. Sunoo’s pleased noise lands against your neck like breath. “Good. Breathe through your nose. In on four, out on six. I’ll count.”

His voice is a rope you have to grab to keep from slipping. When your breath shudders, he matches it; when it calms, he pursues. On the sixth cycle, something sweet pushes the air—lily, wet earth—and you remember the pit and want to be sick. “Stay,” he says, reading your recoil. “Stay where your body is. Don’t run from it. That’s where people rot.”

Across the rows, Jungwon replaces a cracked lamp with quick, sure hands. He doesn’t look at you until he does, a glance like a hand closing on the back of your neck. The air between you tightens. His forearms are netted with healed cuts, white against brown; a fresh welt crosses them like a red thread. When Sunoo says “out on six,” Jungwon turns the dial and the light hums obedient, and you wonder whether the whole building breathes to his count.

Yejin brings you a tray of seed-paper without being asked. When you reach, her gaze drops to your bandage. She moves the pencil like a blade and sketches the back of your hand: the delicate leaf veining, the suggestion of something wanting to break surface. She writes Not yet over the knuckles and slides the paper into your lap. Her mouth is a thin line; her eyes are large and dry and furious.

The day’s chores are smaller and meaner than yesterday’s. Scrub the condensation gutters. Rake. Haul sacks labeled Bone Meal that smell like old molars. Taesun sings under his breath in a language not meant for mouths and leaves a damp trail of crumbs along the east wall. Mr. Ko fetches and carries with blank efficiency, his face empty as a cleaned plate.

By late afternoon, a woman you know only as Auntie Hye—fiftyish, hair cut short for neatness, eyes that scan like a mother bird’s—begins to cough. At first it is dry and prim; then she hunches, pushes a hand to her chest and coughs wet. A ribbon of something bright pops free onto her palm. Petals. White. Tissue-thin and slick with saliva. A few guests laugh—nerves, delight, cruelty. Nurse Min is there before the room decides what to feel, hand under Auntie Hye’s chin, tissues ready. Hye coughs again, harder, and a clot of petals spills: red-tipped now, streaked. She hacks out a final cluster and sags. The tissues are sodden. The petals look like tongues.

“Pollination,” Sunoo says calmly. “Sometimes the body rehearses letting go by practicing bloom.”

Auntie Hye shakes her head, breath hitching. “I didn’t—” she starts.

Sunoo presses two fingers lightly to her throat. “You did.”

She closes her mouth.

Jungwon comes with a bucket and a flat spade; he scoops the petals into the bucket without expression. Your stomach tilts; you grip the bench until the wood prints itself into your palm. He doesn’t look at anyone. He takes the bucket toward the compost. You see his jawclench once when he passes the pit door and files that, like a photographed crime scene.

After the petals, other small horrors follow as if emboldened. A boy pulls his sleeve up to scratch and reveals a faint green tracery along his inner arm; when he scrubs at it, the skin reddens and puffs and the pattern brightens like a pressed leaf held to light. Mira slices a basil stem and it bleeds thin, clean sap; she runs her thumb along the cut and licks it without thinking, then startles at the taste and laughs too loudly. Taesun tips a paper cup into a drain, and a pale, slick worm writhes against the grate and splits into two thinner threads that both crawl the wrong way, toward his fingers. He coos like they’re babies and tucks them back into mud.

“Don’t feed your nightmares,” Nurse Min says without looking up from the woman whose mouth she swabs. “They grow fine on their own.”

By evening, the heat in the greenhouse feels like a hand that won’t lift. The lamps go low. Director Seo stands by the iron ribs with her clipboard like a prayerbook. “For the Naming Rite,” she says, “we welcome Sunoo as Voice and Jungwon as Hands.”

Voice and Hands. A division of power simple enough to live inside.

You are led—gently, unmistakably—toward the central bed, a rectangle of fresh loam bordered by smooth stones. Yejin edges after you, sketchbook clutched to her chest; Nurse Min blocks her with just a glance. “Not this,” Min murmurs. “Later.”

Mira steps forward—too fast—“I can go instead,” she says, smile like a knife wrapped in tissue.

Sunoo’s smile is silk on a nail. “We don’t barter names,” he says. “We harvest them.”

Your knees give. Not dramatic; a small buckling, the body remembering the ground. Sunoo’s hand is there without touching you, a near-weight at your shoulder. “Kneel,” he says, as if reminding you what your body already decided. “Head up. We face what we bring.”

Jungwon stands at the foot of the bed, shovel grounded. Close, his expression is the same flat steel as his blade. He looks at your throat the way carpenters look at walls: not hunger—assessment. When he speaks, his voice is small enough to belong only to the three of you. “Do you know what you’re giving?” he asks.

You try to say No. What comes out is “Something I can’t carry.”

“Good,” he says, and the word is not kindness. It’s calibration.

Sunoo’s fingers hover at your jaw, turning your face by the gravity of proximity. “Open,” he tells you, and your mouth obeys because your body recognizes a doctor’s tone even when it comes from someone who would rather be a priest. He places a petal on your tongue. It tastes like cold tea and a coin. “Hold,” he says. He waits. When you swallow despite yourself, his smile flares. “You see? The body knows ceremony even when the mind resists.”

He steps behind you. You feel his presence like a heat lamp. Jungwon moves to your side and holds out his hand. On his palm: a knife. Not sharp—its edge has been blunted until it’s a tongue of metal—but its point is honest. He waits until you meet his eyes; only then does he set the flat of the blade against your sternum. The steel is cool. Your skin fists under it.

“This is how we write it,” Sunoo says, and his breath touches the shell of your ear like a whispering moth. “Not deep. Not cruel. Not yet.”

The blade slides up without breaking skin, tracing between ribs, across the slow bell of breath—sternum, clavicle, the notch at your throat. The metal leaves a trail of gooseflesh; your pulse hammers against it like an animal trapped under the lid of a box. Jungwon’s other hand is steady at your shoulder, not pushing, not holding, just there, a second horizon the body can measure itself against.

“Name what cannot follow you,” Sunoo murmurs. It could be a real question. It could be a spell. Your mouth fills with the taste of flower and iron; words gather behind it like flies at meat.

You can’t say the fire; to say it would open something that the soil will keep. You say, “The last night.”

“Again,” Sunoo purrs.

“The last night,” you repeat, and the room tilts like a field under wind.

The congregation—guests in white, staff in linen—sways. Mira has both hands pressed to her lips. Taesun rocks in small, violent arcs. Yejin’s pencil moves; she draws you kneeling, two sets of hands marking you; she smudges the graphite so the air around you looks like breath or smoke.

The blade dips, lifts, comes to rest against your throat’s right side. You feel the exact spot where it would enter if it wanted to. Jungwon’s pulse is visible in his wrist; steady, heavier than yours. He moves the flat in a small crescent along the tendon, and your voice leaves you for a moment—pure reflex. A small, unpretty sound. Sunoo shivers behind you, pleased as if you performed a note he’d been coaching you toward.

“Do you understand the price?” Sunoo asks softly.

“No,” you say honestly.

“Beautiful,” he says, delighted. “No one ever does until after.”

He lifts the petal from your mouth with two fingers and lays it on your tongue again like communion. You hold it. Jungwon takes your left hand. His palm is rough and warm; soil lives in the whorls of his fingerprints. He pricks the pad of your finger with the very tip of the blunted knife, as if he wants to remind the blade of its older religion. A bead of blood swells, bright, neat. He turns your hand and presses that red to the seed-paper waiting in a shallow trench at the bed’s edge. Your blood bleeds into the paper like water into thirst.

“Now,” Sunoo says, voice dropped low enough to live in your bones, “we plant what you are not. So what you are can grow.”

Jungwon folds loam over the paper. The soil is cool even in this hothouse weather. It sucks at your finger when he presses your hand flat to it. Something moves underneath—something too quick for roots. Your stomach rocks. You try to pull back. Jungwon’s hand covers yours, firm as a yoke; Sunoo’s hand wraps your throat—not squeezing, just holding the column steady. You are pinned in two places that translate directly to obedience.

“Breathe,” Sunoo says.

You do. The soil under your hand warms like a mouth.

The congregation murmurs. Not words; the sound bodies make when they agree to a script. Director Seo watches like a reader flipping to the end to be sure it comes out as written. Nurse Min’s face has the set of a woman who’s decided to count a vein until morning.

The thing under the soil stills.

Jungwon lifts your hand and wipes the loam away with his thumb. The smear looks like war paint. Sunoo releases your throat and smooths his palm down the line his fingers left, a correction, an apology, a brand. He bends and whispers against your ear, “You belong to the ground,” and then, after a heartbeat, “and to us while you’re learning.”

His mouth never touches skin. The idea of it does.

The Rite closes with a bell that tastes like copper in your teeth. People file out as if stepping around a sleeping animal. Mira gets to you first, palms hot where she holds your face. “Drink water,” she hisses. “Don’t go to sleep. If you dream the name, it sticks.”

“I didn’t give it,” you say.

She laughs, a small animal sound. “You bled. That’s enough.”

Mr. Ko offers a clean handkerchief without meeting your eyes. Hana watches from a distance like a hawk deciding if a rabbit is worth stooping for when the field is full of easier meat. Taesun beams, mud on his lip, as if he’s just watched a very good wedding.

Yejin presses a drawing into your hand and vanishes. It’s you kneeling, hands marked, a line along your throat that is not a cut but knows where one would go. Over your shoulder, two shadows bend—one a heat-halo, one a blunt storm. Soon, she’s written. Don’t say yes with your mouth.

Night. The mountain holds its breath. The lamps in the greenhouse go black one by one until the glass is only a shape. You sit on your dorm bed and watch your hands not shake. Mira sleeps curled like a comma with her stone under her cheek. The drawing under your pillow warms to your scalp as if it wants to crawl into you.

A knock—not on the door. On the window, one knuckle, once. When you slide the frame, cold air pours in, and you think of Nurse Min’s keep your mouth closed in the greenhouse and keep it shut.

Jungwon stands below, lantern hooded, face lit just enough to make eyes and jaw. He tilts his head—come—and you go because your legs have learned this path. Out the back, down the steps, across the boards to the west path. He waits in the shadow of the shed where spades hang like a rack of tongues.

“Any dizziness? Nausea?” he asks, clinic-plain.

“Just… aware.” The word feels too small for your body’s rattled hum.

He grunts—approval. He reaches for your hand and turns the palm up. The loam under your nails has dried to fine grit. He rubs it away with his thumb, slow, methodical. It’s almost tender until you realize he is checking for changes—for the leaf-vein under your skin brightening, for anything moving that shouldn’t. When his thumb passes over the edge of your pulse, it jumps. He looks up sharply. You look away.

“You shouldn’t stay in the dorm tonight.” Matter-of-fact. “You’ll hear things like your name, and some of them will be for you and some won’t. You’re still soft. Soft things take impressions.”

“Where do I go?”

“My room.” Flat. Then, as if he heard how it sounds: “It’s safer. There are no plants there.”

“Is that true?”

“It’s true enough.” He waits. “Or go to the clinic and sit under Min’s lamp and let her count your breaths until morning.”

“Which would you pick,” you ask, because some part of you refuses to let him stand there and decide your body in his head without you in the room.

He takes too long to answer, then says, “The clinic is gentle.” A beat. “I am not.”

Wind combs the pines; the greenhouse ticks as it cools. Somewhere a raven laughs like a woman who knows your secrets and isn’t impressed.

“Choose,” he says quietly.

Sunoo’s shadow falls across the path before you can. He steps into the lantern’s circle like a storybook: pale wrists, clean hands, a smile that tells you exactly how he will use it. “Ah,” he says, soft delight. “My flower and my hands. I wondered where the night would put you.”

Jungwon does not step back. He also does not step forward. The lantern holds the three of you in a tight Venn where your breaths overlap. Sunoo tips his head, curious. “You can take her,” he says to Jungwon, which is to say I will let you. “But she’ll come back to me tasting like soil and fear, and we’ll start again from below.” He turns to you, voice honeyed and mean. “Or you can come with me and I’ll teach your body what calm feels like so you know when you’ve lost it.”

The polite violence of the options makes your stomach liquefy.

“Stop,” Jungwon says, and the word is a tool, not a plea.

Sunoo laughs softly. “The earth doesn’t stop growing just because you ask it gently.” He reaches, very slowly, and lifts your jaw with two fingers—not touching skin; his hand floats a whisper below it and your head lifts anyway, obedient to suggestion. “Show me your throat,” he says, and your body almost does it because it learned tonight and bodies like to repeat lessons. You hold yourself still out of spite. His smile warms. “Good girl.”

The words hit like a hand under your ribs. Jungwon’s breath changes. It darkens the air.

“Enough,” Jungwon says again, and hooks a finger in the lantern hood. He pulls it open. Light flares, pot-bright, brutal. The three of you blink; the world loses its beautiful edges and shows its seams. “Clinic,” he tells you.

Sunoo’s smile fades pixel by pixel until only his eyes shine. “For now,” he agrees. He steps in closer so there is no air between the three bodies but what breath can claim. He looks at Jungwon and speaks to you. “You’ll end up between us anyway,” he says, the prophecy flat, not cruel. “Why not learn the shape early.”

You should move. You should walk yourself to the nurse and let her count your lungs like prayer beads. Instead you stand very still while two men who have learned your pulse by different languages consider the currency of your fear.

Sunoo lifts his hand and stops a breath from your mouth. You feel the heat of him without the permission of touch. “I won’t kiss you,” he says, velvet and wicked. “Not yet.” He turns his palm and hovers over your throat, reading the rush there like a favorite book. “See what your body does with almost.”

Jungwon moves behind you so quietly the night forgets to mark his steps. He doesn’t touch you. His presence is so large it reads like contact anyway—the shape of him corralling air. You have the dizzy thought that if you leaned back, he would catch you, and if you leaned forward, Sunoo would open like a mouth.

“Breathe,” Sunoo whispers, and it isn’t instruction now; it’s a dare.

You do. The air leans with you. The world tightens to a triangle: lantern glare, the line of a blunted blade tucked into Jungwon’s belt, the faint copper on Sunoo’s knuckle where he touched your lip earlier with the petal.

“I said clinic,” Jungwon repeats, low enough to live at your spine.

“Make her say please,” Sunoo counters, amusement sweet as rot. “Our girl loves a ritual.”

“Don’t—” you start, and then stop, because the word tastes like surrender and you haven’t decided whose hands deserve it.

“Not tonight,” Jungwon says, and you understand: it isn’t mercy. It’s control deferred. He steps to your side, inserts a palm—warm, heavy—at your waist, not pulling, not pushing, just a point you can move along. Sunoo mirrors the motion on your other side without touching, an echo your nerves misread as contact. Together they guide you three steps, five, toward the clinic’s dim window—two gravities that agree for once.

At the threshold, Sunoo bends so close your ear warms. “Sleep,” he murmurs, the same command Jungwon uses like a blessing. “Dream of hands.” He smiles against the air where your skin ends. “Next time I’ll count for you while he holds you still.”

Jungwon’s hand tightens one notch at your waist, a warning, a promise, a brand pressed through clothes. “Next time,” he says, to Sunoo, to you, to the night that will keep at this until you’re rewritten, “I’ll decide who goes first.”

Nurse Min opens the clinic door before anyone knocks, lamp bright behind her like a little square sun. She takes in the triangle of bodies, the glint of the knife, the feral set of Sunoo’s mouth, the obedient steadiness of Jungwon’s hand at your side.

“Inside,” she says, and steps aside.

You pass between them—Sunoo’s almost-touch a heat across your throat; Jungwon’s real touch a line at your hip you could follow with your eyes closed—and cross into the light.

You do not kiss anyone. No one kisses you.

But as the door shuts and the mountain presses its ear to the glass to listen, you know it: your body already understands the shape they promised. It will remember. It will hunger.

And when it happens—when it really happens—it will not be an accident.

________

The clinic smelled of metal and mint. Nurse Min left you in a chair under her lamp until the feverish hum in your body dulled to a bearable pitch. She made you drink water, bitter and green as ditch weed, and held your wrist while your pulse rattled beneath her thumb. When you asked her if you were safe, she only said, “Nothing in a place like this is safe. At best, some things are safer than others.”

By the time she dismissed you, the compound had already gone to sleep. Mira was curled on her side in the dorm, bracelets stilled. You should have slept too. Instead you lay awake, tasting the memory of a petal pressed against your tongue, feeling the phantom weight of Jungwon’s hand steady at your waist, the ghost of Sunoo’s fingers just shy of your throat.

Your body remembered. It remembered too well.

When you finally slipped into the corridor, your bare feet soundless on the boards, it wasn’t to find air. It was because something in you had already decided that the ache would not stop on its own.

The greenhouse loomed against the night, ribs of iron and glass sweating mist. The lock had never been for people who wanted to stay out. You pushed the door and it sighed open, warm air rushing at you like a mouth.

He was waiting. Of course he was.

Sunoo leaned against a bench, sleeves rolled, pale wrists glowing under the lamps. His expression was the same one he’d worn when he laid the petal on your tongue earlier—delighted, expectant, like he had always known your body would come back to him.

“You breathe too loud when you lie down,” he murmured. “I could hear you from the other side of the hall.”

You should have left. You stepped closer instead.

Sunoo reached for you without touching, fingers tracing the air beside your cheek. That almost-contact burned hotter than heat itself. Your breath caught, and his smile sharpened. “See? Your body tells the truth. It remembers me already.”

His hand hovered down, stopping at the hollow of your throat. “Here,” he whispered. “Where the pulse lives.” He bent, mouth a whisper away from your skin, never quite sealing it. Your nerves screamed as if he’d kissed you. “You want me to touch you. That’s why you came.”

Your denial scraped your teeth but never left your tongue.

“Good girl,” he said, pleased at your silence. He turned you, pressing between your shoulder blades until your knees bent and you landed on the warm boards of the floor. “Stay open. Stay soft.”

His hands came at last—sliding along your thighs, parting them without rush, without doubt. He dragged his thumb along the cotton of your thin shorts, pressing until the damp there gave you away. “Blooming,” he said reverently, as if the word itself could coax you wider.

You gasped when he pressed harder, the friction maddening. He laughed low in his throat, pleased. “You’ve been waiting since the Rite, haven’t you? You swallowed the petal and your body begged for more.”

He tugged fabric aside with clinical precision, exposing you to the humid air. His fingers slicked easily through the wetness already gathered, and he made a sound of satisfaction that went straight to your gut. “So ready,” he crooned. “So obedient.”

Two fingers circled, teased, pressed—but never where you needed. He watched your hips shift, your breath stutter. “Say please,” he murmured.

“I—”

“Shh.” His free hand covered your mouth lightly, thumb grazing your lower lip. “Not with words. With your body.”

Your thighs trembled. You pushed into his hand, desperate. His smile widened. “There it is. Begging without speech.”

He slipped two fingers inside, slow, deliberate. Your back arched, a strangled sound caught behind his palm. He curled them just right, hitting the place that made you shiver, made your eyes roll back. “Yes,” he whispered against your ear. “That’s it. That’s how you bloom.”

His palm pressed harder over your mouth as your moans broke free. His rhythm quickened, fingers thrusting, scissoring, spreading you open as if he meant to plant something inside. Every push forced slick sounds into the greenhouse air. He bent low, lips brushing your temple, murmuring praises between each thrust: “Perfect. My good flower. Opening just for me. No one else will see you like this.”

Your orgasm came sudden, brutal—your whole body snapping tight around his hand, shuddering against him. He kept moving, dragging it out until you were gasping into his palm, thighs twitching.

When at last he withdrew, his fingers glistened. He lifted them to your lips, smearing wetness across them before pushing between. “Taste yourself,” he ordered softly. “Know what you are to me.”

Shame and hunger tangled in your chest. You sucked his fingers clean, and his eyes darkened, mouth parting as if he might finally kiss you. He didn’t. He pulled back just enough to leave you desperate, to make absence itself a cruelty.

“Blooming,” he whispered again, satisfied. “And tomorrow, you’ll be ready for the soil.”

The greenhouse door creaked. You jerked, Sunoo still crouched over you, his slick fingers withdrawing with deliberate slowness.

Jungwon stood in the doorway, lantern spilling gold over his dirt-streaked arms. His jaw tightened as his eyes tracked the wet shine on your lips, the way your legs trembled, the smug curve of Sunoo’s smile.

For a long, brutal moment, no one spoke. Then Jungwon stepped forward, shovel still in one hand, and his voice came out rough, dangerous.

“She’s mine next.”

The lamps hummed. The soil smelled of iron. Your heart beat against your throat like a trapped bird as the two men stared across you, and you realized the next time you were touched, it would be by both.

And you would not escape it.

______

The night you tried to run, the mountain gave you away.

The boards beneath your feet creaked, wet leaves clung to your calves, and the fog was a hand on your throat. You ran anyway. Past the dorms, past the glasshouse ribs glowing faintly from their lamps, down the west path where the ravens laughed like women who knew your secrets.

You thought the dark would cover you.

But the dark belonged to him.

A hand caught your wrist so hard you nearly went down. The lantern flared, and Jungwon’s face came out of the mist—eyes black, jaw locked, the muscle jumping with rage he didn’t bother to soften. He dragged you against him, chest heaving like you’d run into a wall that had learned how to breathe.

“Running,” he said, voice low and sharp as a spade. “After I told you not to.”

“I—”

“Quiet.” His grip on your wrist tightened until your bones ached. “Do you know what he did to you in there? Do you know what you smell like? Soil and him.” His other hand closed hard around your chin, forcing you to meet his eyes. His breath came hot, furious. “I told you not to let him touch you.”

Your protest was thin. “I didn’t—”

“You did.” He shoved you back against the rough bark of a pine. The trunk dug into your spine; his body crowded yours, heat and dirt and something mean. “You opened your mouth. You let him put his fingers in you.” His hand slid down your throat, pressing just enough to make your pulse throb under his palm. “Do you think that makes you his?”

“No—”

“No,” he repeated, mocking and brutal, pressing harder until your words broke into breath. His eyes raked you up and down like he was reading your body for lies. “You’re mine. If you’re soil, then I’m the one who plants.”

The knife appeared from his belt—not sharp, its edge long since blunted, but the point still honest. He held it flat against your belly, dragging it up under your shirt until the cold metal kissed the underside of your breast. You shivered, body jerking against the bark. His mouth twisted, equal parts fury and hunger.

“Scared?” he murmured. “Good. Fear makes roots dig deeper.”

He hooked the blade under the band of your shorts, pulling until the fabric stretched and then snapped. His hand shoved inside without pause, fingers rough, pushing into you like he meant to stake a claim. You gasped, the sound choking against the hand still at your throat.

“Wet,” he said, voice a growl, face close enough you could feel every word on your skin. “You’re soaked for me already. Even after him. Especially after him.” His fingers thrust harder, curling, relentless, forcing your body to answer him. “Say it. Say whose you are.”

You shook your head, too proud, too broken to give it.

His mouth curved cruel. “Then I’ll fuck it into you.”

He yanked your shorts down to your thighs, lifted you bodily against the tree, and shoved his hips between your legs. You clawed at his shoulders, half to push, half to hold on, but he pinned you easy, the knife’s flat pressed to your throat now like a brand. His cock pressed hot and thick against your entrance, grinding through the slick he’d found there, rubbing until you whined.

“You hear that?” he hissed, rolling his hips, dragging the head over your folds until obscene wet sounds filled the air. “Your body begging me in front of the whole fucking mountain.” He pushed in one brutal stroke, burying himself deep, forcing a cry from your throat. His teeth bared at the sound, savage triumph. “That’s it. Open up. Take me.”

He fucked you hard against the tree, every thrust jarring bark into your spine, every shove brutal and unrelenting. The knife never left your throat—flat, cold, reminding you what he could do if he wanted. His free hand gripped your hip so hard you knew you’d bruise, dragging you down onto him, using your body like it was already his.

“Mine,” he snarled against your ear, hips slamming. “Not his. Not anyone’s. Mine to fuck. Mine to plant. Mine to keep.” His pace grew rougher, desperate, jealousy bleeding into possession. “You’ll carry me. You’ll take my seed. You’ll remember whose cock fucked you open like this.”

Your moans tore free, high and broken, every thrust forcing them out. He laughed, breathless, mean. “Good little soil. Look at you—taking it. Clenching so tight you’ll never forget.”

When you came, it was with your whole body jerking, nails raking his back, his name spilling without permission. He fucked you through it, ruthless, using your climax to milk himself. With a final, brutal thrust, he came inside you, grinding deep, growling your name like a curse and a prayer.

He stayed pressed to you, chest heaving, the knife slipping down to rest against your collarbone. He didn’t soften. He didn’t let go. His mouth found your jaw, biting hard enough to leave a mark.

When he finally pulled out, slick running down your thighs, he yanked your shorts back up roughly, like covering you was a punishment. He grabbed your wrist again, dragging you toward the compound.

“You’re not sleeping in the dorms,” he said, voice iron. “You’re mine now. My room. My bed. No one else touches you.”

The lantern swung, throwing gold across the path. His grip never loosened. You stumbled after him, body raw, used, filled, the echo of his thrusts still beating through you.

And you knew he wasn’t bluffing.

______

Jungwon’s grip on your wrist was iron, dragging you through the silent hallways until the greenhouse lamps and dorm windows disappeared. His door slammed behind you, the bolt driven home with the finality of a lock on a coffin. His room was small, spare, stripped bare of comfort—just a bed, a chair, his tools. No flowers, no soil. Only him.

He shoved you onto the mattress like you weighed nothing. Your body jolted, still slick, still aching from what he’d already done. He stood over you, chest rising and falling hard, sweat at his temples, jaw clenched like a vice.

“You don’t go back to them,” he growled. “Not Mira, not Seo, and never him.” His eyes burned. “You’re mine.”

Your breath hitched; the word stuck in your throat.

A voice cut through the dark. “You’re wrong.”

The lantern on the desk flared, spilling its glow across pale wrists, white robes loosened at the chest, a mouth curved in that familiar, cruel delight. Sunoo. Already inside. Already waiting.

Jungwon stiffened, shoulders tensing like a predator finding another in his territory. “Get out.”

Sunoo ignored him. He stepped closer, his smile syrup-sweet but eyes sharp. “She doesn’t belong to you alone. Look at her.” His gaze slid over you where you trembled on the bed, your thighs pressed together, your lips parted from shallow breaths. “She’s terrified. She’s confused. She needs gentleness.” His tone softened, dripping like honey. “And you can’t give her that.”

“Gentle doesn’t keep her alive,” Jungwon snapped, stepping between you and him, shovel-callused fists at his sides. “Gentle lets her rot.”

“Alive?” Sunoo laughed, low and dangerous. “She’s not alive. She’s blooming. That’s what I make her.”

“Blooming,” Jungwon spat, “is just another word for open. And I’m the one inside her.”

The words made your stomach twist; heat and fear tangled until you couldn’t tell the difference. You tried to speak—stop, please stop—but your throat locked.

Sunoo’s gaze darted back to you, softening. He crouched, ignoring the way Jungwon loomed above him. His hand hovered just shy of your ankle, not touching—never touching—but the heat of him crawled up your skin. “Petal,” he whispered, “don’t be afraid. I’ll take care of you. I’ll show you how it feels to be cherished.” His lips parted, almost grazing your skin as he breathed you in. “Let me taste you.”

Jungwon’s growl shook the air. He seized your arm, yanking you back against his chest, his hand spread possessive across your stomach. His cock, still half-hard, pressed against your spine. “She’s mine. Mine to fuck. Mine to plant. Mine to keep.”

Your body shuddered. Fear, yes—but deeper, darker: want, shame, hunger you couldn’t smother.

Sunoo’s smile only widened. “Then let’s see who she opens for first.” He slid closer, slipping between your knees before Jungwon could stop him. His breath fanned over your thighs, hot and wet, and you gasped when he finally touched you—soft, reverent, his hands parting you like something fragile.

The contrast made you dizzy. Jungwon’s grip bruised; Sunoo’s mouth pressed feather-light kisses along the inside of your thigh, slow, teasing, as if every touch was worship. “Sweet,” he murmured, nose brushing close to the heat of you. “So sweet. I’ll make her sing.”

“Don’t you dare—” Jungwon started, but your body betrayed you, hips twitching toward Sunoo’s mouth, a whimper breaking past your lips.

That sound changed everything.

Jungwon froze, then snarled, shoving you down into the mattress, caging you with his body. One hand pinned your wrists above your head; the other tore your shirt open down the middle, fabric splitting under his strength. His mouth crashed to your throat, biting, marking, sucking bruises into your skin with furious precision.

Sunoo groaned at the sight, as if Jungwon’s violence only made you more beautiful. He leaned in, finally sealing his lips over your cunt, sucking hard, tongue lapping deep through your folds. The wet sounds filled the room, obscene, echoing against the bare walls.

You cried out, the noise muffled against Jungwon’s hand when he clapped it over your mouth. “Quiet,” he hissed, teeth at your jaw. “Don’t give him the satisfaction of hearing how much you love it.”

But Sunoo knew anyway. He moaned against you, tongue flicking your clit, fingers sliding inside with practiced ease, curling just right. He fed off every twitch, every muffled scream, every desperate roll of your hips. “See?” he said between licks, voice thick with arousal. “She opens for me. She’s blooming already.”

Jungwon pressed harder, grinding his cock against your hip through his pants, furious at your body’s betrayal, at the way your thighs trembled around Sunoo’s head. “She’s dripping because I fucked her raw,” he snarled. “All you’re doing is licking up what I left in her.”

The words made your body jerk, shame and desire hitting like lightning.

Sunoo pulled back just enough to look up at you, his mouth shining with your wetness, his eyes dark and soft. “You taste like need,” he whispered. He dragged his tongue slowly over your clit, savoring the way you cried out under Jungwon’s palm. “And you’ll remember I was the first one who made you come with his mouth.”

“Shut up,” Jungwon snapped. But his own hips rolled against you, his cock throbbing, desperate. His jealousy only sharpened his need.

You couldn’t fight it. You came hard, body arching, Sunoo’s mouth sucking your clit, Jungwon’s hand holding you down, his teeth biting at your throat. Your orgasm tore through you like the roots of something invasive, clawing deep, unstoppable.

They didn’t stop.

Sunoo licked you clean, gentle as a lover, humming like he was savoring wine. Jungwon bit harder, grinded rougher, his hand forcing your wrists deeper into the mattress. Both of them on you—one soft, one brutal—until you didn’t know whose name to scream.

And you understood, with raw clarity, that they weren’t fighting for you.

They were fighting through you.

When the shudders finally broke, you collapsed back, gasping, throat raw. Jungwon leaned down, lips brushing your ear, his voice a growl. “This is just the beginning. Next time I’m inside you while he’s in your mouth. We’ll see who you really belong to.”

Sunoo laughed softly, licking his lips clean of you. “She’ll belong to both.”

And for the first time, you realized he was right.

_____

Your body was still shaking when Jungwon yanked you upright, dragging you into his lap as if the bed belonged only to him. His thighs were iron beneath you, his chest hard against your spine. One arm locked around your waist, the other snared your throat, thick fingers spreading wide until his grip owned the column of your neck. He forced your head back, baring your mouth to him.

“You’ll taste me now,” he snarled, lips crashing into yours.

The kiss was brutal—teeth knocking, spit spilling. He shoved his tongue deep, choking you with it, swallowing every noise you tried to make. His palm pressed tighter at your throat until your pulse roared in your ears, until breath itself became something you had to beg him for. Drool slicked your chin, his tongue forcing yours down, his grip refusing to let you turn away. It was less a kiss than a violent claiming, his mouth fucking yours the way his cock had already fucked your body raw.

You gasped when he pulled back just enough to let air in, a string of spit hanging obscenely between your mouths. He licked it off your bottom lip, then spat into your mouth deliberately, cruelly, watching you swallow because you had no choice.

“Open,” he growled, forcing your jaw wider with his hand at your throat. “Good. That’s mine too. Every sound. Every swallow.”

Your vision blurred; your thighs squeezed together involuntarily. Terror and heat tangled until you couldn’t breathe for either.

And then Sunoo was there.

He crouched in front of you, hands sliding up your knees to part them wider, his smile infuriatingly calm even in violence. “My turn.”

“No,” Jungwon bit out, but Sunoo was already moving. He grabbed your chin, fingers digging in hard enough to bruise, and wrenched your head away from Jungwon’s mouth. Your neck snapped to the side, and before you could gasp, Sunoo’s lips were on yours.

It wasn’t tender. It was vicious. He sucked your bottom lip until it split, teeth biting down until pain shot bright, then licked the blood from your mouth as if it belonged to him. His tongue drove past your teeth, tasting everything Jungwon had left there, devouring it with obscene relish.

You moaned helplessly, the sound muffled between them.

Jungwon’s grip on your throat tightened, forcing your head back further, rage pouring off him like heat. “She’s mine.”

Sunoo broke the kiss just long enough to sneer against your wet mouth. “Then why is she kissing me back?” He pressed his tongue to yours again, slow and filthy, sucking until spit ran down your chin. Then he pulled back, wiped it with his thumb, and shoved the slick digit back between your lips. “Lick it clean. That’s mine now.”

Your mouth obeyed before your brain caught up.

Jungwon’s chest vibrated with a growl. He bent and bit your jaw, then your throat, leaving purple marks against Sunoo’s fingerprints. His hand clamped your neck harder, forcing you to gasp around Sunoo’s thumb.

“She’s choking on me,” Jungwon snarled. “Not you.”

Sunoo laughed low, mean. He leaned closer, his forehead pressing to yours, his other hand grabbing Jungwon’s wrist on your throat, not to stop it, but to squeeze it tighter. “Then let’s choke her together.”

The pressure doubled. Your eyes watered, spit pooling at the corner of your mouth, drooling down your chin as both of them held you, forced you open, forced you to take them. One mouth kissed you, sucked you, spat into you; the other bit, bruised, pressed your throat until stars danced.

You weren’t kissing anymore. You were being consumed.

And God help you—your body wanted more.

_______

They had you caged between them—Jungwon at your back, Sunoo at your front—two sets of hands closing every door your body might have tried to escape through.

Your pulse beat frantically against Jungwon’s palm at your throat. Sunoo’s fingers dug into your chin, keeping your face tipped up so you couldn’t hide. Their mouths had already ruined you, spit running down your jaw, bruises blooming on your throat and collarbone like dark flowers. Your chest rose too fast, every breath their permission, every sound something they stole from you.

“You see?” Sunoo whispered, voice as sweet as it was cruel. “She’s ready. She’s shaking for us.” His hand slid down, brushing your stomach, spreading lower. “The soil is wet.”

“She’s wet because I fucked her open,” Jungwon snapped against your ear, his breath harsh. “She’s mine to fill.” He ground his cock against your ass through his pants, thick and hard, a promise of what was coming. His teeth found your neck again, biting until your body arched despite yourself.

The two of them moved you as if you were theirs to arrange. Your thighs were forced wide over Sunoo’s lap, your back crushed to Jungwon’s chest. Rough hands tugged your ruined shorts away; cool air hit the slick heat between your legs. Sunoo hummed like a priest receiving an offering.

“Let me taste again.” He didn’t wait for permission. His mouth descended, sucking your clit into his mouth, tongue lapping at you until your eyes rolled back. His hands locked on your thighs, holding you open for him, his moans vibrating into your cunt.

Jungwon shoved your wrists down into the mattress, his cock rutting against you through fabric, his fury pressed into every grind. “Listen to her,” he growled. “Dripping for us. Begging without words.” He yanked his pants open, the blunt head of his cock dragging along your ass, smearing precum. “She’s going to take both. Right now.”

You sobbed, terror and need colliding until you couldn’t tell them apart. “I can’t—”

“You can,” Sunoo cut in smoothly, lifting his head, chin wet with your slick. He stroked your trembling thighs with a mockery of gentleness. “Your body’s already opening. We’ll guide you.” His eyes glimmered, half-devotion, half-madness. “You’ll bloom for us together.”

Jungwon spat into his palm, gripped his cock, and shoved it between your cheeks, rubbing the head against your tight hole until you whined. “Scared?” he hissed, his hand tightening at your throat. “Good. Fear makes you clench tighter.”

Sunoo’s fingers slid inside your cunt again, curling, coaxing, slicking you up for him. He looked up at you, his smile soft even as he stretched you ruthlessly. “Breathe, petal. I’ll be inside you soon. You’ll be so full you won’t remember how to be empty.”

When Sunoo lined himself up, pressing the head of his cock against your soaked entrance, Jungwon shoved his tip harder at your ass, both of them pushing at once. Your cry ripped the air as your body was forced to split, one cock stretching your cunt, the other pressing past the tight ring of muscle until you thought you’d break.

“Fuck,” Jungwon groaned, voice raw. “So tight. Gripping me like a fist.”

“She’s perfect,” Sunoo sighed, already sinking deeper, your walls convulsing around him. “Taking both of us. Our flower.”

It was too much. The stretch burned, overwhelming, obscene. You clawed at the sheets, eyes rolling back as both of them bottomed out, your body trembling violently with the force of being split in two. They didn’t give you time. Jungwon’s hips snapped forward first, brutal, pounding into your ass with the fury of jealousy. Sunoo met him stroke for stroke, slower, deeper, angling until every thrust speared your cunt exactly where it made you scream.

Pinned, stuffed, broken open—you were nothing but their vessel.

“Say it,” Jungwon snarled, hand squeezing your throat until your vision blurred. “Say you’re mine.”

“She’s ours,” Sunoo countered, kissing you, sucking the spit from your mouth, swallowing your gasps. “Tell us, petal. Tell us who you bloom for.”

Your answer was a sob, a whimper, a strangled cry as their cocks moved inside you, filling every inch, grinding against each other through the thin wall of your body until the sensation drove you half-mad.

“Fuck, I can feel him through you,” Jungwon groaned, rutting harder, holding you down as if you might try to run again. “But you’re squeezing me tighter. That’s how I know you’re mine.”

Sunoo’s tongue licked the tears from your cheeks. “She’s crying for me. Look at her. Look how she wants to be saved even while we ruin her.”

Your body convulsed around them, slick gushing down your thighs, every nerve alight. The pain blurred into pleasure until you were begging without words, your nails tearing the sheets, your cries spilling into their mouths as they fought to own your climax.

When you came, it was devastating—your cunt and ass clenching around them both, milking them, dragging them deeper. Jungwon groaned, teeth sinking into your shoulder as he spilled inside you, hot and overwhelming. Sunoo followed seconds later, filling your cunt until you were overflowing, cum dripping down your thighs, both of them holding you so tightly you couldn’t breathe.

They didn’t pull out. They stayed locked inside, cocks twitching, their breaths harsh against your skin.

Jungwon’s hand squeezed your throat one last time, forcing your eyes to his. “Say it,” he demanded, voice hoarse. “Say you’re planted in me.”

Sunoo kissed your cheek, softer but no less cruel. “Say you’ll bloom for us both.”

And you, too full to think, too wrecked to fight, whispered the only truth left in you:

“I can’t belong to just one.”

They smiled—different smiles, but the same hunger.

And you knew you’d never escape again.

_______

woah this was so diffecult to write SO IM SORRY IF IT ISNT THE BEST

THANK YOU FOR READING!!

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[lollovern]

- The Garden Left to Rot -

enhypen masterlist

wattpad

inspired by this post

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groundskeeper!yang jungwon x guest!femreader x cult counselor!kim sunoo | obsessive romance | cult horror | forced devotion | ritualistic sex | jealousy and rivalry | fucked-up love triangle | knife kink | corrupted comfort | you will belong to someone eventually | DARK CONTENT AHEAD!!

wc: 14k

summary: You’re sent to a grief recovery retreat hidden in the mountains. But this isn’t therapy — it’s a cult blooming in blood and rot. Jungwon wants to bury you where no one else can touch you. Sunoo wants to crack you open until you bloom for him. Both say it’s healing. But it’s obsession.

warnings: extreme gore, threesome, cult rituals, body horror (flowers under skin, insect scenes), blood play, forced confinement, psychological manipulation, emotional degradation, knife play, religious delusion, obsessive behavior, toxic romance, dubcon themes, ritualistic sex, hallucinations, violence

♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡

The van climbs until the road forgets how to be a road. Pines crowd close; fog slicks the windshield like breath on glass. By the time the driver kills the engine, your phone has been surrendered, the waiver signed, and your name—your real one—folded into a sealed envelope with your belongings.

A hand-painted sign leans crooked against a stone pillar: THE GARDEN.

Beneath it, smaller script: Let go. Become.

Everyone here is an adult—paperwork made that clear. Still, the cluster of arrivals huddle like freshmen. A woman in a bone-white coat stands at the gate, serene as a photograph. “Welcome,” she says. “I’m Director Seo. You won’t need last names here. You won’t need yesterday.” Her smile doesn’t reach her eyes. “We begin with stillness.”

Stillness smells like damp soil and rosemary. The compound spreads in tiers: a glasshouse ribbed with iron; dormitories with shuttered windows; a refectory where steam fogs the panes; a low clinic painted the color of milk. The greenhouse breathes—a pulse of heavy, sweet air each time the door opens. Inside, rows of lilies lean toward heat lamps; vines net the rafters; something rustles in the loam.

“Orientation,” says the boy who appears at Director Seo’s shoulder. He’s young—early twenties—with paper-clean features and the kind of smile people don’t realize is a blade until it’s already inside them. Kim Sunoo. His name tag says Counselor; the ribbon beneath it says Ritual Lead. “Shoes off in the greenhouse,” he adds lightly. “We keep the floors soft.”

Your shoes leave the ground. Cool boards. Warm mist. A bell rings once. The arrivals form a circle on woven mats; a dozen white-robed staff ghost the edges. A few guests have the shaved look of hospital discharge; others wear expensive emptiness like cologne.

“Here,” Sunoo says gently, “we do not share pasts. Only needs.” His gaze slips over faces and lands on you. Not a leer. A selection. “You may speak or sit in silence. Both are honest.”

“I need to sleep,” says a woman with chewed nails. “Like, three days.”

“I need to stop remembering,” a man answers, voice flat.

The girl beside you—twenty-two, maybe—says nothing. Yejin is stitched on her wristband. Her hands are ink-stained. She draws while people talk: a quick, vicious graphite—faces with petal-mouths; ribs like trellises. When you shift, she tilts her sketchbook so you can see the newest figure: a person kneeling in dirt, throat blooming with something that isn’t a flower.

“Beautiful,” Sunoo murmurs, as if he’s praising a child’s first recital. “You have a keen eye for transformation, Yejin.”

From across the greenhouse, someone drags burlap sacks along iron grates. Soil dark as coffee spills from a split seam and oozes across the floor. The man hauling the bags moves like he’s apologized to gravity and refuses to do it again. Yang Jungwon. Groundskeeper on his tag. Grey work shirt. Forearms nicked white with old cuts. He doesn’t look at the circle—doesn’t look at you—until he does, and then he doesn’t stop. Not curiosity. Assessment, like weighing a seed between finger and thumb and deciding if it will live in his earth.

Director Seo outlines rules in the smooth tone of a stewardess reciting crash procedures:

No personal histories in group.

No contact with family for the first fourteen days.

No unsupervised access to the greenhouse after dusk.

Do not remove plant material from designated zones.

What is given to the soil remains in the soil.

“That includes grief,” Sunoo says, almost playful. “Especially grief.”

Your dorm is clean in the way of hospital corridors and mortuaries. Two metal beds. Two lockers. A copy of a softbound booklet on each pillow: STILLNESS GUIDE. Your roommate arrives with a jangle of bracelets and the brittle cheer of someone who learned to smile as self-defense. Mira, 26, volunteer-turned-resident-mentor.

“Welcome-welcome,” she chirps, then lowers her voice. “Pro tip: keep your head down the first three days. They watch how you watch.”

“Who?”

“Everyone.” She flicks her gaze toward the window, where the greenhouse skeletons against dusk. “Especially him.” She means Sunoo—you can hear it in the soft, reverent way. “And the groundskeeper when it’s dark.” That last part is almost a warning.

The bell rings again. Dinner is broth that tastes like the inside of a leaf and bread dense with seeds. You eat at long tables while staff move among you like shepherds. Across from you, a jittery young man, Taesun—24, scars like cat-scratches up his wrists—piles his crusts and crumbles them methodically. He pockets a handful when he thinks no one sees.

“For the worms,” he whispers to the crumbs. “They get hungry at night.”

Mira nudges your knee under the table. “He feeds them behind the east wall,” she murmurs. “Says they keep the nightmares down if they’re busy.”

In the clinic after dinner, a nurse swabs your fingers where the paper edges of the waiver bit skin. Nurse Min is beautiful in the harsh way of women who have decided their faces are weapons. When she says “this will sting,” the consonants soften strangely; a long surgical scar splits the underside of her tongue. She catches you looking and lifts a brow that says yes, I am aware of my mouth. Then—almost tender—she tapes your knuckle with gauze printed with tiny flowers.

Back in the greenhouse, the first night session is called Surrender. The lamps buzz. Mist beads your eyelashes. Sunoo stands barefoot on the damp boards, sleeves rolled, voice a low waterfall.

“Close your eyes,” he says. “Name the weight you want the earth to hold for you. Don’t say it out loud. Let your body say it.”

Around you, bodies sway. Some cry. Some freeze. When you keep your eyes open, Sunoo notices. Of course he does.

“New sprout,” he says softly, close to your ear, and the nickname feels chosen, not random. “You don’t have to force stillness. It happens when the soil recognizes you.”

“Does it?” Your voice is hoarse from disuse and altitude.

“Always.” He smiles. Not kind. Not unkind. Satisfied. “The Garden knows its own.”

Across the rows, Jungwon kneels in the dirt, wrist-deep in loam, planting something without a label. He doesn’t follow Sunoo’s cadence; he follows his own. When one lamp flickers, he rises and fixes it with the swift, competent movements of someone who builds instead of asks. When he sits back, the soil clings to his fingers like shadow.

You should sleep. Instead you help Mira remake your beds with the stiff white sheets that smell faintly of bleach and rosemary. She keeps talking, because silence makes her hands shake.

“I came as a volunteer,” she says, tucking corners square. “Stayed as a patient. It’s easier when they tell you what to be.”

“What do they tell you?”

She smiles without humor. “A flower.” Her eyes slide to your bandaged hand. “Try not to bleed in the greenhouse. They don’t like that.”

“Why?”

“Because the soil remembers.”

At night the compound changes. Lights dim. The wind strips the pines and combs the glass with needles. You lie awake and count breaths—yours, Mira’s, the building’s—until you can’t bear numbers anymore.

You go out.

The air is colder than the dorm suggests. The greenhouse glows from within, a pulse behind fogged panes. Beyond the east wall, something moves with slow persistence. You follow the ripple of disturbed leaves to a break in the hedgerow and find Taesun kneeling with his pockets turned inside out, sowing crumbs into the leaf litter like a penitent farmer.

“The worms,” he says. “They hate hunger.”

“And if they’re hungry?”

“They crawl into you,” he says simply, and his eyes are not crazy; they’re convinced. “They’re looking for warmth.”

A lantern kindles behind you. “Curfew,” a voice says.

You turn. Jungwon holds the light up so it paints his face in bones and gold. Up close, his features soften—stillness without Sunoo’s practiced grace; a patient animal’s attention. The lantern makes a thicket of his lashes. He looks from you to Taesun to your bare feet on the cold boards.

“You’ll catch a chill,” he says to you, like it’s a personal offense. “Shoes. Now.”

You should resent the command. Instead, you feel the unreasonable urge to obey. You start toward the dorms.

“Not that way,” he says. “West path. Easier. Less slope.” He tips the lantern so the light doesn’t blind you while you pass. It’s a small courtesy. It also marks you—every guard on the walkway can see who broke curfew and who brought them back.

“Do you plant at night?” you ask, because silence around him feels like standing at a cliff’s edge and leaning a little too far.

“Always,” he says. He doesn’t volunteer more. His eyes drag briefly to your bandaged hand. “You left blood in the greenhouse.”

“I didn’t—”

He lifts two fingers, the gesture efficient and final. “The soil remembers.” His mouth twitches—not a smile, exactly; the ghost of one. “Mira talks too much.”

“Is that against the rules?”

“It’s against survival.”

He walks you to the dorm porch and stops at the bottom step like there’s an invisible line he won’t cross. The night carries pine resin and wet metal. You want to ask him what he plants without labels, what grows under lamps that mimic suns, why the staff wear rosaries made of seeds.

He says, low, “Don’t follow sounds you don’t understand.”

“Why?”

“Because some things here answer to being watched.” He tilts the lantern, and for a heartbeat you see something like a tenderness he hides even from himself. “Sleep.”

You try. You fail. When you finally slide under, it’s the shallow kind of rest that hears every hinge complain.

Morning stains the glasshouse pale gold. Breakfast is porridge and a shot glass of bitter green. “Chlorophyll,” Mira grimaces. “For purity. Or the aesthetic.” She scans the refectory like she’s counting exits. “There’ll be a Placement Walk after breakfast. Don’t volunteer. They love volunteers.”

“What is it?”

She cuts her eyes toward the greenhouse. “They take someone to the grove and ‘help them choose a garden name.’ Sometimes they come back with a wreath. Sometimes without their voice for a while.”

Director Seo taps her cup. “Today’s Placement Walk is for… Yejin.”

The graphite girl looks up, startled as a deer. Her pencil stills. Sunoo’s smile brightens by half a watt. “I’ll take her,” he offers, hand already extended. “I’ve seen her drawings. She understands transformation.”

If you didn’t sleep, you are alert now. Jungwon appears in the doorway like the building made him. His gaze flicks over the room, and when it lands on Yejin’s shaking knuckles, something barely visible tightens in his jaw.

“I’ll go with you,” he says to Sunoo without looking away from the girl.

“Of course,” Sunoo replies. Silk over steel. “Two witnesses. Very proper.”

They lead her out between them: the counselor with a palm light on her shoulder; the groundskeeper holding the door open so it doesn’t bite her. The room exhales when the door closes. Mira’s bracelets clink as her hands start to shake again.

“They’ll bring her back,” you say, because logic is a habit.

“Usually,” Mira says.

Taesun folds bread crumbs into his napkin with ritual care. “If the worms are fed.”

“Stop with the worms—”

He looks up, suddenly fiercer than his tremor allows. “This place eats. I just like to decide what it eats.”

You leave your spoon in your bowl. The porridge lurches in your gut like a tide. Through the greenhouse glass, you can’t see the grove, only the suggestion of trunks and a slit of path. Time grows teeth.

When they return, Yejin walks in her body like someone has moved the furniture. A crown of woven reeds presses her hair flat. There’s a smear of green at the corner of her mouth, like she’s chewed a leaf until it bled. She carries her sketchbook close to her chest as if it’s the last piece of herself no one has touched.

“What did you choose?” Director Seo asks.

Yejin’s voice is soft but intact. “Night-blooming cereus.”

“A flower that opens in darkness,” Sunoo says, pleased. “Perfect.”

Jungwon stands behind them, sleeves rolled to the elbow, forearms dirt-streaked. A single thorn scratches the back of his hand, a bright new welt. You don’t know why your chest warms at the proof that something here can still hurt them too.

As the room settles, Nurse Min touches your shoulder. “Consult,” she says, consonants rounded. In the clinic, she peels your bandage, checks the small cut, nods. “Fine.”

“Was the walk… normal?” you ask, too casual. “For Yejin.”

Nurse Min dabs salve with a gentleness that doesn’t fit her knife-edged face. “Normal is a shape you learn,” she says. “Here, it is round.” She taps your knuckle. “Don’t open yourself on purpose. Things may grow inside.”

“Like what?”

Her eyes flick briefly toward the greenhouse. “Names.”

By afternoon the schedule has you shoveling, watering, scrubbing, writing lines. I am ready to be less. You write it a hundred times until the words separate from meaning and become a pattern of stems and loops. Outside, Jungwon clears a new bed along the south wall. His shovel bites; his shoulders move with the reliable rhythm of practiced labor. A boy twice your size steps into his path and mutters something you can’t hear. Jungwon doesn’t raise his voice. He simply looks at the boy until the boy forgets how to stand where he’s standing and moves.

“Don’t stare,” Mira warns from beside you, but she’s staring too. “He notices.”

“He noticed last night,” you say.

Mira goes still. “You went out?”

“For air.”

“Air is how they catch you,” she whispers, and for the first time her cheer fails. “Promise me you won’t go alone again.”

You don’t promise. You also don’t say I don’t know who I am without alone.

At dusk, group again. Sunoo has you sit closer to him than yesterday. When you resist, he laughs softly, as if you’re charming rather than disobedient. “We sit where the light needs us,” he says. You wonder if that’s a rule or a line he likes. While others speak, he doesn’t look at them; he watches their hands, their throats, the wet edge of eyes. When your breath hitches at someone’s story, he turns his head sharply like a wolf hearing snow crack.

“What would you let go of?” he asks you, voice pitched so the rest of the circle hears only the question, not the ownership threaded through it.

You could say: the fire, the last call you ignored, the smell of burning hair. Instead, you say nothing. He accepts your silence as if it were obedience he taught you.

Outside the glass, Jungwon is a darker shape among dark shapes, moving a hose along the rows. When his head turns toward the circle, it isn’t to the whole; it is to you. He holds you there for a breath you feel in your wrists. Then he tips the hose, and water falls like rain on metal bones.

You sleep after midnight because your body ambushes you. You wake to weight. Not on you; in the air, a heaviness like weather. The greenhouse lights are out. The compound holds its breath.

Something is under your pillow.

You slide your hand beneath it and touch paper—the rough tooth of a sketchbook page. You draw it out under the dim nightlight and see yourself. Not flattering. Not cruel. Exact. You kneel on dark soil, mouth open, and something vines out—delicate stems laced with thorns. Hands—two sets—hold your shoulders lightly, possessively: one set with ink stains, one with dirt ground into the half moons of the nails. At the bottom, Yejin’s cramped script: “Some flowers only open when watched.”

Mira stirs. “What is it?”

“Art,” you say, and your voice surprises you with how steady it is.

“What kind?”

“Prophetic,” you answer, because the truth is an animal pacing the edge of the bed and you’re not ready to let it into your ribs yet.

You slide the drawing back under your pillow and close your eyes. Across the compound, the night shifts. In your mind, Sunoo’s smile threads petals through your tongue. In reality, Jungwon’s lantern skates once across the fogged panes, a slow-moving star. Two orbits, caught in the same sky, tightening.

Slow burn, the booklet promised. Healing begins when you stop resisting.

You do not stop.

You breathe. You listen to the soil remembering you.

And you wait.

______

Morning arrives with a whistle under the door and the faint itch of grit in your teeth, as if you’ve been speaking to the ground in your sleep. Breakfast is the same: porridge, a bitter green shot, tea that tastes like boiled bark. Mira counts sips, bracelets clinking like quiet alarms. Taesun crushes his toast to dust and pockets it, eyes bright with purpose. Yejin sits very still, crown of reeds damp against her hair, sketchbook closed for once like a door she’s guarding with her body.

Director Seo taps her cup. “Today begins the Mouth Fast,” she says, voice smooth as tile. “Speech is the first addiction. For twenty-four hours, we practice voicelessness. Carry your stone”—a monk in linen sets a bowl of river stones on each table—“and let it hold your words. Anyone who breaks the fast will do a double shift in the greenhouse trenches. Sunoo will lead stillness. Jungwon will direct labor.”

A murmur rises and dies, mouths pressing shut to prove eagerness. Mira puts a flat, oval stone in your palm. “Don’t lose it,” she whispers, already breaking the rule. “They’ll say the soil took your voice because you were careless.”

You tuck the stone into your sleeve and meet Sunoo’s eyes across the hall. He’s already watching—of course he is. The smile he gives you would be harmless if you hadn’t seen how he moves when he’s pleased: slower, closer, like a candle drawn to oxygen. Jungwon lingers by the service door with a clipboard and a coil of hose on his shoulder, scanning tables the way a shepherd counts sheep by the sound of their breathing.

Chores first. Outside, the air needles your lungs; the mountain wears its cold like a second skin. Jungwon assigns tasks without looking at his list. “Mira, refectory herbs. Taesun, east wall compost. Yejin, with Nurse Min in the clinic.” His gaze slides to you and steadies. “You—paths and drains. Stay out of the grove.” Not a suggestion.

You carry a stiff-bristled broom down stone paths glazed with last night’s dew. The greenhouse ribs glow under weak sun; from inside, lamps hum, and something leafy slaps damply as if it’s learned the shape of applause. By the east wall, Taesun kneels with a small shovel and a reverence that would be holy if it didn’t smell like rot.

He tips crumbs in a neat line, then pauses to show you something cupped in his palm: a white, blind tangle coiling in damp soil. Worms, yes, but too many knotted together, a living thread. He beams, proud. You force your lips into gratitude and keep sweeping. If you stop, you will hear them, and if you hear them, you will dream them.

A shadow falls across your broom. Jungwon holds out a pair of soft-soled garden shoes with the temporary patience of a man who prefers doing to explaining. “Your feet,” he says. “You bruise easily.”

You glance at your bare socks, damp to the ankle. “Is that a rule?”

“It’s a reality,” he says; the word lands like weight. He crouches without asking, sets the shoes on the path, and steps back, gaze down so you can decide if you’ll take his help. You put them on. They’re warm from his hands. He notices the lift of your breath and looks away so the noticing won’t embarrass you. When he straightens, his eyes snag on the river stone tucked in your sleeve. “Don’t drop that,” he says. “The ravens like to steal them.”

You arch a brow—Are you joking?—but he’s already moving, a steady, unshowy force among the clatter of chores.

By mid-morning the Mouth Fast is a taut cord running through the compound. The quiet isn’t peace; it’s suppression, and suppression hums. Sunoo runs stillness from the center of the greenhouse like a maestro conducting silence. He has you sit within his radius; you don’t know how you know that, but you do. When a guest’s shoulders begin to shake, his hand appears at the nape of their neck—just weight, just heat, just enough to persuade the body that obedience feels like care.

He comes to you last, when the lamps have warmed the panes to sweating. He kneels, not quite touching, gaze on your throat. “Your pulse is stubborn,” he says in a voice pitched for you alone. “It hates rhythm. I like that.” He brushes the air near your jawline, not touching, so you feel it anyway. “The stone will teach it obedience. If you’re good at listening.”

You hold his eyes and refuse to nod. He smiles, pleased with your defiance like a trainer who prefers wild animals because they make better trophies. “We’ll work on it,” he whispers, and stands.

After lunch—a bowl of broth filtered until flavor gives up—you’re pulled into the clinic with half a dozen others for “check-ins.” Nurse Min sits you on a stool and unwraps your finger. The cut is a thin mouth now, pink with newness. She touches a gloved finger to the gauze and sniffs it as if the body has a scent that changes when it’s lying.

“Does it itch?” she asks.

You hesitate. The truth is embarrassing. “Everything does,” you admit. “Under the skin. Like… like something wants out.”

“Something wants in,” she corrects mildly. She takes tweezers to the pad of your finger and draws out a hair-fine splinter you didn’t know was there. It isn’t wood—it’s pale and sappy, flexing like a root in the air. She drops it in a jar and screws the lid tight. “Names need medium,” she says. “Don’t let anyone put theirs under your skin.”

“Is that medical advice?”

“It’s survival.” She tapes a fresh bandage printed with tiny leaves, then, softer, “If you start tasting flowers, spit.”

You leave the clinic with your mouth dry as chalk. On the steps, Yejin waits like a shadow that forgot to attach to a body. She presses a folded paper to your palm and flits off before you can unfold it. In the corner of the page, her fast, lethal graphite: you in profile, throat open, something like a stem ghosting up under the jaw. In the negative space behind you, two silhouettes—Sunoo’s soft edges; Jungwon’s blunt solidity—blur toward one another without touching. Underneath, her careful script: Not yet. But soon.

The Mouth Fast bends afternoon into a colder shape. Without words, people show who they are. Mira hums under her breath and taps her stone against her teeth like a bead. Taesun counts breath with his fingers on his ribs. A new arrival—Hana, thirty and jewel-hard—walks like a woman who refuses to ask permission from the air. An older man, Mr. Ko, rows his spoon through soup with the concentration of a man pretending there is a river and a boat that can take him off this mountain.

At dusk, Director Seo calls for the Seed Burial. “We surrender what we’ve hoarded,” she says, and volunteers step forward with small slips of paper seeded with something that will sprout if the soil wants it. They kneel, press the papers into a rectangle of fresh-turned earth, and cover them with a thin skin of loam. The lamps go low. Sunoo stands at their backs. Jungwon stands at their front, shovel grounded like a staff.

You don’t move. You have nothing to bury you can stand to name.

A woman you recognize from orientation—the one who needed three days of sleep—places both palms flat on the soil like it’s someone she loves. Her breath hitches once; she swallows whatever it shook loose. As the last handful of earth covers the names, something beneath the surface shifts. Not the modest swell of seeds drinking. A shove from below.

The crowd stills. You feel it again—a push. The soil flexes and sighs, grains settling. Someone’s hand jerks back as if bitten. Sunoo’s smile does not change, which means it changes. “The ground recognizes an offering,” he says pleasantly. “Stand, flowers. Let the dark do what it’s for.”

Jungwon’s eyes are on the dirt, not the people. His jaw flexes once, twice. You have the sharp, childish thought—He hears it too—and the relief that follows is so naked you almost miss the fear riding it.

Night stitches the compound tight. The Mouth Fast persists: tongues held, little pantomimes replacing argument. In bed, Mira sleeps with her open palm on her stone like it might roll away. You face the wall because the drawing under your pillow is a magnet and your skull is iron.

A scrape wakes you—a quick, purposeful sound under the window. You slide out of bed and ease the latch. Cold breath pours in. On the path below, a lantern moves slow as a planet. You follow, soft-soled shoes silent on the boards, the stone in your sleeve tapping your wrist like a heart that’s climbed too high.

The lantern stops. Jungwon steps into its circle. He doesn’t look surprised to see you. He looks like a man who has laid a trap and found what he baited it for. He lifts the lantern just enough to catch your face without flaying you with light.

He puts a finger to his mouth—quiet—and crooks that same finger: come.

You should run. You go.

He takes you along the west path to a low, fenced plot you haven’t noticed in daylight, because in daylight everything looks like something else. Up close, the boards are stained darker than weather. He stops you with a hand on your sleeve. His grip is gentle; his hand is strong. “Do not speak,” he says, and for the first time today the command lands like care, not control.

He tilts the lantern over the fence. The light stratifies a pit maybe two meters long, maybe one deep, lined with rough timbers and crawling with the industry of decay. You see peels, stems, pot scrapings—normal compost—then catch on something pale threaded through like lace: cartilage? You squint, heart hammering, and in among the skins and stems you see hair—just a clump, just enough to be undeniable. The sour-metal stink under the rot answers a question you didn’t know you were asking until now.

You stagger, mute because the rule still binds your mouth. Jungwon’s hand rises like he planned for your body to try to leave you. He catches your elbow with two fingers and steadies you without pulling you closer. “Breathe,” he says, voice so low the pit swallows it.

You breathe. He watches your lungs move under your shirt as if measuring if they’ll keep their job.

“What is this,” you manage, a whisper that bruises the fast.

“Everything that isn’t needed,” he says. It is both the most honest sentence you’ve heard since you arrived and the worst one. “Don’t come here alone.”

“Why show me?”

His mouth tightens. He weighs the truth and hands you a ration. “Because you will go looking. Better you see what is true than what you can’t live through.”

He lifts the lantern away; the pit dissolves back into darkness. When he looks at you again, the composure you’ve seen him wear like a uniform slips an inch. “Next time,” he says, “wake me.”

“How?” It comes out harder than you intend. “Do I knock on the earth?”

“On my door.” He says it like a correction and a promise. “I’d rather carry you than find you down there with your throat open to the sky.”

You swallow. The stone in your sleeve digs your wrist bone.

He walks you back along the west path, keeping the lantern low so you don’t blind yourself and tumble. At the bottom of the dorm steps, he stops as if a line of salt has been poured between you. “Sleep,” he says. Then, almost grudgingly—no, carefully, like he fears generosity might teach you to expect it—“You did well.”

“You mean quiet,” you say.

“I mean you didn’t lie to yourself while you were looking.” He turns the lantern, and for a heartbeat your faces share a circle of light. It is not intimate, and it is.

Inside, the warm dark smells like bodies and disinfection. Mira turns in her sleep, bracelets whickering. Your hands shake. Not with the adrenaline of the pit—though that remains like a taste at the back of your throat—but with the realization that both men see you. Sunoo sees the mechanism; Jungwon sees the fracture line. You can’t decide which is worse.

The Mouth Fast breaks at dawn with a bell so soft it feels like a secret. Voices resume like a creek finding an old bed; people speak too loudly, then blush, then laugh at their own relief. Director Seo praises “compliance” as if it were a sacrament. In the refectory, mugs clack, spoons scrape. Words return as barter.

You don’t trust yours yet.

Sunoo flows through tables like sunlight convincing itself it’s holy. He catches your empty mug, pours tea, and sets it in front of you with a flourish that makes a few heads turn. “How did the silence fit?” he asks, lazy, interested. It isn’t small talk. It’s a probe shaped like kindness.

“Like wire,” you say.

He smiles, delighted—as if you’ve told him a secret about yourself he can use. “It looks good on you,” he says, and taps your river stone where it sits on the table as if he gave it to you, as if it obeys him too. “We have Talkback today. You and me.”

“Is that optional?”

“In principle,” he says. “In practice, most people prefer to be seen.” He leans in, lower voice. “You certainly do.”

He leaves before you can snap that you preferred to be alive, actually. Across the room, Jungwon stops at the threshold, takes the refectory in at a glance, and chooses a seat with his back to the wall. He eats fast, plain, as if food is fuel and surveillance is dessert. When he lifts his mug, you notice the fresh welt across the back of his hand—a thorn, yesterday, dragging its punctuation.

Talkback is held in a small room off the clinic, windowless, lit by a lamp that chooses flattery over truth. Sunoo sits too close, but because he knows what too close does to bodies, he leaves exactly enough air that you can fool yourself into thinking you could stand if you wanted to. He doesn’t touch you. He rests his forearms on his knees, hands open, posture full of a patience he wears like silk.

“What is the shape of your fear?” he asks, as if fear is polite enough to have geometry.

“Wide,” you say.

“Flat?”

“Deep.”

He grins. “Good. Honesty makes my job easier.” He looks at your mouth, then your hands, then your throat. “Last night you broke curfew.”

It isn’t a question. “I walked.”

“To the west path,” he says, savoring the corridor of it.

“Is that forbidden?”

“Not if you were with someone.”

You hold his gaze. You don’t look away. You don’t nod. You don’t give him Jungwon.

Sunoo’s smile returns, but thinner. “We don’t punish curiosity,” he says silkily. “We shape it.” He nods to your sleeve. “Keep the stone. I like how you sound when you hold it.”

“I didn’t speak.”

“You breathed differently,” he says, and you hate that you believe him. “This afternoon I want you in the greenhouse. We’ll do matching breath. I’ll keep count so you don’t have to.”

Your stomach remembers the pit and rolls. “What if I say no?”

“Then we’ll go slower,” he says, as if you asked him to make it sweeter. “That’s the kind of consent you like, isn’t it? The kind that arrives after your body learns the lesson.”

You stand because sitting feels like agreeing. He doesn’t stop you. He nods as if you’ve completed a task he set in his head.

“Good,” he says. “The roots are listening.”

Outside, the day is too bright in the way of mountains pretending to be gentle. You find Mira tending pots of kitchen herbs—mint, rosemary, a vicious little basil. “You look like you saw a ghost,” she says without looking up.

“I saw the compost,” you say.

She flinches so hard the basil shudders. “You don’t say it out loud,” she hisses, then checks herself, forces her voice calm again. “Names wake things.”

“Whose hair is in it?”

“Everyone’s,” she says. “Eventually.”

By late afternoon your muscles revolt, and stillness becomes a thing you have to hold down with both hands. In the greenhouse, Sunoo runs breath like a metronome. When he kneels behind a girl whose hands won’t stop shaking, he doesn’t touch her skin; he places his palm two inches away from her spine and waits. The girl’s shoulders ease; her breath learns his count. You hate him for it. You hate her relief. You hate that your body pays attention.

Jungwon moves along the rows with a bucket and a dull pruning blade, nicking stems, turning soil, resetting stakes. When a lamp pops and goes dim, he crosses to replace it without being called. On his way back, he passes near your mat—near, not past. The air shifts with him: sweat, iron, soil, a clean note like water running under rock. He doesn’t look down. He scratches the back of his wrist where a thorn welt cross-hatches older scars and says, as if the comment belongs to the room, “Some things only grow when you pretend you can’t see them.”

You don’t know if he means the plants, the people, or you.

Evening comes with teeth. The bell pulls everyone to the refectory; the sky sits heavy, swollen with weather that refuses to begin. Over dinner, Hana spills her tea and swears loudly enough that half the room jumps; then she laughs, tips her chin like she meant to do it, and glares at anyone who looks sorry on her behalf. Mr. Ko tells Taesun to stop feeding the worms like they’re pets; Taesun bares his teeth, half-smile, half warning. Nurse Min pockets a spoon someone bent into a hook. Director Seo watches it all with the small, sated smile of a zookeeper whose animals are thriving.

Night brings the first scream.

Not a long one. Not a movie howl. A single, keening note cut off hard, like a rope being cut. The compound freezes; forks stop halfway to mouths; breath holds. Sunoo is already on his feet, smile sharpened into usefulness. Jungwon’s chair scrapes; he’s moving before you can find your shoes.

They go toward the grove at a measured pace that says they already know what they’ll find. Director Seo lifts her hand. “Stay seated,” she says, and the command lands like weight on your shoulders. Mira’s fingers take yours under the table and squeeze so hard your knuckles grind. You squeeze back. Your mouth tastes like rosemary and fear.

You wait. The greenhouse sweats. The clock you aren’t allowed to see walks itself around the hour by the sound of your blood in your ears. When the door opens again, Sunoo comes in first, serene, coat unwrinkled. Jungwon follows with a bundled shape in his arms—a blanket, a softness of color, too long where a body should bend.

A gasp skips the room. “She fainted,” Sunoo says, which is both intolerably insufficient and the only story you’ll be allowed. “A cleansing reaction. She will rest. We will keep vigil over the names she surrendered.”

He doesn’t say who. Your mind fills the blank with the sleeping woman from breakfast, because that is who you fear for, and fear is a magnet. Jungwon carries the bundle past. You know how much weight that is—your body recognizes the set of his jaw, the economy of his gait. He does not look at you. He doesn’t look anywhere but the door to the clinic, as if any glance could spill what he’s holding.

The dining hall exhales like it’s been underwater too long. Director Seo claps once, neat. “We will not gossip,” she says. “We will not catastrophize. We will practice serenity.”

You don’t sleep. Not because you’re brave—because you’re scared correctly now, and scared correctly people stay awake. When you doze, you wake to the sensation that someone has put a leaf on your tongue and asked you to pray with it in your mouth. You spit into your sheet and find nothing. When you sit up, a shadow peels off the wall near the window and becomes Jungwon.

You nearly fling yourself out of bed. He doesn’t move, as if sudden gestures would spook you. He should not be in the dorms after lights; rules are their own religion here. He breaks this one like he breaks branches: cleanly, without apology.

“You left your shoes,” he says, low. He sets them at the foot of your bed, lined up, laces tucked. His voice is stripped of everything but function. “Don’t go barefoot again.”

“What happened?” you ask, whispering because anything louder might wake the dark.

“Don’t ask me,” he says, and for a breath you think he’s refusing. Then he adds, “Because I’ll tell you.” His gaze drags over your face, cataloging fine tremors, the cracked edge of your mouth, the way one hand fists in the sheet like rope. “Sleep,” he says. “You’ll need it.”

He is out the way he came, the door kissing its jamb like a secret.

You try to obey. The mountain presses its cold face to the window and listens. Somewhere, a lantern moves. Somewhere else, a man like a hymn kneels by a bed that is too light.

You put the river stone back in your sleeve and hold it against your pulse until the beat stops arguing with your bones. You remember the jar in Nurse Min’s clinic with the threadlike root curled at the bottom like a question mark. You picture Yejin’s hand drawing you with something under your skin you didn’t agree to carry.

Stillness was the promise. Obedience was the price. You have paid neither. Now the Garden pays attention.

And you, finally, are afraid.

_________

You wake with the taste of copper and rosemary slicked over your tongue, as if someone pressed a leaf there while you slept and whispered hold it. A welt has risen along your bandaged finger—thin, pale, almost pretty. When you press it, it flexes under the skin like something answering from underneath.

Breakfast is a choreography of clatter and eyes. Mira smiles too hard; her bracelets rattle out a code you can’t read. Taesun tips crumbs into his pocket with priestly concentration. Yejin’s crown of reeds has dried to a brittle halo; she draws with her pencil held like a knife. Hana sits mean and diamond-bright, daring the room to dull her edges. Mr. Ko’s spoon cuts the same path through porridge like a boatman refusing any other shore. Director Seo watches the surface of her tea the way people watch the sea for bodies.

“The Naming Rite will be held at sundown,” she announces, as if she’s asking for the salt. “Those selected have been notified.”

Sunoo lifts his eyes, and that’s your notification.

Mira’s fingers find your knee under the table and clamp. She shakes her head once, small, fast—refuse. You don’t know what refusal looks like here besides a story they will tell about you afterward.

“Drink,” Nurse Min says when you pass through the clinic to turn in your night report—how many hours asleep, how many awake, whether you dreamed of heat, teeth, drowning. She hands you a glass the green of pond water. You smell it, and it smells like lawn and iron. “Chlorophyll with a little hem,” she says, seeing your face. “Calms the heart.”

“Calms or slows?” Your voice scratches.

She cants her head. “Same action, different motive.” She glances at your finger. “Still itching?”

“It… moves,” you say, and the honesty makes your stomach pitch. “Like a thread.”

“Everything alive wants a home,” she replies. She peels the bandage with sure fingers. Underneath, the welt has subdivided into delicate veins, a fine network. Not veins. Veining. It looks like leaf. She presses the back of her glove along it; the pattern darkens, limned green under the skin. “Names need medium,” she repeats. “Keep your mouth closed in the greenhouse today. Even when you want to answer.”

You want to ask answer what, but Sunoo is in the doorway, dusk caught in the lamplight of his hair. He doesn’t knock; he glides in like permission. “Our new sprout,” he says, pleased to find you in a chair. “I’ll take her.”

Nurse Min’s mouth goes a little flatter. “She eats first.”

“Of course.” Sunoo’s smile doesn’t move. “Then we breathe.”

The greenhouse sweats. Heat lamps hum like insects; the glass with its rain of condensation blurs the mountain into a myth. Staff move among the rows with trays of soil sheets—thin paper seeded with something that glitters faintly when the light hits it wrong. “Embedded affirmations,” Sunoo tells the group. “You write what you’ll surrender. The seeds will carry it.”

Hana snorts. “Is the surrender refundable?”

Sunoo’s eyes quicken. “There’s always a transaction,” he says. “We just prefer you know the price.” He looks back to you. “Mat,” he says, and it isn’t a request.

You sit. He kneels behind you, palms hovering two inches from your ribs. No touch—just the sense of touch waiting. “Open your mouth,” he murmurs. The admonition from Nurse Min echoes; you clamp your lips. Sunoo’s pleased noise lands against your neck like breath. “Good. Breathe through your nose. In on four, out on six. I’ll count.”

His voice is a rope you have to grab to keep from slipping. When your breath shudders, he matches it; when it calms, he pursues. On the sixth cycle, something sweet pushes the air—lily, wet earth—and you remember the pit and want to be sick. “Stay,” he says, reading your recoil. “Stay where your body is. Don’t run from it. That’s where people rot.”

Across the rows, Jungwon replaces a cracked lamp with quick, sure hands. He doesn’t look at you until he does, a glance like a hand closing on the back of your neck. The air between you tightens. His forearms are netted with healed cuts, white against brown; a fresh welt crosses them like a red thread. When Sunoo says “out on six,” Jungwon turns the dial and the light hums obedient, and you wonder whether the whole building breathes to his count.

Yejin brings you a tray of seed-paper without being asked. When you reach, her gaze drops to your bandage. She moves the pencil like a blade and sketches the back of your hand: the delicate leaf veining, the suggestion of something wanting to break surface. She writes Not yet over the knuckles and slides the paper into your lap. Her mouth is a thin line; her eyes are large and dry and furious.

The day’s chores are smaller and meaner than yesterday’s. Scrub the condensation gutters. Rake. Haul sacks labeled Bone Meal that smell like old molars. Taesun sings under his breath in a language not meant for mouths and leaves a damp trail of crumbs along the east wall. Mr. Ko fetches and carries with blank efficiency, his face empty as a cleaned plate.

By late afternoon, a woman you know only as Auntie Hye—fiftyish, hair cut short for neatness, eyes that scan like a mother bird’s—begins to cough. At first it is dry and prim; then she hunches, pushes a hand to her chest and coughs wet. A ribbon of something bright pops free onto her palm. Petals. White. Tissue-thin and slick with saliva. A few guests laugh—nerves, delight, cruelty. Nurse Min is there before the room decides what to feel, hand under Auntie Hye’s chin, tissues ready. Hye coughs again, harder, and a clot of petals spills: red-tipped now, streaked. She hacks out a final cluster and sags. The tissues are sodden. The petals look like tongues.

“Pollination,” Sunoo says calmly. “Sometimes the body rehearses letting go by practicing bloom.”

Auntie Hye shakes her head, breath hitching. “I didn’t—” she starts.

Sunoo presses two fingers lightly to her throat. “You did.”

She closes her mouth.

Jungwon comes with a bucket and a flat spade; he scoops the petals into the bucket without expression. Your stomach tilts; you grip the bench until the wood prints itself into your palm. He doesn’t look at anyone. He takes the bucket toward the compost. You see his jawclench once when he passes the pit door and files that, like a photographed crime scene.

After the petals, other small horrors follow as if emboldened. A boy pulls his sleeve up to scratch and reveals a faint green tracery along his inner arm; when he scrubs at it, the skin reddens and puffs and the pattern brightens like a pressed leaf held to light. Mira slices a basil stem and it bleeds thin, clean sap; she runs her thumb along the cut and licks it without thinking, then startles at the taste and laughs too loudly. Taesun tips a paper cup into a drain, and a pale, slick worm writhes against the grate and splits into two thinner threads that both crawl the wrong way, toward his fingers. He coos like they’re babies and tucks them back into mud.

“Don’t feed your nightmares,” Nurse Min says without looking up from the woman whose mouth she swabs. “They grow fine on their own.”

By evening, the heat in the greenhouse feels like a hand that won’t lift. The lamps go low. Director Seo stands by the iron ribs with her clipboard like a prayerbook. “For the Naming Rite,” she says, “we welcome Sunoo as Voice and Jungwon as Hands.”

Voice and Hands. A division of power simple enough to live inside.

You are led—gently, unmistakably—toward the central bed, a rectangle of fresh loam bordered by smooth stones. Yejin edges after you, sketchbook clutched to her chest; Nurse Min blocks her with just a glance. “Not this,” Min murmurs. “Later.”

Mira steps forward—too fast—“I can go instead,” she says, smile like a knife wrapped in tissue.

Sunoo’s smile is silk on a nail. “We don’t barter names,” he says. “We harvest them.”

Your knees give. Not dramatic; a small buckling, the body remembering the ground. Sunoo’s hand is there without touching you, a near-weight at your shoulder. “Kneel,” he says, as if reminding you what your body already decided. “Head up. We face what we bring.”

Jungwon stands at the foot of the bed, shovel grounded. Close, his expression is the same flat steel as his blade. He looks at your throat the way carpenters look at walls: not hunger—assessment. When he speaks, his voice is small enough to belong only to the three of you. “Do you know what you’re giving?” he asks.

You try to say No. What comes out is “Something I can’t carry.”

“Good,” he says, and the word is not kindness. It’s calibration.

Sunoo’s fingers hover at your jaw, turning your face by the gravity of proximity. “Open,” he tells you, and your mouth obeys because your body recognizes a doctor’s tone even when it comes from someone who would rather be a priest. He places a petal on your tongue. It tastes like cold tea and a coin. “Hold,” he says. He waits. When you swallow despite yourself, his smile flares. “You see? The body knows ceremony even when the mind resists.”

He steps behind you. You feel his presence like a heat lamp. Jungwon moves to your side and holds out his hand. On his palm: a knife. Not sharp—its edge has been blunted until it’s a tongue of metal—but its point is honest. He waits until you meet his eyes; only then does he set the flat of the blade against your sternum. The steel is cool. Your skin fists under it.

“This is how we write it,” Sunoo says, and his breath touches the shell of your ear like a whispering moth. “Not deep. Not cruel. Not yet.”

The blade slides up without breaking skin, tracing between ribs, across the slow bell of breath—sternum, clavicle, the notch at your throat. The metal leaves a trail of gooseflesh; your pulse hammers against it like an animal trapped under the lid of a box. Jungwon’s other hand is steady at your shoulder, not pushing, not holding, just there, a second horizon the body can measure itself against.

“Name what cannot follow you,” Sunoo murmurs. It could be a real question. It could be a spell. Your mouth fills with the taste of flower and iron; words gather behind it like flies at meat.

You can’t say the fire; to say it would open something that the soil will keep. You say, “The last night.”

“Again,” Sunoo purrs.

“The last night,” you repeat, and the room tilts like a field under wind.

The congregation—guests in white, staff in linen—sways. Mira has both hands pressed to her lips. Taesun rocks in small, violent arcs. Yejin’s pencil moves; she draws you kneeling, two sets of hands marking you; she smudges the graphite so the air around you looks like breath or smoke.

The blade dips, lifts, comes to rest against your throat’s right side. You feel the exact spot where it would enter if it wanted to. Jungwon’s pulse is visible in his wrist; steady, heavier than yours. He moves the flat in a small crescent along the tendon, and your voice leaves you for a moment—pure reflex. A small, unpretty sound. Sunoo shivers behind you, pleased as if you performed a note he’d been coaching you toward.

“Do you understand the price?” Sunoo asks softly.

“No,” you say honestly.

“Beautiful,” he says, delighted. “No one ever does until after.”

He lifts the petal from your mouth with two fingers and lays it on your tongue again like communion. You hold it. Jungwon takes your left hand. His palm is rough and warm; soil lives in the whorls of his fingerprints. He pricks the pad of your finger with the very tip of the blunted knife, as if he wants to remind the blade of its older religion. A bead of blood swells, bright, neat. He turns your hand and presses that red to the seed-paper waiting in a shallow trench at the bed’s edge. Your blood bleeds into the paper like water into thirst.

“Now,” Sunoo says, voice dropped low enough to live in your bones, “we plant what you are not. So what you are can grow.”

Jungwon folds loam over the paper. The soil is cool even in this hothouse weather. It sucks at your finger when he presses your hand flat to it. Something moves underneath—something too quick for roots. Your stomach rocks. You try to pull back. Jungwon’s hand covers yours, firm as a yoke; Sunoo’s hand wraps your throat—not squeezing, just holding the column steady. You are pinned in two places that translate directly to obedience.

“Breathe,” Sunoo says.

You do. The soil under your hand warms like a mouth.

The congregation murmurs. Not words; the sound bodies make when they agree to a script. Director Seo watches like a reader flipping to the end to be sure it comes out as written. Nurse Min’s face has the set of a woman who’s decided to count a vein until morning.

The thing under the soil stills.

Jungwon lifts your hand and wipes the loam away with his thumb. The smear looks like war paint. Sunoo releases your throat and smooths his palm down the line his fingers left, a correction, an apology, a brand. He bends and whispers against your ear, “You belong to the ground,” and then, after a heartbeat, “and to us while you’re learning.”

His mouth never touches skin. The idea of it does.

The Rite closes with a bell that tastes like copper in your teeth. People file out as if stepping around a sleeping animal. Mira gets to you first, palms hot where she holds your face. “Drink water,” she hisses. “Don’t go to sleep. If you dream the name, it sticks.”

“I didn’t give it,” you say.

She laughs, a small animal sound. “You bled. That’s enough.”

Mr. Ko offers a clean handkerchief without meeting your eyes. Hana watches from a distance like a hawk deciding if a rabbit is worth stooping for when the field is full of easier meat. Taesun beams, mud on his lip, as if he’s just watched a very good wedding.

Yejin presses a drawing into your hand and vanishes. It’s you kneeling, hands marked, a line along your throat that is not a cut but knows where one would go. Over your shoulder, two shadows bend—one a heat-halo, one a blunt storm. Soon, she’s written. Don’t say yes with your mouth.

Night. The mountain holds its breath. The lamps in the greenhouse go black one by one until the glass is only a shape. You sit on your dorm bed and watch your hands not shake. Mira sleeps curled like a comma with her stone under her cheek. The drawing under your pillow warms to your scalp as if it wants to crawl into you.

A knock—not on the door. On the window, one knuckle, once. When you slide the frame, cold air pours in, and you think of Nurse Min’s keep your mouth closed in the greenhouse and keep it shut.

Jungwon stands below, lantern hooded, face lit just enough to make eyes and jaw. He tilts his head—come—and you go because your legs have learned this path. Out the back, down the steps, across the boards to the west path. He waits in the shadow of the shed where spades hang like a rack of tongues.

“Any dizziness? Nausea?” he asks, clinic-plain.

“Just… aware.” The word feels too small for your body’s rattled hum.

He grunts—approval. He reaches for your hand and turns the palm up. The loam under your nails has dried to fine grit. He rubs it away with his thumb, slow, methodical. It’s almost tender until you realize he is checking for changes—for the leaf-vein under your skin brightening, for anything moving that shouldn’t. When his thumb passes over the edge of your pulse, it jumps. He looks up sharply. You look away.

“You shouldn’t stay in the dorm tonight.” Matter-of-fact. “You’ll hear things like your name, and some of them will be for you and some won’t. You’re still soft. Soft things take impressions.”

“Where do I go?”

“My room.” Flat. Then, as if he heard how it sounds: “It’s safer. There are no plants there.”

“Is that true?”

“It’s true enough.” He waits. “Or go to the clinic and sit under Min’s lamp and let her count your breaths until morning.”

“Which would you pick,” you ask, because some part of you refuses to let him stand there and decide your body in his head without you in the room.

He takes too long to answer, then says, “The clinic is gentle.” A beat. “I am not.”

Wind combs the pines; the greenhouse ticks as it cools. Somewhere a raven laughs like a woman who knows your secrets and isn’t impressed.

“Choose,” he says quietly.

Sunoo’s shadow falls across the path before you can. He steps into the lantern’s circle like a storybook: pale wrists, clean hands, a smile that tells you exactly how he will use it. “Ah,” he says, soft delight. “My flower and my hands. I wondered where the night would put you.”

Jungwon does not step back. He also does not step forward. The lantern holds the three of you in a tight Venn where your breaths overlap. Sunoo tips his head, curious. “You can take her,” he says to Jungwon, which is to say I will let you. “But she’ll come back to me tasting like soil and fear, and we’ll start again from below.” He turns to you, voice honeyed and mean. “Or you can come with me and I’ll teach your body what calm feels like so you know when you’ve lost it.”

The polite violence of the options makes your stomach liquefy.

“Stop,” Jungwon says, and the word is a tool, not a plea.

Sunoo laughs softly. “The earth doesn’t stop growing just because you ask it gently.” He reaches, very slowly, and lifts your jaw with two fingers—not touching skin; his hand floats a whisper below it and your head lifts anyway, obedient to suggestion. “Show me your throat,” he says, and your body almost does it because it learned tonight and bodies like to repeat lessons. You hold yourself still out of spite. His smile warms. “Good girl.”

The words hit like a hand under your ribs. Jungwon’s breath changes. It darkens the air.

“Enough,” Jungwon says again, and hooks a finger in the lantern hood. He pulls it open. Light flares, pot-bright, brutal. The three of you blink; the world loses its beautiful edges and shows its seams. “Clinic,” he tells you.

Sunoo’s smile fades pixel by pixel until only his eyes shine. “For now,” he agrees. He steps in closer so there is no air between the three bodies but what breath can claim. He looks at Jungwon and speaks to you. “You’ll end up between us anyway,” he says, the prophecy flat, not cruel. “Why not learn the shape early.”

You should move. You should walk yourself to the nurse and let her count your lungs like prayer beads. Instead you stand very still while two men who have learned your pulse by different languages consider the currency of your fear.

Sunoo lifts his hand and stops a breath from your mouth. You feel the heat of him without the permission of touch. “I won’t kiss you,” he says, velvet and wicked. “Not yet.” He turns his palm and hovers over your throat, reading the rush there like a favorite book. “See what your body does with almost.”

Jungwon moves behind you so quietly the night forgets to mark his steps. He doesn’t touch you. His presence is so large it reads like contact anyway—the shape of him corralling air. You have the dizzy thought that if you leaned back, he would catch you, and if you leaned forward, Sunoo would open like a mouth.

“Breathe,” Sunoo whispers, and it isn’t instruction now; it’s a dare.

You do. The air leans with you. The world tightens to a triangle: lantern glare, the line of a blunted blade tucked into Jungwon’s belt, the faint copper on Sunoo’s knuckle where he touched your lip earlier with the petal.

“I said clinic,” Jungwon repeats, low enough to live at your spine.

“Make her say please,” Sunoo counters, amusement sweet as rot. “Our girl loves a ritual.”

“Don’t—” you start, and then stop, because the word tastes like surrender and you haven’t decided whose hands deserve it.

“Not tonight,” Jungwon says, and you understand: it isn’t mercy. It’s control deferred. He steps to your side, inserts a palm—warm, heavy—at your waist, not pulling, not pushing, just a point you can move along. Sunoo mirrors the motion on your other side without touching, an echo your nerves misread as contact. Together they guide you three steps, five, toward the clinic’s dim window—two gravities that agree for once.

At the threshold, Sunoo bends so close your ear warms. “Sleep,” he murmurs, the same command Jungwon uses like a blessing. “Dream of hands.” He smiles against the air where your skin ends. “Next time I’ll count for you while he holds you still.”

Jungwon’s hand tightens one notch at your waist, a warning, a promise, a brand pressed through clothes. “Next time,” he says, to Sunoo, to you, to the night that will keep at this until you’re rewritten, “I’ll decide who goes first.”

Nurse Min opens the clinic door before anyone knocks, lamp bright behind her like a little square sun. She takes in the triangle of bodies, the glint of the knife, the feral set of Sunoo’s mouth, the obedient steadiness of Jungwon’s hand at your side.

“Inside,” she says, and steps aside.

You pass between them—Sunoo’s almost-touch a heat across your throat; Jungwon’s real touch a line at your hip you could follow with your eyes closed—and cross into the light.

You do not kiss anyone. No one kisses you.

But as the door shuts and the mountain presses its ear to the glass to listen, you know it: your body already understands the shape they promised. It will remember. It will hunger.

And when it happens—when it really happens—it will not be an accident.

________

The clinic smelled of metal and mint. Nurse Min left you in a chair under her lamp until the feverish hum in your body dulled to a bearable pitch. She made you drink water, bitter and green as ditch weed, and held your wrist while your pulse rattled beneath her thumb. When you asked her if you were safe, she only said, “Nothing in a place like this is safe. At best, some things are safer than others.”

By the time she dismissed you, the compound had already gone to sleep. Mira was curled on her side in the dorm, bracelets stilled. You should have slept too. Instead you lay awake, tasting the memory of a petal pressed against your tongue, feeling the phantom weight of Jungwon’s hand steady at your waist, the ghost of Sunoo’s fingers just shy of your throat.

Your body remembered. It remembered too well.

When you finally slipped into the corridor, your bare feet soundless on the boards, it wasn’t to find air. It was because something in you had already decided that the ache would not stop on its own.

The greenhouse loomed against the night, ribs of iron and glass sweating mist. The lock had never been for people who wanted to stay out. You pushed the door and it sighed open, warm air rushing at you like a mouth.

He was waiting. Of course he was.

Sunoo leaned against a bench, sleeves rolled, pale wrists glowing under the lamps. His expression was the same one he’d worn when he laid the petal on your tongue earlier—delighted, expectant, like he had always known your body would come back to him.

“You breathe too loud when you lie down,” he murmured. “I could hear you from the other side of the hall.”

You should have left. You stepped closer instead.

Sunoo reached for you without touching, fingers tracing the air beside your cheek. That almost-contact burned hotter than heat itself. Your breath caught, and his smile sharpened. “See? Your body tells the truth. It remembers me already.”

His hand hovered down, stopping at the hollow of your throat. “Here,” he whispered. “Where the pulse lives.” He bent, mouth a whisper away from your skin, never quite sealing it. Your nerves screamed as if he’d kissed you. “You want me to touch you. That’s why you came.”

Your denial scraped your teeth but never left your tongue.

“Good girl,” he said, pleased at your silence. He turned you, pressing between your shoulder blades until your knees bent and you landed on the warm boards of the floor. “Stay open. Stay soft.”

His hands came at last—sliding along your thighs, parting them without rush, without doubt. He dragged his thumb along the cotton of your thin shorts, pressing until the damp there gave you away. “Blooming,” he said reverently, as if the word itself could coax you wider.

You gasped when he pressed harder, the friction maddening. He laughed low in his throat, pleased. “You’ve been waiting since the Rite, haven’t you? You swallowed the petal and your body begged for more.”

He tugged fabric aside with clinical precision, exposing you to the humid air. His fingers slicked easily through the wetness already gathered, and he made a sound of satisfaction that went straight to your gut. “So ready,” he crooned. “So obedient.”

Two fingers circled, teased, pressed—but never where you needed. He watched your hips shift, your breath stutter. “Say please,” he murmured.

“I—”

“Shh.” His free hand covered your mouth lightly, thumb grazing your lower lip. “Not with words. With your body.”

Your thighs trembled. You pushed into his hand, desperate. His smile widened. “There it is. Begging without speech.”

He slipped two fingers inside, slow, deliberate. Your back arched, a strangled sound caught behind his palm. He curled them just right, hitting the place that made you shiver, made your eyes roll back. “Yes,” he whispered against your ear. “That’s it. That’s how you bloom.”

His palm pressed harder over your mouth as your moans broke free. His rhythm quickened, fingers thrusting, scissoring, spreading you open as if he meant to plant something inside. Every push forced slick sounds into the greenhouse air. He bent low, lips brushing your temple, murmuring praises between each thrust: “Perfect. My good flower. Opening just for me. No one else will see you like this.”

Your orgasm came sudden, brutal—your whole body snapping tight around his hand, shuddering against him. He kept moving, dragging it out until you were gasping into his palm, thighs twitching.

When at last he withdrew, his fingers glistened. He lifted them to your lips, smearing wetness across them before pushing between. “Taste yourself,” he ordered softly. “Know what you are to me.”

Shame and hunger tangled in your chest. You sucked his fingers clean, and his eyes darkened, mouth parting as if he might finally kiss you. He didn’t. He pulled back just enough to leave you desperate, to make absence itself a cruelty.

“Blooming,” he whispered again, satisfied. “And tomorrow, you’ll be ready for the soil.”

The greenhouse door creaked. You jerked, Sunoo still crouched over you, his slick fingers withdrawing with deliberate slowness.

Jungwon stood in the doorway, lantern spilling gold over his dirt-streaked arms. His jaw tightened as his eyes tracked the wet shine on your lips, the way your legs trembled, the smug curve of Sunoo’s smile.

For a long, brutal moment, no one spoke. Then Jungwon stepped forward, shovel still in one hand, and his voice came out rough, dangerous.

“She’s mine next.”

The lamps hummed. The soil smelled of iron. Your heart beat against your throat like a trapped bird as the two men stared across you, and you realized the next time you were touched, it would be by both.

And you would not escape it.

______

The night you tried to run, the mountain gave you away.

The boards beneath your feet creaked, wet leaves clung to your calves, and the fog was a hand on your throat. You ran anyway. Past the dorms, past the glasshouse ribs glowing faintly from their lamps, down the west path where the ravens laughed like women who knew your secrets.

You thought the dark would cover you.

But the dark belonged to him.

A hand caught your wrist so hard you nearly went down. The lantern flared, and Jungwon’s face came out of the mist—eyes black, jaw locked, the muscle jumping with rage he didn’t bother to soften. He dragged you against him, chest heaving like you’d run into a wall that had learned how to breathe.

“Running,” he said, voice low and sharp as a spade. “After I told you not to.”

“I—”

“Quiet.” His grip on your wrist tightened until your bones ached. “Do you know what he did to you in there? Do you know what you smell like? Soil and him.” His other hand closed hard around your chin, forcing you to meet his eyes. His breath came hot, furious. “I told you not to let him touch you.”

Your protest was thin. “I didn’t—”

“You did.” He shoved you back against the rough bark of a pine. The trunk dug into your spine; his body crowded yours, heat and dirt and something mean. “You opened your mouth. You let him put his fingers in you.” His hand slid down your throat, pressing just enough to make your pulse throb under his palm. “Do you think that makes you his?”

“No—”

“No,” he repeated, mocking and brutal, pressing harder until your words broke into breath. His eyes raked you up and down like he was reading your body for lies. “You’re mine. If you’re soil, then I’m the one who plants.”

The knife appeared from his belt—not sharp, its edge long since blunted, but the point still honest. He held it flat against your belly, dragging it up under your shirt until the cold metal kissed the underside of your breast. You shivered, body jerking against the bark. His mouth twisted, equal parts fury and hunger.

“Scared?” he murmured. “Good. Fear makes roots dig deeper.”

He hooked the blade under the band of your shorts, pulling until the fabric stretched and then snapped. His hand shoved inside without pause, fingers rough, pushing into you like he meant to stake a claim. You gasped, the sound choking against the hand still at your throat.

“Wet,” he said, voice a growl, face close enough you could feel every word on your skin. “You’re soaked for me already. Even after him. Especially after him.” His fingers thrust harder, curling, relentless, forcing your body to answer him. “Say it. Say whose you are.”

You shook your head, too proud, too broken to give it.

His mouth curved cruel. “Then I’ll fuck it into you.”

He yanked your shorts down to your thighs, lifted you bodily against the tree, and shoved his hips between your legs. You clawed at his shoulders, half to push, half to hold on, but he pinned you easy, the knife’s flat pressed to your throat now like a brand. His cock pressed hot and thick against your entrance, grinding through the slick he’d found there, rubbing until you whined.

“You hear that?” he hissed, rolling his hips, dragging the head over your folds until obscene wet sounds filled the air. “Your body begging me in front of the whole fucking mountain.” He pushed in one brutal stroke, burying himself deep, forcing a cry from your throat. His teeth bared at the sound, savage triumph. “That’s it. Open up. Take me.”

He fucked you hard against the tree, every thrust jarring bark into your spine, every shove brutal and unrelenting. The knife never left your throat—flat, cold, reminding you what he could do if he wanted. His free hand gripped your hip so hard you knew you’d bruise, dragging you down onto him, using your body like it was already his.

“Mine,” he snarled against your ear, hips slamming. “Not his. Not anyone’s. Mine to fuck. Mine to plant. Mine to keep.” His pace grew rougher, desperate, jealousy bleeding into possession. “You’ll carry me. You’ll take my seed. You’ll remember whose cock fucked you open like this.”

Your moans tore free, high and broken, every thrust forcing them out. He laughed, breathless, mean. “Good little soil. Look at you—taking it. Clenching so tight you’ll never forget.”

When you came, it was with your whole body jerking, nails raking his back, his name spilling without permission. He fucked you through it, ruthless, using your climax to milk himself. With a final, brutal thrust, he came inside you, grinding deep, growling your name like a curse and a prayer.

He stayed pressed to you, chest heaving, the knife slipping down to rest against your collarbone. He didn’t soften. He didn’t let go. His mouth found your jaw, biting hard enough to leave a mark.

When he finally pulled out, slick running down your thighs, he yanked your shorts back up roughly, like covering you was a punishment. He grabbed your wrist again, dragging you toward the compound.

“You’re not sleeping in the dorms,” he said, voice iron. “You’re mine now. My room. My bed. No one else touches you.”

The lantern swung, throwing gold across the path. His grip never loosened. You stumbled after him, body raw, used, filled, the echo of his thrusts still beating through you.

And you knew he wasn’t bluffing.

______

Jungwon’s grip on your wrist was iron, dragging you through the silent hallways until the greenhouse lamps and dorm windows disappeared. His door slammed behind you, the bolt driven home with the finality of a lock on a coffin. His room was small, spare, stripped bare of comfort—just a bed, a chair, his tools. No flowers, no soil. Only him.

He shoved you onto the mattress like you weighed nothing. Your body jolted, still slick, still aching from what he’d already done. He stood over you, chest rising and falling hard, sweat at his temples, jaw clenched like a vice.

“You don’t go back to them,” he growled. “Not Mira, not Seo, and never him.” His eyes burned. “You’re mine.”

Your breath hitched; the word stuck in your throat.

A voice cut through the dark. “You’re wrong.”

The lantern on the desk flared, spilling its glow across pale wrists, white robes loosened at the chest, a mouth curved in that familiar, cruel delight. Sunoo. Already inside. Already waiting.

Jungwon stiffened, shoulders tensing like a predator finding another in his territory. “Get out.”

Sunoo ignored him. He stepped closer, his smile syrup-sweet but eyes sharp. “She doesn’t belong to you alone. Look at her.” His gaze slid over you where you trembled on the bed, your thighs pressed together, your lips parted from shallow breaths. “She’s terrified. She’s confused. She needs gentleness.” His tone softened, dripping like honey. “And you can’t give her that.”

“Gentle doesn’t keep her alive,” Jungwon snapped, stepping between you and him, shovel-callused fists at his sides. “Gentle lets her rot.”

“Alive?” Sunoo laughed, low and dangerous. “She’s not alive. She’s blooming. That’s what I make her.”

“Blooming,” Jungwon spat, “is just another word for open. And I’m the one inside her.”

The words made your stomach twist; heat and fear tangled until you couldn’t tell the difference. You tried to speak—stop, please stop—but your throat locked.

Sunoo’s gaze darted back to you, softening. He crouched, ignoring the way Jungwon loomed above him. His hand hovered just shy of your ankle, not touching—never touching—but the heat of him crawled up your skin. “Petal,” he whispered, “don’t be afraid. I’ll take care of you. I’ll show you how it feels to be cherished.” His lips parted, almost grazing your skin as he breathed you in. “Let me taste you.”

Jungwon’s growl shook the air. He seized your arm, yanking you back against his chest, his hand spread possessive across your stomach. His cock, still half-hard, pressed against your spine. “She’s mine. Mine to fuck. Mine to plant. Mine to keep.”

Your body shuddered. Fear, yes—but deeper, darker: want, shame, hunger you couldn’t smother.

Sunoo’s smile only widened. “Then let’s see who she opens for first.” He slid closer, slipping between your knees before Jungwon could stop him. His breath fanned over your thighs, hot and wet, and you gasped when he finally touched you—soft, reverent, his hands parting you like something fragile.

The contrast made you dizzy. Jungwon’s grip bruised; Sunoo’s mouth pressed feather-light kisses along the inside of your thigh, slow, teasing, as if every touch was worship. “Sweet,” he murmured, nose brushing close to the heat of you. “So sweet. I’ll make her sing.”

“Don’t you dare—” Jungwon started, but your body betrayed you, hips twitching toward Sunoo’s mouth, a whimper breaking past your lips.

That sound changed everything.

Jungwon froze, then snarled, shoving you down into the mattress, caging you with his body. One hand pinned your wrists above your head; the other tore your shirt open down the middle, fabric splitting under his strength. His mouth crashed to your throat, biting, marking, sucking bruises into your skin with furious precision.

Sunoo groaned at the sight, as if Jungwon’s violence only made you more beautiful. He leaned in, finally sealing his lips over your cunt, sucking hard, tongue lapping deep through your folds. The wet sounds filled the room, obscene, echoing against the bare walls.

You cried out, the noise muffled against Jungwon’s hand when he clapped it over your mouth. “Quiet,” he hissed, teeth at your jaw. “Don’t give him the satisfaction of hearing how much you love it.”

But Sunoo knew anyway. He moaned against you, tongue flicking your clit, fingers sliding inside with practiced ease, curling just right. He fed off every twitch, every muffled scream, every desperate roll of your hips. “See?” he said between licks, voice thick with arousal. “She opens for me. She’s blooming already.”

Jungwon pressed harder, grinding his cock against your hip through his pants, furious at your body’s betrayal, at the way your thighs trembled around Sunoo’s head. “She’s dripping because I fucked her raw,” he snarled. “All you’re doing is licking up what I left in her.”

The words made your body jerk, shame and desire hitting like lightning.

Sunoo pulled back just enough to look up at you, his mouth shining with your wetness, his eyes dark and soft. “You taste like need,” he whispered. He dragged his tongue slowly over your clit, savoring the way you cried out under Jungwon’s palm. “And you’ll remember I was the first one who made you come with his mouth.”

“Shut up,” Jungwon snapped. But his own hips rolled against you, his cock throbbing, desperate. His jealousy only sharpened his need.

You couldn’t fight it. You came hard, body arching, Sunoo’s mouth sucking your clit, Jungwon’s hand holding you down, his teeth biting at your throat. Your orgasm tore through you like the roots of something invasive, clawing deep, unstoppable.

They didn’t stop.

Sunoo licked you clean, gentle as a lover, humming like he was savoring wine. Jungwon bit harder, grinded rougher, his hand forcing your wrists deeper into the mattress. Both of them on you—one soft, one brutal—until you didn’t know whose name to scream.

And you understood, with raw clarity, that they weren’t fighting for you.

They were fighting through you.

When the shudders finally broke, you collapsed back, gasping, throat raw. Jungwon leaned down, lips brushing your ear, his voice a growl. “This is just the beginning. Next time I’m inside you while he’s in your mouth. We’ll see who you really belong to.”

Sunoo laughed softly, licking his lips clean of you. “She’ll belong to both.”

And for the first time, you realized he was right.

_____

Your body was still shaking when Jungwon yanked you upright, dragging you into his lap as if the bed belonged only to him. His thighs were iron beneath you, his chest hard against your spine. One arm locked around your waist, the other snared your throat, thick fingers spreading wide until his grip owned the column of your neck. He forced your head back, baring your mouth to him.

“You’ll taste me now,” he snarled, lips crashing into yours.

The kiss was brutal—teeth knocking, spit spilling. He shoved his tongue deep, choking you with it, swallowing every noise you tried to make. His palm pressed tighter at your throat until your pulse roared in your ears, until breath itself became something you had to beg him for. Drool slicked your chin, his tongue forcing yours down, his grip refusing to let you turn away. It was less a kiss than a violent claiming, his mouth fucking yours the way his cock had already fucked your body raw.

You gasped when he pulled back just enough to let air in, a string of spit hanging obscenely between your mouths. He licked it off your bottom lip, then spat into your mouth deliberately, cruelly, watching you swallow because you had no choice.

“Open,” he growled, forcing your jaw wider with his hand at your throat. “Good. That’s mine too. Every sound. Every swallow.”

Your vision blurred; your thighs squeezed together involuntarily. Terror and heat tangled until you couldn’t breathe for either.

And then Sunoo was there.

He crouched in front of you, hands sliding up your knees to part them wider, his smile infuriatingly calm even in violence. “My turn.”

“No,” Jungwon bit out, but Sunoo was already moving. He grabbed your chin, fingers digging in hard enough to bruise, and wrenched your head away from Jungwon’s mouth. Your neck snapped to the side, and before you could gasp, Sunoo’s lips were on yours.

It wasn’t tender. It was vicious. He sucked your bottom lip until it split, teeth biting down until pain shot bright, then licked the blood from your mouth as if it belonged to him. His tongue drove past your teeth, tasting everything Jungwon had left there, devouring it with obscene relish.

You moaned helplessly, the sound muffled between them.

Jungwon’s grip on your throat tightened, forcing your head back further, rage pouring off him like heat. “She’s mine.”

Sunoo broke the kiss just long enough to sneer against your wet mouth. “Then why is she kissing me back?” He pressed his tongue to yours again, slow and filthy, sucking until spit ran down your chin. Then he pulled back, wiped it with his thumb, and shoved the slick digit back between your lips. “Lick it clean. That’s mine now.”

Your mouth obeyed before your brain caught up.

Jungwon’s chest vibrated with a growl. He bent and bit your jaw, then your throat, leaving purple marks against Sunoo’s fingerprints. His hand clamped your neck harder, forcing you to gasp around Sunoo’s thumb.

“She’s choking on me,” Jungwon snarled. “Not you.”

Sunoo laughed low, mean. He leaned closer, his forehead pressing to yours, his other hand grabbing Jungwon’s wrist on your throat, not to stop it, but to squeeze it tighter. “Then let’s choke her together.”

The pressure doubled. Your eyes watered, spit pooling at the corner of your mouth, drooling down your chin as both of them held you, forced you open, forced you to take them. One mouth kissed you, sucked you, spat into you; the other bit, bruised, pressed your throat until stars danced.

You weren’t kissing anymore. You were being consumed.

And God help you—your body wanted more.

_______

They had you caged between them—Jungwon at your back, Sunoo at your front—two sets of hands closing every door your body might have tried to escape through.

Your pulse beat frantically against Jungwon’s palm at your throat. Sunoo’s fingers dug into your chin, keeping your face tipped up so you couldn’t hide. Their mouths had already ruined you, spit running down your jaw, bruises blooming on your throat and collarbone like dark flowers. Your chest rose too fast, every breath their permission, every sound something they stole from you.

“You see?” Sunoo whispered, voice as sweet as it was cruel. “She’s ready. She’s shaking for us.” His hand slid down, brushing your stomach, spreading lower. “The soil is wet.”

“She’s wet because I fucked her open,” Jungwon snapped against your ear, his breath harsh. “She’s mine to fill.” He ground his cock against your ass through his pants, thick and hard, a promise of what was coming. His teeth found your neck again, biting until your body arched despite yourself.

The two of them moved you as if you were theirs to arrange. Your thighs were forced wide over Sunoo’s lap, your back crushed to Jungwon’s chest. Rough hands tugged your ruined shorts away; cool air hit the slick heat between your legs. Sunoo hummed like a priest receiving an offering.

“Let me taste again.” He didn’t wait for permission. His mouth descended, sucking your clit into his mouth, tongue lapping at you until your eyes rolled back. His hands locked on your thighs, holding you open for him, his moans vibrating into your cunt.

Jungwon shoved your wrists down into the mattress, his cock rutting against you through fabric, his fury pressed into every grind. “Listen to her,” he growled. “Dripping for us. Begging without words.” He yanked his pants open, the blunt head of his cock dragging along your ass, smearing precum. “She’s going to take both. Right now.”

You sobbed, terror and need colliding until you couldn’t tell them apart. “I can’t—”

“You can,” Sunoo cut in smoothly, lifting his head, chin wet with your slick. He stroked your trembling thighs with a mockery of gentleness. “Your body’s already opening. We’ll guide you.” His eyes glimmered, half-devotion, half-madness. “You’ll bloom for us together.”

Jungwon spat into his palm, gripped his cock, and shoved it between your cheeks, rubbing the head against your tight hole until you whined. “Scared?” he hissed, his hand tightening at your throat. “Good. Fear makes you clench tighter.”

Sunoo’s fingers slid inside your cunt again, curling, coaxing, slicking you up for him. He looked up at you, his smile soft even as he stretched you ruthlessly. “Breathe, petal. I’ll be inside you soon. You’ll be so full you won’t remember how to be empty.”

When Sunoo lined himself up, pressing the head of his cock against your soaked entrance, Jungwon shoved his tip harder at your ass, both of them pushing at once. Your cry ripped the air as your body was forced to split, one cock stretching your cunt, the other pressing past the tight ring of muscle until you thought you’d break.

“Fuck,” Jungwon groaned, voice raw. “So tight. Gripping me like a fist.”

“She’s perfect,” Sunoo sighed, already sinking deeper, your walls convulsing around him. “Taking both of us. Our flower.”

It was too much. The stretch burned, overwhelming, obscene. You clawed at the sheets, eyes rolling back as both of them bottomed out, your body trembling violently with the force of being split in two. They didn’t give you time. Jungwon’s hips snapped forward first, brutal, pounding into your ass with the fury of jealousy. Sunoo met him stroke for stroke, slower, deeper, angling until every thrust speared your cunt exactly where it made you scream.

Pinned, stuffed, broken open—you were nothing but their vessel.

“Say it,” Jungwon snarled, hand squeezing your throat until your vision blurred. “Say you’re mine.”

“She’s ours,” Sunoo countered, kissing you, sucking the spit from your mouth, swallowing your gasps. “Tell us, petal. Tell us who you bloom for.”

Your answer was a sob, a whimper, a strangled cry as their cocks moved inside you, filling every inch, grinding against each other through the thin wall of your body until the sensation drove you half-mad.

“Fuck, I can feel him through you,” Jungwon groaned, rutting harder, holding you down as if you might try to run again. “But you’re squeezing me tighter. That’s how I know you’re mine.”

Sunoo’s tongue licked the tears from your cheeks. “She’s crying for me. Look at her. Look how she wants to be saved even while we ruin her.”

Your body convulsed around them, slick gushing down your thighs, every nerve alight. The pain blurred into pleasure until you were begging without words, your nails tearing the sheets, your cries spilling into their mouths as they fought to own your climax.

When you came, it was devastating—your cunt and ass clenching around them both, milking them, dragging them deeper. Jungwon groaned, teeth sinking into your shoulder as he spilled inside you, hot and overwhelming. Sunoo followed seconds later, filling your cunt until you were overflowing, cum dripping down your thighs, both of them holding you so tightly you couldn’t breathe.

They didn’t pull out. They stayed locked inside, cocks twitching, their breaths harsh against your skin.

Jungwon’s hand squeezed your throat one last time, forcing your eyes to his. “Say it,” he demanded, voice hoarse. “Say you’re planted in me.”

Sunoo kissed your cheek, softer but no less cruel. “Say you’ll bloom for us both.”

And you, too full to think, too wrecked to fight, whispered the only truth left in you:

“I can’t belong to just one.”

They smiled—different smiles, but the same hunger.

And you knew you’d never escape again.

_______

woah this was so diffecult to write SO IM SORRY IF IT ISNT THE BEST

THANK YOU FOR READING!!

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[lollovern]

- The Garden Left to Rot -

enhypen masterlist

wattpad

inspired by this post

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groundskeeper!yang jungwon x guest!femreader x cult counselor!kim sunoo | obsessive romance | cult horror | forced devotion | ritualistic sex | jealousy and rivalry | fucked-up love triangle | knife kink | corrupted comfort | you will belong to someone eventually | DARK CONTENT AHEAD!!

wc: 14k

summary: You’re sent to a grief recovery retreat hidden in the mountains. But this isn’t therapy — it’s a cult blooming in blood and rot. Jungwon wants to bury you where no one else can touch you. Sunoo wants to crack you open until you bloom for him. Both say it’s healing. But it’s obsession.

warnings: extreme gore, threesome, cult rituals, body horror (flowers under skin, insect scenes), blood play, forced confinement, psychological manipulation, emotional degradation, knife play, religious delusion, obsessive behavior, toxic romance, dubcon themes, ritualistic sex, hallucinations, violence

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The van climbs until the road forgets how to be a road. Pines crowd close; fog slicks the windshield like breath on glass. By the time the driver kills the engine, your phone has been surrendered, the waiver signed, and your name—your real one—folded into a sealed envelope with your belongings.

A hand-painted sign leans crooked against a stone pillar: THE GARDEN.

Beneath it, smaller script: Let go. Become.

Everyone here is an adult—paperwork made that clear. Still, the cluster of arrivals huddle like freshmen. A woman in a bone-white coat stands at the gate, serene as a photograph. “Welcome,” she says. “I’m Director Seo. You won’t need last names here. You won’t need yesterday.” Her smile doesn’t reach her eyes. “We begin with stillness.”

Stillness smells like damp soil and rosemary. The compound spreads in tiers: a glasshouse ribbed with iron; dormitories with shuttered windows; a refectory where steam fogs the panes; a low clinic painted the color of milk. The greenhouse breathes—a pulse of heavy, sweet air each time the door opens. Inside, rows of lilies lean toward heat lamps; vines net the rafters; something rustles in the loam.

“Orientation,” says the boy who appears at Director Seo’s shoulder. He’s young—early twenties—with paper-clean features and the kind of smile people don’t realize is a blade until it’s already inside them. Kim Sunoo. His name tag says Counselor; the ribbon beneath it says Ritual Lead. “Shoes off in the greenhouse,” he adds lightly. “We keep the floors soft.”

Your shoes leave the ground. Cool boards. Warm mist. A bell rings once. The arrivals form a circle on woven mats; a dozen white-robed staff ghost the edges. A few guests have the shaved look of hospital discharge; others wear expensive emptiness like cologne.

“Here,” Sunoo says gently, “we do not share pasts. Only needs.” His gaze slips over faces and lands on you. Not a leer. A selection. “You may speak or sit in silence. Both are honest.”

“I need to sleep,” says a woman with chewed nails. “Like, three days.”

“I need to stop remembering,” a man answers, voice flat.

The girl beside you—twenty-two, maybe—says nothing. Yejin is stitched on her wristband. Her hands are ink-stained. She draws while people talk: a quick, vicious graphite—faces with petal-mouths; ribs like trellises. When you shift, she tilts her sketchbook so you can see the newest figure: a person kneeling in dirt, throat blooming with something that isn’t a flower.

“Beautiful,” Sunoo murmurs, as if he’s praising a child’s first recital. “You have a keen eye for transformation, Yejin.”

From across the greenhouse, someone drags burlap sacks along iron grates. Soil dark as coffee spills from a split seam and oozes across the floor. The man hauling the bags moves like he’s apologized to gravity and refuses to do it again. Yang Jungwon. Groundskeeper on his tag. Grey work shirt. Forearms nicked white with old cuts. He doesn’t look at the circle—doesn’t look at you—until he does, and then he doesn’t stop. Not curiosity. Assessment, like weighing a seed between finger and thumb and deciding if it will live in his earth.

Director Seo outlines rules in the smooth tone of a stewardess reciting crash procedures:

No personal histories in group.

No contact with family for the first fourteen days.

No unsupervised access to the greenhouse after dusk.

Do not remove plant material from designated zones.

What is given to the soil remains in the soil.

“That includes grief,” Sunoo says, almost playful. “Especially grief.”

Your dorm is clean in the way of hospital corridors and mortuaries. Two metal beds. Two lockers. A copy of a softbound booklet on each pillow: STILLNESS GUIDE. Your roommate arrives with a jangle of bracelets and the brittle cheer of someone who learned to smile as self-defense. Mira, 26, volunteer-turned-resident-mentor.

“Welcome-welcome,” she chirps, then lowers her voice. “Pro tip: keep your head down the first three days. They watch how you watch.”

“Who?”

“Everyone.” She flicks her gaze toward the window, where the greenhouse skeletons against dusk. “Especially him.” She means Sunoo—you can hear it in the soft, reverent way. “And the groundskeeper when it’s dark.” That last part is almost a warning.

The bell rings again. Dinner is broth that tastes like the inside of a leaf and bread dense with seeds. You eat at long tables while staff move among you like shepherds. Across from you, a jittery young man, Taesun—24, scars like cat-scratches up his wrists—piles his crusts and crumbles them methodically. He pockets a handful when he thinks no one sees.

“For the worms,” he whispers to the crumbs. “They get hungry at night.”

Mira nudges your knee under the table. “He feeds them behind the east wall,” she murmurs. “Says they keep the nightmares down if they’re busy.”

In the clinic after dinner, a nurse swabs your fingers where the paper edges of the waiver bit skin. Nurse Min is beautiful in the harsh way of women who have decided their faces are weapons. When she says “this will sting,” the consonants soften strangely; a long surgical scar splits the underside of her tongue. She catches you looking and lifts a brow that says yes, I am aware of my mouth. Then—almost tender—she tapes your knuckle with gauze printed with tiny flowers.

Back in the greenhouse, the first night session is called Surrender. The lamps buzz. Mist beads your eyelashes. Sunoo stands barefoot on the damp boards, sleeves rolled, voice a low waterfall.

“Close your eyes,” he says. “Name the weight you want the earth to hold for you. Don’t say it out loud. Let your body say it.”

Around you, bodies sway. Some cry. Some freeze. When you keep your eyes open, Sunoo notices. Of course he does.

“New sprout,” he says softly, close to your ear, and the nickname feels chosen, not random. “You don’t have to force stillness. It happens when the soil recognizes you.”

“Does it?” Your voice is hoarse from disuse and altitude.

“Always.” He smiles. Not kind. Not unkind. Satisfied. “The Garden knows its own.”

Across the rows, Jungwon kneels in the dirt, wrist-deep in loam, planting something without a label. He doesn’t follow Sunoo’s cadence; he follows his own. When one lamp flickers, he rises and fixes it with the swift, competent movements of someone who builds instead of asks. When he sits back, the soil clings to his fingers like shadow.

You should sleep. Instead you help Mira remake your beds with the stiff white sheets that smell faintly of bleach and rosemary. She keeps talking, because silence makes her hands shake.

“I came as a volunteer,” she says, tucking corners square. “Stayed as a patient. It’s easier when they tell you what to be.”

“What do they tell you?”

She smiles without humor. “A flower.” Her eyes slide to your bandaged hand. “Try not to bleed in the greenhouse. They don’t like that.”

“Why?”

“Because the soil remembers.”

At night the compound changes. Lights dim. The wind strips the pines and combs the glass with needles. You lie awake and count breaths—yours, Mira’s, the building’s—until you can’t bear numbers anymore.

You go out.

The air is colder than the dorm suggests. The greenhouse glows from within, a pulse behind fogged panes. Beyond the east wall, something moves with slow persistence. You follow the ripple of disturbed leaves to a break in the hedgerow and find Taesun kneeling with his pockets turned inside out, sowing crumbs into the leaf litter like a penitent farmer.

“The worms,” he says. “They hate hunger.”

“And if they’re hungry?”

“They crawl into you,” he says simply, and his eyes are not crazy; they’re convinced. “They’re looking for warmth.”

A lantern kindles behind you. “Curfew,” a voice says.

You turn. Jungwon holds the light up so it paints his face in bones and gold. Up close, his features soften—stillness without Sunoo’s practiced grace; a patient animal’s attention. The lantern makes a thicket of his lashes. He looks from you to Taesun to your bare feet on the cold boards.

“You’ll catch a chill,” he says to you, like it’s a personal offense. “Shoes. Now.”

You should resent the command. Instead, you feel the unreasonable urge to obey. You start toward the dorms.

“Not that way,” he says. “West path. Easier. Less slope.” He tips the lantern so the light doesn’t blind you while you pass. It’s a small courtesy. It also marks you—every guard on the walkway can see who broke curfew and who brought them back.

“Do you plant at night?” you ask, because silence around him feels like standing at a cliff’s edge and leaning a little too far.

“Always,” he says. He doesn’t volunteer more. His eyes drag briefly to your bandaged hand. “You left blood in the greenhouse.”

“I didn’t—”

He lifts two fingers, the gesture efficient and final. “The soil remembers.” His mouth twitches—not a smile, exactly; the ghost of one. “Mira talks too much.”

“Is that against the rules?”

“It’s against survival.”

He walks you to the dorm porch and stops at the bottom step like there’s an invisible line he won’t cross. The night carries pine resin and wet metal. You want to ask him what he plants without labels, what grows under lamps that mimic suns, why the staff wear rosaries made of seeds.

He says, low, “Don’t follow sounds you don’t understand.”

“Why?”

“Because some things here answer to being watched.” He tilts the lantern, and for a heartbeat you see something like a tenderness he hides even from himself. “Sleep.”

You try. You fail. When you finally slide under, it’s the shallow kind of rest that hears every hinge complain.

Morning stains the glasshouse pale gold. Breakfast is porridge and a shot glass of bitter green. “Chlorophyll,” Mira grimaces. “For purity. Or the aesthetic.” She scans the refectory like she’s counting exits. “There’ll be a Placement Walk after breakfast. Don’t volunteer. They love volunteers.”

“What is it?”

She cuts her eyes toward the greenhouse. “They take someone to the grove and ‘help them choose a garden name.’ Sometimes they come back with a wreath. Sometimes without their voice for a while.”

Director Seo taps her cup. “Today’s Placement Walk is for… Yejin.”

The graphite girl looks up, startled as a deer. Her pencil stills. Sunoo’s smile brightens by half a watt. “I’ll take her,” he offers, hand already extended. “I’ve seen her drawings. She understands transformation.”

If you didn’t sleep, you are alert now. Jungwon appears in the doorway like the building made him. His gaze flicks over the room, and when it lands on Yejin’s shaking knuckles, something barely visible tightens in his jaw.

“I’ll go with you,” he says to Sunoo without looking away from the girl.

“Of course,” Sunoo replies. Silk over steel. “Two witnesses. Very proper.”

They lead her out between them: the counselor with a palm light on her shoulder; the groundskeeper holding the door open so it doesn’t bite her. The room exhales when the door closes. Mira’s bracelets clink as her hands start to shake again.

“They’ll bring her back,” you say, because logic is a habit.

“Usually,” Mira says.

Taesun folds bread crumbs into his napkin with ritual care. “If the worms are fed.”

“Stop with the worms—”

He looks up, suddenly fiercer than his tremor allows. “This place eats. I just like to decide what it eats.”

You leave your spoon in your bowl. The porridge lurches in your gut like a tide. Through the greenhouse glass, you can’t see the grove, only the suggestion of trunks and a slit of path. Time grows teeth.

When they return, Yejin walks in her body like someone has moved the furniture. A crown of woven reeds presses her hair flat. There’s a smear of green at the corner of her mouth, like she’s chewed a leaf until it bled. She carries her sketchbook close to her chest as if it’s the last piece of herself no one has touched.

“What did you choose?” Director Seo asks.

Yejin’s voice is soft but intact. “Night-blooming cereus.”

“A flower that opens in darkness,” Sunoo says, pleased. “Perfect.”

Jungwon stands behind them, sleeves rolled to the elbow, forearms dirt-streaked. A single thorn scratches the back of his hand, a bright new welt. You don’t know why your chest warms at the proof that something here can still hurt them too.

As the room settles, Nurse Min touches your shoulder. “Consult,” she says, consonants rounded. In the clinic, she peels your bandage, checks the small cut, nods. “Fine.”

“Was the walk… normal?” you ask, too casual. “For Yejin.”

Nurse Min dabs salve with a gentleness that doesn’t fit her knife-edged face. “Normal is a shape you learn,” she says. “Here, it is round.” She taps your knuckle. “Don’t open yourself on purpose. Things may grow inside.”

“Like what?”

Her eyes flick briefly toward the greenhouse. “Names.”

By afternoon the schedule has you shoveling, watering, scrubbing, writing lines. I am ready to be less. You write it a hundred times until the words separate from meaning and become a pattern of stems and loops. Outside, Jungwon clears a new bed along the south wall. His shovel bites; his shoulders move with the reliable rhythm of practiced labor. A boy twice your size steps into his path and mutters something you can’t hear. Jungwon doesn’t raise his voice. He simply looks at the boy until the boy forgets how to stand where he’s standing and moves.

“Don’t stare,” Mira warns from beside you, but she’s staring too. “He notices.”

“He noticed last night,” you say.

Mira goes still. “You went out?”

“For air.”

“Air is how they catch you,” she whispers, and for the first time her cheer fails. “Promise me you won’t go alone again.”

You don’t promise. You also don’t say I don’t know who I am without alone.

At dusk, group again. Sunoo has you sit closer to him than yesterday. When you resist, he laughs softly, as if you’re charming rather than disobedient. “We sit where the light needs us,” he says. You wonder if that’s a rule or a line he likes. While others speak, he doesn’t look at them; he watches their hands, their throats, the wet edge of eyes. When your breath hitches at someone’s story, he turns his head sharply like a wolf hearing snow crack.

“What would you let go of?” he asks you, voice pitched so the rest of the circle hears only the question, not the ownership threaded through it.

You could say: the fire, the last call you ignored, the smell of burning hair. Instead, you say nothing. He accepts your silence as if it were obedience he taught you.

Outside the glass, Jungwon is a darker shape among dark shapes, moving a hose along the rows. When his head turns toward the circle, it isn’t to the whole; it is to you. He holds you there for a breath you feel in your wrists. Then he tips the hose, and water falls like rain on metal bones.

You sleep after midnight because your body ambushes you. You wake to weight. Not on you; in the air, a heaviness like weather. The greenhouse lights are out. The compound holds its breath.

Something is under your pillow.

You slide your hand beneath it and touch paper—the rough tooth of a sketchbook page. You draw it out under the dim nightlight and see yourself. Not flattering. Not cruel. Exact. You kneel on dark soil, mouth open, and something vines out—delicate stems laced with thorns. Hands—two sets—hold your shoulders lightly, possessively: one set with ink stains, one with dirt ground into the half moons of the nails. At the bottom, Yejin’s cramped script: “Some flowers only open when watched.”

Mira stirs. “What is it?”

“Art,” you say, and your voice surprises you with how steady it is.

“What kind?”

“Prophetic,” you answer, because the truth is an animal pacing the edge of the bed and you’re not ready to let it into your ribs yet.

You slide the drawing back under your pillow and close your eyes. Across the compound, the night shifts. In your mind, Sunoo’s smile threads petals through your tongue. In reality, Jungwon’s lantern skates once across the fogged panes, a slow-moving star. Two orbits, caught in the same sky, tightening.

Slow burn, the booklet promised. Healing begins when you stop resisting.

You do not stop.

You breathe. You listen to the soil remembering you.

And you wait.

______

Morning arrives with a whistle under the door and the faint itch of grit in your teeth, as if you’ve been speaking to the ground in your sleep. Breakfast is the same: porridge, a bitter green shot, tea that tastes like boiled bark. Mira counts sips, bracelets clinking like quiet alarms. Taesun crushes his toast to dust and pockets it, eyes bright with purpose. Yejin sits very still, crown of reeds damp against her hair, sketchbook closed for once like a door she’s guarding with her body.

Director Seo taps her cup. “Today begins the Mouth Fast,” she says, voice smooth as tile. “Speech is the first addiction. For twenty-four hours, we practice voicelessness. Carry your stone”—a monk in linen sets a bowl of river stones on each table—“and let it hold your words. Anyone who breaks the fast will do a double shift in the greenhouse trenches. Sunoo will lead stillness. Jungwon will direct labor.”

A murmur rises and dies, mouths pressing shut to prove eagerness. Mira puts a flat, oval stone in your palm. “Don’t lose it,” she whispers, already breaking the rule. “They’ll say the soil took your voice because you were careless.”

You tuck the stone into your sleeve and meet Sunoo’s eyes across the hall. He’s already watching—of course he is. The smile he gives you would be harmless if you hadn’t seen how he moves when he’s pleased: slower, closer, like a candle drawn to oxygen. Jungwon lingers by the service door with a clipboard and a coil of hose on his shoulder, scanning tables the way a shepherd counts sheep by the sound of their breathing.

Chores first. Outside, the air needles your lungs; the mountain wears its cold like a second skin. Jungwon assigns tasks without looking at his list. “Mira, refectory herbs. Taesun, east wall compost. Yejin, with Nurse Min in the clinic.” His gaze slides to you and steadies. “You—paths and drains. Stay out of the grove.” Not a suggestion.

You carry a stiff-bristled broom down stone paths glazed with last night’s dew. The greenhouse ribs glow under weak sun; from inside, lamps hum, and something leafy slaps damply as if it’s learned the shape of applause. By the east wall, Taesun kneels with a small shovel and a reverence that would be holy if it didn’t smell like rot.

He tips crumbs in a neat line, then pauses to show you something cupped in his palm: a white, blind tangle coiling in damp soil. Worms, yes, but too many knotted together, a living thread. He beams, proud. You force your lips into gratitude and keep sweeping. If you stop, you will hear them, and if you hear them, you will dream them.

A shadow falls across your broom. Jungwon holds out a pair of soft-soled garden shoes with the temporary patience of a man who prefers doing to explaining. “Your feet,” he says. “You bruise easily.”

You glance at your bare socks, damp to the ankle. “Is that a rule?”

“It’s a reality,” he says; the word lands like weight. He crouches without asking, sets the shoes on the path, and steps back, gaze down so you can decide if you’ll take his help. You put them on. They’re warm from his hands. He notices the lift of your breath and looks away so the noticing won’t embarrass you. When he straightens, his eyes snag on the river stone tucked in your sleeve. “Don’t drop that,” he says. “The ravens like to steal them.”

You arch a brow—Are you joking?—but he’s already moving, a steady, unshowy force among the clatter of chores.

By mid-morning the Mouth Fast is a taut cord running through the compound. The quiet isn’t peace; it’s suppression, and suppression hums. Sunoo runs stillness from the center of the greenhouse like a maestro conducting silence. He has you sit within his radius; you don’t know how you know that, but you do. When a guest’s shoulders begin to shake, his hand appears at the nape of their neck—just weight, just heat, just enough to persuade the body that obedience feels like care.

He comes to you last, when the lamps have warmed the panes to sweating. He kneels, not quite touching, gaze on your throat. “Your pulse is stubborn,” he says in a voice pitched for you alone. “It hates rhythm. I like that.” He brushes the air near your jawline, not touching, so you feel it anyway. “The stone will teach it obedience. If you’re good at listening.”

You hold his eyes and refuse to nod. He smiles, pleased with your defiance like a trainer who prefers wild animals because they make better trophies. “We’ll work on it,” he whispers, and stands.

After lunch—a bowl of broth filtered until flavor gives up—you’re pulled into the clinic with half a dozen others for “check-ins.” Nurse Min sits you on a stool and unwraps your finger. The cut is a thin mouth now, pink with newness. She touches a gloved finger to the gauze and sniffs it as if the body has a scent that changes when it’s lying.

“Does it itch?” she asks.

You hesitate. The truth is embarrassing. “Everything does,” you admit. “Under the skin. Like… like something wants out.”

“Something wants in,” she corrects mildly. She takes tweezers to the pad of your finger and draws out a hair-fine splinter you didn’t know was there. It isn’t wood—it’s pale and sappy, flexing like a root in the air. She drops it in a jar and screws the lid tight. “Names need medium,” she says. “Don’t let anyone put theirs under your skin.”

“Is that medical advice?”

“It’s survival.” She tapes a fresh bandage printed with tiny leaves, then, softer, “If you start tasting flowers, spit.”

You leave the clinic with your mouth dry as chalk. On the steps, Yejin waits like a shadow that forgot to attach to a body. She presses a folded paper to your palm and flits off before you can unfold it. In the corner of the page, her fast, lethal graphite: you in profile, throat open, something like a stem ghosting up under the jaw. In the negative space behind you, two silhouettes—Sunoo’s soft edges; Jungwon’s blunt solidity—blur toward one another without touching. Underneath, her careful script: Not yet. But soon.

The Mouth Fast bends afternoon into a colder shape. Without words, people show who they are. Mira hums under her breath and taps her stone against her teeth like a bead. Taesun counts breath with his fingers on his ribs. A new arrival—Hana, thirty and jewel-hard—walks like a woman who refuses to ask permission from the air. An older man, Mr. Ko, rows his spoon through soup with the concentration of a man pretending there is a river and a boat that can take him off this mountain.

At dusk, Director Seo calls for the Seed Burial. “We surrender what we’ve hoarded,” she says, and volunteers step forward with small slips of paper seeded with something that will sprout if the soil wants it. They kneel, press the papers into a rectangle of fresh-turned earth, and cover them with a thin skin of loam. The lamps go low. Sunoo stands at their backs. Jungwon stands at their front, shovel grounded like a staff.

You don’t move. You have nothing to bury you can stand to name.

A woman you recognize from orientation—the one who needed three days of sleep—places both palms flat on the soil like it’s someone she loves. Her breath hitches once; she swallows whatever it shook loose. As the last handful of earth covers the names, something beneath the surface shifts. Not the modest swell of seeds drinking. A shove from below.

The crowd stills. You feel it again—a push. The soil flexes and sighs, grains settling. Someone’s hand jerks back as if bitten. Sunoo’s smile does not change, which means it changes. “The ground recognizes an offering,” he says pleasantly. “Stand, flowers. Let the dark do what it’s for.”

Jungwon’s eyes are on the dirt, not the people. His jaw flexes once, twice. You have the sharp, childish thought—He hears it too—and the relief that follows is so naked you almost miss the fear riding it.

Night stitches the compound tight. The Mouth Fast persists: tongues held, little pantomimes replacing argument. In bed, Mira sleeps with her open palm on her stone like it might roll away. You face the wall because the drawing under your pillow is a magnet and your skull is iron.

A scrape wakes you—a quick, purposeful sound under the window. You slide out of bed and ease the latch. Cold breath pours in. On the path below, a lantern moves slow as a planet. You follow, soft-soled shoes silent on the boards, the stone in your sleeve tapping your wrist like a heart that’s climbed too high.

The lantern stops. Jungwon steps into its circle. He doesn’t look surprised to see you. He looks like a man who has laid a trap and found what he baited it for. He lifts the lantern just enough to catch your face without flaying you with light.

He puts a finger to his mouth—quiet—and crooks that same finger: come.

You should run. You go.

He takes you along the west path to a low, fenced plot you haven’t noticed in daylight, because in daylight everything looks like something else. Up close, the boards are stained darker than weather. He stops you with a hand on your sleeve. His grip is gentle; his hand is strong. “Do not speak,” he says, and for the first time today the command lands like care, not control.

He tilts the lantern over the fence. The light stratifies a pit maybe two meters long, maybe one deep, lined with rough timbers and crawling with the industry of decay. You see peels, stems, pot scrapings—normal compost—then catch on something pale threaded through like lace: cartilage? You squint, heart hammering, and in among the skins and stems you see hair—just a clump, just enough to be undeniable. The sour-metal stink under the rot answers a question you didn’t know you were asking until now.

You stagger, mute because the rule still binds your mouth. Jungwon’s hand rises like he planned for your body to try to leave you. He catches your elbow with two fingers and steadies you without pulling you closer. “Breathe,” he says, voice so low the pit swallows it.

You breathe. He watches your lungs move under your shirt as if measuring if they’ll keep their job.

“What is this,” you manage, a whisper that bruises the fast.

“Everything that isn’t needed,” he says. It is both the most honest sentence you’ve heard since you arrived and the worst one. “Don’t come here alone.”

“Why show me?”

His mouth tightens. He weighs the truth and hands you a ration. “Because you will go looking. Better you see what is true than what you can’t live through.”

He lifts the lantern away; the pit dissolves back into darkness. When he looks at you again, the composure you’ve seen him wear like a uniform slips an inch. “Next time,” he says, “wake me.”

“How?” It comes out harder than you intend. “Do I knock on the earth?”

“On my door.” He says it like a correction and a promise. “I’d rather carry you than find you down there with your throat open to the sky.”

You swallow. The stone in your sleeve digs your wrist bone.

He walks you back along the west path, keeping the lantern low so you don’t blind yourself and tumble. At the bottom of the dorm steps, he stops as if a line of salt has been poured between you. “Sleep,” he says. Then, almost grudgingly—no, carefully, like he fears generosity might teach you to expect it—“You did well.”

“You mean quiet,” you say.

“I mean you didn’t lie to yourself while you were looking.” He turns the lantern, and for a heartbeat your faces share a circle of light. It is not intimate, and it is.

Inside, the warm dark smells like bodies and disinfection. Mira turns in her sleep, bracelets whickering. Your hands shake. Not with the adrenaline of the pit—though that remains like a taste at the back of your throat—but with the realization that both men see you. Sunoo sees the mechanism; Jungwon sees the fracture line. You can’t decide which is worse.

The Mouth Fast breaks at dawn with a bell so soft it feels like a secret. Voices resume like a creek finding an old bed; people speak too loudly, then blush, then laugh at their own relief. Director Seo praises “compliance” as if it were a sacrament. In the refectory, mugs clack, spoons scrape. Words return as barter.

You don’t trust yours yet.

Sunoo flows through tables like sunlight convincing itself it’s holy. He catches your empty mug, pours tea, and sets it in front of you with a flourish that makes a few heads turn. “How did the silence fit?” he asks, lazy, interested. It isn’t small talk. It’s a probe shaped like kindness.

“Like wire,” you say.

He smiles, delighted—as if you’ve told him a secret about yourself he can use. “It looks good on you,” he says, and taps your river stone where it sits on the table as if he gave it to you, as if it obeys him too. “We have Talkback today. You and me.”

“Is that optional?”

“In principle,” he says. “In practice, most people prefer to be seen.” He leans in, lower voice. “You certainly do.”

He leaves before you can snap that you preferred to be alive, actually. Across the room, Jungwon stops at the threshold, takes the refectory in at a glance, and chooses a seat with his back to the wall. He eats fast, plain, as if food is fuel and surveillance is dessert. When he lifts his mug, you notice the fresh welt across the back of his hand—a thorn, yesterday, dragging its punctuation.

Talkback is held in a small room off the clinic, windowless, lit by a lamp that chooses flattery over truth. Sunoo sits too close, but because he knows what too close does to bodies, he leaves exactly enough air that you can fool yourself into thinking you could stand if you wanted to. He doesn’t touch you. He rests his forearms on his knees, hands open, posture full of a patience he wears like silk.

“What is the shape of your fear?” he asks, as if fear is polite enough to have geometry.

“Wide,” you say.

“Flat?”

“Deep.”

He grins. “Good. Honesty makes my job easier.” He looks at your mouth, then your hands, then your throat. “Last night you broke curfew.”

It isn’t a question. “I walked.”

“To the west path,” he says, savoring the corridor of it.

“Is that forbidden?”

“Not if you were with someone.”

You hold his gaze. You don’t look away. You don’t nod. You don’t give him Jungwon.

Sunoo’s smile returns, but thinner. “We don’t punish curiosity,” he says silkily. “We shape it.” He nods to your sleeve. “Keep the stone. I like how you sound when you hold it.”

“I didn’t speak.”

“You breathed differently,” he says, and you hate that you believe him. “This afternoon I want you in the greenhouse. We’ll do matching breath. I’ll keep count so you don’t have to.”

Your stomach remembers the pit and rolls. “What if I say no?”

“Then we’ll go slower,” he says, as if you asked him to make it sweeter. “That’s the kind of consent you like, isn’t it? The kind that arrives after your body learns the lesson.”

You stand because sitting feels like agreeing. He doesn’t stop you. He nods as if you’ve completed a task he set in his head.

“Good,” he says. “The roots are listening.”

Outside, the day is too bright in the way of mountains pretending to be gentle. You find Mira tending pots of kitchen herbs—mint, rosemary, a vicious little basil. “You look like you saw a ghost,” she says without looking up.

“I saw the compost,” you say.

She flinches so hard the basil shudders. “You don’t say it out loud,” she hisses, then checks herself, forces her voice calm again. “Names wake things.”

“Whose hair is in it?”

“Everyone’s,” she says. “Eventually.”

By late afternoon your muscles revolt, and stillness becomes a thing you have to hold down with both hands. In the greenhouse, Sunoo runs breath like a metronome. When he kneels behind a girl whose hands won’t stop shaking, he doesn’t touch her skin; he places his palm two inches away from her spine and waits. The girl’s shoulders ease; her breath learns his count. You hate him for it. You hate her relief. You hate that your body pays attention.

Jungwon moves along the rows with a bucket and a dull pruning blade, nicking stems, turning soil, resetting stakes. When a lamp pops and goes dim, he crosses to replace it without being called. On his way back, he passes near your mat—near, not past. The air shifts with him: sweat, iron, soil, a clean note like water running under rock. He doesn’t look down. He scratches the back of his wrist where a thorn welt cross-hatches older scars and says, as if the comment belongs to the room, “Some things only grow when you pretend you can’t see them.”

You don’t know if he means the plants, the people, or you.

Evening comes with teeth. The bell pulls everyone to the refectory; the sky sits heavy, swollen with weather that refuses to begin. Over dinner, Hana spills her tea and swears loudly enough that half the room jumps; then she laughs, tips her chin like she meant to do it, and glares at anyone who looks sorry on her behalf. Mr. Ko tells Taesun to stop feeding the worms like they’re pets; Taesun bares his teeth, half-smile, half warning. Nurse Min pockets a spoon someone bent into a hook. Director Seo watches it all with the small, sated smile of a zookeeper whose animals are thriving.

Night brings the first scream.

Not a long one. Not a movie howl. A single, keening note cut off hard, like a rope being cut. The compound freezes; forks stop halfway to mouths; breath holds. Sunoo is already on his feet, smile sharpened into usefulness. Jungwon’s chair scrapes; he’s moving before you can find your shoes.

They go toward the grove at a measured pace that says they already know what they’ll find. Director Seo lifts her hand. “Stay seated,” she says, and the command lands like weight on your shoulders. Mira’s fingers take yours under the table and squeeze so hard your knuckles grind. You squeeze back. Your mouth tastes like rosemary and fear.

You wait. The greenhouse sweats. The clock you aren’t allowed to see walks itself around the hour by the sound of your blood in your ears. When the door opens again, Sunoo comes in first, serene, coat unwrinkled. Jungwon follows with a bundled shape in his arms—a blanket, a softness of color, too long where a body should bend.

A gasp skips the room. “She fainted,” Sunoo says, which is both intolerably insufficient and the only story you’ll be allowed. “A cleansing reaction. She will rest. We will keep vigil over the names she surrendered.”

He doesn’t say who. Your mind fills the blank with the sleeping woman from breakfast, because that is who you fear for, and fear is a magnet. Jungwon carries the bundle past. You know how much weight that is—your body recognizes the set of his jaw, the economy of his gait. He does not look at you. He doesn’t look anywhere but the door to the clinic, as if any glance could spill what he’s holding.

The dining hall exhales like it’s been underwater too long. Director Seo claps once, neat. “We will not gossip,” she says. “We will not catastrophize. We will practice serenity.”

You don’t sleep. Not because you’re brave—because you’re scared correctly now, and scared correctly people stay awake. When you doze, you wake to the sensation that someone has put a leaf on your tongue and asked you to pray with it in your mouth. You spit into your sheet and find nothing. When you sit up, a shadow peels off the wall near the window and becomes Jungwon.

You nearly fling yourself out of bed. He doesn’t move, as if sudden gestures would spook you. He should not be in the dorms after lights; rules are their own religion here. He breaks this one like he breaks branches: cleanly, without apology.

“You left your shoes,” he says, low. He sets them at the foot of your bed, lined up, laces tucked. His voice is stripped of everything but function. “Don’t go barefoot again.”

“What happened?” you ask, whispering because anything louder might wake the dark.

“Don’t ask me,” he says, and for a breath you think he’s refusing. Then he adds, “Because I’ll tell you.” His gaze drags over your face, cataloging fine tremors, the cracked edge of your mouth, the way one hand fists in the sheet like rope. “Sleep,” he says. “You’ll need it.”

He is out the way he came, the door kissing its jamb like a secret.

You try to obey. The mountain presses its cold face to the window and listens. Somewhere, a lantern moves. Somewhere else, a man like a hymn kneels by a bed that is too light.

You put the river stone back in your sleeve and hold it against your pulse until the beat stops arguing with your bones. You remember the jar in Nurse Min’s clinic with the threadlike root curled at the bottom like a question mark. You picture Yejin’s hand drawing you with something under your skin you didn’t agree to carry.

Stillness was the promise. Obedience was the price. You have paid neither. Now the Garden pays attention.

And you, finally, are afraid.

_________

You wake with the taste of copper and rosemary slicked over your tongue, as if someone pressed a leaf there while you slept and whispered hold it. A welt has risen along your bandaged finger—thin, pale, almost pretty. When you press it, it flexes under the skin like something answering from underneath.

Breakfast is a choreography of clatter and eyes. Mira smiles too hard; her bracelets rattle out a code you can’t read. Taesun tips crumbs into his pocket with priestly concentration. Yejin’s crown of reeds has dried to a brittle halo; she draws with her pencil held like a knife. Hana sits mean and diamond-bright, daring the room to dull her edges. Mr. Ko’s spoon cuts the same path through porridge like a boatman refusing any other shore. Director Seo watches the surface of her tea the way people watch the sea for bodies.

“The Naming Rite will be held at sundown,” she announces, as if she’s asking for the salt. “Those selected have been notified.”

Sunoo lifts his eyes, and that’s your notification.

Mira’s fingers find your knee under the table and clamp. She shakes her head once, small, fast—refuse. You don’t know what refusal looks like here besides a story they will tell about you afterward.

“Drink,” Nurse Min says when you pass through the clinic to turn in your night report—how many hours asleep, how many awake, whether you dreamed of heat, teeth, drowning. She hands you a glass the green of pond water. You smell it, and it smells like lawn and iron. “Chlorophyll with a little hem,” she says, seeing your face. “Calms the heart.”

“Calms or slows?” Your voice scratches.

She cants her head. “Same action, different motive.” She glances at your finger. “Still itching?”

“It… moves,” you say, and the honesty makes your stomach pitch. “Like a thread.”

“Everything alive wants a home,” she replies. She peels the bandage with sure fingers. Underneath, the welt has subdivided into delicate veins, a fine network. Not veins. Veining. It looks like leaf. She presses the back of her glove along it; the pattern darkens, limned green under the skin. “Names need medium,” she repeats. “Keep your mouth closed in the greenhouse today. Even when you want to answer.”

You want to ask answer what, but Sunoo is in the doorway, dusk caught in the lamplight of his hair. He doesn’t knock; he glides in like permission. “Our new sprout,” he says, pleased to find you in a chair. “I’ll take her.”

Nurse Min’s mouth goes a little flatter. “She eats first.”

“Of course.” Sunoo’s smile doesn’t move. “Then we breathe.”

The greenhouse sweats. Heat lamps hum like insects; the glass with its rain of condensation blurs the mountain into a myth. Staff move among the rows with trays of soil sheets—thin paper seeded with something that glitters faintly when the light hits it wrong. “Embedded affirmations,” Sunoo tells the group. “You write what you’ll surrender. The seeds will carry it.”

Hana snorts. “Is the surrender refundable?”

Sunoo’s eyes quicken. “There’s always a transaction,” he says. “We just prefer you know the price.” He looks back to you. “Mat,” he says, and it isn’t a request.

You sit. He kneels behind you, palms hovering two inches from your ribs. No touch—just the sense of touch waiting. “Open your mouth,” he murmurs. The admonition from Nurse Min echoes; you clamp your lips. Sunoo’s pleased noise lands against your neck like breath. “Good. Breathe through your nose. In on four, out on six. I’ll count.”

His voice is a rope you have to grab to keep from slipping. When your breath shudders, he matches it; when it calms, he pursues. On the sixth cycle, something sweet pushes the air—lily, wet earth—and you remember the pit and want to be sick. “Stay,” he says, reading your recoil. “Stay where your body is. Don’t run from it. That’s where people rot.”

Across the rows, Jungwon replaces a cracked lamp with quick, sure hands. He doesn’t look at you until he does, a glance like a hand closing on the back of your neck. The air between you tightens. His forearms are netted with healed cuts, white against brown; a fresh welt crosses them like a red thread. When Sunoo says “out on six,” Jungwon turns the dial and the light hums obedient, and you wonder whether the whole building breathes to his count.

Yejin brings you a tray of seed-paper without being asked. When you reach, her gaze drops to your bandage. She moves the pencil like a blade and sketches the back of your hand: the delicate leaf veining, the suggestion of something wanting to break surface. She writes Not yet over the knuckles and slides the paper into your lap. Her mouth is a thin line; her eyes are large and dry and furious.

The day’s chores are smaller and meaner than yesterday’s. Scrub the condensation gutters. Rake. Haul sacks labeled Bone Meal that smell like old molars. Taesun sings under his breath in a language not meant for mouths and leaves a damp trail of crumbs along the east wall. Mr. Ko fetches and carries with blank efficiency, his face empty as a cleaned plate.

By late afternoon, a woman you know only as Auntie Hye—fiftyish, hair cut short for neatness, eyes that scan like a mother bird’s—begins to cough. At first it is dry and prim; then she hunches, pushes a hand to her chest and coughs wet. A ribbon of something bright pops free onto her palm. Petals. White. Tissue-thin and slick with saliva. A few guests laugh—nerves, delight, cruelty. Nurse Min is there before the room decides what to feel, hand under Auntie Hye’s chin, tissues ready. Hye coughs again, harder, and a clot of petals spills: red-tipped now, streaked. She hacks out a final cluster and sags. The tissues are sodden. The petals look like tongues.

“Pollination,” Sunoo says calmly. “Sometimes the body rehearses letting go by practicing bloom.”

Auntie Hye shakes her head, breath hitching. “I didn’t—” she starts.

Sunoo presses two fingers lightly to her throat. “You did.”

She closes her mouth.

Jungwon comes with a bucket and a flat spade; he scoops the petals into the bucket without expression. Your stomach tilts; you grip the bench until the wood prints itself into your palm. He doesn’t look at anyone. He takes the bucket toward the compost. You see his jawclench once when he passes the pit door and files that, like a photographed crime scene.

After the petals, other small horrors follow as if emboldened. A boy pulls his sleeve up to scratch and reveals a faint green tracery along his inner arm; when he scrubs at it, the skin reddens and puffs and the pattern brightens like a pressed leaf held to light. Mira slices a basil stem and it bleeds thin, clean sap; she runs her thumb along the cut and licks it without thinking, then startles at the taste and laughs too loudly. Taesun tips a paper cup into a drain, and a pale, slick worm writhes against the grate and splits into two thinner threads that both crawl the wrong way, toward his fingers. He coos like they’re babies and tucks them back into mud.

“Don’t feed your nightmares,” Nurse Min says without looking up from the woman whose mouth she swabs. “They grow fine on their own.”

By evening, the heat in the greenhouse feels like a hand that won’t lift. The lamps go low. Director Seo stands by the iron ribs with her clipboard like a prayerbook. “For the Naming Rite,” she says, “we welcome Sunoo as Voice and Jungwon as Hands.”

Voice and Hands. A division of power simple enough to live inside.

You are led—gently, unmistakably—toward the central bed, a rectangle of fresh loam bordered by smooth stones. Yejin edges after you, sketchbook clutched to her chest; Nurse Min blocks her with just a glance. “Not this,” Min murmurs. “Later.”

Mira steps forward—too fast—“I can go instead,” she says, smile like a knife wrapped in tissue.

Sunoo’s smile is silk on a nail. “We don’t barter names,” he says. “We harvest them.”

Your knees give. Not dramatic; a small buckling, the body remembering the ground. Sunoo’s hand is there without touching you, a near-weight at your shoulder. “Kneel,” he says, as if reminding you what your body already decided. “Head up. We face what we bring.”

Jungwon stands at the foot of the bed, shovel grounded. Close, his expression is the same flat steel as his blade. He looks at your throat the way carpenters look at walls: not hunger—assessment. When he speaks, his voice is small enough to belong only to the three of you. “Do you know what you’re giving?” he asks.

You try to say No. What comes out is “Something I can’t carry.”

“Good,” he says, and the word is not kindness. It’s calibration.

Sunoo’s fingers hover at your jaw, turning your face by the gravity of proximity. “Open,” he tells you, and your mouth obeys because your body recognizes a doctor’s tone even when it comes from someone who would rather be a priest. He places a petal on your tongue. It tastes like cold tea and a coin. “Hold,” he says. He waits. When you swallow despite yourself, his smile flares. “You see? The body knows ceremony even when the mind resists.”

He steps behind you. You feel his presence like a heat lamp. Jungwon moves to your side and holds out his hand. On his palm: a knife. Not sharp—its edge has been blunted until it’s a tongue of metal—but its point is honest. He waits until you meet his eyes; only then does he set the flat of the blade against your sternum. The steel is cool. Your skin fists under it.

“This is how we write it,” Sunoo says, and his breath touches the shell of your ear like a whispering moth. “Not deep. Not cruel. Not yet.”

The blade slides up without breaking skin, tracing between ribs, across the slow bell of breath—sternum, clavicle, the notch at your throat. The metal leaves a trail of gooseflesh; your pulse hammers against it like an animal trapped under the lid of a box. Jungwon’s other hand is steady at your shoulder, not pushing, not holding, just there, a second horizon the body can measure itself against.

“Name what cannot follow you,” Sunoo murmurs. It could be a real question. It could be a spell. Your mouth fills with the taste of flower and iron; words gather behind it like flies at meat.

You can’t say the fire; to say it would open something that the soil will keep. You say, “The last night.”

“Again,” Sunoo purrs.

“The last night,” you repeat, and the room tilts like a field under wind.

The congregation—guests in white, staff in linen—sways. Mira has both hands pressed to her lips. Taesun rocks in small, violent arcs. Yejin’s pencil moves; she draws you kneeling, two sets of hands marking you; she smudges the graphite so the air around you looks like breath or smoke.

The blade dips, lifts, comes to rest against your throat’s right side. You feel the exact spot where it would enter if it wanted to. Jungwon’s pulse is visible in his wrist; steady, heavier than yours. He moves the flat in a small crescent along the tendon, and your voice leaves you for a moment—pure reflex. A small, unpretty sound. Sunoo shivers behind you, pleased as if you performed a note he’d been coaching you toward.

“Do you understand the price?” Sunoo asks softly.

“No,” you say honestly.

“Beautiful,” he says, delighted. “No one ever does until after.”

He lifts the petal from your mouth with two fingers and lays it on your tongue again like communion. You hold it. Jungwon takes your left hand. His palm is rough and warm; soil lives in the whorls of his fingerprints. He pricks the pad of your finger with the very tip of the blunted knife, as if he wants to remind the blade of its older religion. A bead of blood swells, bright, neat. He turns your hand and presses that red to the seed-paper waiting in a shallow trench at the bed’s edge. Your blood bleeds into the paper like water into thirst.

“Now,” Sunoo says, voice dropped low enough to live in your bones, “we plant what you are not. So what you are can grow.”

Jungwon folds loam over the paper. The soil is cool even in this hothouse weather. It sucks at your finger when he presses your hand flat to it. Something moves underneath—something too quick for roots. Your stomach rocks. You try to pull back. Jungwon’s hand covers yours, firm as a yoke; Sunoo’s hand wraps your throat—not squeezing, just holding the column steady. You are pinned in two places that translate directly to obedience.

“Breathe,” Sunoo says.

You do. The soil under your hand warms like a mouth.

The congregation murmurs. Not words; the sound bodies make when they agree to a script. Director Seo watches like a reader flipping to the end to be sure it comes out as written. Nurse Min’s face has the set of a woman who’s decided to count a vein until morning.

The thing under the soil stills.

Jungwon lifts your hand and wipes the loam away with his thumb. The smear looks like war paint. Sunoo releases your throat and smooths his palm down the line his fingers left, a correction, an apology, a brand. He bends and whispers against your ear, “You belong to the ground,” and then, after a heartbeat, “and to us while you’re learning.”

His mouth never touches skin. The idea of it does.

The Rite closes with a bell that tastes like copper in your teeth. People file out as if stepping around a sleeping animal. Mira gets to you first, palms hot where she holds your face. “Drink water,” she hisses. “Don’t go to sleep. If you dream the name, it sticks.”

“I didn’t give it,” you say.

She laughs, a small animal sound. “You bled. That’s enough.”

Mr. Ko offers a clean handkerchief without meeting your eyes. Hana watches from a distance like a hawk deciding if a rabbit is worth stooping for when the field is full of easier meat. Taesun beams, mud on his lip, as if he’s just watched a very good wedding.

Yejin presses a drawing into your hand and vanishes. It’s you kneeling, hands marked, a line along your throat that is not a cut but knows where one would go. Over your shoulder, two shadows bend—one a heat-halo, one a blunt storm. Soon, she’s written. Don’t say yes with your mouth.

Night. The mountain holds its breath. The lamps in the greenhouse go black one by one until the glass is only a shape. You sit on your dorm bed and watch your hands not shake. Mira sleeps curled like a comma with her stone under her cheek. The drawing under your pillow warms to your scalp as if it wants to crawl into you.

A knock—not on the door. On the window, one knuckle, once. When you slide the frame, cold air pours in, and you think of Nurse Min’s keep your mouth closed in the greenhouse and keep it shut.

Jungwon stands below, lantern hooded, face lit just enough to make eyes and jaw. He tilts his head—come—and you go because your legs have learned this path. Out the back, down the steps, across the boards to the west path. He waits in the shadow of the shed where spades hang like a rack of tongues.

“Any dizziness? Nausea?” he asks, clinic-plain.

“Just… aware.” The word feels too small for your body’s rattled hum.

He grunts—approval. He reaches for your hand and turns the palm up. The loam under your nails has dried to fine grit. He rubs it away with his thumb, slow, methodical. It’s almost tender until you realize he is checking for changes—for the leaf-vein under your skin brightening, for anything moving that shouldn’t. When his thumb passes over the edge of your pulse, it jumps. He looks up sharply. You look away.

“You shouldn’t stay in the dorm tonight.” Matter-of-fact. “You’ll hear things like your name, and some of them will be for you and some won’t. You’re still soft. Soft things take impressions.”

“Where do I go?”

“My room.” Flat. Then, as if he heard how it sounds: “It’s safer. There are no plants there.”

“Is that true?”

“It’s true enough.” He waits. “Or go to the clinic and sit under Min’s lamp and let her count your breaths until morning.”

“Which would you pick,” you ask, because some part of you refuses to let him stand there and decide your body in his head without you in the room.

He takes too long to answer, then says, “The clinic is gentle.” A beat. “I am not.”

Wind combs the pines; the greenhouse ticks as it cools. Somewhere a raven laughs like a woman who knows your secrets and isn’t impressed.

“Choose,” he says quietly.

Sunoo’s shadow falls across the path before you can. He steps into the lantern’s circle like a storybook: pale wrists, clean hands, a smile that tells you exactly how he will use it. “Ah,” he says, soft delight. “My flower and my hands. I wondered where the night would put you.”

Jungwon does not step back. He also does not step forward. The lantern holds the three of you in a tight Venn where your breaths overlap. Sunoo tips his head, curious. “You can take her,” he says to Jungwon, which is to say I will let you. “But she’ll come back to me tasting like soil and fear, and we’ll start again from below.” He turns to you, voice honeyed and mean. “Or you can come with me and I’ll teach your body what calm feels like so you know when you’ve lost it.”

The polite violence of the options makes your stomach liquefy.

“Stop,” Jungwon says, and the word is a tool, not a plea.

Sunoo laughs softly. “The earth doesn’t stop growing just because you ask it gently.” He reaches, very slowly, and lifts your jaw with two fingers—not touching skin; his hand floats a whisper below it and your head lifts anyway, obedient to suggestion. “Show me your throat,” he says, and your body almost does it because it learned tonight and bodies like to repeat lessons. You hold yourself still out of spite. His smile warms. “Good girl.”

The words hit like a hand under your ribs. Jungwon’s breath changes. It darkens the air.

“Enough,” Jungwon says again, and hooks a finger in the lantern hood. He pulls it open. Light flares, pot-bright, brutal. The three of you blink; the world loses its beautiful edges and shows its seams. “Clinic,” he tells you.

Sunoo’s smile fades pixel by pixel until only his eyes shine. “For now,” he agrees. He steps in closer so there is no air between the three bodies but what breath can claim. He looks at Jungwon and speaks to you. “You’ll end up between us anyway,” he says, the prophecy flat, not cruel. “Why not learn the shape early.”

You should move. You should walk yourself to the nurse and let her count your lungs like prayer beads. Instead you stand very still while two men who have learned your pulse by different languages consider the currency of your fear.

Sunoo lifts his hand and stops a breath from your mouth. You feel the heat of him without the permission of touch. “I won’t kiss you,” he says, velvet and wicked. “Not yet.” He turns his palm and hovers over your throat, reading the rush there like a favorite book. “See what your body does with almost.”

Jungwon moves behind you so quietly the night forgets to mark his steps. He doesn’t touch you. His presence is so large it reads like contact anyway—the shape of him corralling air. You have the dizzy thought that if you leaned back, he would catch you, and if you leaned forward, Sunoo would open like a mouth.

“Breathe,” Sunoo whispers, and it isn’t instruction now; it’s a dare.

You do. The air leans with you. The world tightens to a triangle: lantern glare, the line of a blunted blade tucked into Jungwon’s belt, the faint copper on Sunoo’s knuckle where he touched your lip earlier with the petal.

“I said clinic,” Jungwon repeats, low enough to live at your spine.

“Make her say please,” Sunoo counters, amusement sweet as rot. “Our girl loves a ritual.”

“Don’t—” you start, and then stop, because the word tastes like surrender and you haven’t decided whose hands deserve it.

“Not tonight,” Jungwon says, and you understand: it isn’t mercy. It’s control deferred. He steps to your side, inserts a palm—warm, heavy—at your waist, not pulling, not pushing, just a point you can move along. Sunoo mirrors the motion on your other side without touching, an echo your nerves misread as contact. Together they guide you three steps, five, toward the clinic’s dim window—two gravities that agree for once.

At the threshold, Sunoo bends so close your ear warms. “Sleep,” he murmurs, the same command Jungwon uses like a blessing. “Dream of hands.” He smiles against the air where your skin ends. “Next time I’ll count for you while he holds you still.”

Jungwon’s hand tightens one notch at your waist, a warning, a promise, a brand pressed through clothes. “Next time,” he says, to Sunoo, to you, to the night that will keep at this until you’re rewritten, “I’ll decide who goes first.”

Nurse Min opens the clinic door before anyone knocks, lamp bright behind her like a little square sun. She takes in the triangle of bodies, the glint of the knife, the feral set of Sunoo’s mouth, the obedient steadiness of Jungwon’s hand at your side.

“Inside,” she says, and steps aside.

You pass between them—Sunoo’s almost-touch a heat across your throat; Jungwon’s real touch a line at your hip you could follow with your eyes closed—and cross into the light.

You do not kiss anyone. No one kisses you.

But as the door shuts and the mountain presses its ear to the glass to listen, you know it: your body already understands the shape they promised. It will remember. It will hunger.

And when it happens—when it really happens—it will not be an accident.

________

The clinic smelled of metal and mint. Nurse Min left you in a chair under her lamp until the feverish hum in your body dulled to a bearable pitch. She made you drink water, bitter and green as ditch weed, and held your wrist while your pulse rattled beneath her thumb. When you asked her if you were safe, she only said, “Nothing in a place like this is safe. At best, some things are safer than others.”

By the time she dismissed you, the compound had already gone to sleep. Mira was curled on her side in the dorm, bracelets stilled. You should have slept too. Instead you lay awake, tasting the memory of a petal pressed against your tongue, feeling the phantom weight of Jungwon’s hand steady at your waist, the ghost of Sunoo’s fingers just shy of your throat.

Your body remembered. It remembered too well.

When you finally slipped into the corridor, your bare feet soundless on the boards, it wasn’t to find air. It was because something in you had already decided that the ache would not stop on its own.

The greenhouse loomed against the night, ribs of iron and glass sweating mist. The lock had never been for people who wanted to stay out. You pushed the door and it sighed open, warm air rushing at you like a mouth.

He was waiting. Of course he was.

Sunoo leaned against a bench, sleeves rolled, pale wrists glowing under the lamps. His expression was the same one he’d worn when he laid the petal on your tongue earlier—delighted, expectant, like he had always known your body would come back to him.

“You breathe too loud when you lie down,” he murmured. “I could hear you from the other side of the hall.”

You should have left. You stepped closer instead.

Sunoo reached for you without touching, fingers tracing the air beside your cheek. That almost-contact burned hotter than heat itself. Your breath caught, and his smile sharpened. “See? Your body tells the truth. It remembers me already.”

His hand hovered down, stopping at the hollow of your throat. “Here,” he whispered. “Where the pulse lives.” He bent, mouth a whisper away from your skin, never quite sealing it. Your nerves screamed as if he’d kissed you. “You want me to touch you. That’s why you came.”

Your denial scraped your teeth but never left your tongue.

“Good girl,” he said, pleased at your silence. He turned you, pressing between your shoulder blades until your knees bent and you landed on the warm boards of the floor. “Stay open. Stay soft.”

His hands came at last—sliding along your thighs, parting them without rush, without doubt. He dragged his thumb along the cotton of your thin shorts, pressing until the damp there gave you away. “Blooming,” he said reverently, as if the word itself could coax you wider.

You gasped when he pressed harder, the friction maddening. He laughed low in his throat, pleased. “You’ve been waiting since the Rite, haven’t you? You swallowed the petal and your body begged for more.”

He tugged fabric aside with clinical precision, exposing you to the humid air. His fingers slicked easily through the wetness already gathered, and he made a sound of satisfaction that went straight to your gut. “So ready,” he crooned. “So obedient.”

Two fingers circled, teased, pressed—but never where you needed. He watched your hips shift, your breath stutter. “Say please,” he murmured.

“I—”

“Shh.” His free hand covered your mouth lightly, thumb grazing your lower lip. “Not with words. With your body.”

Your thighs trembled. You pushed into his hand, desperate. His smile widened. “There it is. Begging without speech.”

He slipped two fingers inside, slow, deliberate. Your back arched, a strangled sound caught behind his palm. He curled them just right, hitting the place that made you shiver, made your eyes roll back. “Yes,” he whispered against your ear. “That’s it. That’s how you bloom.”

His palm pressed harder over your mouth as your moans broke free. His rhythm quickened, fingers thrusting, scissoring, spreading you open as if he meant to plant something inside. Every push forced slick sounds into the greenhouse air. He bent low, lips brushing your temple, murmuring praises between each thrust: “Perfect. My good flower. Opening just for me. No one else will see you like this.”

Your orgasm came sudden, brutal—your whole body snapping tight around his hand, shuddering against him. He kept moving, dragging it out until you were gasping into his palm, thighs twitching.

When at last he withdrew, his fingers glistened. He lifted them to your lips, smearing wetness across them before pushing between. “Taste yourself,” he ordered softly. “Know what you are to me.”

Shame and hunger tangled in your chest. You sucked his fingers clean, and his eyes darkened, mouth parting as if he might finally kiss you. He didn’t. He pulled back just enough to leave you desperate, to make absence itself a cruelty.

“Blooming,” he whispered again, satisfied. “And tomorrow, you’ll be ready for the soil.”

The greenhouse door creaked. You jerked, Sunoo still crouched over you, his slick fingers withdrawing with deliberate slowness.

Jungwon stood in the doorway, lantern spilling gold over his dirt-streaked arms. His jaw tightened as his eyes tracked the wet shine on your lips, the way your legs trembled, the smug curve of Sunoo’s smile.

For a long, brutal moment, no one spoke. Then Jungwon stepped forward, shovel still in one hand, and his voice came out rough, dangerous.

“She’s mine next.”

The lamps hummed. The soil smelled of iron. Your heart beat against your throat like a trapped bird as the two men stared across you, and you realized the next time you were touched, it would be by both.

And you would not escape it.

______

The night you tried to run, the mountain gave you away.

The boards beneath your feet creaked, wet leaves clung to your calves, and the fog was a hand on your throat. You ran anyway. Past the dorms, past the glasshouse ribs glowing faintly from their lamps, down the west path where the ravens laughed like women who knew your secrets.

You thought the dark would cover you.

But the dark belonged to him.

A hand caught your wrist so hard you nearly went down. The lantern flared, and Jungwon’s face came out of the mist—eyes black, jaw locked, the muscle jumping with rage he didn’t bother to soften. He dragged you against him, chest heaving like you’d run into a wall that had learned how to breathe.

“Running,” he said, voice low and sharp as a spade. “After I told you not to.”

“I—”

“Quiet.” His grip on your wrist tightened until your bones ached. “Do you know what he did to you in there? Do you know what you smell like? Soil and him.” His other hand closed hard around your chin, forcing you to meet his eyes. His breath came hot, furious. “I told you not to let him touch you.”

Your protest was thin. “I didn’t—”

“You did.” He shoved you back against the rough bark of a pine. The trunk dug into your spine; his body crowded yours, heat and dirt and something mean. “You opened your mouth. You let him put his fingers in you.” His hand slid down your throat, pressing just enough to make your pulse throb under his palm. “Do you think that makes you his?”

“No—”

“No,” he repeated, mocking and brutal, pressing harder until your words broke into breath. His eyes raked you up and down like he was reading your body for lies. “You’re mine. If you’re soil, then I’m the one who plants.”

The knife appeared from his belt—not sharp, its edge long since blunted, but the point still honest. He held it flat against your belly, dragging it up under your shirt until the cold metal kissed the underside of your breast. You shivered, body jerking against the bark. His mouth twisted, equal parts fury and hunger.

“Scared?” he murmured. “Good. Fear makes roots dig deeper.”

He hooked the blade under the band of your shorts, pulling until the fabric stretched and then snapped. His hand shoved inside without pause, fingers rough, pushing into you like he meant to stake a claim. You gasped, the sound choking against the hand still at your throat.

“Wet,” he said, voice a growl, face close enough you could feel every word on your skin. “You’re soaked for me already. Even after him. Especially after him.” His fingers thrust harder, curling, relentless, forcing your body to answer him. “Say it. Say whose you are.”

You shook your head, too proud, too broken to give it.

His mouth curved cruel. “Then I’ll fuck it into you.”

He yanked your shorts down to your thighs, lifted you bodily against the tree, and shoved his hips between your legs. You clawed at his shoulders, half to push, half to hold on, but he pinned you easy, the knife’s flat pressed to your throat now like a brand. His cock pressed hot and thick against your entrance, grinding through the slick he’d found there, rubbing until you whined.

“You hear that?” he hissed, rolling his hips, dragging the head over your folds until obscene wet sounds filled the air. “Your body begging me in front of the whole fucking mountain.” He pushed in one brutal stroke, burying himself deep, forcing a cry from your throat. His teeth bared at the sound, savage triumph. “That’s it. Open up. Take me.”

He fucked you hard against the tree, every thrust jarring bark into your spine, every shove brutal and unrelenting. The knife never left your throat—flat, cold, reminding you what he could do if he wanted. His free hand gripped your hip so hard you knew you’d bruise, dragging you down onto him, using your body like it was already his.

“Mine,” he snarled against your ear, hips slamming. “Not his. Not anyone’s. Mine to fuck. Mine to plant. Mine to keep.” His pace grew rougher, desperate, jealousy bleeding into possession. “You’ll carry me. You’ll take my seed. You’ll remember whose cock fucked you open like this.”

Your moans tore free, high and broken, every thrust forcing them out. He laughed, breathless, mean. “Good little soil. Look at you—taking it. Clenching so tight you’ll never forget.”

When you came, it was with your whole body jerking, nails raking his back, his name spilling without permission. He fucked you through it, ruthless, using your climax to milk himself. With a final, brutal thrust, he came inside you, grinding deep, growling your name like a curse and a prayer.

He stayed pressed to you, chest heaving, the knife slipping down to rest against your collarbone. He didn’t soften. He didn’t let go. His mouth found your jaw, biting hard enough to leave a mark.

When he finally pulled out, slick running down your thighs, he yanked your shorts back up roughly, like covering you was a punishment. He grabbed your wrist again, dragging you toward the compound.

“You’re not sleeping in the dorms,” he said, voice iron. “You’re mine now. My room. My bed. No one else touches you.”

The lantern swung, throwing gold across the path. His grip never loosened. You stumbled after him, body raw, used, filled, the echo of his thrusts still beating through you.

And you knew he wasn’t bluffing.

______

Jungwon’s grip on your wrist was iron, dragging you through the silent hallways until the greenhouse lamps and dorm windows disappeared. His door slammed behind you, the bolt driven home with the finality of a lock on a coffin. His room was small, spare, stripped bare of comfort—just a bed, a chair, his tools. No flowers, no soil. Only him.

He shoved you onto the mattress like you weighed nothing. Your body jolted, still slick, still aching from what he’d already done. He stood over you, chest rising and falling hard, sweat at his temples, jaw clenched like a vice.

“You don’t go back to them,” he growled. “Not Mira, not Seo, and never him.” His eyes burned. “You’re mine.”

Your breath hitched; the word stuck in your throat.

A voice cut through the dark. “You’re wrong.”

The lantern on the desk flared, spilling its glow across pale wrists, white robes loosened at the chest, a mouth curved in that familiar, cruel delight. Sunoo. Already inside. Already waiting.

Jungwon stiffened, shoulders tensing like a predator finding another in his territory. “Get out.”

Sunoo ignored him. He stepped closer, his smile syrup-sweet but eyes sharp. “She doesn’t belong to you alone. Look at her.” His gaze slid over you where you trembled on the bed, your thighs pressed together, your lips parted from shallow breaths. “She’s terrified. She’s confused. She needs gentleness.” His tone softened, dripping like honey. “And you can’t give her that.”

“Gentle doesn’t keep her alive,” Jungwon snapped, stepping between you and him, shovel-callused fists at his sides. “Gentle lets her rot.”

“Alive?” Sunoo laughed, low and dangerous. “She’s not alive. She’s blooming. That’s what I make her.”

“Blooming,” Jungwon spat, “is just another word for open. And I’m the one inside her.”

The words made your stomach twist; heat and fear tangled until you couldn’t tell the difference. You tried to speak—stop, please stop—but your throat locked.

Sunoo’s gaze darted back to you, softening. He crouched, ignoring the way Jungwon loomed above him. His hand hovered just shy of your ankle, not touching—never touching—but the heat of him crawled up your skin. “Petal,” he whispered, “don’t be afraid. I’ll take care of you. I’ll show you how it feels to be cherished.” His lips parted, almost grazing your skin as he breathed you in. “Let me taste you.”

Jungwon’s growl shook the air. He seized your arm, yanking you back against his chest, his hand spread possessive across your stomach. His cock, still half-hard, pressed against your spine. “She’s mine. Mine to fuck. Mine to plant. Mine to keep.”

Your body shuddered. Fear, yes—but deeper, darker: want, shame, hunger you couldn’t smother.

Sunoo’s smile only widened. “Then let’s see who she opens for first.” He slid closer, slipping between your knees before Jungwon could stop him. His breath fanned over your thighs, hot and wet, and you gasped when he finally touched you—soft, reverent, his hands parting you like something fragile.

The contrast made you dizzy. Jungwon’s grip bruised; Sunoo’s mouth pressed feather-light kisses along the inside of your thigh, slow, teasing, as if every touch was worship. “Sweet,” he murmured, nose brushing close to the heat of you. “So sweet. I’ll make her sing.”

“Don’t you dare—” Jungwon started, but your body betrayed you, hips twitching toward Sunoo’s mouth, a whimper breaking past your lips.

That sound changed everything.

Jungwon froze, then snarled, shoving you down into the mattress, caging you with his body. One hand pinned your wrists above your head; the other tore your shirt open down the middle, fabric splitting under his strength. His mouth crashed to your throat, biting, marking, sucking bruises into your skin with furious precision.

Sunoo groaned at the sight, as if Jungwon’s violence only made you more beautiful. He leaned in, finally sealing his lips over your cunt, sucking hard, tongue lapping deep through your folds. The wet sounds filled the room, obscene, echoing against the bare walls.

You cried out, the noise muffled against Jungwon’s hand when he clapped it over your mouth. “Quiet,” he hissed, teeth at your jaw. “Don’t give him the satisfaction of hearing how much you love it.”

But Sunoo knew anyway. He moaned against you, tongue flicking your clit, fingers sliding inside with practiced ease, curling just right. He fed off every twitch, every muffled scream, every desperate roll of your hips. “See?” he said between licks, voice thick with arousal. “She opens for me. She’s blooming already.”

Jungwon pressed harder, grinding his cock against your hip through his pants, furious at your body’s betrayal, at the way your thighs trembled around Sunoo’s head. “She’s dripping because I fucked her raw,” he snarled. “All you’re doing is licking up what I left in her.”

The words made your body jerk, shame and desire hitting like lightning.

Sunoo pulled back just enough to look up at you, his mouth shining with your wetness, his eyes dark and soft. “You taste like need,” he whispered. He dragged his tongue slowly over your clit, savoring the way you cried out under Jungwon’s palm. “And you’ll remember I was the first one who made you come with his mouth.”

“Shut up,” Jungwon snapped. But his own hips rolled against you, his cock throbbing, desperate. His jealousy only sharpened his need.

You couldn’t fight it. You came hard, body arching, Sunoo’s mouth sucking your clit, Jungwon’s hand holding you down, his teeth biting at your throat. Your orgasm tore through you like the roots of something invasive, clawing deep, unstoppable.

They didn’t stop.

Sunoo licked you clean, gentle as a lover, humming like he was savoring wine. Jungwon bit harder, grinded rougher, his hand forcing your wrists deeper into the mattress. Both of them on you—one soft, one brutal—until you didn’t know whose name to scream.

And you understood, with raw clarity, that they weren’t fighting for you.

They were fighting through you.

When the shudders finally broke, you collapsed back, gasping, throat raw. Jungwon leaned down, lips brushing your ear, his voice a growl. “This is just the beginning. Next time I’m inside you while he’s in your mouth. We’ll see who you really belong to.”

Sunoo laughed softly, licking his lips clean of you. “She’ll belong to both.”

And for the first time, you realized he was right.

_____

Your body was still shaking when Jungwon yanked you upright, dragging you into his lap as if the bed belonged only to him. His thighs were iron beneath you, his chest hard against your spine. One arm locked around your waist, the other snared your throat, thick fingers spreading wide until his grip owned the column of your neck. He forced your head back, baring your mouth to him.

“You’ll taste me now,” he snarled, lips crashing into yours.

The kiss was brutal—teeth knocking, spit spilling. He shoved his tongue deep, choking you with it, swallowing every noise you tried to make. His palm pressed tighter at your throat until your pulse roared in your ears, until breath itself became something you had to beg him for. Drool slicked your chin, his tongue forcing yours down, his grip refusing to let you turn away. It was less a kiss than a violent claiming, his mouth fucking yours the way his cock had already fucked your body raw.

You gasped when he pulled back just enough to let air in, a string of spit hanging obscenely between your mouths. He licked it off your bottom lip, then spat into your mouth deliberately, cruelly, watching you swallow because you had no choice.

“Open,” he growled, forcing your jaw wider with his hand at your throat. “Good. That’s mine too. Every sound. Every swallow.”

Your vision blurred; your thighs squeezed together involuntarily. Terror and heat tangled until you couldn’t breathe for either.

And then Sunoo was there.

He crouched in front of you, hands sliding up your knees to part them wider, his smile infuriatingly calm even in violence. “My turn.”

“No,” Jungwon bit out, but Sunoo was already moving. He grabbed your chin, fingers digging in hard enough to bruise, and wrenched your head away from Jungwon’s mouth. Your neck snapped to the side, and before you could gasp, Sunoo’s lips were on yours.

It wasn’t tender. It was vicious. He sucked your bottom lip until it split, teeth biting down until pain shot bright, then licked the blood from your mouth as if it belonged to him. His tongue drove past your teeth, tasting everything Jungwon had left there, devouring it with obscene relish.

You moaned helplessly, the sound muffled between them.

Jungwon’s grip on your throat tightened, forcing your head back further, rage pouring off him like heat. “She’s mine.”

Sunoo broke the kiss just long enough to sneer against your wet mouth. “Then why is she kissing me back?” He pressed his tongue to yours again, slow and filthy, sucking until spit ran down your chin. Then he pulled back, wiped it with his thumb, and shoved the slick digit back between your lips. “Lick it clean. That’s mine now.”

Your mouth obeyed before your brain caught up.

Jungwon’s chest vibrated with a growl. He bent and bit your jaw, then your throat, leaving purple marks against Sunoo’s fingerprints. His hand clamped your neck harder, forcing you to gasp around Sunoo’s thumb.

“She’s choking on me,” Jungwon snarled. “Not you.”

Sunoo laughed low, mean. He leaned closer, his forehead pressing to yours, his other hand grabbing Jungwon’s wrist on your throat, not to stop it, but to squeeze it tighter. “Then let’s choke her together.”

The pressure doubled. Your eyes watered, spit pooling at the corner of your mouth, drooling down your chin as both of them held you, forced you open, forced you to take them. One mouth kissed you, sucked you, spat into you; the other bit, bruised, pressed your throat until stars danced.

You weren’t kissing anymore. You were being consumed.

And God help you—your body wanted more.

_______

They had you caged between them—Jungwon at your back, Sunoo at your front—two sets of hands closing every door your body might have tried to escape through.

Your pulse beat frantically against Jungwon’s palm at your throat. Sunoo’s fingers dug into your chin, keeping your face tipped up so you couldn’t hide. Their mouths had already ruined you, spit running down your jaw, bruises blooming on your throat and collarbone like dark flowers. Your chest rose too fast, every breath their permission, every sound something they stole from you.

“You see?” Sunoo whispered, voice as sweet as it was cruel. “She’s ready. She’s shaking for us.” His hand slid down, brushing your stomach, spreading lower. “The soil is wet.”

“She’s wet because I fucked her open,” Jungwon snapped against your ear, his breath harsh. “She’s mine to fill.” He ground his cock against your ass through his pants, thick and hard, a promise of what was coming. His teeth found your neck again, biting until your body arched despite yourself.

The two of them moved you as if you were theirs to arrange. Your thighs were forced wide over Sunoo’s lap, your back crushed to Jungwon’s chest. Rough hands tugged your ruined shorts away; cool air hit the slick heat between your legs. Sunoo hummed like a priest receiving an offering.

“Let me taste again.” He didn’t wait for permission. His mouth descended, sucking your clit into his mouth, tongue lapping at you until your eyes rolled back. His hands locked on your thighs, holding you open for him, his moans vibrating into your cunt.

Jungwon shoved your wrists down into the mattress, his cock rutting against you through fabric, his fury pressed into every grind. “Listen to her,” he growled. “Dripping for us. Begging without words.” He yanked his pants open, the blunt head of his cock dragging along your ass, smearing precum. “She’s going to take both. Right now.”

You sobbed, terror and need colliding until you couldn’t tell them apart. “I can’t—”

“You can,” Sunoo cut in smoothly, lifting his head, chin wet with your slick. He stroked your trembling thighs with a mockery of gentleness. “Your body’s already opening. We’ll guide you.” His eyes glimmered, half-devotion, half-madness. “You’ll bloom for us together.”

Jungwon spat into his palm, gripped his cock, and shoved it between your cheeks, rubbing the head against your tight hole until you whined. “Scared?” he hissed, his hand tightening at your throat. “Good. Fear makes you clench tighter.”

Sunoo’s fingers slid inside your cunt again, curling, coaxing, slicking you up for him. He looked up at you, his smile soft even as he stretched you ruthlessly. “Breathe, petal. I’ll be inside you soon. You’ll be so full you won’t remember how to be empty.”

When Sunoo lined himself up, pressing the head of his cock against your soaked entrance, Jungwon shoved his tip harder at your ass, both of them pushing at once. Your cry ripped the air as your body was forced to split, one cock stretching your cunt, the other pressing past the tight ring of muscle until you thought you’d break.

“Fuck,” Jungwon groaned, voice raw. “So tight. Gripping me like a fist.”

“She’s perfect,” Sunoo sighed, already sinking deeper, your walls convulsing around him. “Taking both of us. Our flower.”

It was too much. The stretch burned, overwhelming, obscene. You clawed at the sheets, eyes rolling back as both of them bottomed out, your body trembling violently with the force of being split in two. They didn’t give you time. Jungwon’s hips snapped forward first, brutal, pounding into your ass with the fury of jealousy. Sunoo met him stroke for stroke, slower, deeper, angling until every thrust speared your cunt exactly where it made you scream.

Pinned, stuffed, broken open—you were nothing but their vessel.

“Say it,” Jungwon snarled, hand squeezing your throat until your vision blurred. “Say you’re mine.”

“She’s ours,” Sunoo countered, kissing you, sucking the spit from your mouth, swallowing your gasps. “Tell us, petal. Tell us who you bloom for.”

Your answer was a sob, a whimper, a strangled cry as their cocks moved inside you, filling every inch, grinding against each other through the thin wall of your body until the sensation drove you half-mad.

“Fuck, I can feel him through you,” Jungwon groaned, rutting harder, holding you down as if you might try to run again. “But you’re squeezing me tighter. That’s how I know you’re mine.”

Sunoo’s tongue licked the tears from your cheeks. “She’s crying for me. Look at her. Look how she wants to be saved even while we ruin her.”

Your body convulsed around them, slick gushing down your thighs, every nerve alight. The pain blurred into pleasure until you were begging without words, your nails tearing the sheets, your cries spilling into their mouths as they fought to own your climax.

When you came, it was devastating—your cunt and ass clenching around them both, milking them, dragging them deeper. Jungwon groaned, teeth sinking into your shoulder as he spilled inside you, hot and overwhelming. Sunoo followed seconds later, filling your cunt until you were overflowing, cum dripping down your thighs, both of them holding you so tightly you couldn’t breathe.

They didn’t pull out. They stayed locked inside, cocks twitching, their breaths harsh against your skin.

Jungwon’s hand squeezed your throat one last time, forcing your eyes to his. “Say it,” he demanded, voice hoarse. “Say you’re planted in me.”

Sunoo kissed your cheek, softer but no less cruel. “Say you’ll bloom for us both.”

And you, too full to think, too wrecked to fight, whispered the only truth left in you:

“I can’t belong to just one.”

They smiled—different smiles, but the same hunger.

And you knew you’d never escape again.

_______

woah this was so diffecult to write SO IM SORRY IF IT ISNT THE BEST

THANK YOU FOR READING!!

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[lollovern]

- The Garden Left to Rot -

enhypen masterlist

wattpad

inspired by this post

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groundskeeper!yang jungwon x guest!femreader x cult counselor!kim sunoo | obsessive romance | cult horror | forced devotion | ritualistic sex | jealousy and rivalry | fucked-up love triangle | knife kink | corrupted comfort | you will belong to someone eventually | DARK CONTENT AHEAD!!

wc: 14k

summary: You’re sent to a grief recovery retreat hidden in the mountains. But this isn’t therapy — it’s a cult blooming in blood and rot. Jungwon wants to bury you where no one else can touch you. Sunoo wants to crack you open until you bloom for him. Both say it’s healing. But it’s obsession.

warnings: extreme gore, threesome, cult rituals, body horror (flowers under skin, insect scenes), blood play, forced confinement, psychological manipulation, emotional degradation, knife play, religious delusion, obsessive behavior, toxic romance, dubcon themes, ritualistic sex, hallucinations, violence

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The van climbs until the road forgets how to be a road. Pines crowd close; fog slicks the windshield like breath on glass. By the time the driver kills the engine, your phone has been surrendered, the waiver signed, and your name—your real one—folded into a sealed envelope with your belongings.

A hand-painted sign leans crooked against a stone pillar: THE GARDEN.

Beneath it, smaller script: Let go. Become.

Everyone here is an adult—paperwork made that clear. Still, the cluster of arrivals huddle like freshmen. A woman in a bone-white coat stands at the gate, serene as a photograph. “Welcome,” she says. “I’m Director Seo. You won’t need last names here. You won’t need yesterday.” Her smile doesn’t reach her eyes. “We begin with stillness.”

Stillness smells like damp soil and rosemary. The compound spreads in tiers: a glasshouse ribbed with iron; dormitories with shuttered windows; a refectory where steam fogs the panes; a low clinic painted the color of milk. The greenhouse breathes—a pulse of heavy, sweet air each time the door opens. Inside, rows of lilies lean toward heat lamps; vines net the rafters; something rustles in the loam.

“Orientation,” says the boy who appears at Director Seo’s shoulder. He’s young—early twenties—with paper-clean features and the kind of smile people don’t realize is a blade until it’s already inside them. Kim Sunoo. His name tag says Counselor; the ribbon beneath it says Ritual Lead. “Shoes off in the greenhouse,” he adds lightly. “We keep the floors soft.”

Your shoes leave the ground. Cool boards. Warm mist. A bell rings once. The arrivals form a circle on woven mats; a dozen white-robed staff ghost the edges. A few guests have the shaved look of hospital discharge; others wear expensive emptiness like cologne.

“Here,” Sunoo says gently, “we do not share pasts. Only needs.” His gaze slips over faces and lands on you. Not a leer. A selection. “You may speak or sit in silence. Both are honest.”

“I need to sleep,” says a woman with chewed nails. “Like, three days.”

“I need to stop remembering,” a man answers, voice flat.

The girl beside you—twenty-two, maybe—says nothing. Yejin is stitched on her wristband. Her hands are ink-stained. She draws while people talk: a quick, vicious graphite—faces with petal-mouths; ribs like trellises. When you shift, she tilts her sketchbook so you can see the newest figure: a person kneeling in dirt, throat blooming with something that isn’t a flower.

“Beautiful,” Sunoo murmurs, as if he’s praising a child’s first recital. “You have a keen eye for transformation, Yejin.”

From across the greenhouse, someone drags burlap sacks along iron grates. Soil dark as coffee spills from a split seam and oozes across the floor. The man hauling the bags moves like he’s apologized to gravity and refuses to do it again. Yang Jungwon. Groundskeeper on his tag. Grey work shirt. Forearms nicked white with old cuts. He doesn’t look at the circle—doesn’t look at you—until he does, and then he doesn’t stop. Not curiosity. Assessment, like weighing a seed between finger and thumb and deciding if it will live in his earth.

Director Seo outlines rules in the smooth tone of a stewardess reciting crash procedures:

No personal histories in group.

No contact with family for the first fourteen days.

No unsupervised access to the greenhouse after dusk.

Do not remove plant material from designated zones.

What is given to the soil remains in the soil.

“That includes grief,” Sunoo says, almost playful. “Especially grief.”

Your dorm is clean in the way of hospital corridors and mortuaries. Two metal beds. Two lockers. A copy of a softbound booklet on each pillow: STILLNESS GUIDE. Your roommate arrives with a jangle of bracelets and the brittle cheer of someone who learned to smile as self-defense. Mira, 26, volunteer-turned-resident-mentor.

“Welcome-welcome,” she chirps, then lowers her voice. “Pro tip: keep your head down the first three days. They watch how you watch.”

“Who?”

“Everyone.” She flicks her gaze toward the window, where the greenhouse skeletons against dusk. “Especially him.” She means Sunoo—you can hear it in the soft, reverent way. “And the groundskeeper when it’s dark.” That last part is almost a warning.

The bell rings again. Dinner is broth that tastes like the inside of a leaf and bread dense with seeds. You eat at long tables while staff move among you like shepherds. Across from you, a jittery young man, Taesun—24, scars like cat-scratches up his wrists—piles his crusts and crumbles them methodically. He pockets a handful when he thinks no one sees.

“For the worms,” he whispers to the crumbs. “They get hungry at night.”

Mira nudges your knee under the table. “He feeds them behind the east wall,” she murmurs. “Says they keep the nightmares down if they’re busy.”

In the clinic after dinner, a nurse swabs your fingers where the paper edges of the waiver bit skin. Nurse Min is beautiful in the harsh way of women who have decided their faces are weapons. When she says “this will sting,” the consonants soften strangely; a long surgical scar splits the underside of her tongue. She catches you looking and lifts a brow that says yes, I am aware of my mouth. Then—almost tender—she tapes your knuckle with gauze printed with tiny flowers.

Back in the greenhouse, the first night session is called Surrender. The lamps buzz. Mist beads your eyelashes. Sunoo stands barefoot on the damp boards, sleeves rolled, voice a low waterfall.

“Close your eyes,” he says. “Name the weight you want the earth to hold for you. Don’t say it out loud. Let your body say it.”

Around you, bodies sway. Some cry. Some freeze. When you keep your eyes open, Sunoo notices. Of course he does.

“New sprout,” he says softly, close to your ear, and the nickname feels chosen, not random. “You don’t have to force stillness. It happens when the soil recognizes you.”

“Does it?” Your voice is hoarse from disuse and altitude.

“Always.” He smiles. Not kind. Not unkind. Satisfied. “The Garden knows its own.”

Across the rows, Jungwon kneels in the dirt, wrist-deep in loam, planting something without a label. He doesn’t follow Sunoo’s cadence; he follows his own. When one lamp flickers, he rises and fixes it with the swift, competent movements of someone who builds instead of asks. When he sits back, the soil clings to his fingers like shadow.

You should sleep. Instead you help Mira remake your beds with the stiff white sheets that smell faintly of bleach and rosemary. She keeps talking, because silence makes her hands shake.

“I came as a volunteer,” she says, tucking corners square. “Stayed as a patient. It’s easier when they tell you what to be.”

“What do they tell you?”

She smiles without humor. “A flower.” Her eyes slide to your bandaged hand. “Try not to bleed in the greenhouse. They don’t like that.”

“Why?”

“Because the soil remembers.”

At night the compound changes. Lights dim. The wind strips the pines and combs the glass with needles. You lie awake and count breaths—yours, Mira’s, the building’s—until you can’t bear numbers anymore.

You go out.

The air is colder than the dorm suggests. The greenhouse glows from within, a pulse behind fogged panes. Beyond the east wall, something moves with slow persistence. You follow the ripple of disturbed leaves to a break in the hedgerow and find Taesun kneeling with his pockets turned inside out, sowing crumbs into the leaf litter like a penitent farmer.

“The worms,” he says. “They hate hunger.”

“And if they’re hungry?”

“They crawl into you,” he says simply, and his eyes are not crazy; they’re convinced. “They’re looking for warmth.”

A lantern kindles behind you. “Curfew,” a voice says.

You turn. Jungwon holds the light up so it paints his face in bones and gold. Up close, his features soften—stillness without Sunoo’s practiced grace; a patient animal’s attention. The lantern makes a thicket of his lashes. He looks from you to Taesun to your bare feet on the cold boards.

“You’ll catch a chill,” he says to you, like it’s a personal offense. “Shoes. Now.”

You should resent the command. Instead, you feel the unreasonable urge to obey. You start toward the dorms.

“Not that way,” he says. “West path. Easier. Less slope.” He tips the lantern so the light doesn’t blind you while you pass. It’s a small courtesy. It also marks you—every guard on the walkway can see who broke curfew and who brought them back.

“Do you plant at night?” you ask, because silence around him feels like standing at a cliff’s edge and leaning a little too far.

“Always,” he says. He doesn’t volunteer more. His eyes drag briefly to your bandaged hand. “You left blood in the greenhouse.”

“I didn’t—”

He lifts two fingers, the gesture efficient and final. “The soil remembers.” His mouth twitches—not a smile, exactly; the ghost of one. “Mira talks too much.”

“Is that against the rules?”

“It’s against survival.”

He walks you to the dorm porch and stops at the bottom step like there’s an invisible line he won’t cross. The night carries pine resin and wet metal. You want to ask him what he plants without labels, what grows under lamps that mimic suns, why the staff wear rosaries made of seeds.

He says, low, “Don’t follow sounds you don’t understand.”

“Why?”

“Because some things here answer to being watched.” He tilts the lantern, and for a heartbeat you see something like a tenderness he hides even from himself. “Sleep.”

You try. You fail. When you finally slide under, it’s the shallow kind of rest that hears every hinge complain.

Morning stains the glasshouse pale gold. Breakfast is porridge and a shot glass of bitter green. “Chlorophyll,” Mira grimaces. “For purity. Or the aesthetic.” She scans the refectory like she’s counting exits. “There’ll be a Placement Walk after breakfast. Don’t volunteer. They love volunteers.”

“What is it?”

She cuts her eyes toward the greenhouse. “They take someone to the grove and ‘help them choose a garden name.’ Sometimes they come back with a wreath. Sometimes without their voice for a while.”

Director Seo taps her cup. “Today’s Placement Walk is for… Yejin.”

The graphite girl looks up, startled as a deer. Her pencil stills. Sunoo’s smile brightens by half a watt. “I’ll take her,” he offers, hand already extended. “I’ve seen her drawings. She understands transformation.”

If you didn’t sleep, you are alert now. Jungwon appears in the doorway like the building made him. His gaze flicks over the room, and when it lands on Yejin’s shaking knuckles, something barely visible tightens in his jaw.

“I’ll go with you,” he says to Sunoo without looking away from the girl.

“Of course,” Sunoo replies. Silk over steel. “Two witnesses. Very proper.”

They lead her out between them: the counselor with a palm light on her shoulder; the groundskeeper holding the door open so it doesn’t bite her. The room exhales when the door closes. Mira’s bracelets clink as her hands start to shake again.

“They’ll bring her back,” you say, because logic is a habit.

“Usually,” Mira says.

Taesun folds bread crumbs into his napkin with ritual care. “If the worms are fed.”

“Stop with the worms—”

He looks up, suddenly fiercer than his tremor allows. “This place eats. I just like to decide what it eats.”

You leave your spoon in your bowl. The porridge lurches in your gut like a tide. Through the greenhouse glass, you can’t see the grove, only the suggestion of trunks and a slit of path. Time grows teeth.

When they return, Yejin walks in her body like someone has moved the furniture. A crown of woven reeds presses her hair flat. There’s a smear of green at the corner of her mouth, like she’s chewed a leaf until it bled. She carries her sketchbook close to her chest as if it’s the last piece of herself no one has touched.

“What did you choose?” Director Seo asks.

Yejin’s voice is soft but intact. “Night-blooming cereus.”

“A flower that opens in darkness,” Sunoo says, pleased. “Perfect.”

Jungwon stands behind them, sleeves rolled to the elbow, forearms dirt-streaked. A single thorn scratches the back of his hand, a bright new welt. You don’t know why your chest warms at the proof that something here can still hurt them too.

As the room settles, Nurse Min touches your shoulder. “Consult,” she says, consonants rounded. In the clinic, she peels your bandage, checks the small cut, nods. “Fine.”

“Was the walk… normal?” you ask, too casual. “For Yejin.”

Nurse Min dabs salve with a gentleness that doesn’t fit her knife-edged face. “Normal is a shape you learn,” she says. “Here, it is round.” She taps your knuckle. “Don’t open yourself on purpose. Things may grow inside.”

“Like what?”

Her eyes flick briefly toward the greenhouse. “Names.”

By afternoon the schedule has you shoveling, watering, scrubbing, writing lines. I am ready to be less. You write it a hundred times until the words separate from meaning and become a pattern of stems and loops. Outside, Jungwon clears a new bed along the south wall. His shovel bites; his shoulders move with the reliable rhythm of practiced labor. A boy twice your size steps into his path and mutters something you can’t hear. Jungwon doesn’t raise his voice. He simply looks at the boy until the boy forgets how to stand where he’s standing and moves.

“Don’t stare,” Mira warns from beside you, but she’s staring too. “He notices.”

“He noticed last night,” you say.

Mira goes still. “You went out?”

“For air.”

“Air is how they catch you,” she whispers, and for the first time her cheer fails. “Promise me you won’t go alone again.”

You don’t promise. You also don’t say I don’t know who I am without alone.

At dusk, group again. Sunoo has you sit closer to him than yesterday. When you resist, he laughs softly, as if you’re charming rather than disobedient. “We sit where the light needs us,” he says. You wonder if that’s a rule or a line he likes. While others speak, he doesn’t look at them; he watches their hands, their throats, the wet edge of eyes. When your breath hitches at someone’s story, he turns his head sharply like a wolf hearing snow crack.

“What would you let go of?” he asks you, voice pitched so the rest of the circle hears only the question, not the ownership threaded through it.

You could say: the fire, the last call you ignored, the smell of burning hair. Instead, you say nothing. He accepts your silence as if it were obedience he taught you.

Outside the glass, Jungwon is a darker shape among dark shapes, moving a hose along the rows. When his head turns toward the circle, it isn’t to the whole; it is to you. He holds you there for a breath you feel in your wrists. Then he tips the hose, and water falls like rain on metal bones.

You sleep after midnight because your body ambushes you. You wake to weight. Not on you; in the air, a heaviness like weather. The greenhouse lights are out. The compound holds its breath.

Something is under your pillow.

You slide your hand beneath it and touch paper—the rough tooth of a sketchbook page. You draw it out under the dim nightlight and see yourself. Not flattering. Not cruel. Exact. You kneel on dark soil, mouth open, and something vines out—delicate stems laced with thorns. Hands—two sets—hold your shoulders lightly, possessively: one set with ink stains, one with dirt ground into the half moons of the nails. At the bottom, Yejin’s cramped script: “Some flowers only open when watched.”

Mira stirs. “What is it?”

“Art,” you say, and your voice surprises you with how steady it is.

“What kind?”

“Prophetic,” you answer, because the truth is an animal pacing the edge of the bed and you’re not ready to let it into your ribs yet.

You slide the drawing back under your pillow and close your eyes. Across the compound, the night shifts. In your mind, Sunoo’s smile threads petals through your tongue. In reality, Jungwon’s lantern skates once across the fogged panes, a slow-moving star. Two orbits, caught in the same sky, tightening.

Slow burn, the booklet promised. Healing begins when you stop resisting.

You do not stop.

You breathe. You listen to the soil remembering you.

And you wait.

______

Morning arrives with a whistle under the door and the faint itch of grit in your teeth, as if you’ve been speaking to the ground in your sleep. Breakfast is the same: porridge, a bitter green shot, tea that tastes like boiled bark. Mira counts sips, bracelets clinking like quiet alarms. Taesun crushes his toast to dust and pockets it, eyes bright with purpose. Yejin sits very still, crown of reeds damp against her hair, sketchbook closed for once like a door she’s guarding with her body.

Director Seo taps her cup. “Today begins the Mouth Fast,” she says, voice smooth as tile. “Speech is the first addiction. For twenty-four hours, we practice voicelessness. Carry your stone”—a monk in linen sets a bowl of river stones on each table—“and let it hold your words. Anyone who breaks the fast will do a double shift in the greenhouse trenches. Sunoo will lead stillness. Jungwon will direct labor.”

A murmur rises and dies, mouths pressing shut to prove eagerness. Mira puts a flat, oval stone in your palm. “Don’t lose it,” she whispers, already breaking the rule. “They’ll say the soil took your voice because you were careless.”

You tuck the stone into your sleeve and meet Sunoo’s eyes across the hall. He’s already watching—of course he is. The smile he gives you would be harmless if you hadn’t seen how he moves when he’s pleased: slower, closer, like a candle drawn to oxygen. Jungwon lingers by the service door with a clipboard and a coil of hose on his shoulder, scanning tables the way a shepherd counts sheep by the sound of their breathing.

Chores first. Outside, the air needles your lungs; the mountain wears its cold like a second skin. Jungwon assigns tasks without looking at his list. “Mira, refectory herbs. Taesun, east wall compost. Yejin, with Nurse Min in the clinic.” His gaze slides to you and steadies. “You—paths and drains. Stay out of the grove.” Not a suggestion.

You carry a stiff-bristled broom down stone paths glazed with last night’s dew. The greenhouse ribs glow under weak sun; from inside, lamps hum, and something leafy slaps damply as if it’s learned the shape of applause. By the east wall, Taesun kneels with a small shovel and a reverence that would be holy if it didn’t smell like rot.

He tips crumbs in a neat line, then pauses to show you something cupped in his palm: a white, blind tangle coiling in damp soil. Worms, yes, but too many knotted together, a living thread. He beams, proud. You force your lips into gratitude and keep sweeping. If you stop, you will hear them, and if you hear them, you will dream them.

A shadow falls across your broom. Jungwon holds out a pair of soft-soled garden shoes with the temporary patience of a man who prefers doing to explaining. “Your feet,” he says. “You bruise easily.”

You glance at your bare socks, damp to the ankle. “Is that a rule?”

“It’s a reality,” he says; the word lands like weight. He crouches without asking, sets the shoes on the path, and steps back, gaze down so you can decide if you’ll take his help. You put them on. They’re warm from his hands. He notices the lift of your breath and looks away so the noticing won’t embarrass you. When he straightens, his eyes snag on the river stone tucked in your sleeve. “Don’t drop that,” he says. “The ravens like to steal them.”

You arch a brow—Are you joking?—but he’s already moving, a steady, unshowy force among the clatter of chores.

By mid-morning the Mouth Fast is a taut cord running through the compound. The quiet isn’t peace; it’s suppression, and suppression hums. Sunoo runs stillness from the center of the greenhouse like a maestro conducting silence. He has you sit within his radius; you don’t know how you know that, but you do. When a guest’s shoulders begin to shake, his hand appears at the nape of their neck—just weight, just heat, just enough to persuade the body that obedience feels like care.

He comes to you last, when the lamps have warmed the panes to sweating. He kneels, not quite touching, gaze on your throat. “Your pulse is stubborn,” he says in a voice pitched for you alone. “It hates rhythm. I like that.” He brushes the air near your jawline, not touching, so you feel it anyway. “The stone will teach it obedience. If you’re good at listening.”

You hold his eyes and refuse to nod. He smiles, pleased with your defiance like a trainer who prefers wild animals because they make better trophies. “We’ll work on it,” he whispers, and stands.

After lunch—a bowl of broth filtered until flavor gives up—you’re pulled into the clinic with half a dozen others for “check-ins.” Nurse Min sits you on a stool and unwraps your finger. The cut is a thin mouth now, pink with newness. She touches a gloved finger to the gauze and sniffs it as if the body has a scent that changes when it’s lying.

“Does it itch?” she asks.

You hesitate. The truth is embarrassing. “Everything does,” you admit. “Under the skin. Like… like something wants out.”

“Something wants in,” she corrects mildly. She takes tweezers to the pad of your finger and draws out a hair-fine splinter you didn’t know was there. It isn’t wood—it’s pale and sappy, flexing like a root in the air. She drops it in a jar and screws the lid tight. “Names need medium,” she says. “Don’t let anyone put theirs under your skin.”

“Is that medical advice?”

“It’s survival.” She tapes a fresh bandage printed with tiny leaves, then, softer, “If you start tasting flowers, spit.”

You leave the clinic with your mouth dry as chalk. On the steps, Yejin waits like a shadow that forgot to attach to a body. She presses a folded paper to your palm and flits off before you can unfold it. In the corner of the page, her fast, lethal graphite: you in profile, throat open, something like a stem ghosting up under the jaw. In the negative space behind you, two silhouettes—Sunoo’s soft edges; Jungwon’s blunt solidity—blur toward one another without touching. Underneath, her careful script: Not yet. But soon.

The Mouth Fast bends afternoon into a colder shape. Without words, people show who they are. Mira hums under her breath and taps her stone against her teeth like a bead. Taesun counts breath with his fingers on his ribs. A new arrival—Hana, thirty and jewel-hard—walks like a woman who refuses to ask permission from the air. An older man, Mr. Ko, rows his spoon through soup with the concentration of a man pretending there is a river and a boat that can take him off this mountain.

At dusk, Director Seo calls for the Seed Burial. “We surrender what we’ve hoarded,” she says, and volunteers step forward with small slips of paper seeded with something that will sprout if the soil wants it. They kneel, press the papers into a rectangle of fresh-turned earth, and cover them with a thin skin of loam. The lamps go low. Sunoo stands at their backs. Jungwon stands at their front, shovel grounded like a staff.

You don’t move. You have nothing to bury you can stand to name.

A woman you recognize from orientation—the one who needed three days of sleep—places both palms flat on the soil like it’s someone she loves. Her breath hitches once; she swallows whatever it shook loose. As the last handful of earth covers the names, something beneath the surface shifts. Not the modest swell of seeds drinking. A shove from below.

The crowd stills. You feel it again—a push. The soil flexes and sighs, grains settling. Someone’s hand jerks back as if bitten. Sunoo’s smile does not change, which means it changes. “The ground recognizes an offering,” he says pleasantly. “Stand, flowers. Let the dark do what it’s for.”

Jungwon’s eyes are on the dirt, not the people. His jaw flexes once, twice. You have the sharp, childish thought—He hears it too—and the relief that follows is so naked you almost miss the fear riding it.

Night stitches the compound tight. The Mouth Fast persists: tongues held, little pantomimes replacing argument. In bed, Mira sleeps with her open palm on her stone like it might roll away. You face the wall because the drawing under your pillow is a magnet and your skull is iron.

A scrape wakes you—a quick, purposeful sound under the window. You slide out of bed and ease the latch. Cold breath pours in. On the path below, a lantern moves slow as a planet. You follow, soft-soled shoes silent on the boards, the stone in your sleeve tapping your wrist like a heart that’s climbed too high.

The lantern stops. Jungwon steps into its circle. He doesn’t look surprised to see you. He looks like a man who has laid a trap and found what he baited it for. He lifts the lantern just enough to catch your face without flaying you with light.

He puts a finger to his mouth—quiet—and crooks that same finger: come.

You should run. You go.

He takes you along the west path to a low, fenced plot you haven’t noticed in daylight, because in daylight everything looks like something else. Up close, the boards are stained darker than weather. He stops you with a hand on your sleeve. His grip is gentle; his hand is strong. “Do not speak,” he says, and for the first time today the command lands like care, not control.

He tilts the lantern over the fence. The light stratifies a pit maybe two meters long, maybe one deep, lined with rough timbers and crawling with the industry of decay. You see peels, stems, pot scrapings—normal compost—then catch on something pale threaded through like lace: cartilage? You squint, heart hammering, and in among the skins and stems you see hair—just a clump, just enough to be undeniable. The sour-metal stink under the rot answers a question you didn’t know you were asking until now.

You stagger, mute because the rule still binds your mouth. Jungwon’s hand rises like he planned for your body to try to leave you. He catches your elbow with two fingers and steadies you without pulling you closer. “Breathe,” he says, voice so low the pit swallows it.

You breathe. He watches your lungs move under your shirt as if measuring if they’ll keep their job.

“What is this,” you manage, a whisper that bruises the fast.

“Everything that isn’t needed,” he says. It is both the most honest sentence you’ve heard since you arrived and the worst one. “Don’t come here alone.”

“Why show me?”

His mouth tightens. He weighs the truth and hands you a ration. “Because you will go looking. Better you see what is true than what you can’t live through.”

He lifts the lantern away; the pit dissolves back into darkness. When he looks at you again, the composure you’ve seen him wear like a uniform slips an inch. “Next time,” he says, “wake me.”

“How?” It comes out harder than you intend. “Do I knock on the earth?”

“On my door.” He says it like a correction and a promise. “I’d rather carry you than find you down there with your throat open to the sky.”

You swallow. The stone in your sleeve digs your wrist bone.

He walks you back along the west path, keeping the lantern low so you don’t blind yourself and tumble. At the bottom of the dorm steps, he stops as if a line of salt has been poured between you. “Sleep,” he says. Then, almost grudgingly—no, carefully, like he fears generosity might teach you to expect it—“You did well.”

“You mean quiet,” you say.

“I mean you didn’t lie to yourself while you were looking.” He turns the lantern, and for a heartbeat your faces share a circle of light. It is not intimate, and it is.

Inside, the warm dark smells like bodies and disinfection. Mira turns in her sleep, bracelets whickering. Your hands shake. Not with the adrenaline of the pit—though that remains like a taste at the back of your throat—but with the realization that both men see you. Sunoo sees the mechanism; Jungwon sees the fracture line. You can’t decide which is worse.

The Mouth Fast breaks at dawn with a bell so soft it feels like a secret. Voices resume like a creek finding an old bed; people speak too loudly, then blush, then laugh at their own relief. Director Seo praises “compliance” as if it were a sacrament. In the refectory, mugs clack, spoons scrape. Words return as barter.

You don’t trust yours yet.

Sunoo flows through tables like sunlight convincing itself it’s holy. He catches your empty mug, pours tea, and sets it in front of you with a flourish that makes a few heads turn. “How did the silence fit?” he asks, lazy, interested. It isn’t small talk. It’s a probe shaped like kindness.

“Like wire,” you say.

He smiles, delighted—as if you’ve told him a secret about yourself he can use. “It looks good on you,” he says, and taps your river stone where it sits on the table as if he gave it to you, as if it obeys him too. “We have Talkback today. You and me.”

“Is that optional?”

“In principle,” he says. “In practice, most people prefer to be seen.” He leans in, lower voice. “You certainly do.”

He leaves before you can snap that you preferred to be alive, actually. Across the room, Jungwon stops at the threshold, takes the refectory in at a glance, and chooses a seat with his back to the wall. He eats fast, plain, as if food is fuel and surveillance is dessert. When he lifts his mug, you notice the fresh welt across the back of his hand—a thorn, yesterday, dragging its punctuation.

Talkback is held in a small room off the clinic, windowless, lit by a lamp that chooses flattery over truth. Sunoo sits too close, but because he knows what too close does to bodies, he leaves exactly enough air that you can fool yourself into thinking you could stand if you wanted to. He doesn’t touch you. He rests his forearms on his knees, hands open, posture full of a patience he wears like silk.

“What is the shape of your fear?” he asks, as if fear is polite enough to have geometry.

“Wide,” you say.

“Flat?”

“Deep.”

He grins. “Good. Honesty makes my job easier.” He looks at your mouth, then your hands, then your throat. “Last night you broke curfew.”

It isn’t a question. “I walked.”

“To the west path,” he says, savoring the corridor of it.

“Is that forbidden?”

“Not if you were with someone.”

You hold his gaze. You don’t look away. You don’t nod. You don’t give him Jungwon.

Sunoo’s smile returns, but thinner. “We don’t punish curiosity,” he says silkily. “We shape it.” He nods to your sleeve. “Keep the stone. I like how you sound when you hold it.”

“I didn’t speak.”

“You breathed differently,” he says, and you hate that you believe him. “This afternoon I want you in the greenhouse. We’ll do matching breath. I’ll keep count so you don’t have to.”

Your stomach remembers the pit and rolls. “What if I say no?”

“Then we’ll go slower,” he says, as if you asked him to make it sweeter. “That’s the kind of consent you like, isn’t it? The kind that arrives after your body learns the lesson.”

You stand because sitting feels like agreeing. He doesn’t stop you. He nods as if you’ve completed a task he set in his head.

“Good,” he says. “The roots are listening.”

Outside, the day is too bright in the way of mountains pretending to be gentle. You find Mira tending pots of kitchen herbs—mint, rosemary, a vicious little basil. “You look like you saw a ghost,” she says without looking up.

“I saw the compost,” you say.

She flinches so hard the basil shudders. “You don’t say it out loud,” she hisses, then checks herself, forces her voice calm again. “Names wake things.”

“Whose hair is in it?”

“Everyone’s,” she says. “Eventually.”

By late afternoon your muscles revolt, and stillness becomes a thing you have to hold down with both hands. In the greenhouse, Sunoo runs breath like a metronome. When he kneels behind a girl whose hands won’t stop shaking, he doesn’t touch her skin; he places his palm two inches away from her spine and waits. The girl’s shoulders ease; her breath learns his count. You hate him for it. You hate her relief. You hate that your body pays attention.

Jungwon moves along the rows with a bucket and a dull pruning blade, nicking stems, turning soil, resetting stakes. When a lamp pops and goes dim, he crosses to replace it without being called. On his way back, he passes near your mat—near, not past. The air shifts with him: sweat, iron, soil, a clean note like water running under rock. He doesn’t look down. He scratches the back of his wrist where a thorn welt cross-hatches older scars and says, as if the comment belongs to the room, “Some things only grow when you pretend you can’t see them.”

You don’t know if he means the plants, the people, or you.

Evening comes with teeth. The bell pulls everyone to the refectory; the sky sits heavy, swollen with weather that refuses to begin. Over dinner, Hana spills her tea and swears loudly enough that half the room jumps; then she laughs, tips her chin like she meant to do it, and glares at anyone who looks sorry on her behalf. Mr. Ko tells Taesun to stop feeding the worms like they’re pets; Taesun bares his teeth, half-smile, half warning. Nurse Min pockets a spoon someone bent into a hook. Director Seo watches it all with the small, sated smile of a zookeeper whose animals are thriving.

Night brings the first scream.

Not a long one. Not a movie howl. A single, keening note cut off hard, like a rope being cut. The compound freezes; forks stop halfway to mouths; breath holds. Sunoo is already on his feet, smile sharpened into usefulness. Jungwon’s chair scrapes; he’s moving before you can find your shoes.

They go toward the grove at a measured pace that says they already know what they’ll find. Director Seo lifts her hand. “Stay seated,” she says, and the command lands like weight on your shoulders. Mira’s fingers take yours under the table and squeeze so hard your knuckles grind. You squeeze back. Your mouth tastes like rosemary and fear.

You wait. The greenhouse sweats. The clock you aren’t allowed to see walks itself around the hour by the sound of your blood in your ears. When the door opens again, Sunoo comes in first, serene, coat unwrinkled. Jungwon follows with a bundled shape in his arms—a blanket, a softness of color, too long where a body should bend.

A gasp skips the room. “She fainted,” Sunoo says, which is both intolerably insufficient and the only story you’ll be allowed. “A cleansing reaction. She will rest. We will keep vigil over the names she surrendered.”

He doesn’t say who. Your mind fills the blank with the sleeping woman from breakfast, because that is who you fear for, and fear is a magnet. Jungwon carries the bundle past. You know how much weight that is—your body recognizes the set of his jaw, the economy of his gait. He does not look at you. He doesn’t look anywhere but the door to the clinic, as if any glance could spill what he’s holding.

The dining hall exhales like it’s been underwater too long. Director Seo claps once, neat. “We will not gossip,” she says. “We will not catastrophize. We will practice serenity.”

You don’t sleep. Not because you’re brave—because you’re scared correctly now, and scared correctly people stay awake. When you doze, you wake to the sensation that someone has put a leaf on your tongue and asked you to pray with it in your mouth. You spit into your sheet and find nothing. When you sit up, a shadow peels off the wall near the window and becomes Jungwon.

You nearly fling yourself out of bed. He doesn’t move, as if sudden gestures would spook you. He should not be in the dorms after lights; rules are their own religion here. He breaks this one like he breaks branches: cleanly, without apology.

“You left your shoes,” he says, low. He sets them at the foot of your bed, lined up, laces tucked. His voice is stripped of everything but function. “Don’t go barefoot again.”

“What happened?” you ask, whispering because anything louder might wake the dark.

“Don’t ask me,” he says, and for a breath you think he’s refusing. Then he adds, “Because I’ll tell you.” His gaze drags over your face, cataloging fine tremors, the cracked edge of your mouth, the way one hand fists in the sheet like rope. “Sleep,” he says. “You’ll need it.”

He is out the way he came, the door kissing its jamb like a secret.

You try to obey. The mountain presses its cold face to the window and listens. Somewhere, a lantern moves. Somewhere else, a man like a hymn kneels by a bed that is too light.

You put the river stone back in your sleeve and hold it against your pulse until the beat stops arguing with your bones. You remember the jar in Nurse Min’s clinic with the threadlike root curled at the bottom like a question mark. You picture Yejin’s hand drawing you with something under your skin you didn’t agree to carry.

Stillness was the promise. Obedience was the price. You have paid neither. Now the Garden pays attention.

And you, finally, are afraid.

_________

You wake with the taste of copper and rosemary slicked over your tongue, as if someone pressed a leaf there while you slept and whispered hold it. A welt has risen along your bandaged finger—thin, pale, almost pretty. When you press it, it flexes under the skin like something answering from underneath.

Breakfast is a choreography of clatter and eyes. Mira smiles too hard; her bracelets rattle out a code you can’t read. Taesun tips crumbs into his pocket with priestly concentration. Yejin’s crown of reeds has dried to a brittle halo; she draws with her pencil held like a knife. Hana sits mean and diamond-bright, daring the room to dull her edges. Mr. Ko’s spoon cuts the same path through porridge like a boatman refusing any other shore. Director Seo watches the surface of her tea the way people watch the sea for bodies.

“The Naming Rite will be held at sundown,” she announces, as if she’s asking for the salt. “Those selected have been notified.”

Sunoo lifts his eyes, and that’s your notification.

Mira’s fingers find your knee under the table and clamp. She shakes her head once, small, fast—refuse. You don’t know what refusal looks like here besides a story they will tell about you afterward.

“Drink,” Nurse Min says when you pass through the clinic to turn in your night report—how many hours asleep, how many awake, whether you dreamed of heat, teeth, drowning. She hands you a glass the green of pond water. You smell it, and it smells like lawn and iron. “Chlorophyll with a little hem,” she says, seeing your face. “Calms the heart.”

“Calms or slows?” Your voice scratches.

She cants her head. “Same action, different motive.” She glances at your finger. “Still itching?”

“It… moves,” you say, and the honesty makes your stomach pitch. “Like a thread.”

“Everything alive wants a home,” she replies. She peels the bandage with sure fingers. Underneath, the welt has subdivided into delicate veins, a fine network. Not veins. Veining. It looks like leaf. She presses the back of her glove along it; the pattern darkens, limned green under the skin. “Names need medium,” she repeats. “Keep your mouth closed in the greenhouse today. Even when you want to answer.”

You want to ask answer what, but Sunoo is in the doorway, dusk caught in the lamplight of his hair. He doesn’t knock; he glides in like permission. “Our new sprout,” he says, pleased to find you in a chair. “I’ll take her.”

Nurse Min’s mouth goes a little flatter. “She eats first.”

“Of course.” Sunoo’s smile doesn’t move. “Then we breathe.”

The greenhouse sweats. Heat lamps hum like insects; the glass with its rain of condensation blurs the mountain into a myth. Staff move among the rows with trays of soil sheets—thin paper seeded with something that glitters faintly when the light hits it wrong. “Embedded affirmations,” Sunoo tells the group. “You write what you’ll surrender. The seeds will carry it.”

Hana snorts. “Is the surrender refundable?”

Sunoo’s eyes quicken. “There’s always a transaction,” he says. “We just prefer you know the price.” He looks back to you. “Mat,” he says, and it isn’t a request.

You sit. He kneels behind you, palms hovering two inches from your ribs. No touch—just the sense of touch waiting. “Open your mouth,” he murmurs. The admonition from Nurse Min echoes; you clamp your lips. Sunoo’s pleased noise lands against your neck like breath. “Good. Breathe through your nose. In on four, out on six. I’ll count.”

His voice is a rope you have to grab to keep from slipping. When your breath shudders, he matches it; when it calms, he pursues. On the sixth cycle, something sweet pushes the air—lily, wet earth—and you remember the pit and want to be sick. “Stay,” he says, reading your recoil. “Stay where your body is. Don’t run from it. That’s where people rot.”

Across the rows, Jungwon replaces a cracked lamp with quick, sure hands. He doesn’t look at you until he does, a glance like a hand closing on the back of your neck. The air between you tightens. His forearms are netted with healed cuts, white against brown; a fresh welt crosses them like a red thread. When Sunoo says “out on six,” Jungwon turns the dial and the light hums obedient, and you wonder whether the whole building breathes to his count.

Yejin brings you a tray of seed-paper without being asked. When you reach, her gaze drops to your bandage. She moves the pencil like a blade and sketches the back of your hand: the delicate leaf veining, the suggestion of something wanting to break surface. She writes Not yet over the knuckles and slides the paper into your lap. Her mouth is a thin line; her eyes are large and dry and furious.

The day’s chores are smaller and meaner than yesterday’s. Scrub the condensation gutters. Rake. Haul sacks labeled Bone Meal that smell like old molars. Taesun sings under his breath in a language not meant for mouths and leaves a damp trail of crumbs along the east wall. Mr. Ko fetches and carries with blank efficiency, his face empty as a cleaned plate.

By late afternoon, a woman you know only as Auntie Hye—fiftyish, hair cut short for neatness, eyes that scan like a mother bird’s—begins to cough. At first it is dry and prim; then she hunches, pushes a hand to her chest and coughs wet. A ribbon of something bright pops free onto her palm. Petals. White. Tissue-thin and slick with saliva. A few guests laugh—nerves, delight, cruelty. Nurse Min is there before the room decides what to feel, hand under Auntie Hye’s chin, tissues ready. Hye coughs again, harder, and a clot of petals spills: red-tipped now, streaked. She hacks out a final cluster and sags. The tissues are sodden. The petals look like tongues.

“Pollination,” Sunoo says calmly. “Sometimes the body rehearses letting go by practicing bloom.”

Auntie Hye shakes her head, breath hitching. “I didn’t—” she starts.

Sunoo presses two fingers lightly to her throat. “You did.”

She closes her mouth.

Jungwon comes with a bucket and a flat spade; he scoops the petals into the bucket without expression. Your stomach tilts; you grip the bench until the wood prints itself into your palm. He doesn’t look at anyone. He takes the bucket toward the compost. You see his jawclench once when he passes the pit door and files that, like a photographed crime scene.

After the petals, other small horrors follow as if emboldened. A boy pulls his sleeve up to scratch and reveals a faint green tracery along his inner arm; when he scrubs at it, the skin reddens and puffs and the pattern brightens like a pressed leaf held to light. Mira slices a basil stem and it bleeds thin, clean sap; she runs her thumb along the cut and licks it without thinking, then startles at the taste and laughs too loudly. Taesun tips a paper cup into a drain, and a pale, slick worm writhes against the grate and splits into two thinner threads that both crawl the wrong way, toward his fingers. He coos like they’re babies and tucks them back into mud.

“Don’t feed your nightmares,” Nurse Min says without looking up from the woman whose mouth she swabs. “They grow fine on their own.”

By evening, the heat in the greenhouse feels like a hand that won’t lift. The lamps go low. Director Seo stands by the iron ribs with her clipboard like a prayerbook. “For the Naming Rite,” she says, “we welcome Sunoo as Voice and Jungwon as Hands.”

Voice and Hands. A division of power simple enough to live inside.

You are led—gently, unmistakably—toward the central bed, a rectangle of fresh loam bordered by smooth stones. Yejin edges after you, sketchbook clutched to her chest; Nurse Min blocks her with just a glance. “Not this,” Min murmurs. “Later.”

Mira steps forward—too fast—“I can go instead,” she says, smile like a knife wrapped in tissue.

Sunoo’s smile is silk on a nail. “We don’t barter names,” he says. “We harvest them.”

Your knees give. Not dramatic; a small buckling, the body remembering the ground. Sunoo’s hand is there without touching you, a near-weight at your shoulder. “Kneel,” he says, as if reminding you what your body already decided. “Head up. We face what we bring.”

Jungwon stands at the foot of the bed, shovel grounded. Close, his expression is the same flat steel as his blade. He looks at your throat the way carpenters look at walls: not hunger—assessment. When he speaks, his voice is small enough to belong only to the three of you. “Do you know what you’re giving?” he asks.

You try to say No. What comes out is “Something I can’t carry.”

“Good,” he says, and the word is not kindness. It’s calibration.

Sunoo’s fingers hover at your jaw, turning your face by the gravity of proximity. “Open,” he tells you, and your mouth obeys because your body recognizes a doctor’s tone even when it comes from someone who would rather be a priest. He places a petal on your tongue. It tastes like cold tea and a coin. “Hold,” he says. He waits. When you swallow despite yourself, his smile flares. “You see? The body knows ceremony even when the mind resists.”

He steps behind you. You feel his presence like a heat lamp. Jungwon moves to your side and holds out his hand. On his palm: a knife. Not sharp—its edge has been blunted until it’s a tongue of metal���but its point is honest. He waits until you meet his eyes; only then does he set the flat of the blade against your sternum. The steel is cool. Your skin fists under it.

“This is how we write it,” Sunoo says, and his breath touches the shell of your ear like a whispering moth. “Not deep. Not cruel. Not yet.”

The blade slides up without breaking skin, tracing between ribs, across the slow bell of breath—sternum, clavicle, the notch at your throat. The metal leaves a trail of gooseflesh; your pulse hammers against it like an animal trapped under the lid of a box. Jungwon’s other hand is steady at your shoulder, not pushing, not holding, just there, a second horizon the body can measure itself against.

“Name what cannot follow you,” Sunoo murmurs. It could be a real question. It could be a spell. Your mouth fills with the taste of flower and iron; words gather behind it like flies at meat.

You can’t say the fire; to say it would open something that the soil will keep. You say, “The last night.”

“Again,” Sunoo purrs.

“The last night,” you repeat, and the room tilts like a field under wind.

The congregation—guests in white, staff in linen—sways. Mira has both hands pressed to her lips. Taesun rocks in small, violent arcs. Yejin’s pencil moves; she draws you kneeling, two sets of hands marking you; she smudges the graphite so the air around you looks like breath or smoke.

The blade dips, lifts, comes to rest against your throat’s right side. You feel the exact spot where it would enter if it wanted to. Jungwon’s pulse is visible in his wrist; steady, heavier than yours. He moves the flat in a small crescent along the tendon, and your voice leaves you for a moment—pure reflex. A small, unpretty sound. Sunoo shivers behind you, pleased as if you performed a note he’d been coaching you toward.

“Do you understand the price?” Sunoo asks softly.

“No,” you say honestly.

“Beautiful,” he says, delighted. “No one ever does until after.”

He lifts the petal from your mouth with two fingers and lays it on your tongue again like communion. You hold it. Jungwon takes your left hand. His palm is rough and warm; soil lives in the whorls of his fingerprints. He pricks the pad of your finger with the very tip of the blunted knife, as if he wants to remind the blade of its older religion. A bead of blood swells, bright, neat. He turns your hand and presses that red to the seed-paper waiting in a shallow trench at the bed’s edge. Your blood bleeds into the paper like water into thirst.

“Now,” Sunoo says, voice dropped low enough to live in your bones, “we plant what you are not. So what you are can grow.”

Jungwon folds loam over the paper. The soil is cool even in this hothouse weather. It sucks at your finger when he presses your hand flat to it. Something moves underneath—something too quick for roots. Your stomach rocks. You try to pull back. Jungwon’s hand covers yours, firm as a yoke; Sunoo’s hand wraps your throat—not squeezing, just holding the column steady. You are pinned in two places that translate directly to obedience.

“Breathe,” Sunoo says.

You do. The soil under your hand warms like a mouth.

The congregation murmurs. Not words; the sound bodies make when they agree to a script. Director Seo watches like a reader flipping to the end to be sure it comes out as written. Nurse Min’s face has the set of a woman who’s decided to count a vein until morning.

The thing under the soil stills.

Jungwon lifts your hand and wipes the loam away with his thumb. The smear looks like war paint. Sunoo releases your throat and smooths his palm down the line his fingers left, a correction, an apology, a brand. He bends and whispers against your ear, “You belong to the ground,” and then, after a heartbeat, “and to us while you’re learning.”

His mouth never touches skin. The idea of it does.

The Rite closes with a bell that tastes like copper in your teeth. People file out as if stepping around a sleeping animal. Mira gets to you first, palms hot where she holds your face. “Drink water,” she hisses. “Don’t go to sleep. If you dream the name, it sticks.”

“I didn’t give it,” you say.

She laughs, a small animal sound. “You bled. That’s enough.”

Mr. Ko offers a clean handkerchief without meeting your eyes. Hana watches from a distance like a hawk deciding if a rabbit is worth stooping for when the field is full of easier meat. Taesun beams, mud on his lip, as if he’s just watched a very good wedding.

Yejin presses a drawing into your hand and vanishes. It’s you kneeling, hands marked, a line along your throat that is not a cut but knows where one would go. Over your shoulder, two shadows bend—one a heat-halo, one a blunt storm. Soon, she’s written. Don’t say yes with your mouth.

Night. The mountain holds its breath. The lamps in the greenhouse go black one by one until the glass is only a shape. You sit on your dorm bed and watch your hands not shake. Mira sleeps curled like a comma with her stone under her cheek. The drawing under your pillow warms to your scalp as if it wants to crawl into you.

A knock—not on the door. On the window, one knuckle, once. When you slide the frame, cold air pours in, and you think of Nurse Min’s keep your mouth closed in the greenhouse and keep it shut.

Jungwon stands below, lantern hooded, face lit just enough to make eyes and jaw. He tilts his head—come—and you go because your legs have learned this path. Out the back, down the steps, across the boards to the west path. He waits in the shadow of the shed where spades hang like a rack of tongues.

“Any dizziness? Nausea?” he asks, clinic-plain.

“Just… aware.” The word feels too small for your body’s rattled hum.

He grunts—approval. He reaches for your hand and turns the palm up. The loam under your nails has dried to fine grit. He rubs it away with his thumb, slow, methodical. It’s almost tender until you realize he is checking for changes—for the leaf-vein under your skin brightening, for anything moving that shouldn’t. When his thumb passes over the edge of your pulse, it jumps. He looks up sharply. You look away.

“You shouldn’t stay in the dorm tonight.” Matter-of-fact. “You’ll hear things like your name, and some of them will be for you and some won’t. You’re still soft. Soft things take impressions.”

“Where do I go?”

“My room.” Flat. Then, as if he heard how it sounds: “It’s safer. There are no plants there.”

“Is that true?”

“It’s true enough.” He waits. “Or go to the clinic and sit under Min’s lamp and let her count your breaths until morning.”

“Which would you pick,” you ask, because some part of you refuses to let him stand there and decide your body in his head without you in the room.

He takes too long to answer, then says, “The clinic is gentle.” A beat. “I am not.”

Wind combs the pines; the greenhouse ticks as it cools. Somewhere a raven laughs like a woman who knows your secrets and isn’t impressed.

“Choose,” he says quietly.

Sunoo’s shadow falls across the path before you can. He steps into the lantern’s circle like a storybook: pale wrists, clean hands, a smile that tells you exactly how he will use it. “Ah,” he says, soft delight. “My flower and my hands. I wondered where the night would put you.”

Jungwon does not step back. He also does not step forward. The lantern holds the three of you in a tight Venn where your breaths overlap. Sunoo tips his head, curious. “You can take her,” he says to Jungwon, which is to say I will let you. “But she’ll come back to me tasting like soil and fear, and we’ll start again from below.” He turns to you, voice honeyed and mean. “Or you can come with me and I’ll teach your body what calm feels like so you know when you’ve lost it.”

The polite violence of the options makes your stomach liquefy.

“Stop,” Jungwon says, and the word is a tool, not a plea.

Sunoo laughs softly. “The earth doesn’t stop growing just because you ask it gently.” He reaches, very slowly, and lifts your jaw with two fingers—not touching skin; his hand floats a whisper below it and your head lifts anyway, obedient to suggestion. “Show me your throat,” he says, and your body almost does it because it learned tonight and bodies like to repeat lessons. You hold yourself still out of spite. His smile warms. “Good girl.”

The words hit like a hand under your ribs. Jungwon’s breath changes. It darkens the air.

“Enough,” Jungwon says again, and hooks a finger in the lantern hood. He pulls it open. Light flares, pot-bright, brutal. The three of you blink; the world loses its beautiful edges and shows its seams. “Clinic,” he tells you.

Sunoo’s smile fades pixel by pixel until only his eyes shine. “For now,” he agrees. He steps in closer so there is no air between the three bodies but what breath can claim. He looks at Jungwon and speaks to you. “You’ll end up between us anyway,” he says, the prophecy flat, not cruel. “Why not learn the shape early.”

You should move. You should walk yourself to the nurse and let her count your lungs like prayer beads. Instead you stand very still while two men who have learned your pulse by different languages consider the currency of your fear.

Sunoo lifts his hand and stops a breath from your mouth. You feel the heat of him without the permission of touch. “I won’t kiss you,” he says, velvet and wicked. “Not yet.” He turns his palm and hovers over your throat, reading the rush there like a favorite book. “See what your body does with almost.”

Jungwon moves behind you so quietly the night forgets to mark his steps. He doesn’t touch you. His presence is so large it reads like contact anyway—the shape of him corralling air. You have the dizzy thought that if you leaned back, he would catch you, and if you leaned forward, Sunoo would open like a mouth.

“Breathe,” Sunoo whispers, and it isn’t instruction now; it’s a dare.

You do. The air leans with you. The world tightens to a triangle: lantern glare, the line of a blunted blade tucked into Jungwon’s belt, the faint copper on Sunoo’s knuckle where he touched your lip earlier with the petal.

“I said clinic,” Jungwon repeats, low enough to live at your spine.

“Make her say please,” Sunoo counters, amusement sweet as rot. “Our girl loves a ritual.”

“Don’t—” you start, and then stop, because the word tastes like surrender and you haven’t decided whose hands deserve it.

“Not tonight,” Jungwon says, and you understand: it isn’t mercy. It’s control deferred. He steps to your side, inserts a palm—warm, heavy—at your waist, not pulling, not pushing, just a point you can move along. Sunoo mirrors the motion on your other side without touching, an echo your nerves misread as contact. Together they guide you three steps, five, toward the clinic’s dim window—two gravities that agree for once.

At the threshold, Sunoo bends so close your ear warms. “Sleep,” he murmurs, the same command Jungwon uses like a blessing. “Dream of hands.” He smiles against the air where your skin ends. “Next time I’ll count for you while he holds you still.”

Jungwon’s hand tightens one notch at your waist, a warning, a promise, a brand pressed through clothes. “Next time,” he says, to Sunoo, to you, to the night that will keep at this until you’re rewritten, “I’ll decide who goes first.”

Nurse Min opens the clinic door before anyone knocks, lamp bright behind her like a little square sun. She takes in the triangle of bodies, the glint of the knife, the feral set of Sunoo’s mouth, the obedient steadiness of Jungwon’s hand at your side.

“Inside,” she says, and steps aside.

You pass between them—Sunoo’s almost-touch a heat across your throat; Jungwon’s real touch a line at your hip you could follow with your eyes closed—and cross into the light.

You do not kiss anyone. No one kisses you.

But as the door shuts and the mountain presses its ear to the glass to listen, you know it: your body already understands the shape they promised. It will remember. It will hunger.

And when it happens—when it really happens—it will not be an accident.

________

The clinic smelled of metal and mint. Nurse Min left you in a chair under her lamp until the feverish hum in your body dulled to a bearable pitch. She made you drink water, bitter and green as ditch weed, and held your wrist while your pulse rattled beneath her thumb. When you asked her if you were safe, she only said, “Nothing in a place like this is safe. At best, some things are safer than others.”

By the time she dismissed you, the compound had already gone to sleep. Mira was curled on her side in the dorm, bracelets stilled. You should have slept too. Instead you lay awake, tasting the memory of a petal pressed against your tongue, feeling the phantom weight of Jungwon’s hand steady at your waist, the ghost of Sunoo’s fingers just shy of your throat.

Your body remembered. It remembered too well.

When you finally slipped into the corridor, your bare feet soundless on the boards, it wasn’t to find air. It was because something in you had already decided that the ache would not stop on its own.

The greenhouse loomed against the night, ribs of iron and glass sweating mist. The lock had never been for people who wanted to stay out. You pushed the door and it sighed open, warm air rushing at you like a mouth.

He was waiting. Of course he was.

Sunoo leaned against a bench, sleeves rolled, pale wrists glowing under the lamps. His expression was the same one he’d worn when he laid the petal on your tongue earlier—delighted, expectant, like he had always known your body would come back to him.

“You breathe too loud when you lie down,” he murmured. “I could hear you from the other side of the hall.”

You should have left. You stepped closer instead.

Sunoo reached for you without touching, fingers tracing the air beside your cheek. That almost-contact burned hotter than heat itself. Your breath caught, and his smile sharpened. “See? Your body tells the truth. It remembers me already.”

His hand hovered down, stopping at the hollow of your throat. “Here,” he whispered. ��Where the pulse lives.” He bent, mouth a whisper away from your skin, never quite sealing it. Your nerves screamed as if he’d kissed you. “You want me to touch you. That’s why you came.”

Your denial scraped your teeth but never left your tongue.

“Good girl,” he said, pleased at your silence. He turned you, pressing between your shoulder blades until your knees bent and you landed on the warm boards of the floor. “Stay open. Stay soft.”

His hands came at last—sliding along your thighs, parting them without rush, without doubt. He dragged his thumb along the cotton of your thin shorts, pressing until the damp there gave you away. “Blooming,” he said reverently, as if the word itself could coax you wider.

You gasped when he pressed harder, the friction maddening. He laughed low in his throat, pleased. “You’ve been waiting since the Rite, haven’t you? You swallowed the petal and your body begged for more.”

He tugged fabric aside with clinical precision, exposing you to the humid air. His fingers slicked easily through the wetness already gathered, and he made a sound of satisfaction that went straight to your gut. “So ready,” he crooned. “So obedient.”

Two fingers circled, teased, pressed—but never where you needed. He watched your hips shift, your breath stutter. “Say please,” he murmured.

“I—”

“Shh.” His free hand covered your mouth lightly, thumb grazing your lower lip. “Not with words. With your body.”

Your thighs trembled. You pushed into his hand, desperate. His smile widened. “There it is. Begging without speech.”

He slipped two fingers inside, slow, deliberate. Your back arched, a strangled sound caught behind his palm. He curled them just right, hitting the place that made you shiver, made your eyes roll back. “Yes,” he whispered against your ear. “That’s it. That’s how you bloom.”

His palm pressed harder over your mouth as your moans broke free. His rhythm quickened, fingers thrusting, scissoring, spreading you open as if he meant to plant something inside. Every push forced slick sounds into the greenhouse air. He bent low, lips brushing your temple, murmuring praises between each thrust: “Perfect. My good flower. Opening just for me. No one else will see you like this.”

Your orgasm came sudden, brutal—your whole body snapping tight around his hand, shuddering against him. He kept moving, dragging it out until you were gasping into his palm, thighs twitching.

When at last he withdrew, his fingers glistened. He lifted them to your lips, smearing wetness across them before pushing between. “Taste yourself,” he ordered softly. “Know what you are to me.”

Shame and hunger tangled in your chest. You sucked his fingers clean, and his eyes darkened, mouth parting as if he might finally kiss you. He didn’t. He pulled back just enough to leave you desperate, to make absence itself a cruelty.

“Blooming,” he whispered again, satisfied. “And tomorrow, you’ll be ready for the soil.”

The greenhouse door creaked. You jerked, Sunoo still crouched over you, his slick fingers withdrawing with deliberate slowness.

Jungwon stood in the doorway, lantern spilling gold over his dirt-streaked arms. His jaw tightened as his eyes tracked the wet shine on your lips, the way your legs trembled, the smug curve of Sunoo’s smile.

For a long, brutal moment, no one spoke. Then Jungwon stepped forward, shovel still in one hand, and his voice came out rough, dangerous.

“She’s mine next.”

The lamps hummed. The soil smelled of iron. Your heart beat against your throat like a trapped bird as the two men stared across you, and you realized the next time you were touched, it would be by both.

And you would not escape it.

______

The night you tried to run, the mountain gave you away.

The boards beneath your feet creaked, wet leaves clung to your calves, and the fog was a hand on your throat. You ran anyway. Past the dorms, past the glasshouse ribs glowing faintly from their lamps, down the west path where the ravens laughed like women who knew your secrets.

You thought the dark would cover you.

But the dark belonged to him.

A hand caught your wrist so hard you nearly went down. The lantern flared, and Jungwon’s face came out of the mist—eyes black, jaw locked, the muscle jumping with rage he didn’t bother to soften. He dragged you against him, chest heaving like you’d run into a wall that had learned how to breathe.

“Running,” he said, voice low and sharp as a spade. “After I told you not to.”

“I—”

“Quiet.” His grip on your wrist tightened until your bones ached. “Do you know what he did to you in there? Do you know what you smell like? Soil and him.” His other hand closed hard around your chin, forcing you to meet his eyes. His breath came hot, furious. “I told you not to let him touch you.”

Your protest was thin. “I didn’t—”

“You did.” He shoved you back against the rough bark of a pine. The trunk dug into your spine; his body crowded yours, heat and dirt and something mean. “You opened your mouth. You let him put his fingers in you.” His hand slid down your throat, pressing just enough to make your pulse throb under his palm. “Do you think that makes you his?”

“No—”

“No,” he repeated, mocking and brutal, pressing harder until your words broke into breath. His eyes raked you up and down like he was reading your body for lies. “You’re mine. If you’re soil, then I’m the one who plants.”

The knife appeared from his belt—not sharp, its edge long since blunted, but the point still honest. He held it flat against your belly, dragging it up under your shirt until the cold metal kissed the underside of your breast. You shivered, body jerking against the bark. His mouth twisted, equal parts fury and hunger.

“Scared?” he murmured. “Good. Fear makes roots dig deeper.”

He hooked the blade under the band of your shorts, pulling until the fabric stretched and then snapped. His hand shoved inside without pause, fingers rough, pushing into you like he meant to stake a claim. You gasped, the sound choking against the hand still at your throat.

“Wet,” he said, voice a growl, face close enough you could feel every word on your skin. “You’re soaked for me already. Even after him. Especially after him.” His fingers thrust harder, curling, relentless, forcing your body to answer him. “Say it. Say whose you are.”

You shook your head, too proud, too broken to give it.

His mouth curved cruel. “Then I’ll fuck it into you.”

He yanked your shorts down to your thighs, lifted you bodily against the tree, and shoved his hips between your legs. You clawed at his shoulders, half to push, half to hold on, but he pinned you easy, the knife’s flat pressed to your throat now like a brand. His cock pressed hot and thick against your entrance, grinding through the slick he’d found there, rubbing until you whined.

“You hear that?” he hissed, rolling his hips, dragging the head over your folds until obscene wet sounds filled the air. “Your body begging me in front of the whole fucking mountain.” He pushed in one brutal stroke, burying himself deep, forcing a cry from your throat. His teeth bared at the sound, savage triumph. “That’s it. Open up. Take me.”

He fucked you hard against the tree, every thrust jarring bark into your spine, every shove brutal and unrelenting. The knife never left your throat—flat, cold, reminding you what he could do if he wanted. His free hand gripped your hip so hard you knew you’d bruise, dragging you down onto him, using your body like it was already his.

“Mine,” he snarled against your ear, hips slamming. “Not his. Not anyone’s. Mine to fuck. Mine to plant. Mine to keep.” His pace grew rougher, desperate, jealousy bleeding into possession. “You’ll carry me. You’ll take my seed. You’ll remember whose cock fucked you open like this.”

Your moans tore free, high and broken, every thrust forcing them out. He laughed, breathless, mean. “Good little soil. Look at you—taking it. Clenching so tight you’ll never forget.”

When you came, it was with your whole body jerking, nails raking his back, his name spilling without permission. He fucked you through it, ruthless, using your climax to milk himself. With a final, brutal thrust, he came inside you, grinding deep, growling your name like a curse and a prayer.

He stayed pressed to you, chest heaving, the knife slipping down to rest against your collarbone. He didn’t soften. He didn’t let go. His mouth found your jaw, biting hard enough to leave a mark.

When he finally pulled out, slick running down your thighs, he yanked your shorts back up roughly, like covering you was a punishment. He grabbed your wrist again, dragging you toward the compound.

“You’re not sleeping in the dorms,” he said, voice iron. “You’re mine now. My room. My bed. No one else touches you.”

The lantern swung, throwing gold across the path. His grip never loosened. You stumbled after him, body raw, used, filled, the echo of his thrusts still beating through you.

And you knew he wasn’t bluffing.

______

Jungwon’s grip on your wrist was iron, dragging you through the silent hallways until the greenhouse lamps and dorm windows disappeared. His door slammed behind you, the bolt driven home with the finality of a lock on a coffin. His room was small, spare, stripped bare of comfort—just a bed, a chair, his tools. No flowers, no soil. Only him.

He shoved you onto the mattress like you weighed nothing. Your body jolted, still slick, still aching from what he’d already done. He stood over you, chest rising and falling hard, sweat at his temples, jaw clenched like a vice.

“You don’t go back to them,” he growled. “Not Mira, not Seo, and never him.” His eyes burned. “You’re mine.”

Your breath hitched; the word stuck in your throat.

A voice cut through the dark. “You’re wrong.”

The lantern on the desk flared, spilling its glow across pale wrists, white robes loosened at the chest, a mouth curved in that familiar, cruel delight. Sunoo. Already inside. Already waiting.

Jungwon stiffened, shoulders tensing like a predator finding another in his territory. “Get out.”

Sunoo ignored him. He stepped closer, his smile syrup-sweet but eyes sharp. “She doesn’t belong to you alone. Look at her.” His gaze slid over you where you trembled on the bed, your thighs pressed together, your lips parted from shallow breaths. “She’s terrified. She’s confused. She needs gentleness.” His tone softened, dripping like honey. “And you can’t give her that.”

“Gentle doesn’t keep her alive,” Jungwon snapped, stepping between you and him, shovel-callused fists at his sides. “Gentle lets her rot.”

“Alive?” Sunoo laughed, low and dangerous. “She’s not alive. She’s blooming. That’s what I make her.”

“Blooming,” Jungwon spat, “is just another word for open. And I’m the one inside her.”

The words made your stomach twist; heat and fear tangled until you couldn’t tell the difference. You tried to speak—stop, please stop—but your throat locked.

Sunoo’s gaze darted back to you, softening. He crouched, ignoring the way Jungwon loomed above him. His hand hovered just shy of your ankle, not touching—never touching—but the heat of him crawled up your skin. “Petal,” he whispered, “don’t be afraid. I’ll take care of you. I’ll show you how it feels to be cherished.” His lips parted, almost grazing your skin as he breathed you in. “Let me taste you.”

Jungwon’s growl shook the air. He seized your arm, yanking you back against his chest, his hand spread possessive across your stomach. His cock, still half-hard, pressed against your spine. “She’s mine. Mine to fuck. Mine to plant. Mine to keep.”

Your body shuddered. Fear, yes—but deeper, darker: want, shame, hunger you couldn’t smother.

Sunoo’s smile only widened. “Then let’s see who she opens for first.” He slid closer, slipping between your knees before Jungwon could stop him. His breath fanned over your thighs, hot and wet, and you gasped when he finally touched you—soft, reverent, his hands parting you like something fragile.

The contrast made you dizzy. Jungwon’s grip bruised; Sunoo’s mouth pressed feather-light kisses along the inside of your thigh, slow, teasing, as if every touch was worship. “Sweet,” he murmured, nose brushing close to the heat of you. “So sweet. I’ll make her sing.”

“Don’t you dare—” Jungwon started, but your body betrayed you, hips twitching toward Sunoo’s mouth, a whimper breaking past your lips.

That sound changed everything.

Jungwon froze, then snarled, shoving you down into the mattress, caging you with his body. One hand pinned your wrists above your head; the other tore your shirt open down the middle, fabric splitting under his strength. His mouth crashed to your throat, biting, marking, sucking bruises into your skin with furious precision.

Sunoo groaned at the sight, as if Jungwon’s violence only made you more beautiful. He leaned in, finally sealing his lips over your cunt, sucking hard, tongue lapping deep through your folds. The wet sounds filled the room, obscene, echoing against the bare walls.

You cried out, the noise muffled against Jungwon’s hand when he clapped it over your mouth. “Quiet,” he hissed, teeth at your jaw. “Don’t give him the satisfaction of hearing how much you love it.”

But Sunoo knew anyway. He moaned against you, tongue flicking your clit, fingers sliding inside with practiced ease, curling just right. He fed off every twitch, every muffled scream, every desperate roll of your hips. “See?” he said between licks, voice thick with arousal. “She opens for me. She’s blooming already.”

Jungwon pressed harder, grinding his cock against your hip through his pants, furious at your body’s betrayal, at the way your thighs trembled around Sunoo’s head. “She’s dripping because I fucked her raw,” he snarled. “All you’re doing is licking up what I left in her.”

The words made your body jerk, shame and desire hitting like lightning.

Sunoo pulled back just enough to look up at you, his mouth shining with your wetness, his eyes dark and soft. “You taste like need,” he whispered. He dragged his tongue slowly over your clit, savoring the way you cried out under Jungwon’s palm. “And you’ll remember I was the first one who made you come with his mouth.”

“Shut up,” Jungwon snapped. But his own hips rolled against you, his cock throbbing, desperate. His jealousy only sharpened his need.

You couldn’t fight it. You came hard, body arching, Sunoo’s mouth sucking your clit, Jungwon’s hand holding you down, his teeth biting at your throat. Your orgasm tore through you like the roots of something invasive, clawing deep, unstoppable.

They didn’t stop.

Sunoo licked you clean, gentle as a lover, humming like he was savoring wine. Jungwon bit harder, grinded rougher, his hand forcing your wrists deeper into the mattress. Both of them on you—one soft, one brutal—until you didn’t know whose name to scream.

And you understood, with raw clarity, that they weren’t fighting for you.

They were fighting through you.

When the shudders finally broke, you collapsed back, gasping, throat raw. Jungwon leaned down, lips brushing your ear, his voice a growl. “This is just the beginning. Next time I’m inside you while he’s in your mouth. We’ll see who you really belong to.”

Sunoo laughed softly, licking his lips clean of you. “She’ll belong to both.”

And for the first time, you realized he was right.

_____

Your body was still shaking when Jungwon yanked you upright, dragging you into his lap as if the bed belonged only to him. His thighs were iron beneath you, his chest hard against your spine. One arm locked around your waist, the other snared your throat, thick fingers spreading wide until his grip owned the column of your neck. He forced your head back, baring your mouth to him.

“You’ll taste me now,” he snarled, lips crashing into yours.

The kiss was brutal—teeth knocking, spit spilling. He shoved his tongue deep, choking you with it, swallowing every noise you tried to make. His palm pressed tighter at your throat until your pulse roared in your ears, until breath itself became something you had to beg him for. Drool slicked your chin, his tongue forcing yours down, his grip refusing to let you turn away. It was less a kiss than a violent claiming, his mouth fucking yours the way his cock had already fucked your body raw.

You gasped when he pulled back just enough to let air in, a string of spit hanging obscenely between your mouths. He licked it off your bottom lip, then spat into your mouth deliberately, cruelly, watching you swallow because you had no choice.

“Open,” he growled, forcing your jaw wider with his hand at your throat. “Good. That’s mine too. Every sound. Every swallow.”

Your vision blurred; your thighs squeezed together involuntarily. Terror and heat tangled until you couldn’t breathe for either.

And then Sunoo was there.

He crouched in front of you, hands sliding up your knees to part them wider, his smile infuriatingly calm even in violence. “My turn.”

“No,” Jungwon bit out, but Sunoo was already moving. He grabbed your chin, fingers digging in hard enough to bruise, and wrenched your head away from Jungwon’s mouth. Your neck snapped to the side, and before you could gasp, Sunoo’s lips were on yours.

It wasn’t tender. It was vicious. He sucked your bottom lip until it split, teeth biting down until pain shot bright, then licked the blood from your mouth as if it belonged to him. His tongue drove past your teeth, tasting everything Jungwon had left there, devouring it with obscene relish.

You moaned helplessly, the sound muffled between them.

Jungwon’s grip on your throat tightened, forcing your head back further, rage pouring off him like heat. “She’s mine.”

Sunoo broke the kiss just long enough to sneer against your wet mouth. “Then why is she kissing me back?” He pressed his tongue to yours again, slow and filthy, sucking until spit ran down your chin. Then he pulled back, wiped it with his thumb, and shoved the slick digit back between your lips. “Lick it clean. That’s mine now.”

Your mouth obeyed before your brain caught up.

Jungwon’s chest vibrated with a growl. He bent and bit your jaw, then your throat, leaving purple marks against Sunoo’s fingerprints. His hand clamped your neck harder, forcing you to gasp around Sunoo’s thumb.

“She’s choking on me,” Jungwon snarled. “Not you.”

Sunoo laughed low, mean. He leaned closer, his forehead pressing to yours, his other hand grabbing Jungwon’s wrist on your throat, not to stop it, but to squeeze it tighter. “Then let’s choke her together.”

The pressure doubled. Your eyes watered, spit pooling at the corner of your mouth, drooling down your chin as both of them held you, forced you open, forced you to take them. One mouth kissed you, sucked you, spat into you; the other bit, bruised, pressed your throat until stars danced.

You weren’t kissing anymore. You were being consumed.

And God help you—your body wanted more.

_______

They had you caged between them—Jungwon at your back, Sunoo at your front—two sets of hands closing every door your body might have tried to escape through.

Your pulse beat frantically against Jungwon’s palm at your throat. Sunoo’s fingers dug into your chin, keeping your face tipped up so you couldn’t hide. Their mouths had already ruined you, spit running down your jaw, bruises blooming on your throat and collarbone like dark flowers. Your chest rose too fast, every breath their permission, every sound something they stole from you.

“You see?” Sunoo whispered, voice as sweet as it was cruel. “She’s ready. She’s shaking for us.” His hand slid down, brushing your stomach, spreading lower. “The soil is wet.”

“She’s wet because I fucked her open,” Jungwon snapped against your ear, his breath harsh. “She’s mine to fill.” He ground his cock against your ass through his pants, thick and hard, a promise of what was coming. His teeth found your neck again, biting until your body arched despite yourself.

The two of them moved you as if you were theirs to arrange. Your thighs were forced wide over Sunoo’s lap, your back crushed to Jungwon’s chest. Rough hands tugged your ruined shorts away; cool air hit the slick heat between your legs. Sunoo hummed like a priest receiving an offering.

“Let me taste again.” He didn’t wait for permission. His mouth descended, sucking your clit into his mouth, tongue lapping at you until your eyes rolled back. His hands locked on your thighs, holding you open for him, his moans vibrating into your cunt.

Jungwon shoved your wrists down into the mattress, his cock rutting against you through fabric, his fury pressed into every grind. “Listen to her,” he growled. “Dripping for us. Begging without words.” He yanked his pants open, the blunt head of his cock dragging along your ass, smearing precum. “She’s going to take both. Right now.”

You sobbed, terror and need colliding until you couldn’t tell them apart. “I can’t—”

“You can,” Sunoo cut in smoothly, lifting his head, chin wet with your slick. He stroked your trembling thighs with a mockery of gentleness. “Your body’s already opening. We’ll guide you.” His eyes glimmered, half-devotion, half-madness. “You’ll bloom for us together.”

Jungwon spat into his palm, gripped his cock, and shoved it between your cheeks, rubbing the head against your tight hole until you whined. “Scared?” he hissed, his hand tightening at your throat. “Good. Fear makes you clench tighter.”

Sunoo’s fingers slid inside your cunt again, curling, coaxing, slicking you up for him. He looked up at you, his smile soft even as he stretched you ruthlessly. “Breathe, petal. I’ll be inside you soon. You’ll be so full you won’t remember how to be empty.”

When Sunoo lined himself up, pressing the head of his cock against your soaked entrance, Jungwon shoved his tip harder at your ass, both of them pushing at once. Your cry ripped the air as your body was forced to split, one cock stretching your cunt, the other pressing past the tight ring of muscle until you thought you’d break.

“Fuck,” Jungwon groaned, voice raw. “So tight. Gripping me like a fist.”

“She’s perfect,” Sunoo sighed, already sinking deeper, your walls convulsing around him. “Taking both of us. Our flower.”

It was too much. The stretch burned, overwhelming, obscene. You clawed at the sheets, eyes rolling back as both of them bottomed out, your body trembling violently with the force of being split in two. They didn’t give you time. Jungwon’s hips snapped forward first, brutal, pounding into your ass with the fury of jealousy. Sunoo met him stroke for stroke, slower, deeper, angling until every thrust speared your cunt exactly where it made you scream.

Pinned, stuffed, broken open—you were nothing but their vessel.

“Say it,” Jungwon snarled, hand squeezing your throat until your vision blurred. “Say you’re mine.”

“She’s ours,” Sunoo countered, kissing you, sucking the spit from your mouth, swallowing your gasps. “Tell us, petal. Tell us who you bloom for.”

Your answer was a sob, a whimper, a strangled cry as their cocks moved inside you, filling every inch, grinding against each other through the thin wall of your body until the sensation drove you half-mad.

“Fuck, I can feel him through you,” Jungwon groaned, rutting harder, holding you down as if you might try to run again. “But you’re squeezing me tighter. That’s how I know you’re mine.”

Sunoo’s tongue licked the tears from your cheeks. “She’s crying for me. Look at her. Look how she wants to be saved even while we ruin her.”

Your body convulsed around them, slick gushing down your thighs, every nerve alight. The pain blurred into pleasure until you were begging without words, your nails tearing the sheets, your cries spilling into their mouths as they fought to own your climax.

When you came, it was devastating—your cunt and ass clenching around them both, milking them, dragging them deeper. Jungwon groaned, teeth sinking into your shoulder as he spilled inside you, hot and overwhelming. Sunoo followed seconds later, filling your cunt until you were overflowing, cum dripping down your thighs, both of them holding you so tightly you couldn’t breathe.

They didn’t pull out. They stayed locked inside, cocks twitching, their breaths harsh against your skin.

Jungwon’s hand squeezed your throat one last time, forcing your eyes to his. “Say it,” he demanded, voice hoarse. “Say you’re planted in me.”

Sunoo kissed your cheek, softer but no less cruel. “Say you’ll bloom for us both.”

And you, too full to think, too wrecked to fight, whispered the only truth left in you:

“I can’t belong to just one.”

They smiled—different smiles, but the same hunger.

And you knew you’d never escape again.

_______

woah this was so diffecult to write SO IM SORRY IF IT ISNT THE BEST

THANK YOU FOR READING!!

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© si3rren 2025. all rights reserved.

[lollovern]

- The Garden Left to Rot -

enhypen masterlist

wattpad

inspired by this post

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groundskeeper!yang jungwon x guest!femreader x cult counselor!kim sunoo | obsessive romance | cult horror | forced devotion | ritualistic sex | jealousy and rivalry | fucked-up love triangle | knife kink | corrupted comfort | you will belong to someone eventually | DARK CONTENT AHEAD!!

wc: 14k

summary: You’re sent to a grief recovery retreat hidden in the mountains. But this isn’t therapy — it’s a cult blooming in blood and rot. Jungwon wants to bury you where no one else can touch you. Sunoo wants to crack you open until you bloom for him. Both say it’s healing. But it’s obsession.

warnings: extreme gore, threesome, cult rituals, body horror (flowers under skin, insect scenes), blood play, forced confinement, psychological manipulation, emotional degradation, knife play, religious delusion, obsessive behavior, toxic romance, dubcon themes, ritualistic sex, hallucinations, violence

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The van climbs until the road forgets how to be a road. Pines crowd close; fog slicks the windshield like breath on glass. By the time the driver kills the engine, your phone has been surrendered, the waiver signed, and your name—your real one—folded into a sealed envelope with your belongings.

A hand-painted sign leans crooked against a stone pillar: THE GARDEN.

Beneath it, smaller script: Let go. Become.

Everyone here is an adult—paperwork made that clear. Still, the cluster of arrivals huddle like freshmen. A woman in a bone-white coat stands at the gate, serene as a photograph. “Welcome,” she says. “I’m Director Seo. You won’t need last names here. You won’t need yesterday.” Her smile doesn’t reach her eyes. “We begin with stillness.”

Stillness smells like damp soil and rosemary. The compound spreads in tiers: a glasshouse ribbed with iron; dormitories with shuttered windows; a refectory where steam fogs the panes; a low clinic painted the color of milk. The greenhouse breathes—a pulse of heavy, sweet air each time the door opens. Inside, rows of lilies lean toward heat lamps; vines net the rafters; something rustles in the loam.

“Orientation,” says the boy who appears at Director Seo’s shoulder. He’s young—early twenties—with paper-clean features and the kind of smile people don’t realize is a blade until it’s already inside them. Kim Sunoo. His name tag says Counselor; the ribbon beneath it says Ritual Lead. “Shoes off in the greenhouse,” he adds lightly. “We keep the floors soft.”

Your shoes leave the ground. Cool boards. Warm mist. A bell rings once. The arrivals form a circle on woven mats; a dozen white-robed staff ghost the edges. A few guests have the shaved look of hospital discharge; others wear expensive emptiness like cologne.

“Here,” Sunoo says gently, “we do not share pasts. Only needs.” His gaze slips over faces and lands on you. Not a leer. A selection. “You may speak or sit in silence. Both are honest.”

“I need to sleep,” says a woman with chewed nails. “Like, three days.”

“I need to stop remembering,” a man answers, voice flat.

The girl beside you—twenty-two, maybe—says nothing. Yejin is stitched on her wristband. Her hands are ink-stained. She draws while people talk: a quick, vicious graphite—faces with petal-mouths; ribs like trellises. When you shift, she tilts her sketchbook so you can see the newest figure: a person kneeling in dirt, throat blooming with something that isn’t a flower.

“Beautiful,” Sunoo murmurs, as if he’s praising a child’s first recital. “You have a keen eye for transformation, Yejin.”

From across the greenhouse, someone drags burlap sacks along iron grates. Soil dark as coffee spills from a split seam and oozes across the floor. The man hauling the bags moves like he’s apologized to gravity and refuses to do it again. Yang Jungwon. Groundskeeper on his tag. Grey work shirt. Forearms nicked white with old cuts. He doesn’t look at the circle—doesn’t look at you—until he does, and then he doesn’t stop. Not curiosity. Assessment, like weighing a seed between finger and thumb and deciding if it will live in his earth.

Director Seo outlines rules in the smooth tone of a stewardess reciting crash procedures:

No personal histories in group.

No contact with family for the first fourteen days.

No unsupervised access to the greenhouse after dusk.

Do not remove plant material from designated zones.

What is given to the soil remains in the soil.

“That includes grief,” Sunoo says, almost playful. “Especially grief.”

Your dorm is clean in the way of hospital corridors and mortuaries. Two metal beds. Two lockers. A copy of a softbound booklet on each pillow: STILLNESS GUIDE. Your roommate arrives with a jangle of bracelets and the brittle cheer of someone who learned to smile as self-defense. Mira, 26, volunteer-turned-resident-mentor.

“Welcome-welcome,” she chirps, then lowers her voice. “Pro tip: keep your head down the first three days. They watch how you watch.”

“Who?”

“Everyone.” She flicks her gaze toward the window, where the greenhouse skeletons against dusk. “Especially him.” She means Sunoo—you can hear it in the soft, reverent way. “And the groundskeeper when it’s dark.” That last part is almost a warning.

The bell rings again. Dinner is broth that tastes like the inside of a leaf and bread dense with seeds. You eat at long tables while staff move among you like shepherds. Across from you, a jittery young man, Taesun—24, scars like cat-scratches up his wrists—piles his crusts and crumbles them methodically. He pockets a handful when he thinks no one sees.

“For the worms,” he whispers to the crumbs. “They get hungry at night.”

Mira nudges your knee under the table. “He feeds them behind the east wall,” she murmurs. “Says they keep the nightmares down if they’re busy.”

In the clinic after dinner, a nurse swabs your fingers where the paper edges of the waiver bit skin. Nurse Min is beautiful in the harsh way of women who have decided their faces are weapons. When she says “this will sting,” the consonants soften strangely; a long surgical scar splits the underside of her tongue. She catches you looking and lifts a brow that says yes, I am aware of my mouth. Then—almost tender—she tapes your knuckle with gauze printed with tiny flowers.

Back in the greenhouse, the first night session is called Surrender. The lamps buzz. Mist beads your eyelashes. Sunoo stands barefoot on the damp boards, sleeves rolled, voice a low waterfall.

“Close your eyes,” he says. “Name the weight you want the earth to hold for you. Don’t say it out loud. Let your body say it.”

Around you, bodies sway. Some cry. Some freeze. When you keep your eyes open, Sunoo notices. Of course he does.

“New sprout,” he says softly, close to your ear, and the nickname feels chosen, not random. “You don’t have to force stillness. It happens when the soil recognizes you.”

“Does it?” Your voice is hoarse from disuse and altitude.

“Always.” He smiles. Not kind. Not unkind. Satisfied. “The Garden knows its own.”

Across the rows, Jungwon kneels in the dirt, wrist-deep in loam, planting something without a label. He doesn’t follow Sunoo’s cadence; he follows his own. When one lamp flickers, he rises and fixes it with the swift, competent movements of someone who builds instead of asks. When he sits back, the soil clings to his fingers like shadow.

You should sleep. Instead you help Mira remake your beds with the stiff white sheets that smell faintly of bleach and rosemary. She keeps talking, because silence makes her hands shake.

“I came as a volunteer,” she says, tucking corners square. “Stayed as a patient. It’s easier when they tell you what to be.”

“What do they tell you?”

She smiles without humor. “A flower.” Her eyes slide to your bandaged hand. “Try not to bleed in the greenhouse. They don’t like that.”

“Why?”

“Because the soil remembers.”

At night the compound changes. Lights dim. The wind strips the pines and combs the glass with needles. You lie awake and count breaths—yours, Mira’s, the building’s—until you can’t bear numbers anymore.

You go out.

The air is colder than the dorm suggests. The greenhouse glows from within, a pulse behind fogged panes. Beyond the east wall, something moves with slow persistence. You follow the ripple of disturbed leaves to a break in the hedgerow and find Taesun kneeling with his pockets turned inside out, sowing crumbs into the leaf litter like a penitent farmer.

“The worms,” he says. “They hate hunger.”

“And if they’re hungry?”

“They crawl into you,” he says simply, and his eyes are not crazy; they’re convinced. “They’re looking for warmth.”

A lantern kindles behind you. “Curfew,” a voice says.

You turn. Jungwon holds the light up so it paints his face in bones and gold. Up close, his features soften—stillness without Sunoo’s practiced grace; a patient animal’s attention. The lantern makes a thicket of his lashes. He looks from you to Taesun to your bare feet on the cold boards.

“You’ll catch a chill,” he says to you, like it’s a personal offense. “Shoes. Now.”

You should resent the command. Instead, you feel the unreasonable urge to obey. You start toward the dorms.

“Not that way,” he says. “West path. Easier. Less slope.” He tips the lantern so the light doesn’t blind you while you pass. It’s a small courtesy. It also marks you—every guard on the walkway can see who broke curfew and who brought them back.

“Do you plant at night?” you ask, because silence around him feels like standing at a cliff’s edge and leaning a little too far.

“Always,” he says. He doesn’t volunteer more. His eyes drag briefly to your bandaged hand. “You left blood in the greenhouse.”

“I didn’t—”

He lifts two fingers, the gesture efficient and final. “The soil remembers.” His mouth twitches—not a smile, exactly; the ghost of one. “Mira talks too much.”

“Is that against the rules?”

“It’s against survival.”

He walks you to the dorm porch and stops at the bottom step like there’s an invisible line he won’t cross. The night carries pine resin and wet metal. You want to ask him what he plants without labels, what grows under lamps that mimic suns, why the staff wear rosaries made of seeds.

He says, low, “Don’t follow sounds you don’t understand.”

“Why?”

“Because some things here answer to being watched.” He tilts the lantern, and for a heartbeat you see something like a tenderness he hides even from himself. “Sleep.”

You try. You fail. When you finally slide under, it’s the shallow kind of rest that hears every hinge complain.

Morning stains the glasshouse pale gold. Breakfast is porridge and a shot glass of bitter green. “Chlorophyll,” Mira grimaces. “For purity. Or the aesthetic.” She scans the refectory like she’s counting exits. “There’ll be a Placement Walk after breakfast. Don’t volunteer. They love volunteers.”

“What is it?”

She cuts her eyes toward the greenhouse. “They take someone to the grove and ‘help them choose a garden name.’ Sometimes they come back with a wreath. Sometimes without their voice for a while.”

Director Seo taps her cup. “Today’s Placement Walk is for… Yejin.”

The graphite girl looks up, startled as a deer. Her pencil stills. Sunoo’s smile brightens by half a watt. “I’ll take her,” he offers, hand already extended. “I’ve seen her drawings. She understands transformation.”

If you didn’t sleep, you are alert now. Jungwon appears in the doorway like the building made him. His gaze flicks over the room, and when it lands on Yejin’s shaking knuckles, something barely visible tightens in his jaw.

“I’ll go with you,” he says to Sunoo without looking away from the girl.

“Of course,” Sunoo replies. Silk over steel. “Two witnesses. Very proper.”

They lead her out between them: the counselor with a palm light on her shoulder; the groundskeeper holding the door open so it doesn’t bite her. The room exhales when the door closes. Mira’s bracelets clink as her hands start to shake again.

“They’ll bring her back,” you say, because logic is a habit.

“Usually,” Mira says.

Taesun folds bread crumbs into his napkin with ritual care. “If the worms are fed.”

“Stop with the worms—”

He looks up, suddenly fiercer than his tremor allows. “This place eats. I just like to decide what it eats.”

You leave your spoon in your bowl. The porridge lurches in your gut like a tide. Through the greenhouse glass, you can’t see the grove, only the suggestion of trunks and a slit of path. Time grows teeth.

When they return, Yejin walks in her body like someone has moved the furniture. A crown of woven reeds presses her hair flat. There’s a smear of green at the corner of her mouth, like she’s chewed a leaf until it bled. She carries her sketchbook close to her chest as if it’s the last piece of herself no one has touched.

“What did you choose?” Director Seo asks.

Yejin’s voice is soft but intact. “Night-blooming cereus.”

“A flower that opens in darkness,” Sunoo says, pleased. “Perfect.”

Jungwon stands behind them, sleeves rolled to the elbow, forearms dirt-streaked. A single thorn scratches the back of his hand, a bright new welt. You don’t know why your chest warms at the proof that something here can still hurt them too.

As the room settles, Nurse Min touches your shoulder. “Consult,” she says, consonants rounded. In the clinic, she peels your bandage, checks the small cut, nods. “Fine.”

“Was the walk… normal?” you ask, too casual. “For Yejin.”

Nurse Min dabs salve with a gentleness that doesn’t fit her knife-edged face. “Normal is a shape you learn,” she says. “Here, it is round.” She taps your knuckle. “Don’t open yourself on purpose. Things may grow inside.”

“Like what?”

Her eyes flick briefly toward the greenhouse. “Names.”

By afternoon the schedule has you shoveling, watering, scrubbing, writing lines. I am ready to be less. You write it a hundred times until the words separate from meaning and become a pattern of stems and loops. Outside, Jungwon clears a new bed along the south wall. His shovel bites; his shoulders move with the reliable rhythm of practiced labor. A boy twice your size steps into his path and mutters something you can’t hear. Jungwon doesn’t raise his voice. He simply looks at the boy until the boy forgets how to stand where he’s standing and moves.

“Don’t stare,” Mira warns from beside you, but she’s staring too. “He notices.”

“He noticed last night,” you say.

Mira goes still. “You went out?”

“For air.”

“Air is how they catch you,” she whispers, and for the first time her cheer fails. “Promise me you won’t go alone again.”

You don’t promise. You also don’t say I don’t know who I am without alone.

At dusk, group again. Sunoo has you sit closer to him than yesterday. When you resist, he laughs softly, as if you’re charming rather than disobedient. “We sit where the light needs us,” he says. You wonder if that’s a rule or a line he likes. While others speak, he doesn’t look at them; he watches their hands, their throats, the wet edge of eyes. When your breath hitches at someone’s story, he turns his head sharply like a wolf hearing snow crack.

“What would you let go of?” he asks you, voice pitched so the rest of the circle hears only the question, not the ownership threaded through it.

You could say: the fire, the last call you ignored, the smell of burning hair. Instead, you say nothing. He accepts your silence as if it were obedience he taught you.

Outside the glass, Jungwon is a darker shape among dark shapes, moving a hose along the rows. When his head turns toward the circle, it isn’t to the whole; it is to you. He holds you there for a breath you feel in your wrists. Then he tips the hose, and water falls like rain on metal bones.

You sleep after midnight because your body ambushes you. You wake to weight. Not on you; in the air, a heaviness like weather. The greenhouse lights are out. The compound holds its breath.

Something is under your pillow.

You slide your hand beneath it and touch paper—the rough tooth of a sketchbook page. You draw it out under the dim nightlight and see yourself. Not flattering. Not cruel. Exact. You kneel on dark soil, mouth open, and something vines out—delicate stems laced with thorns. Hands—two sets—hold your shoulders lightly, possessively: one set with ink stains, one with dirt ground into the half moons of the nails. At the bottom, Yejin’s cramped script: “Some flowers only open when watched.”

Mira stirs. “What is it?”

“Art,” you say, and your voice surprises you with how steady it is.

“What kind?”

“Prophetic,” you answer, because the truth is an animal pacing the edge of the bed and you’re not ready to let it into your ribs yet.

You slide the drawing back under your pillow and close your eyes. Across the compound, the night shifts. In your mind, Sunoo’s smile threads petals through your tongue. In reality, Jungwon’s lantern skates once across the fogged panes, a slow-moving star. Two orbits, caught in the same sky, tightening.

Slow burn, the booklet promised. Healing begins when you stop resisting.

You do not stop.

You breathe. You listen to the soil remembering you.

And you wait.

______

Morning arrives with a whistle under the door and the faint itch of grit in your teeth, as if you’ve been speaking to the ground in your sleep. Breakfast is the same: porridge, a bitter green shot, tea that tastes like boiled bark. Mira counts sips, bracelets clinking like quiet alarms. Taesun crushes his toast to dust and pockets it, eyes bright with purpose. Yejin sits very still, crown of reeds damp against her hair, sketchbook closed for once like a door she’s guarding with her body.

Director Seo taps her cup. “Today begins the Mouth Fast,” she says, voice smooth as tile. “Speech is the first addiction. For twenty-four hours, we practice voicelessness. Carry your stone”—a monk in linen sets a bowl of river stones on each table—“and let it hold your words. Anyone who breaks the fast will do a double shift in the greenhouse trenches. Sunoo will lead stillness. Jungwon will direct labor.”

A murmur rises and dies, mouths pressing shut to prove eagerness. Mira puts a flat, oval stone in your palm. “Don’t lose it,” she whispers, already breaking the rule. “They’ll say the soil took your voice because you were careless.”

You tuck the stone into your sleeve and meet Sunoo’s eyes across the hall. He’s already watching—of course he is. The smile he gives you would be harmless if you hadn’t seen how he moves when he’s pleased: slower, closer, like a candle drawn to oxygen. Jungwon lingers by the service door with a clipboard and a coil of hose on his shoulder, scanning tables the way a shepherd counts sheep by the sound of their breathing.

Chores first. Outside, the air needles your lungs; the mountain wears its cold like a second skin. Jungwon assigns tasks without looking at his list. “Mira, refectory herbs. Taesun, east wall compost. Yejin, with Nurse Min in the clinic.” His gaze slides to you and steadies. “You—paths and drains. Stay out of the grove.” Not a suggestion.

You carry a stiff-bristled broom down stone paths glazed with last night’s dew. The greenhouse ribs glow under weak sun; from inside, lamps hum, and something leafy slaps damply as if it’s learned the shape of applause. By the east wall, Taesun kneels with a small shovel and a reverence that would be holy if it didn’t smell like rot.

He tips crumbs in a neat line, then pauses to show you something cupped in his palm: a white, blind tangle coiling in damp soil. Worms, yes, but too many knotted together, a living thread. He beams, proud. You force your lips into gratitude and keep sweeping. If you stop, you will hear them, and if you hear them, you will dream them.

A shadow falls across your broom. Jungwon holds out a pair of soft-soled garden shoes with the temporary patience of a man who prefers doing to explaining. “Your feet,” he says. “You bruise easily.”

You glance at your bare socks, damp to the ankle. “Is that a rule?”

“It’s a reality,” he says; the word lands like weight. He crouches without asking, sets the shoes on the path, and steps back, gaze down so you can decide if you’ll take his help. You put them on. They’re warm from his hands. He notices the lift of your breath and looks away so the noticing won’t embarrass you. When he straightens, his eyes snag on the river stone tucked in your sleeve. “Don’t drop that,” he says. “The ravens like to steal them.”

You arch a brow—Are you joking?—but he’s already moving, a steady, unshowy force among the clatter of chores.

By mid-morning the Mouth Fast is a taut cord running through the compound. The quiet isn’t peace; it’s suppression, and suppression hums. Sunoo runs stillness from the center of the greenhouse like a maestro conducting silence. He has you sit within his radius; you don’t know how you know that, but you do. When a guest’s shoulders begin to shake, his hand appears at the nape of their neck—just weight, just heat, just enough to persuade the body that obedience feels like care.

He comes to you last, when the lamps have warmed the panes to sweating. He kneels, not quite touching, gaze on your throat. “Your pulse is stubborn,” he says in a voice pitched for you alone. “It hates rhythm. I like that.” He brushes the air near your jawline, not touching, so you feel it anyway. “The stone will teach it obedience. If you’re good at listening.”

You hold his eyes and refuse to nod. He smiles, pleased with your defiance like a trainer who prefers wild animals because they make better trophies. “We’ll work on it,” he whispers, and stands.

After lunch—a bowl of broth filtered until flavor gives up—you’re pulled into the clinic with half a dozen others for “check-ins.” Nurse Min sits you on a stool and unwraps your finger. The cut is a thin mouth now, pink with newness. She touches a gloved finger to the gauze and sniffs it as if the body has a scent that changes when it’s lying.

“Does it itch?” she asks.

You hesitate. The truth is embarrassing. “Everything does,” you admit. “Under the skin. Like… like something wants out.”

“Something wants in,” she corrects mildly. She takes tweezers to the pad of your finger and draws out a hair-fine splinter you didn’t know was there. It isn’t wood—it’s pale and sappy, flexing like a root in the air. She drops it in a jar and screws the lid tight. “Names need medium,” she says. “Don’t let anyone put theirs under your skin.”

“Is that medical advice?”

“It’s survival.” She tapes a fresh bandage printed with tiny leaves, then, softer, “If you start tasting flowers, spit.”

You leave the clinic with your mouth dry as chalk. On the steps, Yejin waits like a shadow that forgot to attach to a body. She presses a folded paper to your palm and flits off before you can unfold it. In the corner of the page, her fast, lethal graphite: you in profile, throat open, something like a stem ghosting up under the jaw. In the negative space behind you, two silhouettes—Sunoo’s soft edges; Jungwon’s blunt solidity—blur toward one another without touching. Underneath, her careful script: Not yet. But soon.

The Mouth Fast bends afternoon into a colder shape. Without words, people show who they are. Mira hums under her breath and taps her stone against her teeth like a bead. Taesun counts breath with his fingers on his ribs. A new arrival—Hana, thirty and jewel-hard—walks like a woman who refuses to ask permission from the air. An older man, Mr. Ko, rows his spoon through soup with the concentration of a man pretending there is a river and a boat that can take him off this mountain.

At dusk, Director Seo calls for the Seed Burial. “We surrender what we’ve hoarded,” she says, and volunteers step forward with small slips of paper seeded with something that will sprout if the soil wants it. They kneel, press the papers into a rectangle of fresh-turned earth, and cover them with a thin skin of loam. The lamps go low. Sunoo stands at their backs. Jungwon stands at their front, shovel grounded like a staff.

You don’t move. You have nothing to bury you can stand to name.

A woman you recognize from orientation—the one who needed three days of sleep—places both palms flat on the soil like it’s someone she loves. Her breath hitches once; she swallows whatever it shook loose. As the last handful of earth covers the names, something beneath the surface shifts. Not the modest swell of seeds drinking. A shove from below.

The crowd stills. You feel it again—a push. The soil flexes and sighs, grains settling. Someone’s hand jerks back as if bitten. Sunoo’s smile does not change, which means it changes. “The ground recognizes an offering,” he says pleasantly. “Stand, flowers. Let the dark do what it’s for.”

Jungwon’s eyes are on the dirt, not the people. His jaw flexes once, twice. You have the sharp, childish thought—He hears it too—and the relief that follows is so naked you almost miss the fear riding it.

Night stitches the compound tight. The Mouth Fast persists: tongues held, little pantomimes replacing argument. In bed, Mira sleeps with her open palm on her stone like it might roll away. You face the wall because the drawing under your pillow is a magnet and your skull is iron.

A scrape wakes you—a quick, purposeful sound under the window. You slide out of bed and ease the latch. Cold breath pours in. On the path below, a lantern moves slow as a planet. You follow, soft-soled shoes silent on the boards, the stone in your sleeve tapping your wrist like a heart that’s climbed too high.

The lantern stops. Jungwon steps into its circle. He doesn’t look surprised to see you. He looks like a man who has laid a trap and found what he baited it for. He lifts the lantern just enough to catch your face without flaying you with light.

He puts a finger to his mouth—quiet—and crooks that same finger: come.

You should run. You go.

He takes you along the west path to a low, fenced plot you haven’t noticed in daylight, because in daylight everything looks like something else. Up close, the boards are stained darker than weather. He stops you with a hand on your sleeve. His grip is gentle; his hand is strong. “Do not speak,” he says, and for the first time today the command lands like care, not control.

He tilts the lantern over the fence. The light stratifies a pit maybe two meters long, maybe one deep, lined with rough timbers and crawling with the industry of decay. You see peels, stems, pot scrapings—normal compost—then catch on something pale threaded through like lace: cartilage? You squint, heart hammering, and in among the skins and stems you see hair—just a clump, just enough to be undeniable. The sour-metal stink under the rot answers a question you didn’t know you were asking until now.

You stagger, mute because the rule still binds your mouth. Jungwon’s hand rises like he planned for your body to try to leave you. He catches your elbow with two fingers and steadies you without pulling you closer. “Breathe,” he says, voice so low the pit swallows it.

You breathe. He watches your lungs move under your shirt as if measuring if they’ll keep their job.

“What is this,” you manage, a whisper that bruises the fast.

“Everything that isn’t needed,” he says. It is both the most honest sentence you’ve heard since you arrived and the worst one. “Don’t come here alone.”

“Why show me?”

His mouth tightens. He weighs the truth and hands you a ration. “Because you will go looking. Better you see what is true than what you can’t live through.”

He lifts the lantern away; the pit dissolves back into darkness. When he looks at you again, the composure you’ve seen him wear like a uniform slips an inch. “Next time,” he says, “wake me.”

“How?” It comes out harder than you intend. “Do I knock on the earth?”

“On my door.” He says it like a correction and a promise. “I’d rather carry you than find you down there with your throat open to the sky.”

You swallow. The stone in your sleeve digs your wrist bone.

He walks you back along the west path, keeping the lantern low so you don’t blind yourself and tumble. At the bottom of the dorm steps, he stops as if a line of salt has been poured between you. “Sleep,” he says. Then, almost grudgingly—no, carefully, like he fears generosity might teach you to expect it—“You did well.”

“You mean quiet,” you say.

“I mean you didn’t lie to yourself while you were looking.” He turns the lantern, and for a heartbeat your faces share a circle of light. It is not intimate, and it is.

Inside, the warm dark smells like bodies and disinfection. Mira turns in her sleep, bracelets whickering. Your hands shake. Not with the adrenaline of the pit—though that remains like a taste at the back of your throat—but with the realization that both men see you. Sunoo sees the mechanism; Jungwon sees the fracture line. You can’t decide which is worse.

The Mouth Fast breaks at dawn with a bell so soft it feels like a secret. Voices resume like a creek finding an old bed; people speak too loudly, then blush, then laugh at their own relief. Director Seo praises “compliance” as if it were a sacrament. In the refectory, mugs clack, spoons scrape. Words return as barter.

You don’t trust yours yet.

Sunoo flows through tables like sunlight convincing itself it’s holy. He catches your empty mug, pours tea, and sets it in front of you with a flourish that makes a few heads turn. “How did the silence fit?” he asks, lazy, interested. It isn’t small talk. It’s a probe shaped like kindness.

“Like wire,” you say.

He smiles, delighted—as if you’ve told him a secret about yourself he can use. “It looks good on you,” he says, and taps your river stone where it sits on the table as if he gave it to you, as if it obeys him too. “We have Talkback today. You and me.”

“Is that optional?”

“In principle,” he says. “In practice, most people prefer to be seen.” He leans in, lower voice. “You certainly do.”

He leaves before you can snap that you preferred to be alive, actually. Across the room, Jungwon stops at the threshold, takes the refectory in at a glance, and chooses a seat with his back to the wall. He eats fast, plain, as if food is fuel and surveillance is dessert. When he lifts his mug, you notice the fresh welt across the back of his hand—a thorn, yesterday, dragging its punctuation.

Talkback is held in a small room off the clinic, windowless, lit by a lamp that chooses flattery over truth. Sunoo sits too close, but because he knows what too close does to bodies, he leaves exactly enough air that you can fool yourself into thinking you could stand if you wanted to. He doesn’t touch you. He rests his forearms on his knees, hands open, posture full of a patience he wears like silk.

“What is the shape of your fear?” he asks, as if fear is polite enough to have geometry.

“Wide,” you say.

“Flat?”

“Deep.”

He grins. “Good. Honesty makes my job easier.” He looks at your mouth, then your hands, then your throat. “Last night you broke curfew.”

It isn’t a question. “I walked.”

“To the west path,” he says, savoring the corridor of it.

“Is that forbidden?”

“Not if you were with someone.”

You hold his gaze. You don’t look away. You don’t nod. You don’t give him Jungwon.

Sunoo’s smile returns, but thinner. “We don’t punish curiosity,” he says silkily. “We shape it.” He nods to your sleeve. “Keep the stone. I like how you sound when you hold it.”

“I didn’t speak.”

“You breathed differently,” he says, and you hate that you believe him. “This afternoon I want you in the greenhouse. We’ll do matching breath. I’ll keep count so you don’t have to.”

Your stomach remembers the pit and rolls. “What if I say no?”

“Then we’ll go slower,” he says, as if you asked him to make it sweeter. “That’s the kind of consent you like, isn’t it? The kind that arrives after your body learns the lesson.”

You stand because sitting feels like agreeing. He doesn’t stop you. He nods as if you’ve completed a task he set in his head.

“Good,” he says. “The roots are listening.”

Outside, the day is too bright in the way of mountains pretending to be gentle. You find Mira tending pots of kitchen herbs—mint, rosemary, a vicious little basil. “You look like you saw a ghost,” she says without looking up.

“I saw the compost,” you say.

She flinches so hard the basil shudders. “You don’t say it out loud,” she hisses, then checks herself, forces her voice calm again. “Names wake things.”

“Whose hair is in it?”

“Everyone’s,” she says. “Eventually.”

By late afternoon your muscles revolt, and stillness becomes a thing you have to hold down with both hands. In the greenhouse, Sunoo runs breath like a metronome. When he kneels behind a girl whose hands won’t stop shaking, he doesn’t touch her skin; he places his palm two inches away from her spine and waits. The girl’s shoulders ease; her breath learns his count. You hate him for it. You hate her relief. You hate that your body pays attention.

Jungwon moves along the rows with a bucket and a dull pruning blade, nicking stems, turning soil, resetting stakes. When a lamp pops and goes dim, he crosses to replace it without being called. On his way back, he passes near your mat—near, not past. The air shifts with him: sweat, iron, soil, a clean note like water running under rock. He doesn’t look down. He scratches the back of his wrist where a thorn welt cross-hatches older scars and says, as if the comment belongs to the room, “Some things only grow when you pretend you can’t see them.”

You don’t know if he means the plants, the people, or you.

Evening comes with teeth. The bell pulls everyone to the refectory; the sky sits heavy, swollen with weather that refuses to begin. Over dinner, Hana spills her tea and swears loudly enough that half the room jumps; then she laughs, tips her chin like she meant to do it, and glares at anyone who looks sorry on her behalf. Mr. Ko tells Taesun to stop feeding the worms like they’re pets; Taesun bares his teeth, half-smile, half warning. Nurse Min pockets a spoon someone bent into a hook. Director Seo watches it all with the small, sated smile of a zookeeper whose animals are thriving.

Night brings the first scream.

Not a long one. Not a movie howl. A single, keening note cut off hard, like a rope being cut. The compound freezes; forks stop halfway to mouths; breath holds. Sunoo is already on his feet, smile sharpened into usefulness. Jungwon’s chair scrapes; he’s moving before you can find your shoes.

They go toward the grove at a measured pace that says they already know what they’ll find. Director Seo lifts her hand. “Stay seated,” she says, and the command lands like weight on your shoulders. Mira’s fingers take yours under the table and squeeze so hard your knuckles grind. You squeeze back. Your mouth tastes like rosemary and fear.

You wait. The greenhouse sweats. The clock you aren’t allowed to see walks itself around the hour by the sound of your blood in your ears. When the door opens again, Sunoo comes in first, serene, coat unwrinkled. Jungwon follows with a bundled shape in his arms—a blanket, a softness of color, too long where a body should bend.

A gasp skips the room. “She fainted,” Sunoo says, which is both intolerably insufficient and the only story you’ll be allowed. “A cleansing reaction. She will rest. We will keep vigil over the names she surrendered.”

He doesn’t say who. Your mind fills the blank with the sleeping woman from breakfast, because that is who you fear for, and fear is a magnet. Jungwon carries the bundle past. You know how much weight that is—your body recognizes the set of his jaw, the economy of his gait. He does not look at you. He doesn’t look anywhere but the door to the clinic, as if any glance could spill what he’s holding.

The dining hall exhales like it’s been underwater too long. Director Seo claps once, neat. “We will not gossip,” she says. “We will not catastrophize. We will practice serenity.”

You don’t sleep. Not because you’re brave—because you’re scared correctly now, and scared correctly people stay awake. When you doze, you wake to the sensation that someone has put a leaf on your tongue and asked you to pray with it in your mouth. You spit into your sheet and find nothing. When you sit up, a shadow peels off the wall near the window and becomes Jungwon.

You nearly fling yourself out of bed. He doesn’t move, as if sudden gestures would spook you. He should not be in the dorms after lights; rules are their own religion here. He breaks this one like he breaks branches: cleanly, without apology.

“You left your shoes,” he says, low. He sets them at the foot of your bed, lined up, laces tucked. His voice is stripped of everything but function. “Don’t go barefoot again.”

“What happened?” you ask, whispering because anything louder might wake the dark.

“Don’t ask me,” he says, and for a breath you think he’s refusing. Then he adds, “Because I’ll tell you.” His gaze drags over your face, cataloging fine tremors, the cracked edge of your mouth, the way one hand fists in the sheet like rope. “Sleep,” he says. “You’ll need it.”

He is out the way he came, the door kissing its jamb like a secret.

You try to obey. The mountain presses its cold face to the window and listens. Somewhere, a lantern moves. Somewhere else, a man like a hymn kneels by a bed that is too light.

You put the river stone back in your sleeve and hold it against your pulse until the beat stops arguing with your bones. You remember the jar in Nurse Min’s clinic with the threadlike root curled at the bottom like a question mark. You picture Yejin’s hand drawing you with something under your skin you didn’t agree to carry.

Stillness was the promise. Obedience was the price. You have paid neither. Now the Garden pays attention.

And you, finally, are afraid.

_________

You wake with the taste of copper and rosemary slicked over your tongue, as if someone pressed a leaf there while you slept and whispered hold it. A welt has risen along your bandaged finger—thin, pale, almost pretty. When you press it, it flexes under the skin like something answering from underneath.

Breakfast is a choreography of clatter and eyes. Mira smiles too hard; her bracelets rattle out a code you can’t read. Taesun tips crumbs into his pocket with priestly concentration. Yejin’s crown of reeds has dried to a brittle halo; she draws with her pencil held like a knife. Hana sits mean and diamond-bright, daring the room to dull her edges. Mr. Ko’s spoon cuts the same path through porridge like a boatman refusing any other shore. Director Seo watches the surface of her tea the way people watch the sea for bodies.

“The Naming Rite will be held at sundown,” she announces, as if she’s asking for the salt. “Those selected have been notified.”

Sunoo lifts his eyes, and that’s your notification.

Mira’s fingers find your knee under the table and clamp. She shakes her head once, small, fast—refuse. You don’t know what refusal looks like here besides a story they will tell about you afterward.

“Drink,” Nurse Min says when you pass through the clinic to turn in your night report—how many hours asleep, how many awake, whether you dreamed of heat, teeth, drowning. She hands you a glass the green of pond water. You smell it, and it smells like lawn and iron. “Chlorophyll with a little hem,” she says, seeing your face. “Calms the heart.”

“Calms or slows?” Your voice scratches.

She cants her head. “Same action, different motive.” She glances at your finger. “Still itching?”

“It… moves,” you say, and the honesty makes your stomach pitch. “Like a thread.”

“Everything alive wants a home,” she replies. She peels the bandage with sure fingers. Underneath, the welt has subdivided into delicate veins, a fine network. Not veins. Veining. It looks like leaf. She presses the back of her glove along it; the pattern darkens, limned green under the skin. “Names need medium,” she repeats. “Keep your mouth closed in the greenhouse today. Even when you want to answer.”

You want to ask answer what, but Sunoo is in the doorway, dusk caught in the lamplight of his hair. He doesn’t knock; he glides in like permission. “Our new sprout,” he says, pleased to find you in a chair. “I’ll take her.”

Nurse Min’s mouth goes a little flatter. “She eats first.”

“Of course.” Sunoo’s smile doesn’t move. “Then we breathe.”

The greenhouse sweats. Heat lamps hum like insects; the glass with its rain of condensation blurs the mountain into a myth. Staff move among the rows with trays of soil sheets—thin paper seeded with something that glitters faintly when the light hits it wrong. “Embedded affirmations,” Sunoo tells the group. “You write what you’ll surrender. The seeds will carry it.”

Hana snorts. “Is the surrender refundable?”

Sunoo’s eyes quicken. “There’s always a transaction,” he says. “We just prefer you know the price.” He looks back to you. “Mat,” he says, and it isn’t a request.

You sit. He kneels behind you, palms hovering two inches from your ribs. No touch—just the sense of touch waiting. “Open your mouth,” he murmurs. The admonition from Nurse Min echoes; you clamp your lips. Sunoo’s pleased noise lands against your neck like breath. “Good. Breathe through your nose. In on four, out on six. I’ll count.”

His voice is a rope you have to grab to keep from slipping. When your breath shudders, he matches it; when it calms, he pursues. On the sixth cycle, something sweet pushes the air—lily, wet earth—and you remember the pit and want to be sick. “Stay,” he says, reading your recoil. “Stay where your body is. Don’t run from it. That’s where people rot.”

Across the rows, Jungwon replaces a cracked lamp with quick, sure hands. He doesn’t look at you until he does, a glance like a hand closing on the back of your neck. The air between you tightens. His forearms are netted with healed cuts, white against brown; a fresh welt crosses them like a red thread. When Sunoo says “out on six,” Jungwon turns the dial and the light hums obedient, and you wonder whether the whole building breathes to his count.

Yejin brings you a tray of seed-paper without being asked. When you reach, her gaze drops to your bandage. She moves the pencil like a blade and sketches the back of your hand: the delicate leaf veining, the suggestion of something wanting to break surface. She writes Not yet over the knuckles and slides the paper into your lap. Her mouth is a thin line; her eyes are large and dry and furious.

The day’s chores are smaller and meaner than yesterday’s. Scrub the condensation gutters. Rake. Haul sacks labeled Bone Meal that smell like old molars. Taesun sings under his breath in a language not meant for mouths and leaves a damp trail of crumbs along the east wall. Mr. Ko fetches and carries with blank efficiency, his face empty as a cleaned plate.

By late afternoon, a woman you know only as Auntie Hye—fiftyish, hair cut short for neatness, eyes that scan like a mother bird’s—begins to cough. At first it is dry and prim; then she hunches, pushes a hand to her chest and coughs wet. A ribbon of something bright pops free onto her palm. Petals. White. Tissue-thin and slick with saliva. A few guests laugh—nerves, delight, cruelty. Nurse Min is there before the room decides what to feel, hand under Auntie Hye’s chin, tissues ready. Hye coughs again, harder, and a clot of petals spills: red-tipped now, streaked. She hacks out a final cluster and sags. The tissues are sodden. The petals look like tongues.

“Pollination,” Sunoo says calmly. “Sometimes the body rehearses letting go by practicing bloom.”

Auntie Hye shakes her head, breath hitching. “I didn’t—” she starts.

Sunoo presses two fingers lightly to her throat. “You did.”

She closes her mouth.

Jungwon comes with a bucket and a flat spade; he scoops the petals into the bucket without expression. Your stomach tilts; you grip the bench until the wood prints itself into your palm. He doesn’t look at anyone. He takes the bucket toward the compost. You see his jawclench once when he passes the pit door and files that, like a photographed crime scene.

After the petals, other small horrors follow as if emboldened. A boy pulls his sleeve up to scratch and reveals a faint green tracery along his inner arm; when he scrubs at it, the skin reddens and puffs and the pattern brightens like a pressed leaf held to light. Mira slices a basil stem and it bleeds thin, clean sap; she runs her thumb along the cut and licks it without thinking, then startles at the taste and laughs too loudly. Taesun tips a paper cup into a drain, and a pale, slick worm writhes against the grate and splits into two thinner threads that both crawl the wrong way, toward his fingers. He coos like they’re babies and tucks them back into mud.

“Don’t feed your nightmares,” Nurse Min says without looking up from the woman whose mouth she swabs. “They grow fine on their own.”

By evening, the heat in the greenhouse feels like a hand that won’t lift. The lamps go low. Director Seo stands by the iron ribs with her clipboard like a prayerbook. “For the Naming Rite,” she says, “we welcome Sunoo as Voice and Jungwon as Hands.”

Voice and Hands. A division of power simple enough to live inside.

You are led—gently, unmistakably—toward the central bed, a rectangle of fresh loam bordered by smooth stones. Yejin edges after you, sketchbook clutched to her chest; Nurse Min blocks her with just a glance. “Not this,” Min murmurs. “Later.”

Mira steps forward—too fast—“I can go instead,” she says, smile like a knife wrapped in tissue.

Sunoo’s smile is silk on a nail. “We don’t barter names,” he says. “We harvest them.”

Your knees give. Not dramatic; a small buckling, the body remembering the ground. Sunoo’s hand is there without touching you, a near-weight at your shoulder. “Kneel,” he says, as if reminding you what your body already decided. “Head up. We face what we bring.”

Jungwon stands at the foot of the bed, shovel grounded. Close, his expression is the same flat steel as his blade. He looks at your throat the way carpenters look at walls: not hunger—assessment. When he speaks, his voice is small enough to belong only to the three of you. “Do you know what you’re giving?” he asks.

You try to say No. What comes out is “Something I can’t carry.”

“Good,” he says, and the word is not kindness. It’s calibration.

Sunoo’s fingers hover at your jaw, turning your face by the gravity of proximity. “Open,” he tells you, and your mouth obeys because your body recognizes a doctor’s tone even when it comes from someone who would rather be a priest. He places a petal on your tongue. It tastes like cold tea and a coin. “Hold,” he says. He waits. When you swallow despite yourself, his smile flares. “You see? The body knows ceremony even when the mind resists.”

He steps behind you. You feel his presence like a heat lamp. Jungwon moves to your side and holds out his hand. On his palm: a knife. Not sharp—its edge has been blunted until it’s a tongue of metal—but its point is honest. He waits until you meet his eyes; only then does he set the flat of the blade against your sternum. The steel is cool. Your skin fists under it.

“This is how we write it,” Sunoo says, and his breath touches the shell of your ear like a whispering moth. “Not deep. Not cruel. Not yet.”

The blade slides up without breaking skin, tracing between ribs, across the slow bell of breath—sternum, clavicle, the notch at your throat. The metal leaves a trail of gooseflesh; your pulse hammers against it like an animal trapped under the lid of a box. Jungwon’s other hand is steady at your shoulder, not pushing, not holding, just there, a second horizon the body can measure itself against.

“Name what cannot follow you,” Sunoo murmurs. It could be a real question. It could be a spell. Your mouth fills with the taste of flower and iron; words gather behind it like flies at meat.

You can’t say the fire; to say it would open something that the soil will keep. You say, “The last night.”

“Again,” Sunoo purrs.

“The last night,” you repeat, and the room tilts like a field under wind.

The congregation—guests in white, staff in linen—sways. Mira has both hands pressed to her lips. Taesun rocks in small, violent arcs. Yejin’s pencil moves; she draws you kneeling, two sets of hands marking you; she smudges the graphite so the air around you looks like breath or smoke.

The blade dips, lifts, comes to rest against your throat’s right side. You feel the exact spot where it would enter if it wanted to. Jungwon’s pulse is visible in his wrist; steady, heavier than yours. He moves the flat in a small crescent along the tendon, and your voice leaves you for a moment—pure reflex. A small, unpretty sound. Sunoo shivers behind you, pleased as if you performed a note he’d been coaching you toward.

“Do you understand the price?” Sunoo asks softly.

“No,” you say honestly.

“Beautiful,” he says, delighted. “No one ever does until after.”

He lifts the petal from your mouth with two fingers and lays it on your tongue again like communion. You hold it. Jungwon takes your left hand. His palm is rough and warm; soil lives in the whorls of his fingerprints. He pricks the pad of your finger with the very tip of the blunted knife, as if he wants to remind the blade of its older religion. A bead of blood swells, bright, neat. He turns your hand and presses that red to the seed-paper waiting in a shallow trench at the bed’s edge. Your blood bleeds into the paper like water into thirst.

“Now,” Sunoo says, voice dropped low enough to live in your bones, “we plant what you are not. So what you are can grow.”

Jungwon folds loam over the paper. The soil is cool even in this hothouse weather. It sucks at your finger when he presses your hand flat to it. Something moves underneath—something too quick for roots. Your stomach rocks. You try to pull back. Jungwon’s hand covers yours, firm as a yoke; Sunoo’s hand wraps your throat—not squeezing, just holding the column steady. You are pinned in two places that translate directly to obedience.

“Breathe,” Sunoo says.

You do. The soil under your hand warms like a mouth.

The congregation murmurs. Not words; the sound bodies make when they agree to a script. Director Seo watches like a reader flipping to the end to be sure it comes out as written. Nurse Min’s face has the set of a woman who’s decided to count a vein until morning.

The thing under the soil stills.

Jungwon lifts your hand and wipes the loam away with his thumb. The smear looks like war paint. Sunoo releases your throat and smooths his palm down the line his fingers left, a correction, an apology, a brand. He bends and whispers against your ear, “You belong to the ground,” and then, after a heartbeat, “and to us while you’re learning.”

His mouth never touches skin. The idea of it does.

The Rite closes with a bell that tastes like copper in your teeth. People file out as if stepping around a sleeping animal. Mira gets to you first, palms hot where she holds your face. “Drink water,” she hisses. “Don’t go to sleep. If you dream the name, it sticks.”

“I didn’t give it,” you say.

She laughs, a small animal sound. “You bled. That’s enough.”

Mr. Ko offers a clean handkerchief without meeting your eyes. Hana watches from a distance like a hawk deciding if a rabbit is worth stooping for when the field is full of easier meat. Taesun beams, mud on his lip, as if he’s just watched a very good wedding.

Yejin presses a drawing into your hand and vanishes. It’s you kneeling, hands marked, a line along your throat that is not a cut but knows where one would go. Over your shoulder, two shadows bend—one a heat-halo, one a blunt storm. Soon, she’s written. Don’t say yes with your mouth.

Night. The mountain holds its breath. The lamps in the greenhouse go black one by one until the glass is only a shape. You sit on your dorm bed and watch your hands not shake. Mira sleeps curled like a comma with her stone under her cheek. The drawing under your pillow warms to your scalp as if it wants to crawl into you.

A knock—not on the door. On the window, one knuckle, once. When you slide the frame, cold air pours in, and you think of Nurse Min’s keep your mouth closed in the greenhouse and keep it shut.

Jungwon stands below, lantern hooded, face lit just enough to make eyes and jaw. He tilts his head—come—and you go because your legs have learned this path. Out the back, down the steps, across the boards to the west path. He waits in the shadow of the shed where spades hang like a rack of tongues.

“Any dizziness? Nausea?” he asks, clinic-plain.

“Just… aware.” The word feels too small for your body’s rattled hum.

He grunts—approval. He reaches for your hand and turns the palm up. The loam under your nails has dried to fine grit. He rubs it away with his thumb, slow, methodical. It’s almost tender until you realize he is checking for changes—for the leaf-vein under your skin brightening, for anything moving that shouldn’t. When his thumb passes over the edge of your pulse, it jumps. He looks up sharply. You look away.

“You shouldn’t stay in the dorm tonight.” Matter-of-fact. “You’ll hear things like your name, and some of them will be for you and some won’t. You’re still soft. Soft things take impressions.”

“Where do I go?”

“My room.” Flat. Then, as if he heard how it sounds: “It’s safer. There are no plants there.”

“Is that true?”

“It’s true enough.” He waits. “Or go to the clinic and sit under Min’s lamp and let her count your breaths until morning.”

“Which would you pick,” you ask, because some part of you refuses to let him stand there and decide your body in his head without you in the room.

He takes too long to answer, then says, “The clinic is gentle.” A beat. “I am not.”

Wind combs the pines; the greenhouse ticks as it cools. Somewhere a raven laughs like a woman who knows your secrets and isn’t impressed.

“Choose,” he says quietly.

Sunoo’s shadow falls across the path before you can. He steps into the lantern’s circle like a storybook: pale wrists, clean hands, a smile that tells you exactly how he will use it. “Ah,” he says, soft delight. “My flower and my hands. I wondered where the night would put you.”

Jungwon does not step back. He also does not step forward. The lantern holds the three of you in a tight Venn where your breaths overlap. Sunoo tips his head, curious. “You can take her,” he says to Jungwon, which is to say I will let you. “But she’ll come back to me tasting like soil and fear, and we’ll start again from below.” He turns to you, voice honeyed and mean. “Or you can come with me and I’ll teach your body what calm feels like so you know when you’ve lost it.”

The polite violence of the options makes your stomach liquefy.

“Stop,” Jungwon says, and the word is a tool, not a plea.

Sunoo laughs softly. “The earth doesn’t stop growing just because you ask it gently.” He reaches, very slowly, and lifts your jaw with two fingers—not touching skin; his hand floats a whisper below it and your head lifts anyway, obedient to suggestion. “Show me your throat,” he says, and your body almost does it because it learned tonight and bodies like to repeat lessons. You hold yourself still out of spite. His smile warms. “Good girl.”

The words hit like a hand under your ribs. Jungwon’s breath changes. It darkens the air.

“Enough,” Jungwon says again, and hooks a finger in the lantern hood. He pulls it open. Light flares, pot-bright, brutal. The three of you blink; the world loses its beautiful edges and shows its seams. “Clinic,” he tells you.

Sunoo’s smile fades pixel by pixel until only his eyes shine. “For now,” he agrees. He steps in closer so there is no air between the three bodies but what breath can claim. He looks at Jungwon and speaks to you. “You’ll end up between us anyway,” he says, the prophecy flat, not cruel. “Why not learn the shape early.”

You should move. You should walk yourself to the nurse and let her count your lungs like prayer beads. Instead you stand very still while two men who have learned your pulse by different languages consider the currency of your fear.

Sunoo lifts his hand and stops a breath from your mouth. You feel the heat of him without the permission of touch. “I won’t kiss you,” he says, velvet and wicked. “Not yet.” He turns his palm and hovers over your throat, reading the rush there like a favorite book. “See what your body does with almost.”

Jungwon moves behind you so quietly the night forgets to mark his steps. He doesn’t touch you. His presence is so large it reads like contact anyway—the shape of him corralling air. You have the dizzy thought that if you leaned back, he would catch you, and if you leaned forward, Sunoo would open like a mouth.

“Breathe,” Sunoo whispers, and it isn’t instruction now; it’s a dare.

You do. The air leans with you. The world tightens to a triangle: lantern glare, the line of a blunted blade tucked into Jungwon’s belt, the faint copper on Sunoo’s knuckle where he touched your lip earlier with the petal.

“I said clinic,” Jungwon repeats, low enough to live at your spine.

“Make her say please,” Sunoo counters, amusement sweet as rot. “Our girl loves a ritual.”

“Don’t—” you start, and then stop, because the word tastes like surrender and you haven’t decided whose hands deserve it.

“Not tonight,” Jungwon says, and you understand: it isn’t mercy. It’s control deferred. He steps to your side, inserts a palm—warm, heavy—at your waist, not pulling, not pushing, just a point you can move along. Sunoo mirrors the motion on your other side without touching, an echo your nerves misread as contact. Together they guide you three steps, five, toward the clinic’s dim window—two gravities that agree for once.

At the threshold, Sunoo bends so close your ear warms. “Sleep,” he murmurs, the same command Jungwon uses like a blessing. “Dream of hands.” He smiles against the air where your skin ends. “Next time I’ll count for you while he holds you still.”

Jungwon’s hand tightens one notch at your waist, a warning, a promise, a brand pressed through clothes. “Next time,” he says, to Sunoo, to you, to the night that will keep at this until you’re rewritten, “I’ll decide who goes first.”

Nurse Min opens the clinic door before anyone knocks, lamp bright behind her like a little square sun. She takes in the triangle of bodies, the glint of the knife, the feral set of Sunoo’s mouth, the obedient steadiness of Jungwon’s hand at your side.

“Inside,” she says, and steps aside.

You pass between them—Sunoo’s almost-touch a heat across your throat; Jungwon’s real touch a line at your hip you could follow with your eyes closed—and cross into the light.

You do not kiss anyone. No one kisses you.

But as the door shuts and the mountain presses its ear to the glass to listen, you know it: your body already understands the shape they promised. It will remember. It will hunger.

And when it happens—when it really happens—it will not be an accident.

________

The clinic smelled of metal and mint. Nurse Min left you in a chair under her lamp until the feverish hum in your body dulled to a bearable pitch. She made you drink water, bitter and green as ditch weed, and held your wrist while your pulse rattled beneath her thumb. When you asked her if you were safe, she only said, “Nothing in a place like this is safe. At best, some things are safer than others.”

By the time she dismissed you, the compound had already gone to sleep. Mira was curled on her side in the dorm, bracelets stilled. You should have slept too. Instead you lay awake, tasting the memory of a petal pressed against your tongue, feeling the phantom weight of Jungwon’s hand steady at your waist, the ghost of Sunoo’s fingers just shy of your throat.

Your body remembered. It remembered too well.

When you finally slipped into the corridor, your bare feet soundless on the boards, it wasn’t to find air. It was because something in you had already decided that the ache would not stop on its own.

The greenhouse loomed against the night, ribs of iron and glass sweating mist. The lock had never been for people who wanted to stay out. You pushed the door and it sighed open, warm air rushing at you like a mouth.

He was waiting. Of course he was.

Sunoo leaned against a bench, sleeves rolled, pale wrists glowing under the lamps. His expression was the same one he’d worn when he laid the petal on your tongue earlier—delighted, expectant, like he had always known your body would come back to him.

“You breathe too loud when you lie down,” he murmured. “I could hear you from the other side of the hall.”

You should have left. You stepped closer instead.

Sunoo reached for you without touching, fingers tracing the air beside your cheek. That almost-contact burned hotter than heat itself. Your breath caught, and his smile sharpened. “See? Your body tells the truth. It remembers me already.”

His hand hovered down, stopping at the hollow of your throat. “Here,” he whispered. “Where the pulse lives.” He bent, mouth a whisper away from your skin, never quite sealing it. Your nerves screamed as if he’d kissed you. “You want me to touch you. That’s why you came.”

Your denial scraped your teeth but never left your tongue.

“Good girl,” he said, pleased at your silence. He turned you, pressing between your shoulder blades until your knees bent and you landed on the warm boards of the floor. “Stay open. Stay soft.”

His hands came at last—sliding along your thighs, parting them without rush, without doubt. He dragged his thumb along the cotton of your thin shorts, pressing until the damp there gave you away. “Blooming,” he said reverently, as if the word itself could coax you wider.

You gasped when he pressed harder, the friction maddening. He laughed low in his throat, pleased. “You’ve been waiting since the Rite, haven’t you? You swallowed the petal and your body begged for more.”

He tugged fabric aside with clinical precision, exposing you to the humid air. His fingers slicked easily through the wetness already gathered, and he made a sound of satisfaction that went straight to your gut. “So ready,” he crooned. “So obedient.”

Two fingers circled, teased, pressed—but never where you needed. He watched your hips shift, your breath stutter. “Say please,” he murmured.

“I—”

“Shh.” His free hand covered your mouth lightly, thumb grazing your lower lip. “Not with words. With your body.”

Your thighs trembled. You pushed into his hand, desperate. His smile widened. “There it is. Begging without speech.”

He slipped two fingers inside, slow, deliberate. Your back arched, a strangled sound caught behind his palm. He curled them just right, hitting the place that made you shiver, made your eyes roll back. “Yes,” he whispered against your ear. “That’s it. That’s how you bloom.”

His palm pressed harder over your mouth as your moans broke free. His rhythm quickened, fingers thrusting, scissoring, spreading you open as if he meant to plant something inside. Every push forced slick sounds into the greenhouse air. He bent low, lips brushing your temple, murmuring praises between each thrust: “Perfect. My good flower. Opening just for me. No one else will see you like this.”

Your orgasm came sudden, brutal—your whole body snapping tight around his hand, shuddering against him. He kept moving, dragging it out until you were gasping into his palm, thighs twitching.

When at last he withdrew, his fingers glistened. He lifted them to your lips, smearing wetness across them before pushing between. “Taste yourself,” he ordered softly. “Know what you are to me.”

Shame and hunger tangled in your chest. You sucked his fingers clean, and his eyes darkened, mouth parting as if he might finally kiss you. He didn’t. He pulled back just enough to leave you desperate, to make absence itself a cruelty.

“Blooming,” he whispered again, satisfied. “And tomorrow, you’ll be ready for the soil.”

The greenhouse door creaked. You jerked, Sunoo still crouched over you, his slick fingers withdrawing with deliberate slowness.

Jungwon stood in the doorway, lantern spilling gold over his dirt-streaked arms. His jaw tightened as his eyes tracked the wet shine on your lips, the way your legs trembled, the smug curve of Sunoo’s smile.

For a long, brutal moment, no one spoke. Then Jungwon stepped forward, shovel still in one hand, and his voice came out rough, dangerous.

“She’s mine next.”

The lamps hummed. The soil smelled of iron. Your heart beat against your throat like a trapped bird as the two men stared across you, and you realized the next time you were touched, it would be by both.

And you would not escape it.

______

The night you tried to run, the mountain gave you away.

The boards beneath your feet creaked, wet leaves clung to your calves, and the fog was a hand on your throat. You ran anyway. Past the dorms, past the glasshouse ribs glowing faintly from their lamps, down the west path where the ravens laughed like women who knew your secrets.

You thought the dark would cover you.

But the dark belonged to him.

A hand caught your wrist so hard you nearly went down. The lantern flared, and Jungwon’s face came out of the mist—eyes black, jaw locked, the muscle jumping with rage he didn’t bother to soften. He dragged you against him, chest heaving like you’d run into a wall that had learned how to breathe.

“Running,” he said, voice low and sharp as a spade. “After I told you not to.”

“I—”

“Quiet.” His grip on your wrist tightened until your bones ached. “Do you know what he did to you in there? Do you know what you smell like? Soil and him.” His other hand closed hard around your chin, forcing you to meet his eyes. His breath came hot, furious. “I told you not to let him touch you.”

Your protest was thin. “I didn’t—”

“You did.” He shoved you back against the rough bark of a pine. The trunk dug into your spine; his body crowded yours, heat and dirt and something mean. “You opened your mouth. You let him put his fingers in you.” His hand slid down your throat, pressing just enough to make your pulse throb under his palm. “Do you think that makes you his?”

“No—”

“No,” he repeated, mocking and brutal, pressing harder until your words broke into breath. His eyes raked you up and down like he was reading your body for lies. “You’re mine. If you’re soil, then I’m the one who plants.”

The knife appeared from his belt—not sharp, its edge long since blunted, but the point still honest. He held it flat against your belly, dragging it up under your shirt until the cold metal kissed the underside of your breast. You shivered, body jerking against the bark. His mouth twisted, equal parts fury and hunger.

“Scared?” he murmured. “Good. Fear makes roots dig deeper.”

He hooked the blade under the band of your shorts, pulling until the fabric stretched and then snapped. His hand shoved inside without pause, fingers rough, pushing into you like he meant to stake a claim. You gasped, the sound choking against the hand still at your throat.

“Wet,” he said, voice a growl, face close enough you could feel every word on your skin. “You’re soaked for me already. Even after him. Especially after him.” His fingers thrust harder, curling, relentless, forcing your body to answer him. “Say it. Say whose you are.”

You shook your head, too proud, too broken to give it.

His mouth curved cruel. “Then I’ll fuck it into you.”

He yanked your shorts down to your thighs, lifted you bodily against the tree, and shoved his hips between your legs. You clawed at his shoulders, half to push, half to hold on, but he pinned you easy, the knife’s flat pressed to your throat now like a brand. His cock pressed hot and thick against your entrance, grinding through the slick he’d found there, rubbing until you whined.

“You hear that?” he hissed, rolling his hips, dragging the head over your folds until obscene wet sounds filled the air. “Your body begging me in front of the whole fucking mountain.” He pushed in one brutal stroke, burying himself deep, forcing a cry from your throat. His teeth bared at the sound, savage triumph. “That’s it. Open up. Take me.”

He fucked you hard against the tree, every thrust jarring bark into your spine, every shove brutal and unrelenting. The knife never left your throat—flat, cold, reminding you what he could do if he wanted. His free hand gripped your hip so hard you knew you’d bruise, dragging you down onto him, using your body like it was already his.

“Mine,” he snarled against your ear, hips slamming. “Not his. Not anyone’s. Mine to fuck. Mine to plant. Mine to keep.” His pace grew rougher, desperate, jealousy bleeding into possession. “You’ll carry me. You’ll take my seed. You’ll remember whose cock fucked you open like this.”

Your moans tore free, high and broken, every thrust forcing them out. He laughed, breathless, mean. “Good little soil. Look at you—taking it. Clenching so tight you’ll never forget.”

When you came, it was with your whole body jerking, nails raking his back, his name spilling without permission. He fucked you through it, ruthless, using your climax to milk himself. With a final, brutal thrust, he came inside you, grinding deep, growling your name like a curse and a prayer.

He stayed pressed to you, chest heaving, the knife slipping down to rest against your collarbone. He didn’t soften. He didn’t let go. His mouth found your jaw, biting hard enough to leave a mark.

When he finally pulled out, slick running down your thighs, he yanked your shorts back up roughly, like covering you was a punishment. He grabbed your wrist again, dragging you toward the compound.

“You’re not sleeping in the dorms,” he said, voice iron. “You’re mine now. My room. My bed. No one else touches you.”

The lantern swung, throwing gold across the path. His grip never loosened. You stumbled after him, body raw, used, filled, the echo of his thrusts still beating through you.

And you knew he wasn’t bluffing.

______

Jungwon’s grip on your wrist was iron, dragging you through the silent hallways until the greenhouse lamps and dorm windows disappeared. His door slammed behind you, the bolt driven home with the finality of a lock on a coffin. His room was small, spare, stripped bare of comfort—just a bed, a chair, his tools. No flowers, no soil. Only him.

He shoved you onto the mattress like you weighed nothing. Your body jolted, still slick, still aching from what he’d already done. He stood over you, chest rising and falling hard, sweat at his temples, jaw clenched like a vice.

“You don’t go back to them,” he growled. “Not Mira, not Seo, and never him.” His eyes burned. “You’re mine.”

Your breath hitched; the word stuck in your throat.

A voice cut through the dark. “You’re wrong.”

The lantern on the desk flared, spilling its glow across pale wrists, white robes loosened at the chest, a mouth curved in that familiar, cruel delight. Sunoo. Already inside. Already waiting.

Jungwon stiffened, shoulders tensing like a predator finding another in his territory. “Get out.”

Sunoo ignored him. He stepped closer, his smile syrup-sweet but eyes sharp. “She doesn’t belong to you alone. Look at her.” His gaze slid over you where you trembled on the bed, your thighs pressed together, your lips parted from shallow breaths. “She’s terrified. She’s confused. She needs gentleness.” His tone softened, dripping like honey. “And you can’t give her that.”

“Gentle doesn’t keep her alive,” Jungwon snapped, stepping between you and him, shovel-callused fists at his sides. “Gentle lets her rot.”

“Alive?” Sunoo laughed, low and dangerous. “She’s not alive. She’s blooming. That’s what I make her.”

“Blooming,” Jungwon spat, “is just another word for open. And I’m the one inside her.”

The words made your stomach twist; heat and fear tangled until you couldn’t tell the difference. You tried to speak—stop, please stop—but your throat locked.

Sunoo’s gaze darted back to you, softening. He crouched, ignoring the way Jungwon loomed above him. His hand hovered just shy of your ankle, not touching—never touching—but the heat of him crawled up your skin. “Petal,” he whispered, “don’t be afraid. I’ll take care of you. I’ll show you how it feels to be cherished.” His lips parted, almost grazing your skin as he breathed you in. “Let me taste you.”

Jungwon’s growl shook the air. He seized your arm, yanking you back against his chest, his hand spread possessive across your stomach. His cock, still half-hard, pressed against your spine. “She’s mine. Mine to fuck. Mine to plant. Mine to keep.”

Your body shuddered. Fear, yes—but deeper, darker: want, shame, hunger you couldn’t smother.

Sunoo’s smile only widened. “Then let’s see who she opens for first.” He slid closer, slipping between your knees before Jungwon could stop him. His breath fanned over your thighs, hot and wet, and you gasped when he finally touched you—soft, reverent, his hands parting you like something fragile.

The contrast made you dizzy. Jungwon’s grip bruised; Sunoo’s mouth pressed feather-light kisses along the inside of your thigh, slow, teasing, as if every touch was worship. “Sweet,” he murmured, nose brushing close to the heat of you. “So sweet. I’ll make her sing.”

“Don’t you dare—” Jungwon started, but your body betrayed you, hips twitching toward Sunoo’s mouth, a whimper breaking past your lips.

That sound changed everything.

Jungwon froze, then snarled, shoving you down into the mattress, caging you with his body. One hand pinned your wrists above your head; the other tore your shirt open down the middle, fabric splitting under his strength. His mouth crashed to your throat, biting, marking, sucking bruises into your skin with furious precision.

Sunoo groaned at the sight, as if Jungwon’s violence only made you more beautiful. He leaned in, finally sealing his lips over your cunt, sucking hard, tongue lapping deep through your folds. The wet sounds filled the room, obscene, echoing against the bare walls.

You cried out, the noise muffled against Jungwon’s hand when he clapped it over your mouth. “Quiet,” he hissed, teeth at your jaw. “Don’t give him the satisfaction of hearing how much you love it.”

But Sunoo knew anyway. He moaned against you, tongue flicking your clit, fingers sliding inside with practiced ease, curling just right. He fed off every twitch, every muffled scream, every desperate roll of your hips. “See?” he said between licks, voice thick with arousal. “She opens for me. She’s blooming already.”

Jungwon pressed harder, grinding his cock against your hip through his pants, furious at your body’s betrayal, at the way your thighs trembled around Sunoo’s head. “She’s dripping because I fucked her raw,” he snarled. “All you’re doing is licking up what I left in her.”

The words made your body jerk, shame and desire hitting like lightning.

Sunoo pulled back just enough to look up at you, his mouth shining with your wetness, his eyes dark and soft. “You taste like need,” he whispered. He dragged his tongue slowly over your clit, savoring the way you cried out under Jungwon’s palm. “And you’ll remember I was the first one who made you come with his mouth.”

“Shut up,” Jungwon snapped. But his own hips rolled against you, his cock throbbing, desperate. His jealousy only sharpened his need.

You couldn’t fight it. You came hard, body arching, Sunoo’s mouth sucking your clit, Jungwon’s hand holding you down, his teeth biting at your throat. Your orgasm tore through you like the roots of something invasive, clawing deep, unstoppable.

They didn’t stop.

Sunoo licked you clean, gentle as a lover, humming like he was savoring wine. Jungwon bit harder, grinded rougher, his hand forcing your wrists deeper into the mattress. Both of them on you—one soft, one brutal—until you didn’t know whose name to scream.

And you understood, with raw clarity, that they weren’t fighting for you.

They were fighting through you.

When the shudders finally broke, you collapsed back, gasping, throat raw. Jungwon leaned down, lips brushing your ear, his voice a growl. “This is just the beginning. Next time I’m inside you while he’s in your mouth. We’ll see who you really belong to.”

Sunoo laughed softly, licking his lips clean of you. “She’ll belong to both.”

And for the first time, you realized he was right.

_____

Your body was still shaking when Jungwon yanked you upright, dragging you into his lap as if the bed belonged only to him. His thighs were iron beneath you, his chest hard against your spine. One arm locked around your waist, the other snared your throat, thick fingers spreading wide until his grip owned the column of your neck. He forced your head back, baring your mouth to him.

“You’ll taste me now,” he snarled, lips crashing into yours.

The kiss was brutal—teeth knocking, spit spilling. He shoved his tongue deep, choking you with it, swallowing every noise you tried to make. His palm pressed tighter at your throat until your pulse roared in your ears, until breath itself became something you had to beg him for. Drool slicked your chin, his tongue forcing yours down, his grip refusing to let you turn away. It was less a kiss than a violent claiming, his mouth fucking yours the way his cock had already fucked your body raw.

You gasped when he pulled back just enough to let air in, a string of spit hanging obscenely between your mouths. He licked it off your bottom lip, then spat into your mouth deliberately, cruelly, watching you swallow because you had no choice.

“Open,” he growled, forcing your jaw wider with his hand at your throat. “Good. That’s mine too. Every sound. Every swallow.”

Your vision blurred; your thighs squeezed together involuntarily. Terror and heat tangled until you couldn’t breathe for either.

And then Sunoo was there.

He crouched in front of you, hands sliding up your knees to part them wider, his smile infuriatingly calm even in violence. “My turn.”

“No,” Jungwon bit out, but Sunoo was already moving. He grabbed your chin, fingers digging in hard enough to bruise, and wrenched your head away from Jungwon’s mouth. Your neck snapped to the side, and before you could gasp, Sunoo’s lips were on yours.

It wasn’t tender. It was vicious. He sucked your bottom lip until it split, teeth biting down until pain shot bright, then licked the blood from your mouth as if it belonged to him. His tongue drove past your teeth, tasting everything Jungwon had left there, devouring it with obscene relish.

You moaned helplessly, the sound muffled between them.

Jungwon’s grip on your throat tightened, forcing your head back further, rage pouring off him like heat. “She’s mine.”

Sunoo broke the kiss just long enough to sneer against your wet mouth. “Then why is she kissing me back?” He pressed his tongue to yours again, slow and filthy, sucking until spit ran down your chin. Then he pulled back, wiped it with his thumb, and shoved the slick digit back between your lips. “Lick it clean. That’s mine now.”

Your mouth obeyed before your brain caught up.

Jungwon’s chest vibrated with a growl. He bent and bit your jaw, then your throat, leaving purple marks against Sunoo’s fingerprints. His hand clamped your neck harder, forcing you to gasp around Sunoo’s thumb.

“She’s choking on me,” Jungwon snarled. “Not you.”

Sunoo laughed low, mean. He leaned closer, his forehead pressing to yours, his other hand grabbing Jungwon’s wrist on your throat, not to stop it, but to squeeze it tighter. “Then let’s choke her together.”

The pressure doubled. Your eyes watered, spit pooling at the corner of your mouth, drooling down your chin as both of them held you, forced you open, forced you to take them. One mouth kissed you, sucked you, spat into you; the other bit, bruised, pressed your throat until stars danced.

You weren’t kissing anymore. You were being consumed.

And God help you—your body wanted more.

_______

They had you caged between them—Jungwon at your back, Sunoo at your front—two sets of hands closing every door your body might have tried to escape through.

Your pulse beat frantically against Jungwon’s palm at your throat. Sunoo’s fingers dug into your chin, keeping your face tipped up so you couldn’t hide. Their mouths had already ruined you, spit running down your jaw, bruises blooming on your throat and collarbone like dark flowers. Your chest rose too fast, every breath their permission, every sound something they stole from you.

“You see?” Sunoo whispered, voice as sweet as it was cruel. “She’s ready. She’s shaking for us.” His hand slid down, brushing your stomach, spreading lower. “The soil is wet.”

“She’s wet because I fucked her open,” Jungwon snapped against your ear, his breath harsh. “She’s mine to fill.” He ground his cock against your ass through his pants, thick and hard, a promise of what was coming. His teeth found your neck again, biting until your body arched despite yourself.

The two of them moved you as if you were theirs to arrange. Your thighs were forced wide over Sunoo’s lap, your back crushed to Jungwon’s chest. Rough hands tugged your ruined shorts away; cool air hit the slick heat between your legs. Sunoo hummed like a priest receiving an offering.

“Let me taste again.” He didn’t wait for permission. His mouth descended, sucking your clit into his mouth, tongue lapping at you until your eyes rolled back. His hands locked on your thighs, holding you open for him, his moans vibrating into your cunt.

Jungwon shoved your wrists down into the mattress, his cock rutting against you through fabric, his fury pressed into every grind. “Listen to her,” he growled. “Dripping for us. Begging without words.” He yanked his pants open, the blunt head of his cock dragging along your ass, smearing precum. “She’s going to take both. Right now.”

You sobbed, terror and need colliding until you couldn’t tell them apart. “I can’t—”

“You can,” Sunoo cut in smoothly, lifting his head, chin wet with your slick. He stroked your trembling thighs with a mockery of gentleness. “Your body’s already opening. We’ll guide you.” His eyes glimmered, half-devotion, half-madness. “You’ll bloom for us together.”

Jungwon spat into his palm, gripped his cock, and shoved it between your cheeks, rubbing the head against your tight hole until you whined. “Scared?” he hissed, his hand tightening at your throat. “Good. Fear makes you clench tighter.”

Sunoo’s fingers slid inside your cunt again, curling, coaxing, slicking you up for him. He looked up at you, his smile soft even as he stretched you ruthlessly. “Breathe, petal. I’ll be inside you soon. You’ll be so full you won’t remember how to be empty.”

When Sunoo lined himself up, pressing the head of his cock against your soaked entrance, Jungwon shoved his tip harder at your ass, both of them pushing at once. Your cry ripped the air as your body was forced to split, one cock stretching your cunt, the other pressing past the tight ring of muscle until you thought you’d break.

“Fuck,” Jungwon groaned, voice raw. “So tight. Gripping me like a fist.”

“She’s perfect,” Sunoo sighed, already sinking deeper, your walls convulsing around him. “Taking both of us. Our flower.”

It was too much. The stretch burned, overwhelming, obscene. You clawed at the sheets, eyes rolling back as both of them bottomed out, your body trembling violently with the force of being split in two. They didn’t give you time. Jungwon’s hips snapped forward first, brutal, pounding into your ass with the fury of jealousy. Sunoo met him stroke for stroke, slower, deeper, angling until every thrust speared your cunt exactly where it made you scream.

Pinned, stuffed, broken open—you were nothing but their vessel.

“Say it,” Jungwon snarled, hand squeezing your throat until your vision blurred. “Say you’re mine.”

“She’s ours,” Sunoo countered, kissing you, sucking the spit from your mouth, swallowing your gasps. “Tell us, petal. Tell us who you bloom for.”

Your answer was a sob, a whimper, a strangled cry as their cocks moved inside you, filling every inch, grinding against each other through the thin wall of your body until the sensation drove you half-mad.

“Fuck, I can feel him through you,” Jungwon groaned, rutting harder, holding you down as if you might try to run again. “But you’re squeezing me tighter. That’s how I know you’re mine.”

Sunoo’s tongue licked the tears from your cheeks. “She’s crying for me. Look at her. Look how she wants to be saved even while we ruin her.”

Your body convulsed around them, slick gushing down your thighs, every nerve alight. The pain blurred into pleasure until you were begging without words, your nails tearing the sheets, your cries spilling into their mouths as they fought to own your climax.

When you came, it was devastating—your cunt and ass clenching around them both, milking them, dragging them deeper. Jungwon groaned, teeth sinking into your shoulder as he spilled inside you, hot and overwhelming. Sunoo followed seconds later, filling your cunt until you were overflowing, cum dripping down your thighs, both of them holding you so tightly you couldn’t breathe.

They didn’t pull out. They stayed locked inside, cocks twitching, their breaths harsh against your skin.

Jungwon’s hand squeezed your throat one last time, forcing your eyes to his. “Say it,” he demanded, voice hoarse. “Say you’re planted in me.”

Sunoo kissed your cheek, softer but no less cruel. “Say you’ll bloom for us both.”

And you, too full to think, too wrecked to fight, whispered the only truth left in you:

“I can’t belong to just one.”

They smiled—different smiles, but the same hunger.

And you knew you’d never escape again.

_______

woah this was so diffecult to write SO IM SORRY IF IT ISNT THE BEST

THANK YOU FOR READING!!

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[lollovern]

- The Garden Left to Rot -

enhypen masterlist

wattpad

inspired by this post

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groundskeeper!yang jungwon x guest!femreader x cult counselor!kim sunoo | obsessive romance | cult horror | forced devotion | ritualistic sex | jealousy and rivalry | fucked-up love triangle | knife kink | corrupted comfort | you will belong to someone eventually | DARK CONTENT AHEAD!!

wc: 14k

summary: You’re sent to a grief recovery retreat hidden in the mountains. But this isn’t therapy — it’s a cult blooming in blood and rot. Jungwon wants to bury you where no one else can touch you. Sunoo wants to crack you open until you bloom for him. Both say it’s healing. But it’s obsession.

warnings: extreme gore, threesome, cult rituals, body horror (flowers under skin, insect scenes), blood play, forced confinement, psychological manipulation, emotional degradation, knife play, religious delusion, obsessive behavior, toxic romance, dubcon themes, ritualistic sex, hallucinations, violence

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The van climbs until the road forgets how to be a road. Pines crowd close; fog slicks the windshield like breath on glass. By the time the driver kills the engine, your phone has been surrendered, the waiver signed, and your name—your real one—folded into a sealed envelope with your belongings.

A hand-painted sign leans crooked against a stone pillar: THE GARDEN.

Beneath it, smaller script: Let go. Become.

Everyone here is an adult—paperwork made that clear. Still, the cluster of arrivals huddle like freshmen. A woman in a bone-white coat stands at the gate, serene as a photograph. “Welcome,” she says. “I’m Director Seo. You won’t need last names here. You won’t need yesterday.” Her smile doesn’t reach her eyes. “We begin with stillness.”

Stillness smells like damp soil and rosemary. The compound spreads in tiers: a glasshouse ribbed with iron; dormitories with shuttered windows; a refectory where steam fogs the panes; a low clinic painted the color of milk. The greenhouse breathes—a pulse of heavy, sweet air each time the door opens. Inside, rows of lilies lean toward heat lamps; vines net the rafters; something rustles in the loam.

“Orientation,” says the boy who appears at Director Seo’s shoulder. He’s young—early twenties—with paper-clean features and the kind of smile people don’t realize is a blade until it’s already inside them. Kim Sunoo. His name tag says Counselor; the ribbon beneath it says Ritual Lead. “Shoes off in the greenhouse,” he adds lightly. “We keep the floors soft.”

Your shoes leave the ground. Cool boards. Warm mist. A bell rings once. The arrivals form a circle on woven mats; a dozen white-robed staff ghost the edges. A few guests have the shaved look of hospital discharge; others wear expensive emptiness like cologne.

“Here,” Sunoo says gently, “we do not share pasts. Only needs.” His gaze slips over faces and lands on you. Not a leer. A selection. “You may speak or sit in silence. Both are honest.”

“I need to sleep,” says a woman with chewed nails. “Like, three days.”

“I need to stop remembering,” a man answers, voice flat.

The girl beside you—twenty-two, maybe—says nothing. Yejin is stitched on her wristband. Her hands are ink-stained. She draws while people talk: a quick, vicious graphite—faces with petal-mouths; ribs like trellises. When you shift, she tilts her sketchbook so you can see the newest figure: a person kneeling in dirt, throat blooming with something that isn’t a flower.

“Beautiful,” Sunoo murmurs, as if he’s praising a child’s first recital. “You have a keen eye for transformation, Yejin.”

From across the greenhouse, someone drags burlap sacks along iron grates. Soil dark as coffee spills from a split seam and oozes across the floor. The man hauling the bags moves like he’s apologized to gravity and refuses to do it again. Yang Jungwon. Groundskeeper on his tag. Grey work shirt. Forearms nicked white with old cuts. He doesn’t look at the circle—doesn’t look at you—until he does, and then he doesn’t stop. Not curiosity. Assessment, like weighing a seed between finger and thumb and deciding if it will live in his earth.

Director Seo outlines rules in the smooth tone of a stewardess reciting crash procedures:

No personal histories in group.

No contact with family for the first fourteen days.

No unsupervised access to the greenhouse after dusk.

Do not remove plant material from designated zones.

What is given to the soil remains in the soil.

“That includes grief,” Sunoo says, almost playful. “Especially grief.”

Your dorm is clean in the way of hospital corridors and mortuaries. Two metal beds. Two lockers. A copy of a softbound booklet on each pillow: STILLNESS GUIDE. Your roommate arrives with a jangle of bracelets and the brittle cheer of someone who learned to smile as self-defense. Mira, 26, volunteer-turned-resident-mentor.

“Welcome-welcome,” she chirps, then lowers her voice. “Pro tip: keep your head down the first three days. They watch how you watch.”

“Who?”

“Everyone.” She flicks her gaze toward the window, where the greenhouse skeletons against dusk. “Especially him.” She means Sunoo—you can hear it in the soft, reverent way. “And the groundskeeper when it’s dark.” That last part is almost a warning.

The bell rings again. Dinner is broth that tastes like the inside of a leaf and bread dense with seeds. You eat at long tables while staff move among you like shepherds. Across from you, a jittery young man, Taesun—24, scars like cat-scratches up his wrists—piles his crusts and crumbles them methodically. He pockets a handful when he thinks no one sees.

“For the worms,” he whispers to the crumbs. “They get hungry at night.”

Mira nudges your knee under the table. “He feeds them behind the east wall,” she murmurs. “Says they keep the nightmares down if they’re busy.”

In the clinic after dinner, a nurse swabs your fingers where the paper edges of the waiver bit skin. Nurse Min is beautiful in the harsh way of women who have decided their faces are weapons. When she says “this will sting,” the consonants soften strangely; a long surgical scar splits the underside of her tongue. She catches you looking and lifts a brow that says yes, I am aware of my mouth. Then—almost tender—she tapes your knuckle with gauze printed with tiny flowers.

Back in the greenhouse, the first night session is called Surrender. The lamps buzz. Mist beads your eyelashes. Sunoo stands barefoot on the damp boards, sleeves rolled, voice a low waterfall.

“Close your eyes,” he says. “Name the weight you want the earth to hold for you. Don’t say it out loud. Let your body say it.”

Around you, bodies sway. Some cry. Some freeze. When you keep your eyes open, Sunoo notices. Of course he does.

“New sprout,” he says softly, close to your ear, and the nickname feels chosen, not random. “You don’t have to force stillness. It happens when the soil recognizes you.”

“Does it?” Your voice is hoarse from disuse and altitude.

“Always.” He smiles. Not kind. Not unkind. Satisfied. “The Garden knows its own.”

Across the rows, Jungwon kneels in the dirt, wrist-deep in loam, planting something without a label. He doesn’t follow Sunoo’s cadence; he follows his own. When one lamp flickers, he rises and fixes it with the swift, competent movements of someone who builds instead of asks. When he sits back, the soil clings to his fingers like shadow.

You should sleep. Instead you help Mira remake your beds with the stiff white sheets that smell faintly of bleach and rosemary. She keeps talking, because silence makes her hands shake.

“I came as a volunteer,” she says, tucking corners square. “Stayed as a patient. It’s easier when they tell you what to be.”

“What do they tell you?”

She smiles without humor. “A flower.” Her eyes slide to your bandaged hand. “Try not to bleed in the greenhouse. They don’t like that.”

“Why?”

“Because the soil remembers.”

At night the compound changes. Lights dim. The wind strips the pines and combs the glass with needles. You lie awake and count breaths—yours, Mira’s, the building’s—until you can’t bear numbers anymore.

You go out.

The air is colder than the dorm suggests. The greenhouse glows from within, a pulse behind fogged panes. Beyond the east wall, something moves with slow persistence. You follow the ripple of disturbed leaves to a break in the hedgerow and find Taesun kneeling with his pockets turned inside out, sowing crumbs into the leaf litter like a penitent farmer.

“The worms,” he says. “They hate hunger.”

“And if they’re hungry?”

“They crawl into you,” he says simply, and his eyes are not crazy; they’re convinced. “They’re looking for warmth.”

A lantern kindles behind you. “Curfew,” a voice says.

You turn. Jungwon holds the light up so it paints his face in bones and gold. Up close, his features soften—stillness without Sunoo’s practiced grace; a patient animal’s attention. The lantern makes a thicket of his lashes. He looks from you to Taesun to your bare feet on the cold boards.

“You’ll catch a chill,” he says to you, like it’s a personal offense. “Shoes. Now.”

You should resent the command. Instead, you feel the unreasonable urge to obey. You start toward the dorms.

“Not that way,” he says. “West path. Easier. Less slope.” He tips the lantern so the light doesn’t blind you while you pass. It’s a small courtesy. It also marks you—every guard on the walkway can see who broke curfew and who brought them back.

“Do you plant at night?” you ask, because silence around him feels like standing at a cliff’s edge and leaning a little too far.

“Always,” he says. He doesn’t volunteer more. His eyes drag briefly to your bandaged hand. “You left blood in the greenhouse.”

“I didn’t—”

He lifts two fingers, the gesture efficient and final. “The soil remembers.” His mouth twitches—not a smile, exactly; the ghost of one. “Mira talks too much.”

“Is that against the rules?”

“It’s against survival.”

He walks you to the dorm porch and stops at the bottom step like there’s an invisible line he won’t cross. The night carries pine resin and wet metal. You want to ask him what he plants without labels, what grows under lamps that mimic suns, why the staff wear rosaries made of seeds.

He says, low, “Don’t follow sounds you don’t understand.”

“Why?”

“Because some things here answer to being watched.” He tilts the lantern, and for a heartbeat you see something like a tenderness he hides even from himself. “Sleep.”

You try. You fail. When you finally slide under, it’s the shallow kind of rest that hears every hinge complain.

Morning stains the glasshouse pale gold. Breakfast is porridge and a shot glass of bitter green. “Chlorophyll,” Mira grimaces. “For purity. Or the aesthetic.” She scans the refectory like she’s counting exits. “There’ll be a Placement Walk after breakfast. Don’t volunteer. They love volunteers.”

“What is it?”

She cuts her eyes toward the greenhouse. “They take someone to the grove and ‘help them choose a garden name.’ Sometimes they come back with a wreath. Sometimes without their voice for a while.”

Director Seo taps her cup. “Today’s Placement Walk is for… Yejin.”

The graphite girl looks up, startled as a deer. Her pencil stills. Sunoo’s smile brightens by half a watt. “I’ll take her,” he offers, hand already extended. “I’ve seen her drawings. She understands transformation.”

If you didn’t sleep, you are alert now. Jungwon appears in the doorway like the building made him. His gaze flicks over the room, and when it lands on Yejin’s shaking knuckles, something barely visible tightens in his jaw.

“I’ll go with you,” he says to Sunoo without looking away from the girl.

“Of course,” Sunoo replies. Silk over steel. “Two witnesses. Very proper.”

They lead her out between them: the counselor with a palm light on her shoulder; the groundskeeper holding the door open so it doesn’t bite her. The room exhales when the door closes. Mira’s bracelets clink as her hands start to shake again.

“They’ll bring her back,” you say, because logic is a habit.

“Usually,” Mira says.

Taesun folds bread crumbs into his napkin with ritual care. “If the worms are fed.”

“Stop with the worms—”

He looks up, suddenly fiercer than his tremor allows. “This place eats. I just like to decide what it eats.”

You leave your spoon in your bowl. The porridge lurches in your gut like a tide. Through the greenhouse glass, you can’t see the grove, only the suggestion of trunks and a slit of path. Time grows teeth.

When they return, Yejin walks in her body like someone has moved the furniture. A crown of woven reeds presses her hair flat. There’s a smear of green at the corner of her mouth, like she’s chewed a leaf until it bled. She carries her sketchbook close to her chest as if it’s the last piece of herself no one has touched.

“What did you choose?” Director Seo asks.

Yejin’s voice is soft but intact. “Night-blooming cereus.”

“A flower that opens in darkness,” Sunoo says, pleased. “Perfect.”

Jungwon stands behind them, sleeves rolled to the elbow, forearms dirt-streaked. A single thorn scratches the back of his hand, a bright new welt. You don’t know why your chest warms at the proof that something here can still hurt them too.

As the room settles, Nurse Min touches your shoulder. “Consult,” she says, consonants rounded. In the clinic, she peels your bandage, checks the small cut, nods. “Fine.”

“Was the walk… normal?” you ask, too casual. “For Yejin.”

Nurse Min dabs salve with a gentleness that doesn’t fit her knife-edged face. “Normal is a shape you learn,” she says. “Here, it is round.” She taps your knuckle. “Don’t open yourself on purpose. Things may grow inside.”

“Like what?”

Her eyes flick briefly toward the greenhouse. “Names.”

By afternoon the schedule has you shoveling, watering, scrubbing, writing lines. I am ready to be less. You write it a hundred times until the words separate from meaning and become a pattern of stems and loops. Outside, Jungwon clears a new bed along the south wall. His shovel bites; his shoulders move with the reliable rhythm of practiced labor. A boy twice your size steps into his path and mutters something you can’t hear. Jungwon doesn’t raise his voice. He simply looks at the boy until the boy forgets how to stand where he’s standing and moves.

“Don’t stare,” Mira warns from beside you, but she’s staring too. “He notices.”

“He noticed last night,” you say.

Mira goes still. “You went out?”

“For air.”

“Air is how they catch you,” she whispers, and for the first time her cheer fails. “Promise me you won’t go alone again.”

You don’t promise. You also don’t say I don’t know who I am without alone.

At dusk, group again. Sunoo has you sit closer to him than yesterday. When you resist, he laughs softly, as if you’re charming rather than disobedient. “We sit where the light needs us,” he says. You wonder if that’s a rule or a line he likes. While others speak, he doesn’t look at them; he watches their hands, their throats, the wet edge of eyes. When your breath hitches at someone’s story, he turns his head sharply like a wolf hearing snow crack.

“What would you let go of?” he asks you, voice pitched so the rest of the circle hears only the question, not the ownership threaded through it.

You could say: the fire, the last call you ignored, the smell of burning hair. Instead, you say nothing. He accepts your silence as if it were obedience he taught you.

Outside the glass, Jungwon is a darker shape among dark shapes, moving a hose along the rows. When his head turns toward the circle, it isn’t to the whole; it is to you. He holds you there for a breath you feel in your wrists. Then he tips the hose, and water falls like rain on metal bones.

You sleep after midnight because your body ambushes you. You wake to weight. Not on you; in the air, a heaviness like weather. The greenhouse lights are out. The compound holds its breath.

Something is under your pillow.

You slide your hand beneath it and touch paper—the rough tooth of a sketchbook page. You draw it out under the dim nightlight and see yourself. Not flattering. Not cruel. Exact. You kneel on dark soil, mouth open, and something vines out—delicate stems laced with thorns. Hands—two sets—hold your shoulders lightly, possessively: one set with ink stains, one with dirt ground into the half moons of the nails. At the bottom, Yejin’s cramped script: “Some flowers only open when watched.”

Mira stirs. “What is it?”

“Art,” you say, and your voice surprises you with how steady it is.

“What kind?”

“Prophetic,” you answer, because the truth is an animal pacing the edge of the bed and you’re not ready to let it into your ribs yet.

You slide the drawing back under your pillow and close your eyes. Across the compound, the night shifts. In your mind, Sunoo’s smile threads petals through your tongue. In reality, Jungwon’s lantern skates once across the fogged panes, a slow-moving star. Two orbits, caught in the same sky, tightening.

Slow burn, the booklet promised. Healing begins when you stop resisting.

You do not stop.

You breathe. You listen to the soil remembering you.

And you wait.

______

Morning arrives with a whistle under the door and the faint itch of grit in your teeth, as if you’ve been speaking to the ground in your sleep. Breakfast is the same: porridge, a bitter green shot, tea that tastes like boiled bark. Mira counts sips, bracelets clinking like quiet alarms. Taesun crushes his toast to dust and pockets it, eyes bright with purpose. Yejin sits very still, crown of reeds damp against her hair, sketchbook closed for once like a door she’s guarding with her body.

Director Seo taps her cup. “Today begins the Mouth Fast,” she says, voice smooth as tile. “Speech is the first addiction. For twenty-four hours, we practice voicelessness. Carry your stone”—a monk in linen sets a bowl of river stones on each table—“and let it hold your words. Anyone who breaks the fast will do a double shift in the greenhouse trenches. Sunoo will lead stillness. Jungwon will direct labor.”

A murmur rises and dies, mouths pressing shut to prove eagerness. Mira puts a flat, oval stone in your palm. “Don’t lose it,” she whispers, already breaking the rule. “They’ll say the soil took your voice because you were careless.”

You tuck the stone into your sleeve and meet Sunoo’s eyes across the hall. He’s already watching—of course he is. The smile he gives you would be harmless if you hadn’t seen how he moves when he’s pleased: slower, closer, like a candle drawn to oxygen. Jungwon lingers by the service door with a clipboard and a coil of hose on his shoulder, scanning tables the way a shepherd counts sheep by the sound of their breathing.

Chores first. Outside, the air needles your lungs; the mountain wears its cold like a second skin. Jungwon assigns tasks without looking at his list. “Mira, refectory herbs. Taesun, east wall compost. Yejin, with Nurse Min in the clinic.” His gaze slides to you and steadies. “You—paths and drains. Stay out of the grove.” Not a suggestion.

You carry a stiff-bristled broom down stone paths glazed with last night’s dew. The greenhouse ribs glow under weak sun; from inside, lamps hum, and something leafy slaps damply as if it’s learned the shape of applause. By the east wall, Taesun kneels with a small shovel and a reverence that would be holy if it didn’t smell like rot.

He tips crumbs in a neat line, then pauses to show you something cupped in his palm: a white, blind tangle coiling in damp soil. Worms, yes, but too many knotted together, a living thread. He beams, proud. You force your lips into gratitude and keep sweeping. If you stop, you will hear them, and if you hear them, you will dream them.

A shadow falls across your broom. Jungwon holds out a pair of soft-soled garden shoes with the temporary patience of a man who prefers doing to explaining. “Your feet,” he says. “You bruise easily.”

You glance at your bare socks, damp to the ankle. “Is that a rule?”

“It’s a reality,” he says; the word lands like weight. He crouches without asking, sets the shoes on the path, and steps back, gaze down so you can decide if you’ll take his help. You put them on. They’re warm from his hands. He notices the lift of your breath and looks away so the noticing won’t embarrass you. When he straightens, his eyes snag on the river stone tucked in your sleeve. “Don’t drop that,” he says. “The ravens like to steal them.”

You arch a brow—Are you joking?—but he’s already moving, a steady, unshowy force among the clatter of chores.

By mid-morning the Mouth Fast is a taut cord running through the compound. The quiet isn’t peace; it’s suppression, and suppression hums. Sunoo runs stillness from the center of the greenhouse like a maestro conducting silence. He has you sit within his radius; you don’t know how you know that, but you do. When a guest’s shoulders begin to shake, his hand appears at the nape of their neck—just weight, just heat, just enough to persuade the body that obedience feels like care.

He comes to you last, when the lamps have warmed the panes to sweating. He kneels, not quite touching, gaze on your throat. “Your pulse is stubborn,” he says in a voice pitched for you alone. “It hates rhythm. I like that.” He brushes the air near your jawline, not touching, so you feel it anyway. “The stone will teach it obedience. If you’re good at listening.”

You hold his eyes and refuse to nod. He smiles, pleased with your defiance like a trainer who prefers wild animals because they make better trophies. “We’ll work on it,” he whispers, and stands.

After lunch—a bowl of broth filtered until flavor gives up—you’re pulled into the clinic with half a dozen others for “check-ins.” Nurse Min sits you on a stool and unwraps your finger. The cut is a thin mouth now, pink with newness. She touches a gloved finger to the gauze and sniffs it as if the body has a scent that changes when it’s lying.

“Does it itch?” she asks.

You hesitate. The truth is embarrassing. “Everything does,” you admit. “Under the skin. Like… like something wants out.”

“Something wants in,” she corrects mildly. She takes tweezers to the pad of your finger and draws out a hair-fine splinter you didn’t know was there. It isn’t wood—it’s pale and sappy, flexing like a root in the air. She drops it in a jar and screws the lid tight. “Names need medium,” she says. “Don’t let anyone put theirs under your skin.”

“Is that medical advice?”

“It’s survival.” She tapes a fresh bandage printed with tiny leaves, then, softer, “If you start tasting flowers, spit.”

You leave the clinic with your mouth dry as chalk. On the steps, Yejin waits like a shadow that forgot to attach to a body. She presses a folded paper to your palm and flits off before you can unfold it. In the corner of the page, her fast, lethal graphite: you in profile, throat open, something like a stem ghosting up under the jaw. In the negative space behind you, two silhouettes—Sunoo’s soft edges; Jungwon’s blunt solidity—blur toward one another without touching. Underneath, her careful script: Not yet. But soon.

The Mouth Fast bends afternoon into a colder shape. Without words, people show who they are. Mira hums under her breath and taps her stone against her teeth like a bead. Taesun counts breath with his fingers on his ribs. A new arrival—Hana, thirty and jewel-hard—walks like a woman who refuses to ask permission from the air. An older man, Mr. Ko, rows his spoon through soup with the concentration of a man pretending there is a river and a boat that can take him off this mountain.

At dusk, Director Seo calls for the Seed Burial. “We surrender what we’ve hoarded,” she says, and volunteers step forward with small slips of paper seeded with something that will sprout if the soil wants it. They kneel, press the papers into a rectangle of fresh-turned earth, and cover them with a thin skin of loam. The lamps go low. Sunoo stands at their backs. Jungwon stands at their front, shovel grounded like a staff.

You don’t move. You have nothing to bury you can stand to name.

A woman you recognize from orientation—the one who needed three days of sleep—places both palms flat on the soil like it’s someone she loves. Her breath hitches once; she swallows whatever it shook loose. As the last handful of earth covers the names, something beneath the surface shifts. Not the modest swell of seeds drinking. A shove from below.

The crowd stills. You feel it again—a push. The soil flexes and sighs, grains settling. Someone’s hand jerks back as if bitten. Sunoo’s smile does not change, which means it changes. “The ground recognizes an offering,” he says pleasantly. “Stand, flowers. Let the dark do what it’s for.”

Jungwon’s eyes are on the dirt, not the people. His jaw flexes once, twice. You have the sharp, childish thought—He hears it too—and the relief that follows is so naked you almost miss the fear riding it.

Night stitches the compound tight. The Mouth Fast persists: tongues held, little pantomimes replacing argument. In bed, Mira sleeps with her open palm on her stone like it might roll away. You face the wall because the drawing under your pillow is a magnet and your skull is iron.

A scrape wakes you—a quick, purposeful sound under the window. You slide out of bed and ease the latch. Cold breath pours in. On the path below, a lantern moves slow as a planet. You follow, soft-soled shoes silent on the boards, the stone in your sleeve tapping your wrist like a heart that’s climbed too high.

The lantern stops. Jungwon steps into its circle. He doesn’t look surprised to see you. He looks like a man who has laid a trap and found what he baited it for. He lifts the lantern just enough to catch your face without flaying you with light.

He puts a finger to his mouth—quiet—and crooks that same finger: come.

You should run. You go.

He takes you along the west path to a low, fenced plot you haven’t noticed in daylight, because in daylight everything looks like something else. Up close, the boards are stained darker than weather. He stops you with a hand on your sleeve. His grip is gentle; his hand is strong. “Do not speak,” he says, and for the first time today the command lands like care, not control.

He tilts the lantern over the fence. The light stratifies a pit maybe two meters long, maybe one deep, lined with rough timbers and crawling with the industry of decay. You see peels, stems, pot scrapings—normal compost—then catch on something pale threaded through like lace: cartilage? You squint, heart hammering, and in among the skins and stems you see hair—just a clump, just enough to be undeniable. The sour-metal stink under the rot answers a question you didn’t know you were asking until now.

You stagger, mute because the rule still binds your mouth. Jungwon’s hand rises like he planned for your body to try to leave you. He catches your elbow with two fingers and steadies you without pulling you closer. “Breathe,” he says, voice so low the pit swallows it.

You breathe. He watches your lungs move under your shirt as if measuring if they’ll keep their job.

“What is this,” you manage, a whisper that bruises the fast.

“Everything that isn’t needed,” he says. It is both the most honest sentence you’ve heard since you arrived and the worst one. “Don’t come here alone.”

“Why show me?”

His mouth tightens. He weighs the truth and hands you a ration. “Because you will go looking. Better you see what is true than what you can’t live through.”

He lifts the lantern away; the pit dissolves back into darkness. When he looks at you again, the composure you’ve seen him wear like a uniform slips an inch. “Next time,” he says, “wake me.”

“How?” It comes out harder than you intend. “Do I knock on the earth?”

“On my door.” He says it like a correction and a promise. “I’d rather carry you than find you down there with your throat open to the sky.”

You swallow. The stone in your sleeve digs your wrist bone.

He walks you back along the west path, keeping the lantern low so you don’t blind yourself and tumble. At the bottom of the dorm steps, he stops as if a line of salt has been poured between you. “Sleep,” he says. Then, almost grudgingly—no, carefully, like he fears generosity might teach you to expect it—“You did well.”

“You mean quiet,” you say.

“I mean you didn’t lie to yourself while you were looking.” He turns the lantern, and for a heartbeat your faces share a circle of light. It is not intimate, and it is.

Inside, the warm dark smells like bodies and disinfection. Mira turns in her sleep, bracelets whickering. Your hands shake. Not with the adrenaline of the pit—though that remains like a taste at the back of your throat—but with the realization that both men see you. Sunoo sees the mechanism; Jungwon sees the fracture line. You can’t decide which is worse.

The Mouth Fast breaks at dawn with a bell so soft it feels like a secret. Voices resume like a creek finding an old bed; people speak too loudly, then blush, then laugh at their own relief. Director Seo praises “compliance” as if it were a sacrament. In the refectory, mugs clack, spoons scrape. Words return as barter.

You don’t trust yours yet.

Sunoo flows through tables like sunlight convincing itself it’s holy. He catches your empty mug, pours tea, and sets it in front of you with a flourish that makes a few heads turn. “How did the silence fit?” he asks, lazy, interested. It isn’t small talk. It’s a probe shaped like kindness.

“Like wire,” you say.

He smiles, delighted—as if you’ve told him a secret about yourself he can use. “It looks good on you,” he says, and taps your river stone where it sits on the table as if he gave it to you, as if it obeys him too. “We have Talkback today. You and me.”

“Is that optional?”

“In principle,” he says. “In practice, most people prefer to be seen.” He leans in, lower voice. “You certainly do.”

He leaves before you can snap that you preferred to be alive, actually. Across the room, Jungwon stops at the threshold, takes the refectory in at a glance, and chooses a seat with his back to the wall. He eats fast, plain, as if food is fuel and surveillance is dessert. When he lifts his mug, you notice the fresh welt across the back of his hand—a thorn, yesterday, dragging its punctuation.

Talkback is held in a small room off the clinic, windowless, lit by a lamp that chooses flattery over truth. Sunoo sits too close, but because he knows what too close does to bodies, he leaves exactly enough air that you can fool yourself into thinking you could stand if you wanted to. He doesn’t touch you. He rests his forearms on his knees, hands open, posture full of a patience he wears like silk.

“What is the shape of your fear?” he asks, as if fear is polite enough to have geometry.

“Wide,” you say.

“Flat?”

“Deep.”

He grins. “Good. Honesty makes my job easier.” He looks at your mouth, then your hands, then your throat. “Last night you broke curfew.”

It isn’t a question. “I walked.”

“To the west path,” he says, savoring the corridor of it.

“Is that forbidden?”

“Not if you were with someone.”

You hold his gaze. You don’t look away. You don’t nod. You don’t give him Jungwon.

Sunoo’s smile returns, but thinner. “We don’t punish curiosity,” he says silkily. “We shape it.” He nods to your sleeve. “Keep the stone. I like how you sound when you hold it.”

“I didn’t speak.”

“You breathed differently,” he says, and you hate that you believe him. “This afternoon I want you in the greenhouse. We’ll do matching breath. I’ll keep count so you don’t have to.”

Your stomach remembers the pit and rolls. “What if I say no?”

“Then we’ll go slower,” he says, as if you asked him to make it sweeter. “That’s the kind of consent you like, isn’t it? The kind that arrives after your body learns the lesson.”

You stand because sitting feels like agreeing. He doesn’t stop you. He nods as if you’ve completed a task he set in his head.

“Good,” he says. “The roots are listening.”

Outside, the day is too bright in the way of mountains pretending to be gentle. You find Mira tending pots of kitchen herbs—mint, rosemary, a vicious little basil. “You look like you saw a ghost,” she says without looking up.

“I saw the compost,” you say.

She flinches so hard the basil shudders. “You don’t say it out loud,” she hisses, then checks herself, forces her voice calm again. “Names wake things.”

“Whose hair is in it?”

“Everyone’s,” she says. “Eventually.”

By late afternoon your muscles revolt, and stillness becomes a thing you have to hold down with both hands. In the greenhouse, Sunoo runs breath like a metronome. When he kneels behind a girl whose hands won’t stop shaking, he doesn’t touch her skin; he places his palm two inches away from her spine and waits. The girl’s shoulders ease; her breath learns his count. You hate him for it. You hate her relief. You hate that your body pays attention.

Jungwon moves along the rows with a bucket and a dull pruning blade, nicking stems, turning soil, resetting stakes. When a lamp pops and goes dim, he crosses to replace it without being called. On his way back, he passes near your mat—near, not past. The air shifts with him: sweat, iron, soil, a clean note like water running under rock. He doesn’t look down. He scratches the back of his wrist where a thorn welt cross-hatches older scars and says, as if the comment belongs to the room, “Some things only grow when you pretend you can’t see them.”

You don’t know if he means the plants, the people, or you.

Evening comes with teeth. The bell pulls everyone to the refectory; the sky sits heavy, swollen with weather that refuses to begin. Over dinner, Hana spills her tea and swears loudly enough that half the room jumps; then she laughs, tips her chin like she meant to do it, and glares at anyone who looks sorry on her behalf. Mr. Ko tells Taesun to stop feeding the worms like they’re pets; Taesun bares his teeth, half-smile, half warning. Nurse Min pockets a spoon someone bent into a hook. Director Seo watches it all with the small, sated smile of a zookeeper whose animals are thriving.

Night brings the first scream.

Not a long one. Not a movie howl. A single, keening note cut off hard, like a rope being cut. The compound freezes; forks stop halfway to mouths; breath holds. Sunoo is already on his feet, smile sharpened into usefulness. Jungwon’s chair scrapes; he’s moving before you can find your shoes.

They go toward the grove at a measured pace that says they already know what they’ll find. Director Seo lifts her hand. “Stay seated,” she says, and the command lands like weight on your shoulders. Mira’s fingers take yours under the table and squeeze so hard your knuckles grind. You squeeze back. Your mouth tastes like rosemary and fear.

You wait. The greenhouse sweats. The clock you aren’t allowed to see walks itself around the hour by the sound of your blood in your ears. When the door opens again, Sunoo comes in first, serene, coat unwrinkled. Jungwon follows with a bundled shape in his arms—a blanket, a softness of color, too long where a body should bend.

A gasp skips the room. “She fainted,” Sunoo says, which is both intolerably insufficient and the only story you’ll be allowed. “A cleansing reaction. She will rest. We will keep vigil over the names she surrendered.”

He doesn’t say who. Your mind fills the blank with the sleeping woman from breakfast, because that is who you fear for, and fear is a magnet. Jungwon carries the bundle past. You know how much weight that is—your body recognizes the set of his jaw, the economy of his gait. He does not look at you. He doesn’t look anywhere but the door to the clinic, as if any glance could spill what he’s holding.

The dining hall exhales like it’s been underwater too long. Director Seo claps once, neat. “We will not gossip,” she says. “We will not catastrophize. We will practice serenity.”

You don’t sleep. Not because you’re brave—because you’re scared correctly now, and scared correctly people stay awake. When you doze, you wake to the sensation that someone has put a leaf on your tongue and asked you to pray with it in your mouth. You spit into your sheet and find nothing. When you sit up, a shadow peels off the wall near the window and becomes Jungwon.

You nearly fling yourself out of bed. He doesn’t move, as if sudden gestures would spook you. He should not be in the dorms after lights; rules are their own religion here. He breaks this one like he breaks branches: cleanly, without apology.

“You left your shoes,” he says, low. He sets them at the foot of your bed, lined up, laces tucked. His voice is stripped of everything but function. “Don’t go barefoot again.”

“What happened?” you ask, whispering because anything louder might wake the dark.

“Don’t ask me,” he says, and for a breath you think he’s refusing. Then he adds, “Because I’ll tell you.” His gaze drags over your face, cataloging fine tremors, the cracked edge of your mouth, the way one hand fists in the sheet like rope. “Sleep,” he says. “You’ll need it.”

He is out the way he came, the door kissing its jamb like a secret.

You try to obey. The mountain presses its cold face to the window and listens. Somewhere, a lantern moves. Somewhere else, a man like a hymn kneels by a bed that is too light.

You put the river stone back in your sleeve and hold it against your pulse until the beat stops arguing with your bones. You remember the jar in Nurse Min’s clinic with the threadlike root curled at the bottom like a question mark. You picture Yejin’s hand drawing you with something under your skin you didn’t agree to carry.

Stillness was the promise. Obedience was the price. You have paid neither. Now the Garden pays attention.

And you, finally, are afraid.

_________

You wake with the taste of copper and rosemary slicked over your tongue, as if someone pressed a leaf there while you slept and whispered hold it. A welt has risen along your bandaged finger—thin, pale, almost pretty. When you press it, it flexes under the skin like something answering from underneath.

Breakfast is a choreography of clatter and eyes. Mira smiles too hard; her bracelets rattle out a code you can’t read. Taesun tips crumbs into his pocket with priestly concentration. Yejin’s crown of reeds has dried to a brittle halo; she draws with her pencil held like a knife. Hana sits mean and diamond-bright, daring the room to dull her edges. Mr. Ko’s spoon cuts the same path through porridge like a boatman refusing any other shore. Director Seo watches the surface of her tea the way people watch the sea for bodies.

“The Naming Rite will be held at sundown,” she announces, as if she’s asking for the salt. “Those selected have been notified.”

Sunoo lifts his eyes, and that’s your notification.

Mira’s fingers find your knee under the table and clamp. She shakes her head once, small, fast—refuse. You don’t know what refusal looks like here besides a story they will tell about you afterward.

“Drink,” Nurse Min says when you pass through the clinic to turn in your night report—how many hours asleep, how many awake, whether you dreamed of heat, teeth, drowning. She hands you a glass the green of pond water. You smell it, and it smells like lawn and iron. “Chlorophyll with a little hem,” she says, seeing your face. “Calms the heart.”

“Calms or slows?” Your voice scratches.

She cants her head. “Same action, different motive.” She glances at your finger. “Still itching?”

“It… moves,” you say, and the honesty makes your stomach pitch. “Like a thread.”

“Everything alive wants a home,” she replies. She peels the bandage with sure fingers. Underneath, the welt has subdivided into delicate veins, a fine network. Not veins. Veining. It looks like leaf. She presses the back of her glove along it; the pattern darkens, limned green under the skin. “Names need medium,” she repeats. “Keep your mouth closed in the greenhouse today. Even when you want to answer.”

You want to ask answer what, but Sunoo is in the doorway, dusk caught in the lamplight of his hair. He doesn’t knock; he glides in like permission. “Our new sprout,” he says, pleased to find you in a chair. “I’ll take her.”

Nurse Min’s mouth goes a little flatter. “She eats first.”

“Of course.” Sunoo’s smile doesn’t move. “Then we breathe.”

The greenhouse sweats. Heat lamps hum like insects; the glass with its rain of condensation blurs the mountain into a myth. Staff move among the rows with trays of soil sheets—thin paper seeded with something that glitters faintly when the light hits it wrong. “Embedded affirmations,” Sunoo tells the group. “You write what you’ll surrender. The seeds will carry it.”

Hana snorts. “Is the surrender refundable?”

Sunoo’s eyes quicken. “There’s always a transaction,” he says. “We just prefer you know the price.” He looks back to you. “Mat,” he says, and it isn’t a request.

You sit. He kneels behind you, palms hovering two inches from your ribs. No touch—just the sense of touch waiting. “Open your mouth,” he murmurs. The admonition from Nurse Min echoes; you clamp your lips. Sunoo’s pleased noise lands against your neck like breath. “Good. Breathe through your nose. In on four, out on six. I’ll count.”

His voice is a rope you have to grab to keep from slipping. When your breath shudders, he matches it; when it calms, he pursues. On the sixth cycle, something sweet pushes the air—lily, wet earth—and you remember the pit and want to be sick. “Stay,” he says, reading your recoil. “Stay where your body is. Don’t run from it. That’s where people rot.”

Across the rows, Jungwon replaces a cracked lamp with quick, sure hands. He doesn’t look at you until he does, a glance like a hand closing on the back of your neck. The air between you tightens. His forearms are netted with healed cuts, white against brown; a fresh welt crosses them like a red thread. When Sunoo says “out on six,” Jungwon turns the dial and the light hums obedient, and you wonder whether the whole building breathes to his count.

Yejin brings you a tray of seed-paper without being asked. When you reach, her gaze drops to your bandage. She moves the pencil like a blade and sketches the back of your hand: the delicate leaf veining, the suggestion of something wanting to break surface. She writes Not yet over the knuckles and slides the paper into your lap. Her mouth is a thin line; her eyes are large and dry and furious.

The day’s chores are smaller and meaner than yesterday’s. Scrub the condensation gutters. Rake. Haul sacks labeled Bone Meal that smell like old molars. Taesun sings under his breath in a language not meant for mouths and leaves a damp trail of crumbs along the east wall. Mr. Ko fetches and carries with blank efficiency, his face empty as a cleaned plate.

By late afternoon, a woman you know only as Auntie Hye—fiftyish, hair cut short for neatness, eyes that scan like a mother bird’s—begins to cough. At first it is dry and prim; then she hunches, pushes a hand to her chest and coughs wet. A ribbon of something bright pops free onto her palm. Petals. White. Tissue-thin and slick with saliva. A few guests laugh—nerves, delight, cruelty. Nurse Min is there before the room decides what to feel, hand under Auntie Hye’s chin, tissues ready. Hye coughs again, harder, and a clot of petals spills: red-tipped now, streaked. She hacks out a final cluster and sags. The tissues are sodden. The petals look like tongues.

“Pollination,” Sunoo says calmly. “Sometimes the body rehearses letting go by practicing bloom.”

Auntie Hye shakes her head, breath hitching. “I didn’t—” she starts.

Sunoo presses two fingers lightly to her throat. “You did.”

She closes her mouth.

Jungwon comes with a bucket and a flat spade; he scoops the petals into the bucket without expression. Your stomach tilts; you grip the bench until the wood prints itself into your palm. He doesn’t look at anyone. He takes the bucket toward the compost. You see his jawclench once when he passes the pit door and files that, like a photographed crime scene.

After the petals, other small horrors follow as if emboldened. A boy pulls his sleeve up to scratch and reveals a faint green tracery along his inner arm; when he scrubs at it, the skin reddens and puffs and the pattern brightens like a pressed leaf held to light. Mira slices a basil stem and it bleeds thin, clean sap; she runs her thumb along the cut and licks it without thinking, then startles at the taste and laughs too loudly. Taesun tips a paper cup into a drain, and a pale, slick worm writhes against the grate and splits into two thinner threads that both crawl the wrong way, toward his fingers. He coos like they’re babies and tucks them back into mud.

“Don’t feed your nightmares,” Nurse Min says without looking up from the woman whose mouth she swabs. “They grow fine on their own.”

By evening, the heat in the greenhouse feels like a hand that won’t lift. The lamps go low. Director Seo stands by the iron ribs with her clipboard like a prayerbook. “For the Naming Rite,” she says, “we welcome Sunoo as Voice and Jungwon as Hands.”

Voice and Hands. A division of power simple enough to live inside.

You are led—gently, unmistakably—toward the central bed, a rectangle of fresh loam bordered by smooth stones. Yejin edges after you, sketchbook clutched to her chest; Nurse Min blocks her with just a glance. “Not this,” Min murmurs. “Later.”

Mira steps forward—too fast—“I can go instead,” she says, smile like a knife wrapped in tissue.

Sunoo’s smile is silk on a nail. “We don’t barter names,” he says. “We harvest them.”

Your knees give. Not dramatic; a small buckling, the body remembering the ground. Sunoo’s hand is there without touching you, a near-weight at your shoulder. “Kneel,” he says, as if reminding you what your body already decided. “Head up. We face what we bring.”

Jungwon stands at the foot of the bed, shovel grounded. Close, his expression is the same flat steel as his blade. He looks at your throat the way carpenters look at walls: not hunger—assessment. When he speaks, his voice is small enough to belong only to the three of you. “Do you know what you’re giving?” he asks.

You try to say No. What comes out is “Something I can’t carry.”

“Good,” he says, and the word is not kindness. It’s calibration.

Sunoo’s fingers hover at your jaw, turning your face by the gravity of proximity. “Open,” he tells you, and your mouth obeys because your body recognizes a doctor’s tone even when it comes from someone who would rather be a priest. He places a petal on your tongue. It tastes like cold tea and a coin. “Hold,” he says. He waits. When you swallow despite yourself, his smile flares. “You see? The body knows ceremony even when the mind resists.”

He steps behind you. You feel his presence like a heat lamp. Jungwon moves to your side and holds out his hand. On his palm: a knife. Not sharp—its edge has been blunted until it’s a tongue of metal—but its point is honest. He waits until you meet his eyes; only then does he set the flat of the blade against your sternum. The steel is cool. Your skin fists under it.

“This is how we write it,” Sunoo says, and his breath touches the shell of your ear like a whispering moth. “Not deep. Not cruel. Not yet.”

The blade slides up without breaking skin, tracing between ribs, across the slow bell of breath—sternum, clavicle, the notch at your throat. The metal leaves a trail of gooseflesh; your pulse hammers against it like an animal trapped under the lid of a box. Jungwon’s other hand is steady at your shoulder, not pushing, not holding, just there, a second horizon the body can measure itself against.

“Name what cannot follow you,” Sunoo murmurs. It could be a real question. It could be a spell. Your mouth fills with the taste of flower and iron; words gather behind it like flies at meat.

You can’t say the fire; to say it would open something that the soil will keep. You say, “The last night.”

“Again,” Sunoo purrs.

“The last night,” you repeat, and the room tilts like a field under wind.

The congregation—guests in white, staff in linen—sways. Mira has both hands pressed to her lips. Taesun rocks in small, violent arcs. Yejin’s pencil moves; she draws you kneeling, two sets of hands marking you; she smudges the graphite so the air around you looks like breath or smoke.

The blade dips, lifts, comes to rest against your throat’s right side. You feel the exact spot where it would enter if it wanted to. Jungwon’s pulse is visible in his wrist; steady, heavier than yours. He moves the flat in a small crescent along the tendon, and your voice leaves you for a moment—pure reflex. A small, unpretty sound. Sunoo shivers behind you, pleased as if you performed a note he’d been coaching you toward.

“Do you understand the price?” Sunoo asks softly.

“No,” you say honestly.

“Beautiful,” he says, delighted. “No one ever does until after.”

He lifts the petal from your mouth with two fingers and lays it on your tongue again like communion. You hold it. Jungwon takes your left hand. His palm is rough and warm; soil lives in the whorls of his fingerprints. He pricks the pad of your finger with the very tip of the blunted knife, as if he wants to remind the blade of its older religion. A bead of blood swells, bright, neat. He turns your hand and presses that red to the seed-paper waiting in a shallow trench at the bed’s edge. Your blood bleeds into the paper like water into thirst.

“Now,” Sunoo says, voice dropped low enough to live in your bones, “we plant what you are not. So what you are can grow.”

Jungwon folds loam over the paper. The soil is cool even in this hothouse weather. It sucks at your finger when he presses your hand flat to it. Something moves underneath—something too quick for roots. Your stomach rocks. You try to pull back. Jungwon’s hand covers yours, firm as a yoke; Sunoo’s hand wraps your throat—not squeezing, just holding the column steady. You are pinned in two places that translate directly to obedience.

“Breathe,” Sunoo says.

You do. The soil under your hand warms like a mouth.

The congregation murmurs. Not words; the sound bodies make when they agree to a script. Director Seo watches like a reader flipping to the end to be sure it comes out as written. Nurse Min’s face has the set of a woman who’s decided to count a vein until morning.

The thing under the soil stills.

Jungwon lifts your hand and wipes the loam away with his thumb. The smear looks like war paint. Sunoo releases your throat and smooths his palm down the line his fingers left, a correction, an apology, a brand. He bends and whispers against your ear, “You belong to the ground,” and then, after a heartbeat, “and to us while you’re learning.”

His mouth never touches skin. The idea of it does.

The Rite closes with a bell that tastes like copper in your teeth. People file out as if stepping around a sleeping animal. Mira gets to you first, palms hot where she holds your face. “Drink water,” she hisses. “Don’t go to sleep. If you dream the name, it sticks.”

“I didn’t give it,” you say.

She laughs, a small animal sound. “You bled. That’s enough.”

Mr. Ko offers a clean handkerchief without meeting your eyes. Hana watches from a distance like a hawk deciding if a rabbit is worth stooping for when the field is full of easier meat. Taesun beams, mud on his lip, as if he’s just watched a very good wedding.

Yejin presses a drawing into your hand and vanishes. It’s you kneeling, hands marked, a line along your throat that is not a cut but knows where one would go. Over your shoulder, two shadows bend—one a heat-halo, one a blunt storm. Soon, she’s written. Don’t say yes with your mouth.

Night. The mountain holds its breath. The lamps in the greenhouse go black one by one until the glass is only a shape. You sit on your dorm bed and watch your hands not shake. Mira sleeps curled like a comma with her stone under her cheek. The drawing under your pillow warms to your scalp as if it wants to crawl into you.

A knock—not on the door. On the window, one knuckle, once. When you slide the frame, cold air pours in, and you think of Nurse Min’s keep your mouth closed in the greenhouse and keep it shut.

Jungwon stands below, lantern hooded, face lit just enough to make eyes and jaw. He tilts his head—come—and you go because your legs have learned this path. Out the back, down the steps, across the boards to the west path. He waits in the shadow of the shed where spades hang like a rack of tongues.

“Any dizziness? Nausea?” he asks, clinic-plain.

“Just… aware.” The word feels too small for your body’s rattled hum.

He grunts—approval. He reaches for your hand and turns the palm up. The loam under your nails has dried to fine grit. He rubs it away with his thumb, slow, methodical. It’s almost tender until you realize he is checking for changes—for the leaf-vein under your skin brightening, for anything moving that shouldn’t. When his thumb passes over the edge of your pulse, it jumps. He looks up sharply. You look away.

“You shouldn’t stay in the dorm tonight.” Matter-of-fact. “You’ll hear things like your name, and some of them will be for you and some won’t. You’re still soft. Soft things take impressions.”

“Where do I go?”

“My room.” Flat. Then, as if he heard how it sounds: “It’s safer. There are no plants there.”

“Is that true?”

“It’s true enough.” He waits. “Or go to the clinic and sit under Min’s lamp and let her count your breaths until morning.”

“Which would you pick,” you ask, because some part of you refuses to let him stand there and decide your body in his head without you in the room.

He takes too long to answer, then says, “The clinic is gentle.” A beat. “I am not.”

Wind combs the pines; the greenhouse ticks as it cools. Somewhere a raven laughs like a woman who knows your secrets and isn’t impressed.

“Choose,” he says quietly.

Sunoo’s shadow falls across the path before you can. He steps into the lantern’s circle like a storybook: pale wrists, clean hands, a smile that tells you exactly how he will use it. “Ah,” he says, soft delight. “My flower and my hands. I wondered where the night would put you.”

Jungwon does not step back. He also does not step forward. The lantern holds the three of you in a tight Venn where your breaths overlap. Sunoo tips his head, curious. “You can take her,” he says to Jungwon, which is to say I will let you. “But she’ll come back to me tasting like soil and fear, and we’ll start again from below.” He turns to you, voice honeyed and mean. “Or you can come with me and I’ll teach your body what calm feels like so you know when you’ve lost it.”

The polite violence of the options makes your stomach liquefy.

“Stop,” Jungwon says, and the word is a tool, not a plea.

Sunoo laughs softly. “The earth doesn’t stop growing just because you ask it gently.” He reaches, very slowly, and lifts your jaw with two fingers—not touching skin; his hand floats a whisper below it and your head lifts anyway, obedient to suggestion. “Show me your throat,” he says, and your body almost does it because it learned tonight and bodies like to repeat lessons. You hold yourself still out of spite. His smile warms. “Good girl.”

The words hit like a hand under your ribs. Jungwon’s breath changes. It darkens the air.

“Enough,” Jungwon says again, and hooks a finger in the lantern hood. He pulls it open. Light flares, pot-bright, brutal. The three of you blink; the world loses its beautiful edges and shows its seams. “Clinic,” he tells you.

Sunoo’s smile fades pixel by pixel until only his eyes shine. “For now,” he agrees. He steps in closer so there is no air between the three bodies but what breath can claim. He looks at Jungwon and speaks to you. “You’ll end up between us anyway,” he says, the prophecy flat, not cruel. “Why not learn the shape early.”

You should move. You should walk yourself to the nurse and let her count your lungs like prayer beads. Instead you stand very still while two men who have learned your pulse by different languages consider the currency of your fear.

Sunoo lifts his hand and stops a breath from your mouth. You feel the heat of him without the permission of touch. “I won’t kiss you,” he says, velvet and wicked. “Not yet.” He turns his palm and hovers over your throat, reading the rush there like a favorite book. “See what your body does with almost.”

Jungwon moves behind you so quietly the night forgets to mark his steps. He doesn’t touch you. His presence is so large it reads like contact anyway—the shape of him corralling air. You have the dizzy thought that if you leaned back, he would catch you, and if you leaned forward, Sunoo would open like a mouth.

“Breathe,” Sunoo whispers, and it isn’t instruction now; it’s a dare.

You do. The air leans with you. The world tightens to a triangle: lantern glare, the line of a blunted blade tucked into Jungwon’s belt, the faint copper on Sunoo’s knuckle where he touched your lip earlier with the petal.

“I said clinic,” Jungwon repeats, low enough to live at your spine.

“Make her say please,” Sunoo counters, amusement sweet as rot. “Our girl loves a ritual.”

“Don’t—” you start, and then stop, because the word tastes like surrender and you haven’t decided whose hands deserve it.

“Not tonight,” Jungwon says, and you understand: it isn’t mercy. It’s control deferred. He steps to your side, inserts a palm—warm, heavy—at your waist, not pulling, not pushing, just a point you can move along. Sunoo mirrors the motion on your other side without touching, an echo your nerves misread as contact. Together they guide you three steps, five, toward the clinic’s dim window—two gravities that agree for once.

At the threshold, Sunoo bends so close your ear warms. “Sleep,” he murmurs, the same command Jungwon uses like a blessing. “Dream of hands.” He smiles against the air where your skin ends. “Next time I’ll count for you while he holds you still.”

Jungwon’s hand tightens one notch at your waist, a warning, a promise, a brand pressed through clothes. “Next time,” he says, to Sunoo, to you, to the night that will keep at this until you’re rewritten, “I’ll decide who goes first.”

Nurse Min opens the clinic door before anyone knocks, lamp bright behind her like a little square sun. She takes in the triangle of bodies, the glint of the knife, the feral set of Sunoo’s mouth, the obedient steadiness of Jungwon’s hand at your side.

“Inside,” she says, and steps aside.

You pass between them—Sunoo’s almost-touch a heat across your throat; Jungwon’s real touch a line at your hip you could follow with your eyes closed—and cross into the light.

You do not kiss anyone. No one kisses you.

But as the door shuts and the mountain presses its ear to the glass to listen, you know it: your body already understands the shape they promised. It will remember. It will hunger.

And when it happens—when it really happens—it will not be an accident.

________

The clinic smelled of metal and mint. Nurse Min left you in a chair under her lamp until the feverish hum in your body dulled to a bearable pitch. She made you drink water, bitter and green as ditch weed, and held your wrist while your pulse rattled beneath her thumb. When you asked her if you were safe, she only said, “Nothing in a place like this is safe. At best, some things are safer than others.”

By the time she dismissed you, the compound had already gone to sleep. Mira was curled on her side in the dorm, bracelets stilled. You should have slept too. Instead you lay awake, tasting the memory of a petal pressed against your tongue, feeling the phantom weight of Jungwon’s hand steady at your waist, the ghost of Sunoo’s fingers just shy of your throat.

Your body remembered. It remembered too well.

When you finally slipped into the corridor, your bare feet soundless on the boards, it wasn’t to find air. It was because something in you had already decided that the ache would not stop on its own.

The greenhouse loomed against the night, ribs of iron and glass sweating mist. The lock had never been for people who wanted to stay out. You pushed the door and it sighed open, warm air rushing at you like a mouth.

He was waiting. Of course he was.

Sunoo leaned against a bench, sleeves rolled, pale wrists glowing under the lamps. His expression was the same one he’d worn when he laid the petal on your tongue earlier—delighted, expectant, like he had always known your body would come back to him.

“You breathe too loud when you lie down,” he murmured. “I could hear you from the other side of the hall.”

You should have left. You stepped closer instead.

Sunoo reached for you without touching, fingers tracing the air beside your cheek. That almost-contact burned hotter than heat itself. Your breath caught, and his smile sharpened. “See? Your body tells the truth. It remembers me already.”

His hand hovered down, stopping at the hollow of your throat. “Here,” he whispered. “Where the pulse lives.” He bent, mouth a whisper away from your skin, never quite sealing it. Your nerves screamed as if he’d kissed you. “You want me to touch you. That’s why you came.”

Your denial scraped your teeth but never left your tongue.

“Good girl,” he said, pleased at your silence. He turned you, pressing between your shoulder blades until your knees bent and you landed on the warm boards of the floor. “Stay open. Stay soft.”

His hands came at last—sliding along your thighs, parting them without rush, without doubt. He dragged his thumb along the cotton of your thin shorts, pressing until the damp there gave you away. “Blooming,” he said reverently, as if the word itself could coax you wider.

You gasped when he pressed harder, the friction maddening. He laughed low in his throat, pleased. “You’ve been waiting since the Rite, haven’t you? You swallowed the petal and your body begged for more.”

He tugged fabric aside with clinical precision, exposing you to the humid air. His fingers slicked easily through the wetness already gathered, and he made a sound of satisfaction that went straight to your gut. “So ready,” he crooned. “So obedient.”

Two fingers circled, teased, pressed—but never where you needed. He watched your hips shift, your breath stutter. “Say please,” he murmured.

“I—”

“Shh.” His free hand covered your mouth lightly, thumb grazing your lower lip. “Not with words. With your body.”

Your thighs trembled. You pushed into his hand, desperate. His smile widened. “There it is. Begging without speech.”

He slipped two fingers inside, slow, deliberate. Your back arched, a strangled sound caught behind his palm. He curled them just right, hitting the place that made you shiver, made your eyes roll back. “Yes,” he whispered against your ear. “That’s it. That’s how you bloom.”

His palm pressed harder over your mouth as your moans broke free. His rhythm quickened, fingers thrusting, scissoring, spreading you open as if he meant to plant something inside. Every push forced slick sounds into the greenhouse air. He bent low, lips brushing your temple, murmuring praises between each thrust: “Perfect. My good flower. Opening just for me. No one else will see you like this.”

Your orgasm came sudden, brutal—your whole body snapping tight around his hand, shuddering against him. He kept moving, dragging it out until you were gasping into his palm, thighs twitching.

When at last he withdrew, his fingers glistened. He lifted them to your lips, smearing wetness across them before pushing between. “Taste yourself,” he ordered softly. “Know what you are to me.”

Shame and hunger tangled in your chest. You sucked his fingers clean, and his eyes darkened, mouth parting as if he might finally kiss you. He didn’t. He pulled back just enough to leave you desperate, to make absence itself a cruelty.

“Blooming,” he whispered again, satisfied. “And tomorrow, you’ll be ready for the soil.”

The greenhouse door creaked. You jerked, Sunoo still crouched over you, his slick fingers withdrawing with deliberate slowness.

Jungwon stood in the doorway, lantern spilling gold over his dirt-streaked arms. His jaw tightened as his eyes tracked the wet shine on your lips, the way your legs trembled, the smug curve of Sunoo’s smile.

For a long, brutal moment, no one spoke. Then Jungwon stepped forward, shovel still in one hand, and his voice came out rough, dangerous.

“She’s mine next.”

The lamps hummed. The soil smelled of iron. Your heart beat against your throat like a trapped bird as the two men stared across you, and you realized the next time you were touched, it would be by both.

And you would not escape it.

______

The night you tried to run, the mountain gave you away.

The boards beneath your feet creaked, wet leaves clung to your calves, and the fog was a hand on your throat. You ran anyway. Past the dorms, past the glasshouse ribs glowing faintly from their lamps, down the west path where the ravens laughed like women who knew your secrets.

You thought the dark would cover you.

But the dark belonged to him.

A hand caught your wrist so hard you nearly went down. The lantern flared, and Jungwon’s face came out of the mist—eyes black, jaw locked, the muscle jumping with rage he didn’t bother to soften. He dragged you against him, chest heaving like you’d run into a wall that had learned how to breathe.

“Running,” he said, voice low and sharp as a spade. “After I told you not to.”

“I—”

“Quiet.” His grip on your wrist tightened until your bones ached. “Do you know what he did to you in there? Do you know what you smell like? Soil and him.” His other hand closed hard around your chin, forcing you to meet his eyes. His breath came hot, furious. “I told you not to let him touch you.”

Your protest was thin. “I didn’t—”

“You did.” He shoved you back against the rough bark of a pine. The trunk dug into your spine; his body crowded yours, heat and dirt and something mean. “You opened your mouth. You let him put his fingers in you.” His hand slid down your throat, pressing just enough to make your pulse throb under his palm. “Do you think that makes you his?”

“No—”

“No,” he repeated, mocking and brutal, pressing harder until your words broke into breath. His eyes raked you up and down like he was reading your body for lies. “You’re mine. If you’re soil, then I’m the one who plants.”

The knife appeared from his belt—not sharp, its edge long since blunted, but the point still honest. He held it flat against your belly, dragging it up under your shirt until the cold metal kissed the underside of your breast. You shivered, body jerking against the bark. His mouth twisted, equal parts fury and hunger.

“Scared?” he murmured. “Good. Fear makes roots dig deeper.”

He hooked the blade under the band of your shorts, pulling until the fabric stretched and then snapped. His hand shoved inside without pause, fingers rough, pushing into you like he meant to stake a claim. You gasped, the sound choking against the hand still at your throat.

“Wet,” he said, voice a growl, face close enough you could feel every word on your skin. “You’re soaked for me already. Even after him. Especially after him.” His fingers thrust harder, curling, relentless, forcing your body to answer him. “Say it. Say whose you are.”

You shook your head, too proud, too broken to give it.

His mouth curved cruel. “Then I’ll fuck it into you.”

He yanked your shorts down to your thighs, lifted you bodily against the tree, and shoved his hips between your legs. You clawed at his shoulders, half to push, half to hold on, but he pinned you easy, the knife’s flat pressed to your throat now like a brand. His cock pressed hot and thick against your entrance, grinding through the slick he’d found there, rubbing until you whined.

“You hear that?” he hissed, rolling his hips, dragging the head over your folds until obscene wet sounds filled the air. “Your body begging me in front of the whole fucking mountain.” He pushed in one brutal stroke, burying himself deep, forcing a cry from your throat. His teeth bared at the sound, savage triumph. “That’s it. Open up. Take me.”

He fucked you hard against the tree, every thrust jarring bark into your spine, every shove brutal and unrelenting. The knife never left your throat—flat, cold, reminding you what he could do if he wanted. His free hand gripped your hip so hard you knew you’d bruise, dragging you down onto him, using your body like it was already his.

“Mine,” he snarled against your ear, hips slamming. “Not his. Not anyone’s. Mine to fuck. Mine to plant. Mine to keep.” His pace grew rougher, desperate, jealousy bleeding into possession. “You’ll carry me. You’ll take my seed. You’ll remember whose cock fucked you open like this.”

Your moans tore free, high and broken, every thrust forcing them out. He laughed, breathless, mean. “Good little soil. Look at you—taking it. Clenching so tight you’ll never forget.”

When you came, it was with your whole body jerking, nails raking his back, his name spilling without permission. He fucked you through it, ruthless, using your climax to milk himself. With a final, brutal thrust, he came inside you, grinding deep, growling your name like a curse and a prayer.

He stayed pressed to you, chest heaving, the knife slipping down to rest against your collarbone. He didn’t soften. He didn’t let go. His mouth found your jaw, biting hard enough to leave a mark.

When he finally pulled out, slick running down your thighs, he yanked your shorts back up roughly, like covering you was a punishment. He grabbed your wrist again, dragging you toward the compound.

“You’re not sleeping in the dorms,” he said, voice iron. “You’re mine now. My room. My bed. No one else touches you.”

The lantern swung, throwing gold across the path. His grip never loosened. You stumbled after him, body raw, used, filled, the echo of his thrusts still beating through you.

And you knew he wasn’t bluffing.

______

Jungwon’s grip on your wrist was iron, dragging you through the silent hallways until the greenhouse lamps and dorm windows disappeared. His door slammed behind you, the bolt driven home with the finality of a lock on a coffin. His room was small, spare, stripped bare of comfort—just a bed, a chair, his tools. No flowers, no soil. Only him.

He shoved you onto the mattress like you weighed nothing. Your body jolted, still slick, still aching from what he’d already done. He stood over you, chest rising and falling hard, sweat at his temples, jaw clenched like a vice.

“You don’t go back to them,” he growled. “Not Mira, not Seo, and never him.” His eyes burned. “You’re mine.”

Your breath hitched; the word stuck in your throat.

A voice cut through the dark. “You’re wrong.”

The lantern on the desk flared, spilling its glow across pale wrists, white robes loosened at the chest, a mouth curved in that familiar, cruel delight. Sunoo. Already inside. Already waiting.

Jungwon stiffened, shoulders tensing like a predator finding another in his territory. “Get out.”

Sunoo ignored him. He stepped closer, his smile syrup-sweet but eyes sharp. “She doesn’t belong to you alone. Look at her.” His gaze slid over you where you trembled on the bed, your thighs pressed together, your lips parted from shallow breaths. “She’s terrified. She’s confused. She needs gentleness.” His tone softened, dripping like honey. “And you can’t give her that.”

“Gentle doesn’t keep her alive,” Jungwon snapped, stepping between you and him, shovel-callused fists at his sides. “Gentle lets her rot.”

“Alive?” Sunoo laughed, low and dangerous. “She’s not alive. She’s blooming. That’s what I make her.”

“Blooming,” Jungwon spat, “is just another word for open. And I’m the one inside her.”

The words made your stomach twist; heat and fear tangled until you couldn’t tell the difference. You tried to speak—stop, please stop—but your throat locked.

Sunoo’s gaze darted back to you, softening. He crouched, ignoring the way Jungwon loomed above him. His hand hovered just shy of your ankle, not touching—never touching—but the heat of him crawled up your skin. “Petal,” he whispered, “don’t be afraid. I’ll take care of you. I’ll show you how it feels to be cherished.” His lips parted, almost grazing your skin as he breathed you in. “Let me taste you.”

Jungwon’s growl shook the air. He seized your arm, yanking you back against his chest, his hand spread possessive across your stomach. His cock, still half-hard, pressed against your spine. “She’s mine. Mine to fuck. Mine to plant. Mine to keep.”

Your body shuddered. Fear, yes—but deeper, darker: want, shame, hunger you couldn’t smother.

Sunoo’s smile only widened. “Then let’s see who she opens for first.” He slid closer, slipping between your knees before Jungwon could stop him. His breath fanned over your thighs, hot and wet, and you gasped when he finally touched you—soft, reverent, his hands parting you like something fragile.

The contrast made you dizzy. Jungwon’s grip bruised; Sunoo’s mouth pressed feather-light kisses along the inside of your thigh, slow, teasing, as if every touch was worship. “Sweet,” he murmured, nose brushing close to the heat of you. “So sweet. I’ll make her sing.”

“Don’t you dare—” Jungwon started, but your body betrayed you, hips twitching toward Sunoo’s mouth, a whimper breaking past your lips.

That sound changed everything.

Jungwon froze, then snarled, shoving you down into the mattress, caging you with his body. One hand pinned your wrists above your head; the other tore your shirt open down the middle, fabric splitting under his strength. His mouth crashed to your throat, biting, marking, sucking bruises into your skin with furious precision.

Sunoo groaned at the sight, as if Jungwon’s violence only made you more beautiful. He leaned in, finally sealing his lips over your cunt, sucking hard, tongue lapping deep through your folds. The wet sounds filled the room, obscene, echoing against the bare walls.

You cried out, the noise muffled against Jungwon’s hand when he clapped it over your mouth. “Quiet,” he hissed, teeth at your jaw. “Don’t give him the satisfaction of hearing how much you love it.”

But Sunoo knew anyway. He moaned against you, tongue flicking your clit, fingers sliding inside with practiced ease, curling just right. He fed off every twitch, every muffled scream, every desperate roll of your hips. “See?” he said between licks, voice thick with arousal. “She opens for me. She’s blooming already.”

Jungwon pressed harder, grinding his cock against your hip through his pants, furious at your body’s betrayal, at the way your thighs trembled around Sunoo’s head. “She’s dripping because I fucked her raw,” he snarled. “All you’re doing is licking up what I left in her.”

The words made your body jerk, shame and desire hitting like lightning.

Sunoo pulled back just enough to look up at you, his mouth shining with your wetness, his eyes dark and soft. “You taste like need,” he whispered. He dragged his tongue slowly over your clit, savoring the way you cried out under Jungwon’s palm. “And you’ll remember I was the first one who made you come with his mouth.”

“Shut up,” Jungwon snapped. But his own hips rolled against you, his cock throbbing, desperate. His jealousy only sharpened his need.

You couldn’t fight it. You came hard, body arching, Sunoo’s mouth sucking your clit, Jungwon’s hand holding you down, his teeth biting at your throat. Your orgasm tore through you like the roots of something invasive, clawing deep, unstoppable.

They didn’t stop.

Sunoo licked you clean, gentle as a lover, humming like he was savoring wine. Jungwon bit harder, grinded rougher, his hand forcing your wrists deeper into the mattress. Both of them on you—one soft, one brutal—until you didn’t know whose name to scream.

And you understood, with raw clarity, that they weren’t fighting for you.

They were fighting through you.

When the shudders finally broke, you collapsed back, gasping, throat raw. Jungwon leaned down, lips brushing your ear, his voice a growl. “This is just the beginning. Next time I’m inside you while he’s in your mouth. We’ll see who you really belong to.”

Sunoo laughed softly, licking his lips clean of you. “She’ll belong to both.”

And for the first time, you realized he was right.

_____

Your body was still shaking when Jungwon yanked you upright, dragging you into his lap as if the bed belonged only to him. His thighs were iron beneath you, his chest hard against your spine. One arm locked around your waist, the other snared your throat, thick fingers spreading wide until his grip owned the column of your neck. He forced your head back, baring your mouth to him.

“You’ll taste me now,” he snarled, lips crashing into yours.

The kiss was brutal—teeth knocking, spit spilling. He shoved his tongue deep, choking you with it, swallowing every noise you tried to make. His palm pressed tighter at your throat until your pulse roared in your ears, until breath itself became something you had to beg him for. Drool slicked your chin, his tongue forcing yours down, his grip refusing to let you turn away. It was less a kiss than a violent claiming, his mouth fucking yours the way his cock had already fucked your body raw.

You gasped when he pulled back just enough to let air in, a string of spit hanging obscenely between your mouths. He licked it off your bottom lip, then spat into your mouth deliberately, cruelly, watching you swallow because you had no choice.

“Open,” he growled, forcing your jaw wider with his hand at your throat. “Good. That’s mine too. Every sound. Every swallow.”

Your vision blurred; your thighs squeezed together involuntarily. Terror and heat tangled until you couldn’t breathe for either.

And then Sunoo was there.

He crouched in front of you, hands sliding up your knees to part them wider, his smile infuriatingly calm even in violence. “My turn.”

“No,” Jungwon bit out, but Sunoo was already moving. He grabbed your chin, fingers digging in hard enough to bruise, and wrenched your head away from Jungwon’s mouth. Your neck snapped to the side, and before you could gasp, Sunoo’s lips were on yours.

It wasn’t tender. It was vicious. He sucked your bottom lip until it split, teeth biting down until pain shot bright, then licked the blood from your mouth as if it belonged to him. His tongue drove past your teeth, tasting everything Jungwon had left there, devouring it with obscene relish.

You moaned helplessly, the sound muffled between them.

Jungwon’s grip on your throat tightened, forcing your head back further, rage pouring off him like heat. “She’s mine.”

Sunoo broke the kiss just long enough to sneer against your wet mouth. “Then why is she kissing me back?” He pressed his tongue to yours again, slow and filthy, sucking until spit ran down your chin. Then he pulled back, wiped it with his thumb, and shoved the slick digit back between your lips. “Lick it clean. That’s mine now.”

Your mouth obeyed before your brain caught up.

Jungwon’s chest vibrated with a growl. He bent and bit your jaw, then your throat, leaving purple marks against Sunoo’s fingerprints. His hand clamped your neck harder, forcing you to gasp around Sunoo’s thumb.

“She’s choking on me,” Jungwon snarled. “Not you.”

Sunoo laughed low, mean. He leaned closer, his forehead pressing to yours, his other hand grabbing Jungwon’s wrist on your throat, not to stop it, but to squeeze it tighter. “Then let’s choke her together.”

The pressure doubled. Your eyes watered, spit pooling at the corner of your mouth, drooling down your chin as both of them held you, forced you open, forced you to take them. One mouth kissed you, sucked you, spat into you; the other bit, bruised, pressed your throat until stars danced.

You weren’t kissing anymore. You were being consumed.

And God help you—your body wanted more.

_______

They had you caged between them—Jungwon at your back, Sunoo at your front—two sets of hands closing every door your body might have tried to escape through.

Your pulse beat frantically against Jungwon’s palm at your throat. Sunoo’s fingers dug into your chin, keeping your face tipped up so you couldn’t hide. Their mouths had already ruined you, spit running down your jaw, bruises blooming on your throat and collarbone like dark flowers. Your chest rose too fast, every breath their permission, every sound something they stole from you.

“You see?” Sunoo whispered, voice as sweet as it was cruel. “She’s ready. She’s shaking for us.” His hand slid down, brushing your stomach, spreading lower. “The soil is wet.”

“She’s wet because I fucked her open,” Jungwon snapped against your ear, his breath harsh. “She’s mine to fill.” He ground his cock against your ass through his pants, thick and hard, a promise of what was coming. His teeth found your neck again, biting until your body arched despite yourself.

The two of them moved you as if you were theirs to arrange. Your thighs were forced wide over Sunoo’s lap, your back crushed to Jungwon’s chest. Rough hands tugged your ruined shorts away; cool air hit the slick heat between your legs. Sunoo hummed like a priest receiving an offering.

“Let me taste again.” He didn’t wait for permission. His mouth descended, sucking your clit into his mouth, tongue lapping at you until your eyes rolled back. His hands locked on your thighs, holding you open for him, his moans vibrating into your cunt.

Jungwon shoved your wrists down into the mattress, his cock rutting against you through fabric, his fury pressed into every grind. “Listen to her,” he growled. “Dripping for us. Begging without words.” He yanked his pants open, the blunt head of his cock dragging along your ass, smearing precum. “She’s going to take both. Right now.”

You sobbed, terror and need colliding until you couldn’t tell them apart. “I can’t—”

“You can,” Sunoo cut in smoothly, lifting his head, chin wet with your slick. He stroked your trembling thighs with a mockery of gentleness. “Your body’s already opening. We’ll guide you.” His eyes glimmered, half-devotion, half-madness. “You’ll bloom for us together.”

Jungwon spat into his palm, gripped his cock, and shoved it between your cheeks, rubbing the head against your tight hole until you whined. “Scared?” he hissed, his hand tightening at your throat. “Good. Fear makes you clench tighter.”

Sunoo’s fingers slid inside your cunt again, curling, coaxing, slicking you up for him. He looked up at you, his smile soft even as he stretched you ruthlessly. “Breathe, petal. I’ll be inside you soon. You’ll be so full you won’t remember how to be empty.”

When Sunoo lined himself up, pressing the head of his cock against your soaked entrance, Jungwon shoved his tip harder at your ass, both of them pushing at once. Your cry ripped the air as your body was forced to split, one cock stretching your cunt, the other pressing past the tight ring of muscle until you thought you’d break.

“Fuck,” Jungwon groaned, voice raw. “So tight. Gripping me like a fist.”

“She’s perfect,” Sunoo sighed, already sinking deeper, your walls convulsing around him. “Taking both of us. Our flower.”

It was too much. The stretch burned, overwhelming, obscene. You clawed at the sheets, eyes rolling back as both of them bottomed out, your body trembling violently with the force of being split in two. They didn’t give you time. Jungwon’s hips snapped forward first, brutal, pounding into your ass with the fury of jealousy. Sunoo met him stroke for stroke, slower, deeper, angling until every thrust speared your cunt exactly where it made you scream.

Pinned, stuffed, broken open—you were nothing but their vessel.

“Say it,” Jungwon snarled, hand squeezing your throat until your vision blurred. “Say you’re mine.”

“She’s ours,” Sunoo countered, kissing you, sucking the spit from your mouth, swallowing your gasps. “Tell us, petal. Tell us who you bloom for.”

Your answer was a sob, a whimper, a strangled cry as their cocks moved inside you, filling every inch, grinding against each other through the thin wall of your body until the sensation drove you half-mad.

“Fuck, I can feel him through you,” Jungwon groaned, rutting harder, holding you down as if you might try to run again. “But you’re squeezing me tighter. That’s how I know you’re mine.”

Sunoo’s tongue licked the tears from your cheeks. “She’s crying for me. Look at her. Look how she wants to be saved even while we ruin her.”

Your body convulsed around them, slick gushing down your thighs, every nerve alight. The pain blurred into pleasure until you were begging without words, your nails tearing the sheets, your cries spilling into their mouths as they fought to own your climax.

When you came, it was devastating—your cunt and ass clenching around them both, milking them, dragging them deeper. Jungwon groaned, teeth sinking into your shoulder as he spilled inside you, hot and overwhelming. Sunoo followed seconds later, filling your cunt until you were overflowing, cum dripping down your thighs, both of them holding you so tightly you couldn’t breathe.

They didn’t pull out. They stayed locked inside, cocks twitching, their breaths harsh against your skin.

Jungwon’s hand squeezed your throat one last time, forcing your eyes to his. “Say it,” he demanded, voice hoarse. “Say you’re planted in me.”

Sunoo kissed your cheek, softer but no less cruel. “Say you’ll bloom for us both.”

And you, too full to think, too wrecked to fight, whispered the only truth left in you:

“I can’t belong to just one.”

They smiled—different smiles, but the same hunger.

And you knew you’d never escape again.

_______

woah this was so diffecult to write SO IM SORRY IF IT ISNT THE BEST

THANK YOU FOR READING!!

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[lollovern]

- The Garden Left to Rot -

enhypen masterlist

wattpad

inspired by this post

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groundskeeper!yang jungwon x guest!femreader x cult counselor!kim sunoo | obsessive romance | cult horror | forced devotion | ritualistic sex | jealousy and rivalry | fucked-up love triangle | knife kink | corrupted comfort | you will belong to someone eventually | DARK CONTENT AHEAD!!

wc: 14k

summary: You’re sent to a grief recovery retreat hidden in the mountains. But this isn’t therapy — it’s a cult blooming in blood and rot. Jungwon wants to bury you where no one else can touch you. Sunoo wants to crack you open until you bloom for him. Both say it’s healing. But it’s obsession.

warnings: extreme gore, threesome, cult rituals, body horror (flowers under skin, insect scenes), blood play, forced confinement, psychological manipulation, emotional degradation, knife play, religious delusion, obsessive behavior, toxic romance, dubcon themes, ritualistic sex, hallucinations, violence

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The van climbs until the road forgets how to be a road. Pines crowd close; fog slicks the windshield like breath on glass. By the time the driver kills the engine, your phone has been surrendered, the waiver signed, and your name—your real one—folded into a sealed envelope with your belongings.

A hand-painted sign leans crooked against a stone pillar: THE GARDEN.

Beneath it, smaller script: Let go. Become.

Everyone here is an adult—paperwork made that clear. Still, the cluster of arrivals huddle like freshmen. A woman in a bone-white coat stands at the gate, serene as a photograph. “Welcome,” she says. “I’m Director Seo. You won’t need last names here. You won’t need yesterday.” Her smile doesn’t reach her eyes. “We begin with stillness.”

Stillness smells like damp soil and rosemary. The compound spreads in tiers: a glasshouse ribbed with iron; dormitories with shuttered windows; a refectory where steam fogs the panes; a low clinic painted the color of milk. The greenhouse breathes—a pulse of heavy, sweet air each time the door opens. Inside, rows of lilies lean toward heat lamps; vines net the rafters; something rustles in the loam.

“Orientation,” says the boy who appears at Director Seo’s shoulder. He’s young—early twenties—with paper-clean features and the kind of smile people don’t realize is a blade until it’s already inside them. Kim Sunoo. His name tag says Counselor; the ribbon beneath it says Ritual Lead. “Shoes off in the greenhouse,” he adds lightly. “We keep the floors soft.”

Your shoes leave the ground. Cool boards. Warm mist. A bell rings once. The arrivals form a circle on woven mats; a dozen white-robed staff ghost the edges. A few guests have the shaved look of hospital discharge; others wear expensive emptiness like cologne.

“Here,” Sunoo says gently, “we do not share pasts. Only needs.” His gaze slips over faces and lands on you. Not a leer. A selection. “You may speak or sit in silence. Both are honest.”

“I need to sleep,” says a woman with chewed nails. “Like, three days.”

“I need to stop remembering,” a man answers, voice flat.

The girl beside you—twenty-two, maybe—says nothing. Yejin is stitched on her wristband. Her hands are ink-stained. She draws while people talk: a quick, vicious graphite—faces with petal-mouths; ribs like trellises. When you shift, she tilts her sketchbook so you can see the newest figure: a person kneeling in dirt, throat blooming with something that isn’t a flower.

“Beautiful,” Sunoo murmurs, as if he’s praising a child’s first recital. “You have a keen eye for transformation, Yejin.”

From across the greenhouse, someone drags burlap sacks along iron grates. Soil dark as coffee spills from a split seam and oozes across the floor. The man hauling the bags moves like he’s apologized to gravity and refuses to do it again. Yang Jungwon. Groundskeeper on his tag. Grey work shirt. Forearms nicked white with old cuts. He doesn’t look at the circle—doesn’t look at you—until he does, and then he doesn’t stop. Not curiosity. Assessment, like weighing a seed between finger and thumb and deciding if it will live in his earth.

Director Seo outlines rules in the smooth tone of a stewardess reciting crash procedures:

No personal histories in group.

No contact with family for the first fourteen days.

No unsupervised access to the greenhouse after dusk.

Do not remove plant material from designated zones.

What is given to the soil remains in the soil.

“That includes grief,” Sunoo says, almost playful. “Especially grief.”

Your dorm is clean in the way of hospital corridors and mortuaries. Two metal beds. Two lockers. A copy of a softbound booklet on each pillow: STILLNESS GUIDE. Your roommate arrives with a jangle of bracelets and the brittle cheer of someone who learned to smile as self-defense. Mira, 26, volunteer-turned-resident-mentor.

“Welcome-welcome,” she chirps, then lowers her voice. “Pro tip: keep your head down the first three days. They watch how you watch.”

“Who?”

“Everyone.” She flicks her gaze toward the window, where the greenhouse skeletons against dusk. “Especially him.” She means Sunoo—you can hear it in the soft, reverent way. “And the groundskeeper when it’s dark.” That last part is almost a warning.

The bell rings again. Dinner is broth that tastes like the inside of a leaf and bread dense with seeds. You eat at long tables while staff move among you like shepherds. Across from you, a jittery young man, Taesun—24, scars like cat-scratches up his wrists—piles his crusts and crumbles them methodically. He pockets a handful when he thinks no one sees.

“For the worms,” he whispers to the crumbs. “They get hungry at night.”

Mira nudges your knee under the table. “He feeds them behind the east wall,” she murmurs. “Says they keep the nightmares down if they’re busy.”

In the clinic after dinner, a nurse swabs your fingers where the paper edges of the waiver bit skin. Nurse Min is beautiful in the harsh way of women who have decided their faces are weapons. When she says “this will sting,” the consonants soften strangely; a long surgical scar splits the underside of her tongue. She catches you looking and lifts a brow that says yes, I am aware of my mouth. Then—almost tender—she tapes your knuckle with gauze printed with tiny flowers.

Back in the greenhouse, the first night session is called Surrender. The lamps buzz. Mist beads your eyelashes. Sunoo stands barefoot on the damp boards, sleeves rolled, voice a low waterfall.

“Close your eyes,” he says. “Name the weight you want the earth to hold for you. Don’t say it out loud. Let your body say it.”

Around you, bodies sway. Some cry. Some freeze. When you keep your eyes open, Sunoo notices. Of course he does.

“New sprout,” he says softly, close to your ear, and the nickname feels chosen, not random. “You don’t have to force stillness. It happens when the soil recognizes you.”

“Does it?” Your voice is hoarse from disuse and altitude.

“Always.” He smiles. Not kind. Not unkind. Satisfied. “The Garden knows its own.”

Across the rows, Jungwon kneels in the dirt, wrist-deep in loam, planting something without a label. He doesn’t follow Sunoo’s cadence; he follows his own. When one lamp flickers, he rises and fixes it with the swift, competent movements of someone who builds instead of asks. When he sits back, the soil clings to his fingers like shadow.

You should sleep. Instead you help Mira remake your beds with the stiff white sheets that smell faintly of bleach and rosemary. She keeps talking, because silence makes her hands shake.

“I came as a volunteer,” she says, tucking corners square. “Stayed as a patient. It’s easier when they tell you what to be.”

“What do they tell you?”

She smiles without humor. “A flower.” Her eyes slide to your bandaged hand. “Try not to bleed in the greenhouse. They don’t like that.”

“Why?”

“Because the soil remembers.”

At night the compound changes. Lights dim. The wind strips the pines and combs the glass with needles. You lie awake and count breaths—yours, Mira’s, the building’s—until you can’t bear numbers anymore.

You go out.

The air is colder than the dorm suggests. The greenhouse glows from within, a pulse behind fogged panes. Beyond the east wall, something moves with slow persistence. You follow the ripple of disturbed leaves to a break in the hedgerow and find Taesun kneeling with his pockets turned inside out, sowing crumbs into the leaf litter like a penitent farmer.

“The worms,” he says. “They hate hunger.”

“And if they’re hungry?”

“They crawl into you,” he says simply, and his eyes are not crazy; they’re convinced. “They’re looking for warmth.”

A lantern kindles behind you. “Curfew,” a voice says.

You turn. Jungwon holds the light up so it paints his face in bones and gold. Up close, his features soften—stillness without Sunoo’s practiced grace; a patient animal’s attention. The lantern makes a thicket of his lashes. He looks from you to Taesun to your bare feet on the cold boards.

“You’ll catch a chill,” he says to you, like it’s a personal offense. “Shoes. Now.”

You should resent the command. Instead, you feel the unreasonable urge to obey. You start toward the dorms.

“Not that way,” he says. “West path. Easier. Less slope.” He tips the lantern so the light doesn’t blind you while you pass. It’s a small courtesy. It also marks you—every guard on the walkway can see who broke curfew and who brought them back.

“Do you plant at night?” you ask, because silence around him feels like standing at a cliff’s edge and leaning a little too far.

“Always,” he says. He doesn’t volunteer more. His eyes drag briefly to your bandaged hand. “You left blood in the greenhouse.”

“I didn’t—”

He lifts two fingers, the gesture efficient and final. “The soil remembers.” His mouth twitches—not a smile, exactly; the ghost of one. “Mira talks too much.”

“Is that against the rules?”

“It’s against survival.”

He walks you to the dorm porch and stops at the bottom step like there’s an invisible line he won’t cross. The night carries pine resin and wet metal. You want to ask him what he plants without labels, what grows under lamps that mimic suns, why the staff wear rosaries made of seeds.

He says, low, “Don’t follow sounds you don’t understand.”

“Why?”

“Because some things here answer to being watched.” He tilts the lantern, and for a heartbeat you see something like a tenderness he hides even from himself. “Sleep.”

You try. You fail. When you finally slide under, it’s the shallow kind of rest that hears every hinge complain.

Morning stains the glasshouse pale gold. Breakfast is porridge and a shot glass of bitter green. “Chlorophyll,” Mira grimaces. “For purity. Or the aesthetic.” She scans the refectory like she’s counting exits. “There’ll be a Placement Walk after breakfast. Don’t volunteer. They love volunteers.”

“What is it?”

She cuts her eyes toward the greenhouse. “They take someone to the grove and ‘help them choose a garden name.’ Sometimes they come back with a wreath. Sometimes without their voice for a while.”

Director Seo taps her cup. “Today’s Placement Walk is for… Yejin.”

The graphite girl looks up, startled as a deer. Her pencil stills. Sunoo’s smile brightens by half a watt. “I’ll take her,” he offers, hand already extended. “I’ve seen her drawings. She understands transformation.”

If you didn’t sleep, you are alert now. Jungwon appears in the doorway like the building made him. His gaze flicks over the room, and when it lands on Yejin’s shaking knuckles, something barely visible tightens in his jaw.

“I’ll go with you,” he says to Sunoo without looking away from the girl.

“Of course,” Sunoo replies. Silk over steel. “Two witnesses. Very proper.”

They lead her out between them: the counselor with a palm light on her shoulder; the groundskeeper holding the door open so it doesn’t bite her. The room exhales when the door closes. Mira’s bracelets clink as her hands start to shake again.

“They’ll bring her back,” you say, because logic is a habit.

“Usually,” Mira says.

Taesun folds bread crumbs into his napkin with ritual care. “If the worms are fed.”

“Stop with the worms—”

He looks up, suddenly fiercer than his tremor allows. “This place eats. I just like to decide what it eats.”

You leave your spoon in your bowl. The porridge lurches in your gut like a tide. Through the greenhouse glass, you can’t see the grove, only the suggestion of trunks and a slit of path. Time grows teeth.

When they return, Yejin walks in her body like someone has moved the furniture. A crown of woven reeds presses her hair flat. There’s a smear of green at the corner of her mouth, like she’s chewed a leaf until it bled. She carries her sketchbook close to her chest as if it’s the last piece of herself no one has touched.

“What did you choose?” Director Seo asks.

Yejin’s voice is soft but intact. “Night-blooming cereus.”

“A flower that opens in darkness,” Sunoo says, pleased. “Perfect.”

Jungwon stands behind them, sleeves rolled to the elbow, forearms dirt-streaked. A single thorn scratches the back of his hand, a bright new welt. You don’t know why your chest warms at the proof that something here can still hurt them too.

As the room settles, Nurse Min touches your shoulder. “Consult,” she says, consonants rounded. In the clinic, she peels your bandage, checks the small cut, nods. “Fine.”

“Was the walk… normal?” you ask, too casual. “For Yejin.”

Nurse Min dabs salve with a gentleness that doesn’t fit her knife-edged face. “Normal is a shape you learn,” she says. “Here, it is round.” She taps your knuckle. “Don’t open yourself on purpose. Things may grow inside.”

“Like what?”

Her eyes flick briefly toward the greenhouse. “Names.”

By afternoon the schedule has you shoveling, watering, scrubbing, writing lines. I am ready to be less. You write it a hundred times until the words separate from meaning and become a pattern of stems and loops. Outside, Jungwon clears a new bed along the south wall. His shovel bites; his shoulders move with the reliable rhythm of practiced labor. A boy twice your size steps into his path and mutters something you can’t hear. Jungwon doesn’t raise his voice. He simply looks at the boy until the boy forgets how to stand where he’s standing and moves.

“Don’t stare,” Mira warns from beside you, but she’s staring too. “He notices.”

“He noticed last night,” you say.

Mira goes still. “You went out?”

“For air.”

“Air is how they catch you,” she whispers, and for the first time her cheer fails. “Promise me you won’t go alone again.”

You don’t promise. You also don’t say I don’t know who I am without alone.

At dusk, group again. Sunoo has you sit closer to him than yesterday. When you resist, he laughs softly, as if you’re charming rather than disobedient. “We sit where the light needs us,” he says. You wonder if that’s a rule or a line he likes. While others speak, he doesn’t look at them; he watches their hands, their throats, the wet edge of eyes. When your breath hitches at someone’s story, he turns his head sharply like a wolf hearing snow crack.

“What would you let go of?” he asks you, voice pitched so the rest of the circle hears only the question, not the ownership threaded through it.

You could say: the fire, the last call you ignored, the smell of burning hair. Instead, you say nothing. He accepts your silence as if it were obedience he taught you.

Outside the glass, Jungwon is a darker shape among dark shapes, moving a hose along the rows. When his head turns toward the circle, it isn’t to the whole; it is to you. He holds you there for a breath you feel in your wrists. Then he tips the hose, and water falls like rain on metal bones.

You sleep after midnight because your body ambushes you. You wake to weight. Not on you; in the air, a heaviness like weather. The greenhouse lights are out. The compound holds its breath.

Something is under your pillow.

You slide your hand beneath it and touch paper—the rough tooth of a sketchbook page. You draw it out under the dim nightlight and see yourself. Not flattering. Not cruel. Exact. You kneel on dark soil, mouth open, and something vines out—delicate stems laced with thorns. Hands—two sets—hold your shoulders lightly, possessively: one set with ink stains, one with dirt ground into the half moons of the nails. At the bottom, Yejin’s cramped script: “Some flowers only open when watched.”

Mira stirs. “What is it?”

“Art,” you say, and your voice surprises you with how steady it is.

“What kind?”

“Prophetic,” you answer, because the truth is an animal pacing the edge of the bed and you’re not ready to let it into your ribs yet.

You slide the drawing back under your pillow and close your eyes. Across the compound, the night shifts. In your mind, Sunoo’s smile threads petals through your tongue. In reality, Jungwon’s lantern skates once across the fogged panes, a slow-moving star. Two orbits, caught in the same sky, tightening.

Slow burn, the booklet promised. Healing begins when you stop resisting.

You do not stop.

You breathe. You listen to the soil remembering you.

And you wait.

______

Morning arrives with a whistle under the door and the faint itch of grit in your teeth, as if you’ve been speaking to the ground in your sleep. Breakfast is the same: porridge, a bitter green shot, tea that tastes like boiled bark. Mira counts sips, bracelets clinking like quiet alarms. Taesun crushes his toast to dust and pockets it, eyes bright with purpose. Yejin sits very still, crown of reeds damp against her hair, sketchbook closed for once like a door she’s guarding with her body.

Director Seo taps her cup. “Today begins the Mouth Fast,” she says, voice smooth as tile. “Speech is the first addiction. For twenty-four hours, we practice voicelessness. Carry your stone”—a monk in linen sets a bowl of river stones on each table—“and let it hold your words. Anyone who breaks the fast will do a double shift in the greenhouse trenches. Sunoo will lead stillness. Jungwon will direct labor.”

A murmur rises and dies, mouths pressing shut to prove eagerness. Mira puts a flat, oval stone in your palm. “Don’t lose it,” she whispers, already breaking the rule. “They’ll say the soil took your voice because you were careless.”

You tuck the stone into your sleeve and meet Sunoo’s eyes across the hall. He’s already watching—of course he is. The smile he gives you would be harmless if you hadn’t seen how he moves when he’s pleased: slower, closer, like a candle drawn to oxygen. Jungwon lingers by the service door with a clipboard and a coil of hose on his shoulder, scanning tables the way a shepherd counts sheep by the sound of their breathing.

Chores first. Outside, the air needles your lungs; the mountain wears its cold like a second skin. Jungwon assigns tasks without looking at his list. “Mira, refectory herbs. Taesun, east wall compost. Yejin, with Nurse Min in the clinic.” His gaze slides to you and steadies. “You—paths and drains. Stay out of the grove.” Not a suggestion.

You carry a stiff-bristled broom down stone paths glazed with last night’s dew. The greenhouse ribs glow under weak sun; from inside, lamps hum, and something leafy slaps damply as if it’s learned the shape of applause. By the east wall, Taesun kneels with a small shovel and a reverence that would be holy if it didn’t smell like rot.

He tips crumbs in a neat line, then pauses to show you something cupped in his palm: a white, blind tangle coiling in damp soil. Worms, yes, but too many knotted together, a living thread. He beams, proud. You force your lips into gratitude and keep sweeping. If you stop, you will hear them, and if you hear them, you will dream them.

A shadow falls across your broom. Jungwon holds out a pair of soft-soled garden shoes with the temporary patience of a man who prefers doing to explaining. “Your feet,” he says. “You bruise easily.”

You glance at your bare socks, damp to the ankle. “Is that a rule?”

“It’s a reality,” he says; the word lands like weight. He crouches without asking, sets the shoes on the path, and steps back, gaze down so you can decide if you’ll take his help. You put them on. They’re warm from his hands. He notices the lift of your breath and looks away so the noticing won’t embarrass you. When he straightens, his eyes snag on the river stone tucked in your sleeve. “Don’t drop that,” he says. “The ravens like to steal them.”

You arch a brow—Are you joking?—but he’s already moving, a steady, unshowy force among the clatter of chores.

By mid-morning the Mouth Fast is a taut cord running through the compound. The quiet isn’t peace; it’s suppression, and suppression hums. Sunoo runs stillness from the center of the greenhouse like a maestro conducting silence. He has you sit within his radius; you don’t know how you know that, but you do. When a guest’s shoulders begin to shake, his hand appears at the nape of their neck—just weight, just heat, just enough to persuade the body that obedience feels like care.

He comes to you last, when the lamps have warmed the panes to sweating. He kneels, not quite touching, gaze on your throat. “Your pulse is stubborn,” he says in a voice pitched for you alone. “It hates rhythm. I like that.” He brushes the air near your jawline, not touching, so you feel it anyway. “The stone will teach it obedience. If you’re good at listening.”

You hold his eyes and refuse to nod. He smiles, pleased with your defiance like a trainer who prefers wild animals because they make better trophies. “We’ll work on it,” he whispers, and stands.

After lunch—a bowl of broth filtered until flavor gives up—you’re pulled into the clinic with half a dozen others for “check-ins.” Nurse Min sits you on a stool and unwraps your finger. The cut is a thin mouth now, pink with newness. She touches a gloved finger to the gauze and sniffs it as if the body has a scent that changes when it’s lying.

“Does it itch?” she asks.

You hesitate. The truth is embarrassing. “Everything does,” you admit. “Under the skin. Like… like something wants out.”

“Something wants in,” she corrects mildly. She takes tweezers to the pad of your finger and draws out a hair-fine splinter you didn’t know was there. It isn’t wood—it’s pale and sappy, flexing like a root in the air. She drops it in a jar and screws the lid tight. “Names need medium,” she says. “Don’t let anyone put theirs under your skin.”

“Is that medical advice?”

“It’s survival.” She tapes a fresh bandage printed with tiny leaves, then, softer, “If you start tasting flowers, spit.”

You leave the clinic with your mouth dry as chalk. On the steps, Yejin waits like a shadow that forgot to attach to a body. She presses a folded paper to your palm and flits off before you can unfold it. In the corner of the page, her fast, lethal graphite: you in profile, throat open, something like a stem ghosting up under the jaw. In the negative space behind you, two silhouettes—Sunoo’s soft edges; Jungwon’s blunt solidity—blur toward one another without touching. Underneath, her careful script: Not yet. But soon.

The Mouth Fast bends afternoon into a colder shape. Without words, people show who they are. Mira hums under her breath and taps her stone against her teeth like a bead. Taesun counts breath with his fingers on his ribs. A new arrival—Hana, thirty and jewel-hard—walks like a woman who refuses to ask permission from the air. An older man, Mr. Ko, rows his spoon through soup with the concentration of a man pretending there is a river and a boat that can take him off this mountain.

At dusk, Director Seo calls for the Seed Burial. “We surrender what we’ve hoarded,” she says, and volunteers step forward with small slips of paper seeded with something that will sprout if the soil wants it. They kneel, press the papers into a rectangle of fresh-turned earth, and cover them with a thin skin of loam. The lamps go low. Sunoo stands at their backs. Jungwon stands at their front, shovel grounded like a staff.

You don’t move. You have nothing to bury you can stand to name.

A woman you recognize from orientation—the one who needed three days of sleep—places both palms flat on the soil like it’s someone she loves. Her breath hitches once; she swallows whatever it shook loose. As the last handful of earth covers the names, something beneath the surface shifts. Not the modest swell of seeds drinking. A shove from below.

The crowd stills. You feel it again—a push. The soil flexes and sighs, grains settling. Someone’s hand jerks back as if bitten. Sunoo’s smile does not change, which means it changes. “The ground recognizes an offering,” he says pleasantly. “Stand, flowers. Let the dark do what it’s for.”

Jungwon’s eyes are on the dirt, not the people. His jaw flexes once, twice. You have the sharp, childish thought—He hears it too—and the relief that follows is so naked you almost miss the fear riding it.

Night stitches the compound tight. The Mouth Fast persists: tongues held, little pantomimes replacing argument. In bed, Mira sleeps with her open palm on her stone like it might roll away. You face the wall because the drawing under your pillow is a magnet and your skull is iron.

A scrape wakes you—a quick, purposeful sound under the window. You slide out of bed and ease the latch. Cold breath pours in. On the path below, a lantern moves slow as a planet. You follow, soft-soled shoes silent on the boards, the stone in your sleeve tapping your wrist like a heart that’s climbed too high.

The lantern stops. Jungwon steps into its circle. He doesn’t look surprised to see you. He looks like a man who has laid a trap and found what he baited it for. He lifts the lantern just enough to catch your face without flaying you with light.

He puts a finger to his mouth—quiet—and crooks that same finger: come.

You should run. You go.

He takes you along the west path to a low, fenced plot you haven’t noticed in daylight, because in daylight everything looks like something else. Up close, the boards are stained darker than weather. He stops you with a hand on your sleeve. His grip is gentle; his hand is strong. “Do not speak,” he says, and for the first time today the command lands like care, not control.

He tilts the lantern over the fence. The light stratifies a pit maybe two meters long, maybe one deep, lined with rough timbers and crawling with the industry of decay. You see peels, stems, pot scrapings—normal compost—then catch on something pale threaded through like lace: cartilage? You squint, heart hammering, and in among the skins and stems you see hair—just a clump, just enough to be undeniable. The sour-metal stink under the rot answers a question you didn’t know you were asking until now.

You stagger, mute because the rule still binds your mouth. Jungwon’s hand rises like he planned for your body to try to leave you. He catches your elbow with two fingers and steadies you without pulling you closer. “Breathe,” he says, voice so low the pit swallows it.

You breathe. He watches your lungs move under your shirt as if measuring if they’ll keep their job.

“What is this,” you manage, a whisper that bruises the fast.

“Everything that isn’t needed,” he says. It is both the most honest sentence you’ve heard since you arrived and the worst one. “Don’t come here alone.”

“Why show me?”

His mouth tightens. He weighs the truth and hands you a ration. “Because you will go looking. Better you see what is true than what you can’t live through.”

He lifts the lantern away; the pit dissolves back into darkness. When he looks at you again, the composure you’ve seen him wear like a uniform slips an inch. “Next time,” he says, “wake me.”

“How?” It comes out harder than you intend. “Do I knock on the earth?”

“On my door.” He says it like a correction and a promise. “I’d rather carry you than find you down there with your throat open to the sky.”

You swallow. The stone in your sleeve digs your wrist bone.

He walks you back along the west path, keeping the lantern low so you don’t blind yourself and tumble. At the bottom of the dorm steps, he stops as if a line of salt has been poured between you. “Sleep,” he says. Then, almost grudgingly—no, carefully, like he fears generosity might teach you to expect it—“You did well.”

“You mean quiet,” you say.

“I mean you didn’t lie to yourself while you were looking.” He turns the lantern, and for a heartbeat your faces share a circle of light. It is not intimate, and it is.

Inside, the warm dark smells like bodies and disinfection. Mira turns in her sleep, bracelets whickering. Your hands shake. Not with the adrenaline of the pit—though that remains like a taste at the back of your throat—but with the realization that both men see you. Sunoo sees the mechanism; Jungwon sees the fracture line. You can’t decide which is worse.

The Mouth Fast breaks at dawn with a bell so soft it feels like a secret. Voices resume like a creek finding an old bed; people speak too loudly, then blush, then laugh at their own relief. Director Seo praises “compliance” as if it were a sacrament. In the refectory, mugs clack, spoons scrape. Words return as barter.

You don’t trust yours yet.

Sunoo flows through tables like sunlight convincing itself it’s holy. He catches your empty mug, pours tea, and sets it in front of you with a flourish that makes a few heads turn. “How did the silence fit?” he asks, lazy, interested. It isn’t small talk. It’s a probe shaped like kindness.

“Like wire,” you say.

He smiles, delighted—as if you’ve told him a secret about yourself he can use. “It looks good on you,” he says, and taps your river stone where it sits on the table as if he gave it to you, as if it obeys him too. “We have Talkback today. You and me.”

“Is that optional?”

“In principle,” he says. “In practice, most people prefer to be seen.” He leans in, lower voice. “You certainly do.”

He leaves before you can snap that you preferred to be alive, actually. Across the room, Jungwon stops at the threshold, takes the refectory in at a glance, and chooses a seat with his back to the wall. He eats fast, plain, as if food is fuel and surveillance is dessert. When he lifts his mug, you notice the fresh welt across the back of his hand—a thorn, yesterday, dragging its punctuation.

Talkback is held in a small room off the clinic, windowless, lit by a lamp that chooses flattery over truth. Sunoo sits too close, but because he knows what too close does to bodies, he leaves exactly enough air that you can fool yourself into thinking you could stand if you wanted to. He doesn’t touch you. He rests his forearms on his knees, hands open, posture full of a patience he wears like silk.

“What is the shape of your fear?” he asks, as if fear is polite enough to have geometry.

“Wide,” you say.

“Flat?”

“Deep.”

He grins. “Good. Honesty makes my job easier.” He looks at your mouth, then your hands, then your throat. “Last night you broke curfew.”

It isn’t a question. “I walked.”

“To the west path,” he says, savoring the corridor of it.

“Is that forbidden?”

“Not if you were with someone.”

You hold his gaze. You don’t look away. You don’t nod. You don’t give him Jungwon.

Sunoo’s smile returns, but thinner. “We don’t punish curiosity,” he says silkily. “We shape it.” He nods to your sleeve. “Keep the stone. I like how you sound when you hold it.”

“I didn’t speak.”

“You breathed differently,” he says, and you hate that you believe him. “This afternoon I want you in the greenhouse. We’ll do matching breath. I’ll keep count so you don’t have to.”

Your stomach remembers the pit and rolls. “What if I say no?”

“Then we’ll go slower,” he says, as if you asked him to make it sweeter. “That’s the kind of consent you like, isn’t it? The kind that arrives after your body learns the lesson.”

You stand because sitting feels like agreeing. He doesn’t stop you. He nods as if you’ve completed a task he set in his head.

“Good,” he says. “The roots are listening.”

Outside, the day is too bright in the way of mountains pretending to be gentle. You find Mira tending pots of kitchen herbs—mint, rosemary, a vicious little basil. “You look like you saw a ghost,” she says without looking up.

“I saw the compost,” you say.

She flinches so hard the basil shudders. “You don’t say it out loud,” she hisses, then checks herself, forces her voice calm again. “Names wake things.”

“Whose hair is in it?”

“Everyone’s,” she says. “Eventually.”

By late afternoon your muscles revolt, and stillness becomes a thing you have to hold down with both hands. In the greenhouse, Sunoo runs breath like a metronome. When he kneels behind a girl whose hands won’t stop shaking, he doesn’t touch her skin; he places his palm two inches away from her spine and waits. The girl’s shoulders ease; her breath learns his count. You hate him for it. You hate her relief. You hate that your body pays attention.

Jungwon moves along the rows with a bucket and a dull pruning blade, nicking stems, turning soil, resetting stakes. When a lamp pops and goes dim, he crosses to replace it without being called. On his way back, he passes near your mat—near, not past. The air shifts with him: sweat, iron, soil, a clean note like water running under rock. He doesn’t look down. He scratches the back of his wrist where a thorn welt cross-hatches older scars and says, as if the comment belongs to the room, “Some things only grow when you pretend you can’t see them.”

You don’t know if he means the plants, the people, or you.

Evening comes with teeth. The bell pulls everyone to the refectory; the sky sits heavy, swollen with weather that refuses to begin. Over dinner, Hana spills her tea and swears loudly enough that half the room jumps; then she laughs, tips her chin like she meant to do it, and glares at anyone who looks sorry on her behalf. Mr. Ko tells Taesun to stop feeding the worms like they’re pets; Taesun bares his teeth, half-smile, half warning. Nurse Min pockets a spoon someone bent into a hook. Director Seo watches it all with the small, sated smile of a zookeeper whose animals are thriving.

Night brings the first scream.

Not a long one. Not a movie howl. A single, keening note cut off hard, like a rope being cut. The compound freezes; forks stop halfway to mouths; breath holds. Sunoo is already on his feet, smile sharpened into usefulness. Jungwon’s chair scrapes; he’s moving before you can find your shoes.

They go toward the grove at a measured pace that says they already know what they’ll find. Director Seo lifts her hand. “Stay seated,” she says, and the command lands like weight on your shoulders. Mira’s fingers take yours under the table and squeeze so hard your knuckles grind. You squeeze back. Your mouth tastes like rosemary and fear.

You wait. The greenhouse sweats. The clock you aren’t allowed to see walks itself around the hour by the sound of your blood in your ears. When the door opens again, Sunoo comes in first, serene, coat unwrinkled. Jungwon follows with a bundled shape in his arms—a blanket, a softness of color, too long where a body should bend.

A gasp skips the room. “She fainted,” Sunoo says, which is both intolerably insufficient and the only story you’ll be allowed. “A cleansing reaction. She will rest. We will keep vigil over the names she surrendered.”

He doesn’t say who. Your mind fills the blank with the sleeping woman from breakfast, because that is who you fear for, and fear is a magnet. Jungwon carries the bundle past. You know how much weight that is—your body recognizes the set of his jaw, the economy of his gait. He does not look at you. He doesn’t look anywhere but the door to the clinic, as if any glance could spill what he’s holding.

The dining hall exhales like it’s been underwater too long. Director Seo claps once, neat. “We will not gossip,” she says. “We will not catastrophize. We will practice serenity.”

You don’t sleep. Not because you’re brave—because you’re scared correctly now, and scared correctly people stay awake. When you doze, you wake to the sensation that someone has put a leaf on your tongue and asked you to pray with it in your mouth. You spit into your sheet and find nothing. When you sit up, a shadow peels off the wall near the window and becomes Jungwon.

You nearly fling yourself out of bed. He doesn’t move, as if sudden gestures would spook you. He should not be in the dorms after lights; rules are their own religion here. He breaks this one like he breaks branches: cleanly, without apology.

“You left your shoes,” he says, low. He sets them at the foot of your bed, lined up, laces tucked. His voice is stripped of everything but function. “Don’t go barefoot again.”

“What happened?” you ask, whispering because anything louder might wake the dark.

“Don’t ask me,” he says, and for a breath you think he’s refusing. Then he adds, “Because I’ll tell you.” His gaze drags over your face, cataloging fine tremors, the cracked edge of your mouth, the way one hand fists in the sheet like rope. “Sleep,” he says. “You’ll need it.”

He is out the way he came, the door kissing its jamb like a secret.

You try to obey. The mountain presses its cold face to the window and listens. Somewhere, a lantern moves. Somewhere else, a man like a hymn kneels by a bed that is too light.

You put the river stone back in your sleeve and hold it against your pulse until the beat stops arguing with your bones. You remember the jar in Nurse Min’s clinic with the threadlike root curled at the bottom like a question mark. You picture Yejin’s hand drawing you with something under your skin you didn’t agree to carry.

Stillness was the promise. Obedience was the price. You have paid neither. Now the Garden pays attention.

And you, finally, are afraid.

_________

You wake with the taste of copper and rosemary slicked over your tongue, as if someone pressed a leaf there while you slept and whispered hold it. A welt has risen along your bandaged finger—thin, pale, almost pretty. When you press it, it flexes under the skin like something answering from underneath.

Breakfast is a choreography of clatter and eyes. Mira smiles too hard; her bracelets rattle out a code you can’t read. Taesun tips crumbs into his pocket with priestly concentration. Yejin’s crown of reeds has dried to a brittle halo; she draws with her pencil held like a knife. Hana sits mean and diamond-bright, daring the room to dull her edges. Mr. Ko’s spoon cuts the same path through porridge like a boatman refusing any other shore. Director Seo watches the surface of her tea the way people watch the sea for bodies.

“The Naming Rite will be held at sundown,” she announces, as if she’s asking for the salt. “Those selected have been notified.”

Sunoo lifts his eyes, and that’s your notification.

Mira’s fingers find your knee under the table and clamp. She shakes her head once, small, fast—refuse. You don’t know what refusal looks like here besides a story they will tell about you afterward.

“Drink,” Nurse Min says when you pass through the clinic to turn in your night report—how many hours asleep, how many awake, whether you dreamed of heat, teeth, drowning. She hands you a glass the green of pond water. You smell it, and it smells like lawn and iron. “Chlorophyll with a little hem,” she says, seeing your face. “Calms the heart.”

“Calms or slows?” Your voice scratches.

She cants her head. “Same action, different motive.” She glances at your finger. “Still itching?”

“It… moves,” you say, and the honesty makes your stomach pitch. “Like a thread.”

“Everything alive wants a home,” she replies. She peels the bandage with sure fingers. Underneath, the welt has subdivided into delicate veins, a fine network. Not veins. Veining. It looks like leaf. She presses the back of her glove along it; the pattern darkens, limned green under the skin. “Names need medium,” she repeats. “Keep your mouth closed in the greenhouse today. Even when you want to answer.”

You want to ask answer what, but Sunoo is in the doorway, dusk caught in the lamplight of his hair. He doesn’t knock; he glides in like permission. “Our new sprout,” he says, pleased to find you in a chair. “I’ll take her.”

Nurse Min’s mouth goes a little flatter. “She eats first.”

“Of course.” Sunoo’s smile doesn’t move. “Then we breathe.”

The greenhouse sweats. Heat lamps hum like insects; the glass with its rain of condensation blurs the mountain into a myth. Staff move among the rows with trays of soil sheets—thin paper seeded with something that glitters faintly when the light hits it wrong. “Embedded affirmations,” Sunoo tells the group. “You write what you’ll surrender. The seeds will carry it.”

Hana snorts. “Is the surrender refundable?”

Sunoo’s eyes quicken. “There’s always a transaction,” he says. “We just prefer you know the price.” He looks back to you. “Mat,” he says, and it isn’t a request.

You sit. He kneels behind you, palms hovering two inches from your ribs. No touch—just the sense of touch waiting. “Open your mouth,” he murmurs. The admonition from Nurse Min echoes; you clamp your lips. Sunoo’s pleased noise lands against your neck like breath. “Good. Breathe through your nose. In on four, out on six. I’ll count.”

His voice is a rope you have to grab to keep from slipping. When your breath shudders, he matches it; when it calms, he pursues. On the sixth cycle, something sweet pushes the air—lily, wet earth—and you remember the pit and want to be sick. “Stay,” he says, reading your recoil. “Stay where your body is. Don’t run from it. That’s where people rot.”

Across the rows, Jungwon replaces a cracked lamp with quick, sure hands. He doesn’t look at you until he does, a glance like a hand closing on the back of your neck. The air between you tightens. His forearms are netted with healed cuts, white against brown; a fresh welt crosses them like a red thread. When Sunoo says “out on six,” Jungwon turns the dial and the light hums obedient, and you wonder whether the whole building breathes to his count.

Yejin brings you a tray of seed-paper without being asked. When you reach, her gaze drops to your bandage. She moves the pencil like a blade and sketches the back of your hand: the delicate leaf veining, the suggestion of something wanting to break surface. She writes Not yet over the knuckles and slides the paper into your lap. Her mouth is a thin line; her eyes are large and dry and furious.

The day’s chores are smaller and meaner than yesterday’s. Scrub the condensation gutters. Rake. Haul sacks labeled Bone Meal that smell like old molars. Taesun sings under his breath in a language not meant for mouths and leaves a damp trail of crumbs along the east wall. Mr. Ko fetches and carries with blank efficiency, his face empty as a cleaned plate.

By late afternoon, a woman you know only as Auntie Hye—fiftyish, hair cut short for neatness, eyes that scan like a mother bird’s—begins to cough. At first it is dry and prim; then she hunches, pushes a hand to her chest and coughs wet. A ribbon of something bright pops free onto her palm. Petals. White. Tissue-thin and slick with saliva. A few guests laugh—nerves, delight, cruelty. Nurse Min is there before the room decides what to feel, hand under Auntie Hye’s chin, tissues ready. Hye coughs again, harder, and a clot of petals spills: red-tipped now, streaked. She hacks out a final cluster and sags. The tissues are sodden. The petals look like tongues.

“Pollination,” Sunoo says calmly. “Sometimes the body rehearses letting go by practicing bloom.”

Auntie Hye shakes her head, breath hitching. “I didn’t—” she starts.

Sunoo presses two fingers lightly to her throat. “You did.”

She closes her mouth.

Jungwon comes with a bucket and a flat spade; he scoops the petals into the bucket without expression. Your stomach tilts; you grip the bench until the wood prints itself into your palm. He doesn’t look at anyone. He takes the bucket toward the compost. You see his jawclench once when he passes the pit door and files that, like a photographed crime scene.

After the petals, other small horrors follow as if emboldened. A boy pulls his sleeve up to scratch and reveals a faint green tracery along his inner arm; when he scrubs at it, the skin reddens and puffs and the pattern brightens like a pressed leaf held to light. Mira slices a basil stem and it bleeds thin, clean sap; she runs her thumb along the cut and licks it without thinking, then startles at the taste and laughs too loudly. Taesun tips a paper cup into a drain, and a pale, slick worm writhes against the grate and splits into two thinner threads that both crawl the wrong way, toward his fingers. He coos like they’re babies and tucks them back into mud.

“Don’t feed your nightmares,” Nurse Min says without looking up from the woman whose mouth she swabs. “They grow fine on their own.”

By evening, the heat in the greenhouse feels like a hand that won’t lift. The lamps go low. Director Seo stands by the iron ribs with her clipboard like a prayerbook. “For the Naming Rite,” she says, “we welcome Sunoo as Voice and Jungwon as Hands.”

Voice and Hands. A division of power simple enough to live inside.

You are led—gently, unmistakably—toward the central bed, a rectangle of fresh loam bordered by smooth stones. Yejin edges after you, sketchbook clutched to her chest; Nurse Min blocks her with just a glance. “Not this,” Min murmurs. “Later.”

Mira steps forward—too fast—“I can go instead,” she says, smile like a knife wrapped in tissue.

Sunoo’s smile is silk on a nail. “We don’t barter names,” he says. “We harvest them.”

Your knees give. Not dramatic; a small buckling, the body remembering the ground. Sunoo’s hand is there without touching you, a near-weight at your shoulder. “Kneel,” he says, as if reminding you what your body already decided. “Head up. We face what we bring.”

Jungwon stands at the foot of the bed, shovel grounded. Close, his expression is the same flat steel as his blade. He looks at your throat the way carpenters look at walls: not hunger—assessment. When he speaks, his voice is small enough to belong only to the three of you. “Do you know what you’re giving?” he asks.

You try to say No. What comes out is “Something I can’t carry.”

“Good,” he says, and the word is not kindness. It’s calibration.

Sunoo’s fingers hover at your jaw, turning your face by the gravity of proximity. “Open,” he tells you, and your mouth obeys because your body recognizes a doctor’s tone even when it comes from someone who would rather be a priest. He places a petal on your tongue. It tastes like cold tea and a coin. “Hold,” he says. He waits. When you swallow despite yourself, his smile flares. “You see? The body knows ceremony even when the mind resists.”

He steps behind you. You feel his presence like a heat lamp. Jungwon moves to your side and holds out his hand. On his palm: a knife. Not sharp—its edge has been blunted until it’s a tongue of metal—but its point is honest. He waits until you meet his eyes; only then does he set the flat of the blade against your sternum. The steel is cool. Your skin fists under it.

“This is how we write it,” Sunoo says, and his breath touches the shell of your ear like a whispering moth. “Not deep. Not cruel. Not yet.”

The blade slides up without breaking skin, tracing between ribs, across the slow bell of breath—sternum, clavicle, the notch at your throat. The metal leaves a trail of gooseflesh; your pulse hammers against it like an animal trapped under the lid of a box. Jungwon’s other hand is steady at your shoulder, not pushing, not holding, just there, a second horizon the body can measure itself against.

“Name what cannot follow you,” Sunoo murmurs. It could be a real question. It could be a spell. Your mouth fills with the taste of flower and iron; words gather behind it like flies at meat.

You can’t say the fire; to say it would open something that the soil will keep. You say, “The last night.”

“Again,” Sunoo purrs.

“The last night,” you repeat, and the room tilts like a field under wind.

The congregation—guests in white, staff in linen—sways. Mira has both hands pressed to her lips. Taesun rocks in small, violent arcs. Yejin’s pencil moves; she draws you kneeling, two sets of hands marking you; she smudges the graphite so the air around you looks like breath or smoke.

The blade dips, lifts, comes to rest against your throat’s right side. You feel the exact spot where it would enter if it wanted to. Jungwon’s pulse is visible in his wrist; steady, heavier than yours. He moves the flat in a small crescent along the tendon, and your voice leaves you for a moment—pure reflex. A small, unpretty sound. Sunoo shivers behind you, pleased as if you performed a note he’d been coaching you toward.

“Do you understand the price?” Sunoo asks softly.

“No,” you say honestly.

“Beautiful,” he says, delighted. “No one ever does until after.”

He lifts the petal from your mouth with two fingers and lays it on your tongue again like communion. You hold it. Jungwon takes your left hand. His palm is rough and warm; soil lives in the whorls of his fingerprints. He pricks the pad of your finger with the very tip of the blunted knife, as if he wants to remind the blade of its older religion. A bead of blood swells, bright, neat. He turns your hand and presses that red to the seed-paper waiting in a shallow trench at the bed’s edge. Your blood bleeds into the paper like water into thirst.

“Now,” Sunoo says, voice dropped low enough to live in your bones, “we plant what you are not. So what you are can grow.”

Jungwon folds loam over the paper. The soil is cool even in this hothouse weather. It sucks at your finger when he presses your hand flat to it. Something moves underneath—something too quick for roots. Your stomach rocks. You try to pull back. Jungwon’s hand covers yours, firm as a yoke; Sunoo’s hand wraps your throat—not squeezing, just holding the column steady. You are pinned in two places that translate directly to obedience.

“Breathe,” Sunoo says.

You do. The soil under your hand warms like a mouth.

The congregation murmurs. Not words; the sound bodies make when they agree to a script. Director Seo watches like a reader flipping to the end to be sure it comes out as written. Nurse Min’s face has the set of a woman who’s decided to count a vein until morning.

The thing under the soil stills.

Jungwon lifts your hand and wipes the loam away with his thumb. The smear looks like war paint. Sunoo releases your throat and smooths his palm down the line his fingers left, a correction, an apology, a brand. He bends and whispers against your ear, “You belong to the ground,” and then, after a heartbeat, “and to us while you’re learning.”

His mouth never touches skin. The idea of it does.

The Rite closes with a bell that tastes like copper in your teeth. People file out as if stepping around a sleeping animal. Mira gets to you first, palms hot where she holds your face. “Drink water,” she hisses. “Don’t go to sleep. If you dream the name, it sticks.”

“I didn’t give it,” you say.

She laughs, a small animal sound. “You bled. That’s enough.”

Mr. Ko offers a clean handkerchief without meeting your eyes. Hana watches from a distance like a hawk deciding if a rabbit is worth stooping for when the field is full of easier meat. Taesun beams, mud on his lip, as if he’s just watched a very good wedding.

Yejin presses a drawing into your hand and vanishes. It’s you kneeling, hands marked, a line along your throat that is not a cut but knows where one would go. Over your shoulder, two shadows bend—one a heat-halo, one a blunt storm. Soon, she’s written. Don’t say yes with your mouth.

Night. The mountain holds its breath. The lamps in the greenhouse go black one by one until the glass is only a shape. You sit on your dorm bed and watch your hands not shake. Mira sleeps curled like a comma with her stone under her cheek. The drawing under your pillow warms to your scalp as if it wants to crawl into you.

A knock—not on the door. On the window, one knuckle, once. When you slide the frame, cold air pours in, and you think of Nurse Min’s keep your mouth closed in the greenhouse and keep it shut.

Jungwon stands below, lantern hooded, face lit just enough to make eyes and jaw. He tilts his head—come—and you go because your legs have learned this path. Out the back, down the steps, across the boards to the west path. He waits in the shadow of the shed where spades hang like a rack of tongues.

“Any dizziness? Nausea?” he asks, clinic-plain.

“Just… aware.” The word feels too small for your body’s rattled hum.

He grunts—approval. He reaches for your hand and turns the palm up. The loam under your nails has dried to fine grit. He rubs it away with his thumb, slow, methodical. It’s almost tender until you realize he is checking for changes—for the leaf-vein under your skin brightening, for anything moving that shouldn’t. When his thumb passes over the edge of your pulse, it jumps. He looks up sharply. You look away.

“You shouldn’t stay in the dorm tonight.” Matter-of-fact. “You’ll hear things like your name, and some of them will be for you and some won’t. You’re still soft. Soft things take impressions.”

“Where do I go?”

“My room.” Flat. Then, as if he heard how it sounds: “It’s safer. There are no plants there.”

“Is that true?”

“It’s true enough.” He waits. “Or go to the clinic and sit under Min’s lamp and let her count your breaths until morning.”

“Which would you pick,” you ask, because some part of you refuses to let him stand there and decide your body in his head without you in the room.

He takes too long to answer, then says, “The clinic is gentle.” A beat. “I am not.”

Wind combs the pines; the greenhouse ticks as it cools. Somewhere a raven laughs like a woman who knows your secrets and isn’t impressed.

“Choose,” he says quietly.

Sunoo’s shadow falls across the path before you can. He steps into the lantern’s circle like a storybook: pale wrists, clean hands, a smile that tells you exactly how he will use it. “Ah,” he says, soft delight. “My flower and my hands. I wondered where the night would put you.”

Jungwon does not step back. He also does not step forward. The lantern holds the three of you in a tight Venn where your breaths overlap. Sunoo tips his head, curious. “You can take her,” he says to Jungwon, which is to say I will let you. “But she’ll come back to me tasting like soil and fear, and we’ll start again from below.” He turns to you, voice honeyed and mean. “Or you can come with me and I’ll teach your body what calm feels like so you know when you’ve lost it.”

The polite violence of the options makes your stomach liquefy.

“Stop,” Jungwon says, and the word is a tool, not a plea.

Sunoo laughs softly. “The earth doesn’t stop growing just because you ask it gently.” He reaches, very slowly, and lifts your jaw with two fingers—not touching skin; his hand floats a whisper below it and your head lifts anyway, obedient to suggestion. “Show me your throat,” he says, and your body almost does it because it learned tonight and bodies like to repeat lessons. You hold yourself still out of spite. His smile warms. “Good girl.”

The words hit like a hand under your ribs. Jungwon’s breath changes. It darkens the air.

“Enough,” Jungwon says again, and hooks a finger in the lantern hood. He pulls it open. Light flares, pot-bright, brutal. The three of you blink; the world loses its beautiful edges and shows its seams. “Clinic,” he tells you.

Sunoo’s smile fades pixel by pixel until only his eyes shine. “For now,” he agrees. He steps in closer so there is no air between the three bodies but what breath can claim. He looks at Jungwon and speaks to you. “You’ll end up between us anyway,” he says, the prophecy flat, not cruel. “Why not learn the shape early.”

You should move. You should walk yourself to the nurse and let her count your lungs like prayer beads. Instead you stand very still while two men who have learned your pulse by different languages consider the currency of your fear.

Sunoo lifts his hand and stops a breath from your mouth. You feel the heat of him without the permission of touch. “I won’t kiss you,” he says, velvet and wicked. “Not yet.” He turns his palm and hovers over your throat, reading the rush there like a favorite book. “See what your body does with almost.”

Jungwon moves behind you so quietly the night forgets to mark his steps. He doesn’t touch you. His presence is so large it reads like contact anyway—the shape of him corralling air. You have the dizzy thought that if you leaned back, he would catch you, and if you leaned forward, Sunoo would open like a mouth.

“Breathe,” Sunoo whispers, and it isn’t instruction now; it’s a dare.

You do. The air leans with you. The world tightens to a triangle: lantern glare, the line of a blunted blade tucked into Jungwon’s belt, the faint copper on Sunoo’s knuckle where he touched your lip earlier with the petal.

“I said clinic,” Jungwon repeats, low enough to live at your spine.

“Make her say please,” Sunoo counters, amusement sweet as rot. “Our girl loves a ritual.”

“Don’t—” you start, and then stop, because the word tastes like surrender and you haven’t decided whose hands deserve it.

“Not tonight,” Jungwon says, and you understand: it isn’t mercy. It’s control deferred. He steps to your side, inserts a palm—warm, heavy—at your waist, not pulling, not pushing, just a point you can move along. Sunoo mirrors the motion on your other side without touching, an echo your nerves misread as contact. Together they guide you three steps, five, toward the clinic’s dim window—two gravities that agree for once.

At the threshold, Sunoo bends so close your ear warms. “Sleep,” he murmurs, the same command Jungwon uses like a blessing. “Dream of hands.” He smiles against the air where your skin ends. “Next time I’ll count for you while he holds you still.”

Jungwon’s hand tightens one notch at your waist, a warning, a promise, a brand pressed through clothes. “Next time,” he says, to Sunoo, to you, to the night that will keep at this until you’re rewritten, “I’ll decide who goes first.”

Nurse Min opens the clinic door before anyone knocks, lamp bright behind her like a little square sun. She takes in the triangle of bodies, the glint of the knife, the feral set of Sunoo’s mouth, the obedient steadiness of Jungwon’s hand at your side.

“Inside,” she says, and steps aside.

You pass between them—Sunoo’s almost-touch a heat across your throat; Jungwon’s real touch a line at your hip you could follow with your eyes closed—and cross into the light.

You do not kiss anyone. No one kisses you.

But as the door shuts and the mountain presses its ear to the glass to listen, you know it: your body already understands the shape they promised. It will remember. It will hunger.

And when it happens—when it really happens—it will not be an accident.

________

The clinic smelled of metal and mint. Nurse Min left you in a chair under her lamp until the feverish hum in your body dulled to a bearable pitch. She made you drink water, bitter and green as ditch weed, and held your wrist while your pulse rattled beneath her thumb. When you asked her if you were safe, she only said, “Nothing in a place like this is safe. At best, some things are safer than others.”

By the time she dismissed you, the compound had already gone to sleep. Mira was curled on her side in the dorm, bracelets stilled. You should have slept too. Instead you lay awake, tasting the memory of a petal pressed against your tongue, feeling the phantom weight of Jungwon’s hand steady at your waist, the ghost of Sunoo’s fingers just shy of your throat.

Your body remembered. It remembered too well.

When you finally slipped into the corridor, your bare feet soundless on the boards, it wasn’t to find air. It was because something in you had already decided that the ache would not stop on its own.

The greenhouse loomed against the night, ribs of iron and glass sweating mist. The lock had never been for people who wanted to stay out. You pushed the door and it sighed open, warm air rushing at you like a mouth.

He was waiting. Of course he was.

Sunoo leaned against a bench, sleeves rolled, pale wrists glowing under the lamps. His expression was the same one he’d worn when he laid the petal on your tongue earlier—delighted, expectant, like he had always known your body would come back to him.

“You breathe too loud when you lie down,” he murmured. “I could hear you from the other side of the hall.”

You should have left. You stepped closer instead.

Sunoo reached for you without touching, fingers tracing the air beside your cheek. That almost-contact burned hotter than heat itself. Your breath caught, and his smile sharpened. “See? Your body tells the truth. It remembers me already.”

His hand hovered down, stopping at the hollow of your throat. “Here,” he whispered. “Where the pulse lives.” He bent, mouth a whisper away from your skin, never quite sealing it. Your nerves screamed as if he’d kissed you. “You want me to touch you. That’s why you came.”

Your denial scraped your teeth but never left your tongue.

“Good girl,” he said, pleased at your silence. He turned you, pressing between your shoulder blades until your knees bent and you landed on the warm boards of the floor. “Stay open. Stay soft.”

His hands came at last—sliding along your thighs, parting them without rush, without doubt. He dragged his thumb along the cotton of your thin shorts, pressing until the damp there gave you away. “Blooming,” he said reverently, as if the word itself could coax you wider.

You gasped when he pressed harder, the friction maddening. He laughed low in his throat, pleased. “You’ve been waiting since the Rite, haven’t you? You swallowed the petal and your body begged for more.”

He tugged fabric aside with clinical precision, exposing you to the humid air. His fingers slicked easily through the wetness already gathered, and he made a sound of satisfaction that went straight to your gut. “So ready,” he crooned. “So obedient.”

Two fingers circled, teased, pressed—but never where you needed. He watched your hips shift, your breath stutter. “Say please,” he murmured.

“I—”

“Shh.” His free hand covered your mouth lightly, thumb grazing your lower lip. “Not with words. With your body.”

Your thighs trembled. You pushed into his hand, desperate. His smile widened. “There it is. Begging without speech.”

He slipped two fingers inside, slow, deliberate. Your back arched, a strangled sound caught behind his palm. He curled them just right, hitting the place that made you shiver, made your eyes roll back. “Yes,” he whispered against your ear. “That’s it. That’s how you bloom.”

His palm pressed harder over your mouth as your moans broke free. His rhythm quickened, fingers thrusting, scissoring, spreading you open as if he meant to plant something inside. Every push forced slick sounds into the greenhouse air. He bent low, lips brushing your temple, murmuring praises between each thrust: “Perfect. My good flower. Opening just for me. No one else will see you like this.”

Your orgasm came sudden, brutal—your whole body snapping tight around his hand, shuddering against him. He kept moving, dragging it out until you were gasping into his palm, thighs twitching.

When at last he withdrew, his fingers glistened. He lifted them to your lips, smearing wetness across them before pushing between. “Taste yourself,” he ordered softly. “Know what you are to me.”

Shame and hunger tangled in your chest. You sucked his fingers clean, and his eyes darkened, mouth parting as if he might finally kiss you. He didn’t. He pulled back just enough to leave you desperate, to make absence itself a cruelty.

“Blooming,” he whispered again, satisfied. “And tomorrow, you’ll be ready for the soil.”

The greenhouse door creaked. You jerked, Sunoo still crouched over you, his slick fingers withdrawing with deliberate slowness.

Jungwon stood in the doorway, lantern spilling gold over his dirt-streaked arms. His jaw tightened as his eyes tracked the wet shine on your lips, the way your legs trembled, the smug curve of Sunoo’s smile.

For a long, brutal moment, no one spoke. Then Jungwon stepped forward, shovel still in one hand, and his voice came out rough, dangerous.

“She’s mine next.”

The lamps hummed. The soil smelled of iron. Your heart beat against your throat like a trapped bird as the two men stared across you, and you realized the next time you were touched, it would be by both.

And you would not escape it.

______

The night you tried to run, the mountain gave you away.

The boards beneath your feet creaked, wet leaves clung to your calves, and the fog was a hand on your throat. You ran anyway. Past the dorms, past the glasshouse ribs glowing faintly from their lamps, down the west path where the ravens laughed like women who knew your secrets.

You thought the dark would cover you.

But the dark belonged to him.

A hand caught your wrist so hard you nearly went down. The lantern flared, and Jungwon’s face came out of the mist—eyes black, jaw locked, the muscle jumping with rage he didn’t bother to soften. He dragged you against him, chest heaving like you’d run into a wall that had learned how to breathe.

“Running,” he said, voice low and sharp as a spade. “After I told you not to.”

“I—”

“Quiet.” His grip on your wrist tightened until your bones ached. “Do you know what he did to you in there? Do you know what you smell like? Soil and him.” His other hand closed hard around your chin, forcing you to meet his eyes. His breath came hot, furious. “I told you not to let him touch you.”

Your protest was thin. “I didn’t—”

“You did.” He shoved you back against the rough bark of a pine. The trunk dug into your spine; his body crowded yours, heat and dirt and something mean. “You opened your mouth. You let him put his fingers in you.” His hand slid down your throat, pressing just enough to make your pulse throb under his palm. “Do you think that makes you his?”

“No—”

“No,” he repeated, mocking and brutal, pressing harder until your words broke into breath. His eyes raked you up and down like he was reading your body for lies. “You’re mine. If you’re soil, then I’m the one who plants.”

The knife appeared from his belt—not sharp, its edge long since blunted, but the point still honest. He held it flat against your belly, dragging it up under your shirt until the cold metal kissed the underside of your breast. You shivered, body jerking against the bark. His mouth twisted, equal parts fury and hunger.

“Scared?” he murmured. “Good. Fear makes roots dig deeper.”

He hooked the blade under the band of your shorts, pulling until the fabric stretched and then snapped. His hand shoved inside without pause, fingers rough, pushing into you like he meant to stake a claim. You gasped, the sound choking against the hand still at your throat.

“Wet,” he said, voice a growl, face close enough you could feel every word on your skin. “You’re soaked for me already. Even after him. Especially after him.” His fingers thrust harder, curling, relentless, forcing your body to answer him. “Say it. Say whose you are.”

You shook your head, too proud, too broken to give it.

His mouth curved cruel. “Then I’ll fuck it into you.”

He yanked your shorts down to your thighs, lifted you bodily against the tree, and shoved his hips between your legs. You clawed at his shoulders, half to push, half to hold on, but he pinned you easy, the knife’s flat pressed to your throat now like a brand. His cock pressed hot and thick against your entrance, grinding through the slick he’d found there, rubbing until you whined.

“You hear that?” he hissed, rolling his hips, dragging the head over your folds until obscene wet sounds filled the air. “Your body begging me in front of the whole fucking mountain.” He pushed in one brutal stroke, burying himself deep, forcing a cry from your throat. His teeth bared at the sound, savage triumph. “That’s it. Open up. Take me.”

He fucked you hard against the tree, every thrust jarring bark into your spine, every shove brutal and unrelenting. The knife never left your throat—flat, cold, reminding you what he could do if he wanted. His free hand gripped your hip so hard you knew you’d bruise, dragging you down onto him, using your body like it was already his.

“Mine,” he snarled against your ear, hips slamming. “Not his. Not anyone’s. Mine to fuck. Mine to plant. Mine to keep.” His pace grew rougher, desperate, jealousy bleeding into possession. “You’ll carry me. You’ll take my seed. You’ll remember whose cock fucked you open like this.”

Your moans tore free, high and broken, every thrust forcing them out. He laughed, breathless, mean. “Good little soil. Look at you—taking it. Clenching so tight you’ll never forget.”

When you came, it was with your whole body jerking, nails raking his back, his name spilling without permission. He fucked you through it, ruthless, using your climax to milk himself. With a final, brutal thrust, he came inside you, grinding deep, growling your name like a curse and a prayer.

He stayed pressed to you, chest heaving, the knife slipping down to rest against your collarbone. He didn’t soften. He didn’t let go. His mouth found your jaw, biting hard enough to leave a mark.

When he finally pulled out, slick running down your thighs, he yanked your shorts back up roughly, like covering you was a punishment. He grabbed your wrist again, dragging you toward the compound.

“You’re not sleeping in the dorms,” he said, voice iron. “You’re mine now. My room. My bed. No one else touches you.”

The lantern swung, throwing gold across the path. His grip never loosened. You stumbled after him, body raw, used, filled, the echo of his thrusts still beating through you.

And you knew he wasn’t bluffing.

______

Jungwon’s grip on your wrist was iron, dragging you through the silent hallways until the greenhouse lamps and dorm windows disappeared. His door slammed behind you, the bolt driven home with the finality of a lock on a coffin. His room was small, spare, stripped bare of comfort—just a bed, a chair, his tools. No flowers, no soil. Only him.

He shoved you onto the mattress like you weighed nothing. Your body jolted, still slick, still aching from what he’d already done. He stood over you, chest rising and falling hard, sweat at his temples, jaw clenched like a vice.

“You don’t go back to them,” he growled. “Not Mira, not Seo, and never him.” His eyes burned. “You’re mine.”

Your breath hitched; the word stuck in your throat.

A voice cut through the dark. “You’re wrong.”

The lantern on the desk flared, spilling its glow across pale wrists, white robes loosened at the chest, a mouth curved in that familiar, cruel delight. Sunoo. Already inside. Already waiting.

Jungwon stiffened, shoulders tensing like a predator finding another in his territory. “Get out.”

Sunoo ignored him. He stepped closer, his smile syrup-sweet but eyes sharp. “She doesn’t belong to you alone. Look at her.” His gaze slid over you where you trembled on the bed, your thighs pressed together, your lips parted from shallow breaths. “She’s terrified. She’s confused. She needs gentleness.” His tone softened, dripping like honey. “And you can’t give her that.”

“Gentle doesn’t keep her alive,” Jungwon snapped, stepping between you and him, shovel-callused fists at his sides. “Gentle lets her rot.”

“Alive?” Sunoo laughed, low and dangerous. “She’s not alive. She’s blooming. That’s what I make her.”

“Blooming,” Jungwon spat, “is just another word for open. And I’m the one inside her.”

The words made your stomach twist; heat and fear tangled until you couldn’t tell the difference. You tried to speak—stop, please stop—but your throat locked.

Sunoo’s gaze darted back to you, softening. He crouched, ignoring the way Jungwon loomed above him. His hand hovered just shy of your ankle, not touching—never touching—but the heat of him crawled up your skin. “Petal,” he whispered, “don’t be afraid. I’ll take care of you. I’ll show you how it feels to be cherished.” His lips parted, almost grazing your skin as he breathed you in. “Let me taste you.”

Jungwon’s growl shook the air. He seized your arm, yanking you back against his chest, his hand spread possessive across your stomach. His cock, still half-hard, pressed against your spine. “She’s mine. Mine to fuck. Mine to plant. Mine to keep.”

Your body shuddered. Fear, yes—but deeper, darker: want, shame, hunger you couldn’t smother.

Sunoo’s smile only widened. “Then let’s see who she opens for first.” He slid closer, slipping between your knees before Jungwon could stop him. His breath fanned over your thighs, hot and wet, and you gasped when he finally touched you—soft, reverent, his hands parting you like something fragile.

The contrast made you dizzy. Jungwon’s grip bruised; Sunoo’s mouth pressed feather-light kisses along the inside of your thigh, slow, teasing, as if every touch was worship. “Sweet,” he murmured, nose brushing close to the heat of you. “So sweet. I’ll make her sing.”

“Don’t you dare—” Jungwon started, but your body betrayed you, hips twitching toward Sunoo’s mouth, a whimper breaking past your lips.

That sound changed everything.

Jungwon froze, then snarled, shoving you down into the mattress, caging you with his body. One hand pinned your wrists above your head; the other tore your shirt open down the middle, fabric splitting under his strength. His mouth crashed to your throat, biting, marking, sucking bruises into your skin with furious precision.

Sunoo groaned at the sight, as if Jungwon’s violence only made you more beautiful. He leaned in, finally sealing his lips over your cunt, sucking hard, tongue lapping deep through your folds. The wet sounds filled the room, obscene, echoing against the bare walls.

You cried out, the noise muffled against Jungwon’s hand when he clapped it over your mouth. “Quiet,” he hissed, teeth at your jaw. “Don’t give him the satisfaction of hearing how much you love it.”

But Sunoo knew anyway. He moaned against you, tongue flicking your clit, fingers sliding inside with practiced ease, curling just right. He fed off every twitch, every muffled scream, every desperate roll of your hips. “See?” he said between licks, voice thick with arousal. “She opens for me. She’s blooming already.”

Jungwon pressed harder, grinding his cock against your hip through his pants, furious at your body’s betrayal, at the way your thighs trembled around Sunoo’s head. “She’s dripping because I fucked her raw,” he snarled. “All you’re doing is licking up what I left in her.”

The words made your body jerk, shame and desire hitting like lightning.

Sunoo pulled back just enough to look up at you, his mouth shining with your wetness, his eyes dark and soft. “You taste like need,” he whispered. He dragged his tongue slowly over your clit, savoring the way you cried out under Jungwon’s palm. “And you’ll remember I was the first one who made you come with his mouth.”

“Shut up,” Jungwon snapped. But his own hips rolled against you, his cock throbbing, desperate. His jealousy only sharpened his need.

You couldn’t fight it. You came hard, body arching, Sunoo’s mouth sucking your clit, Jungwon’s hand holding you down, his teeth biting at your throat. Your orgasm tore through you like the roots of something invasive, clawing deep, unstoppable.

They didn’t stop.

Sunoo licked you clean, gentle as a lover, humming like he was savoring wine. Jungwon bit harder, grinded rougher, his hand forcing your wrists deeper into the mattress. Both of them on you—one soft, one brutal—until you didn’t know whose name to scream.

And you understood, with raw clarity, that they weren’t fighting for you.

They were fighting through you.

When the shudders finally broke, you collapsed back, gasping, throat raw. Jungwon leaned down, lips brushing your ear, his voice a growl. “This is just the beginning. Next time I’m inside you while he’s in your mouth. We’ll see who you really belong to.”

Sunoo laughed softly, licking his lips clean of you. “She’ll belong to both.”

And for the first time, you realized he was right.

_____

Your body was still shaking when Jungwon yanked you upright, dragging you into his lap as if the bed belonged only to him. His thighs were iron beneath you, his chest hard against your spine. One arm locked around your waist, the other snared your throat, thick fingers spreading wide until his grip owned the column of your neck. He forced your head back, baring your mouth to him.

“You’ll taste me now,” he snarled, lips crashing into yours.

The kiss was brutal—teeth knocking, spit spilling. He shoved his tongue deep, choking you with it, swallowing every noise you tried to make. His palm pressed tighter at your throat until your pulse roared in your ears, until breath itself became something you had to beg him for. Drool slicked your chin, his tongue forcing yours down, his grip refusing to let you turn away. It was less a kiss than a violent claiming, his mouth fucking yours the way his cock had already fucked your body raw.

You gasped when he pulled back just enough to let air in, a string of spit hanging obscenely between your mouths. He licked it off your bottom lip, then spat into your mouth deliberately, cruelly, watching you swallow because you had no choice.

“Open,” he growled, forcing your jaw wider with his hand at your throat. “Good. That’s mine too. Every sound. Every swallow.”

Your vision blurred; your thighs squeezed together involuntarily. Terror and heat tangled until you couldn’t breathe for either.

And then Sunoo was there.

He crouched in front of you, hands sliding up your knees to part them wider, his smile infuriatingly calm even in violence. “My turn.”

“No,” Jungwon bit out, but Sunoo was already moving. He grabbed your chin, fingers digging in hard enough to bruise, and wrenched your head away from Jungwon’s mouth. Your neck snapped to the side, and before you could gasp, Sunoo’s lips were on yours.

It wasn’t tender. It was vicious. He sucked your bottom lip until it split, teeth biting down until pain shot bright, then licked the blood from your mouth as if it belonged to him. His tongue drove past your teeth, tasting everything Jungwon had left there, devouring it with obscene relish.

You moaned helplessly, the sound muffled between them.

Jungwon’s grip on your throat tightened, forcing your head back further, rage pouring off him like heat. “She’s mine.”

Sunoo broke the kiss just long enough to sneer against your wet mouth. “Then why is she kissing me back?” He pressed his tongue to yours again, slow and filthy, sucking until spit ran down your chin. Then he pulled back, wiped it with his thumb, and shoved the slick digit back between your lips. “Lick it clean. That’s mine now.”

Your mouth obeyed before your brain caught up.

Jungwon’s chest vibrated with a growl. He bent and bit your jaw, then your throat, leaving purple marks against Sunoo’s fingerprints. His hand clamped your neck harder, forcing you to gasp around Sunoo’s thumb.

“She’s choking on me,” Jungwon snarled. “Not you.”

Sunoo laughed low, mean. He leaned closer, his forehead pressing to yours, his other hand grabbing Jungwon’s wrist on your throat, not to stop it, but to squeeze it tighter. “Then let’s choke her together.”

The pressure doubled. Your eyes watered, spit pooling at the corner of your mouth, drooling down your chin as both of them held you, forced you open, forced you to take them. One mouth kissed you, sucked you, spat into you; the other bit, bruised, pressed your throat until stars danced.

You weren’t kissing anymore. You were being consumed.

And God help you—your body wanted more.

_______

They had you caged between them—Jungwon at your back, Sunoo at your front—two sets of hands closing every door your body might have tried to escape through.

Your pulse beat frantically against Jungwon’s palm at your throat. Sunoo’s fingers dug into your chin, keeping your face tipped up so you couldn’t hide. Their mouths had already ruined you, spit running down your jaw, bruises blooming on your throat and collarbone like dark flowers. Your chest rose too fast, every breath their permission, every sound something they stole from you.

“You see?” Sunoo whispered, voice as sweet as it was cruel. “She’s ready. She’s shaking for us.” His hand slid down, brushing your stomach, spreading lower. “The soil is wet.”

“She’s wet because I fucked her open,” Jungwon snapped against your ear, his breath harsh. “She’s mine to fill.” He ground his cock against your ass through his pants, thick and hard, a promise of what was coming. His teeth found your neck again, biting until your body arched despite yourself.

The two of them moved you as if you were theirs to arrange. Your thighs were forced wide over Sunoo’s lap, your back crushed to Jungwon’s chest. Rough hands tugged your ruined shorts away; cool air hit the slick heat between your legs. Sunoo hummed like a priest receiving an offering.

“Let me taste again.” He didn’t wait for permission. His mouth descended, sucking your clit into his mouth, tongue lapping at you until your eyes rolled back. His hands locked on your thighs, holding you open for him, his moans vibrating into your cunt.

Jungwon shoved your wrists down into the mattress, his cock rutting against you through fabric, his fury pressed into every grind. “Listen to her,” he growled. “Dripping for us. Begging without words.” He yanked his pants open, the blunt head of his cock dragging along your ass, smearing precum. “She’s going to take both. Right now.”

You sobbed, terror and need colliding until you couldn’t tell them apart. “I can’t—”

“You can,” Sunoo cut in smoothly, lifting his head, chin wet with your slick. He stroked your trembling thighs with a mockery of gentleness. “Your body’s already opening. We’ll guide you.” His eyes glimmered, half-devotion, half-madness. “You’ll bloom for us together.”

Jungwon spat into his palm, gripped his cock, and shoved it between your cheeks, rubbing the head against your tight hole until you whined. “Scared?” he hissed, his hand tightening at your throat. “Good. Fear makes you clench tighter.”

Sunoo’s fingers slid inside your cunt again, curling, coaxing, slicking you up for him. He looked up at you, his smile soft even as he stretched you ruthlessly. “Breathe, petal. I’ll be inside you soon. You’ll be so full you won’t remember how to be empty.”

When Sunoo lined himself up, pressing the head of his cock against your soaked entrance, Jungwon shoved his tip harder at your ass, both of them pushing at once. Your cry ripped the air as your body was forced to split, one cock stretching your cunt, the other pressing past the tight ring of muscle until you thought you’d break.

“Fuck,” Jungwon groaned, voice raw. “So tight. Gripping me like a fist.”

“She’s perfect,” Sunoo sighed, already sinking deeper, your walls convulsing around him. “Taking both of us. Our flower.”

It was too much. The stretch burned, overwhelming, obscene. You clawed at the sheets, eyes rolling back as both of them bottomed out, your body trembling violently with the force of being split in two. They didn’t give you time. Jungwon’s hips snapped forward first, brutal, pounding into your ass with the fury of jealousy. Sunoo met him stroke for stroke, slower, deeper, angling until every thrust speared your cunt exactly where it made you scream.

Pinned, stuffed, broken open—you were nothing but their vessel.

“Say it,” Jungwon snarled, hand squeezing your throat until your vision blurred. “Say you’re mine.”

“She’s ours,” Sunoo countered, kissing you, sucking the spit from your mouth, swallowing your gasps. “Tell us, petal. Tell us who you bloom for.”

Your answer was a sob, a whimper, a strangled cry as their cocks moved inside you, filling every inch, grinding against each other through the thin wall of your body until the sensation drove you half-mad.

“Fuck, I can feel him through you,” Jungwon groaned, rutting harder, holding you down as if you might try to run again. “But you’re squeezing me tighter. That’s how I know you’re mine.”

Sunoo’s tongue licked the tears from your cheeks. “She’s crying for me. Look at her. Look how she wants to be saved even while we ruin her.”

Your body convulsed around them, slick gushing down your thighs, every nerve alight. The pain blurred into pleasure until you were begging without words, your nails tearing the sheets, your cries spilling into their mouths as they fought to own your climax.

When you came, it was devastating—your cunt and ass clenching around them both, milking them, dragging them deeper. Jungwon groaned, teeth sinking into your shoulder as he spilled inside you, hot and overwhelming. Sunoo followed seconds later, filling your cunt until you were overflowing, cum dripping down your thighs, both of them holding you so tightly you couldn’t breathe.

They didn’t pull out. They stayed locked inside, cocks twitching, their breaths harsh against your skin.

Jungwon’s hand squeezed your throat one last time, forcing your eyes to his. “Say it,” he demanded, voice hoarse. “Say you’re planted in me.”

Sunoo kissed your cheek, softer but no less cruel. “Say you’ll bloom for us both.”

And you, too full to think, too wrecked to fight, whispered the only truth left in you:

“I can’t belong to just one.”

They smiled—different smiles, but the same hunger.

And you knew you’d never escape again.

_______

woah this was so diffecult to write SO IM SORRY IF IT ISNT THE BEST

THANK YOU FOR READING!!

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[lollovern]

- The Garden Left to Rot -

enhypen masterlist

wattpad

inspired by this post

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groundskeeper!yang jungwon x guest!femreader x cult counselor!kim sunoo | obsessive romance | cult horror | forced devotion | ritualistic sex | jealousy and rivalry | fucked-up love triangle | knife kink | corrupted comfort | you will belong to someone eventually | DARK CONTENT AHEAD!!

wc: 14k

summary: You’re sent to a grief recovery retreat hidden in the mountains. But this isn’t therapy — it’s a cult blooming in blood and rot. Jungwon wants to bury you where no one else can touch you. Sunoo wants to crack you open until you bloom for him. Both say it’s healing. But it’s obsession.

warnings: extreme gore, threesome, cult rituals, body horror (flowers under skin, insect scenes), blood play, forced confinement, psychological manipulation, emotional degradation, knife play, religious delusion, obsessive behavior, toxic romance, dubcon themes, ritualistic sex, hallucinations, violence

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The van climbs until the road forgets how to be a road. Pines crowd close; fog slicks the windshield like breath on glass. By the time the driver kills the engine, your phone has been surrendered, the waiver signed, and your name—your real one—folded into a sealed envelope with your belongings.

A hand-painted sign leans crooked against a stone pillar: THE GARDEN.

Beneath it, smaller script: Let go. Become.

Everyone here is an adult—paperwork made that clear. Still, the cluster of arrivals huddle like freshmen. A woman in a bone-white coat stands at the gate, serene as a photograph. “Welcome,” she says. “I’m Director Seo. You won’t need last names here. You won’t need yesterday.” Her smile doesn’t reach her eyes. “We begin with stillness.”

Stillness smells like damp soil and rosemary. The compound spreads in tiers: a glasshouse ribbed with iron; dormitories with shuttered windows; a refectory where steam fogs the panes; a low clinic painted the color of milk. The greenhouse breathes—a pulse of heavy, sweet air each time the door opens. Inside, rows of lilies lean toward heat lamps; vines net the rafters; something rustles in the loam.

“Orientation,” says the boy who appears at Director Seo’s shoulder. He’s young—early twenties—with paper-clean features and the kind of smile people don’t realize is a blade until it’s already inside them. Kim Sunoo. His name tag says Counselor; the ribbon beneath it says Ritual Lead. “Shoes off in the greenhouse,” he adds lightly. “We keep the floors soft.”

Your shoes leave the ground. Cool boards. Warm mist. A bell rings once. The arrivals form a circle on woven mats; a dozen white-robed staff ghost the edges. A few guests have the shaved look of hospital discharge; others wear expensive emptiness like cologne.

“Here,” Sunoo says gently, “we do not share pasts. Only needs.” His gaze slips over faces and lands on you. Not a leer. A selection. “You may speak or sit in silence. Both are honest.”

“I need to sleep,” says a woman with chewed nails. “Like, three days.”

“I need to stop remembering,” a man answers, voice flat.

The girl beside you—twenty-two, maybe—says nothing. Yejin is stitched on her wristband. Her hands are ink-stained. She draws while people talk: a quick, vicious graphite—faces with petal-mouths; ribs like trellises. When you shift, she tilts her sketchbook so you can see the newest figure: a person kneeling in dirt, throat blooming with something that isn’t a flower.

“Beautiful,” Sunoo murmurs, as if he’s praising a child’s first recital. “You have a keen eye for transformation, Yejin.”

From across the greenhouse, someone drags burlap sacks along iron grates. Soil dark as coffee spills from a split seam and oozes across the floor. The man hauling the bags moves like he’s apologized to gravity and refuses to do it again. Yang Jungwon. Groundskeeper on his tag. Grey work shirt. Forearms nicked white with old cuts. He doesn’t look at the circle—doesn’t look at you—until he does, and then he doesn’t stop. Not curiosity. Assessment, like weighing a seed between finger and thumb and deciding if it will live in his earth.

Director Seo outlines rules in the smooth tone of a stewardess reciting crash procedures:

No personal histories in group.

No contact with family for the first fourteen days.

No unsupervised access to the greenhouse after dusk.

Do not remove plant material from designated zones.

What is given to the soil remains in the soil.

“That includes grief,” Sunoo says, almost playful. “Especially grief.”

Your dorm is clean in the way of hospital corridors and mortuaries. Two metal beds. Two lockers. A copy of a softbound booklet on each pillow: STILLNESS GUIDE. Your roommate arrives with a jangle of bracelets and the brittle cheer of someone who learned to smile as self-defense. Mira, 26, volunteer-turned-resident-mentor.

“Welcome-welcome,” she chirps, then lowers her voice. “Pro tip: keep your head down the first three days. They watch how you watch.”

“Who?”

“Everyone.” She flicks her gaze toward the window, where the greenhouse skeletons against dusk. “Especially him.” She means Sunoo—you can hear it in the soft, reverent way. “And the groundskeeper when it’s dark.” That last part is almost a warning.

The bell rings again. Dinner is broth that tastes like the inside of a leaf and bread dense with seeds. You eat at long tables while staff move among you like shepherds. Across from you, a jittery young man, Taesun—24, scars like cat-scratches up his wrists—piles his crusts and crumbles them methodically. He pockets a handful when he thinks no one sees.

“For the worms,” he whispers to the crumbs. “They get hungry at night.”

Mira nudges your knee under the table. “He feeds them behind the east wall,” she murmurs. “Says they keep the nightmares down if they’re busy.”

In the clinic after dinner, a nurse swabs your fingers where the paper edges of the waiver bit skin. Nurse Min is beautiful in the harsh way of women who have decided their faces are weapons. When she says “this will sting,” the consonants soften strangely; a long surgical scar splits the underside of her tongue. She catches you looking and lifts a brow that says yes, I am aware of my mouth. Then—almost tender—she tapes your knuckle with gauze printed with tiny flowers.

Back in the greenhouse, the first night session is called Surrender. The lamps buzz. Mist beads your eyelashes. Sunoo stands barefoot on the damp boards, sleeves rolled, voice a low waterfall.

“Close your eyes,” he says. “Name the weight you want the earth to hold for you. Don’t say it out loud. Let your body say it.”

Around you, bodies sway. Some cry. Some freeze. When you keep your eyes open, Sunoo notices. Of course he does.

“New sprout,” he says softly, close to your ear, and the nickname feels chosen, not random. “You don’t have to force stillness. It happens when the soil recognizes you.”

“Does it?” Your voice is hoarse from disuse and altitude.

“Always.” He smiles. Not kind. Not unkind. Satisfied. “The Garden knows its own.”

Across the rows, Jungwon kneels in the dirt, wrist-deep in loam, planting something without a label. He doesn’t follow Sunoo’s cadence; he follows his own. When one lamp flickers, he rises and fixes it with the swift, competent movements of someone who builds instead of asks. When he sits back, the soil clings to his fingers like shadow.

You should sleep. Instead you help Mira remake your beds with the stiff white sheets that smell faintly of bleach and rosemary. She keeps talking, because silence makes her hands shake.

“I came as a volunteer,” she says, tucking corners square. “Stayed as a patient. It’s easier when they tell you what to be.”

“What do they tell you?”

She smiles without humor. “A flower.” Her eyes slide to your bandaged hand. “Try not to bleed in the greenhouse. They don’t like that.”

“Why?”

“Because the soil remembers.”

At night the compound changes. Lights dim. The wind strips the pines and combs the glass with needles. You lie awake and count breaths—yours, Mira’s, the building’s—until you can’t bear numbers anymore.

You go out.

The air is colder than the dorm suggests. The greenhouse glows from within, a pulse behind fogged panes. Beyond the east wall, something moves with slow persistence. You follow the ripple of disturbed leaves to a break in the hedgerow and find Taesun kneeling with his pockets turned inside out, sowing crumbs into the leaf litter like a penitent farmer.

“The worms,” he says. “They hate hunger.”

“And if they’re hungry?”

“They crawl into you,” he says simply, and his eyes are not crazy; they’re convinced. “They’re looking for warmth.”

A lantern kindles behind you. “Curfew,” a voice says.

You turn. Jungwon holds the light up so it paints his face in bones and gold. Up close, his features soften—stillness without Sunoo’s practiced grace; a patient animal’s attention. The lantern makes a thicket of his lashes. He looks from you to Taesun to your bare feet on the cold boards.

“You’ll catch a chill,” he says to you, like it’s a personal offense. “Shoes. Now.”

You should resent the command. Instead, you feel the unreasonable urge to obey. You start toward the dorms.

“Not that way,” he says. “West path. Easier. Less slope.” He tips the lantern so the light doesn’t blind you while you pass. It’s a small courtesy. It also marks you—every guard on the walkway can see who broke curfew and who brought them back.

“Do you plant at night?” you ask, because silence around him feels like standing at a cliff’s edge and leaning a little too far.

“Always,” he says. He doesn’t volunteer more. His eyes drag briefly to your bandaged hand. “You left blood in the greenhouse.”

“I didn’t—”

He lifts two fingers, the gesture efficient and final. “The soil remembers.” His mouth twitches—not a smile, exactly; the ghost of one. “Mira talks too much.”

“Is that against the rules?”

“It’s against survival.”

He walks you to the dorm porch and stops at the bottom step like there’s an invisible line he won’t cross. The night carries pine resin and wet metal. You want to ask him what he plants without labels, what grows under lamps that mimic suns, why the staff wear rosaries made of seeds.

He says, low, “Don’t follow sounds you don’t understand.”

“Why?”

“Because some things here answer to being watched.” He tilts the lantern, and for a heartbeat you see something like a tenderness he hides even from himself. “Sleep.”

You try. You fail. When you finally slide under, it’s the shallow kind of rest that hears every hinge complain.

Morning stains the glasshouse pale gold. Breakfast is porridge and a shot glass of bitter green. “Chlorophyll,” Mira grimaces. “For purity. Or the aesthetic.” She scans the refectory like she’s counting exits. “There’ll be a Placement Walk after breakfast. Don’t volunteer. They love volunteers.”

“What is it?”

She cuts her eyes toward the greenhouse. “They take someone to the grove and ‘help them choose a garden name.’ Sometimes they come back with a wreath. Sometimes without their voice for a while.”

Director Seo taps her cup. “Today’s Placement Walk is for… Yejin.”

The graphite girl looks up, startled as a deer. Her pencil stills. Sunoo’s smile brightens by half a watt. “I’ll take her,” he offers, hand already extended. “I’ve seen her drawings. She understands transformation.”

If you didn’t sleep, you are alert now. Jungwon appears in the doorway like the building made him. His gaze flicks over the room, and when it lands on Yejin’s shaking knuckles, something barely visible tightens in his jaw.

“I’ll go with you,” he says to Sunoo without looking away from the girl.

“Of course,” Sunoo replies. Silk over steel. “Two witnesses. Very proper.”

They lead her out between them: the counselor with a palm light on her shoulder; the groundskeeper holding the door open so it doesn’t bite her. The room exhales when the door closes. Mira’s bracelets clink as her hands start to shake again.

“They’ll bring her back,” you say, because logic is a habit.

“Usually,” Mira says.

Taesun folds bread crumbs into his napkin with ritual care. “If the worms are fed.”

“Stop with the worms—”

He looks up, suddenly fiercer than his tremor allows. “This place eats. I just like to decide what it eats.”

You leave your spoon in your bowl. The porridge lurches in your gut like a tide. Through the greenhouse glass, you can’t see the grove, only the suggestion of trunks and a slit of path. Time grows teeth.

When they return, Yejin walks in her body like someone has moved the furniture. A crown of woven reeds presses her hair flat. There’s a smear of green at the corner of her mouth, like she’s chewed a leaf until it bled. She carries her sketchbook close to her chest as if it’s the last piece of herself no one has touched.

“What did you choose?” Director Seo asks.

Yejin’s voice is soft but intact. “Night-blooming cereus.”

“A flower that opens in darkness,” Sunoo says, pleased. “Perfect.”

Jungwon stands behind them, sleeves rolled to the elbow, forearms dirt-streaked. A single thorn scratches the back of his hand, a bright new welt. You don’t know why your chest warms at the proof that something here can still hurt them too.

As the room settles, Nurse Min touches your shoulder. “Consult,” she says, consonants rounded. In the clinic, she peels your bandage, checks the small cut, nods. “Fine.”

“Was the walk… normal?” you ask, too casual. “For Yejin.”

Nurse Min dabs salve with a gentleness that doesn’t fit her knife-edged face. “Normal is a shape you learn,” she says. “Here, it is round.” She taps your knuckle. “Don’t open yourself on purpose. Things may grow inside.”

“Like what?”

Her eyes flick briefly toward the greenhouse. “Names.”

By afternoon the schedule has you shoveling, watering, scrubbing, writing lines. I am ready to be less. You write it a hundred times until the words separate from meaning and become a pattern of stems and loops. Outside, Jungwon clears a new bed along the south wall. His shovel bites; his shoulders move with the reliable rhythm of practiced labor. A boy twice your size steps into his path and mutters something you can’t hear. Jungwon doesn’t raise his voice. He simply looks at the boy until the boy forgets how to stand where he’s standing and moves.

“Don’t stare,” Mira warns from beside you, but she’s staring too. “He notices.”

“He noticed last night,” you say.

Mira goes still. “You went out?”

“For air.”

“Air is how they catch you,” she whispers, and for the first time her cheer fails. “Promise me you won’t go alone again.”

You don’t promise. You also don’t say I don’t know who I am without alone.

At dusk, group again. Sunoo has you sit closer to him than yesterday. When you resist, he laughs softly, as if you’re charming rather than disobedient. “We sit where the light needs us,” he says. You wonder if that’s a rule or a line he likes. While others speak, he doesn’t look at them; he watches their hands, their throats, the wet edge of eyes. When your breath hitches at someone’s story, he turns his head sharply like a wolf hearing snow crack.

“What would you let go of?” he asks you, voice pitched so the rest of the circle hears only the question, not the ownership threaded through it.

You could say: the fire, the last call you ignored, the smell of burning hair. Instead, you say nothing. He accepts your silence as if it were obedience he taught you.

Outside the glass, Jungwon is a darker shape among dark shapes, moving a hose along the rows. When his head turns toward the circle, it isn’t to the whole; it is to you. He holds you there for a breath you feel in your wrists. Then he tips the hose, and water falls like rain on metal bones.

You sleep after midnight because your body ambushes you. You wake to weight. Not on you; in the air, a heaviness like weather. The greenhouse lights are out. The compound holds its breath.

Something is under your pillow.

You slide your hand beneath it and touch paper—the rough tooth of a sketchbook page. You draw it out under the dim nightlight and see yourself. Not flattering. Not cruel. Exact. You kneel on dark soil, mouth open, and something vines out—delicate stems laced with thorns. Hands—two sets—hold your shoulders lightly, possessively: one set with ink stains, one with dirt ground into the half moons of the nails. At the bottom, Yejin’s cramped script: “Some flowers only open when watched.”

Mira stirs. “What is it?”

“Art,” you say, and your voice surprises you with how steady it is.

“What kind?”

“Prophetic,” you answer, because the truth is an animal pacing the edge of the bed and you’re not ready to let it into your ribs yet.

You slide the drawing back under your pillow and close your eyes. Across the compound, the night shifts. In your mind, Sunoo’s smile threads petals through your tongue. In reality, Jungwon’s lantern skates once across the fogged panes, a slow-moving star. Two orbits, caught in the same sky, tightening.

Slow burn, the booklet promised. Healing begins when you stop resisting.

You do not stop.

You breathe. You listen to the soil remembering you.

And you wait.

______

Morning arrives with a whistle under the door and the faint itch of grit in your teeth, as if you’ve been speaking to the ground in your sleep. Breakfast is the same: porridge, a bitter green shot, tea that tastes like boiled bark. Mira counts sips, bracelets clinking like quiet alarms. Taesun crushes his toast to dust and pockets it, eyes bright with purpose. Yejin sits very still, crown of reeds damp against her hair, sketchbook closed for once like a door she’s guarding with her body.

Director Seo taps her cup. “Today begins the Mouth Fast,” she says, voice smooth as tile. “Speech is the first addiction. For twenty-four hours, we practice voicelessness. Carry your stone”—a monk in linen sets a bowl of river stones on each table—“and let it hold your words. Anyone who breaks the fast will do a double shift in the greenhouse trenches. Sunoo will lead stillness. Jungwon will direct labor.”

A murmur rises and dies, mouths pressing shut to prove eagerness. Mira puts a flat, oval stone in your palm. “Don’t lose it,” she whispers, already breaking the rule. “They’ll say the soil took your voice because you were careless.”

You tuck the stone into your sleeve and meet Sunoo’s eyes across the hall. He’s already watching—of course he is. The smile he gives you would be harmless if you hadn’t seen how he moves when he’s pleased: slower, closer, like a candle drawn to oxygen. Jungwon lingers by the service door with a clipboard and a coil of hose on his shoulder, scanning tables the way a shepherd counts sheep by the sound of their breathing.

Chores first. Outside, the air needles your lungs; the mountain wears its cold like a second skin. Jungwon assigns tasks without looking at his list. “Mira, refectory herbs. Taesun, east wall compost. Yejin, with Nurse Min in the clinic.” His gaze slides to you and steadies. “You—paths and drains. Stay out of the grove.” Not a suggestion.

You carry a stiff-bristled broom down stone paths glazed with last night’s dew. The greenhouse ribs glow under weak sun; from inside, lamps hum, and something leafy slaps damply as if it’s learned the shape of applause. By the east wall, Taesun kneels with a small shovel and a reverence that would be holy if it didn’t smell like rot.

He tips crumbs in a neat line, then pauses to show you something cupped in his palm: a white, blind tangle coiling in damp soil. Worms, yes, but too many knotted together, a living thread. He beams, proud. You force your lips into gratitude and keep sweeping. If you stop, you will hear them, and if you hear them, you will dream them.

A shadow falls across your broom. Jungwon holds out a pair of soft-soled garden shoes with the temporary patience of a man who prefers doing to explaining. “Your feet,” he says. “You bruise easily.”

You glance at your bare socks, damp to the ankle. “Is that a rule?”

“It’s a reality,” he says; the word lands like weight. He crouches without asking, sets the shoes on the path, and steps back, gaze down so you can decide if you’ll take his help. You put them on. They’re warm from his hands. He notices the lift of your breath and looks away so the noticing won’t embarrass you. When he straightens, his eyes snag on the river stone tucked in your sleeve. “Don’t drop that,” he says. “The ravens like to steal them.”

You arch a brow—Are you joking?—but he’s already moving, a steady, unshowy force among the clatter of chores.

By mid-morning the Mouth Fast is a taut cord running through the compound. The quiet isn’t peace; it’s suppression, and suppression hums. Sunoo runs stillness from the center of the greenhouse like a maestro conducting silence. He has you sit within his radius; you don’t know how you know that, but you do. When a guest’s shoulders begin to shake, his hand appears at the nape of their neck—just weight, just heat, just enough to persuade the body that obedience feels like care.

He comes to you last, when the lamps have warmed the panes to sweating. He kneels, not quite touching, gaze on your throat. “Your pulse is stubborn,” he says in a voice pitched for you alone. “It hates rhythm. I like that.” He brushes the air near your jawline, not touching, so you feel it anyway. “The stone will teach it obedience. If you’re good at listening.”

You hold his eyes and refuse to nod. He smiles, pleased with your defiance like a trainer who prefers wild animals because they make better trophies. “We’ll work on it,” he whispers, and stands.

After lunch—a bowl of broth filtered until flavor gives up—you’re pulled into the clinic with half a dozen others for “check-ins.” Nurse Min sits you on a stool and unwraps your finger. The cut is a thin mouth now, pink with newness. She touches a gloved finger to the gauze and sniffs it as if the body has a scent that changes when it’s lying.

“Does it itch?” she asks.

You hesitate. The truth is embarrassing. “Everything does,” you admit. “Under the skin. Like… like something wants out.”

“Something wants in,” she corrects mildly. She takes tweezers to the pad of your finger and draws out a hair-fine splinter you didn’t know was there. It isn’t wood—it’s pale and sappy, flexing like a root in the air. She drops it in a jar and screws the lid tight. “Names need medium,” she says. “Don’t let anyone put theirs under your skin.”

“Is that medical advice?”

“It’s survival.” She tapes a fresh bandage printed with tiny leaves, then, softer, “If you start tasting flowers, spit.”

You leave the clinic with your mouth dry as chalk. On the steps, Yejin waits like a shadow that forgot to attach to a body. She presses a folded paper to your palm and flits off before you can unfold it. In the corner of the page, her fast, lethal graphite: you in profile, throat open, something like a stem ghosting up under the jaw. In the negative space behind you, two silhouettes—Sunoo’s soft edges; Jungwon’s blunt solidity—blur toward one another without touching. Underneath, her careful script: Not yet. But soon.

The Mouth Fast bends afternoon into a colder shape. Without words, people show who they are. Mira hums under her breath and taps her stone against her teeth like a bead. Taesun counts breath with his fingers on his ribs. A new arrival—Hana, thirty and jewel-hard—walks like a woman who refuses to ask permission from the air. An older man, Mr. Ko, rows his spoon through soup with the concentration of a man pretending there is a river and a boat that can take him off this mountain.

At dusk, Director Seo calls for the Seed Burial. “We surrender what we’ve hoarded,” she says, and volunteers step forward with small slips of paper seeded with something that will sprout if the soil wants it. They kneel, press the papers into a rectangle of fresh-turned earth, and cover them with a thin skin of loam. The lamps go low. Sunoo stands at their backs. Jungwon stands at their front, shovel grounded like a staff.

You don’t move. You have nothing to bury you can stand to name.

A woman you recognize from orientation—the one who needed three days of sleep—places both palms flat on the soil like it’s someone she loves. Her breath hitches once; she swallows whatever it shook loose. As the last handful of earth covers the names, something beneath the surface shifts. Not the modest swell of seeds drinking. A shove from below.

The crowd stills. You feel it again—a push. The soil flexes and sighs, grains settling. Someone’s hand jerks back as if bitten. Sunoo’s smile does not change, which means it changes. “The ground recognizes an offering,” he says pleasantly. “Stand, flowers. Let the dark do what it’s for.”

Jungwon’s eyes are on the dirt, not the people. His jaw flexes once, twice. You have the sharp, childish thought—He hears it too—and the relief that follows is so naked you almost miss the fear riding it.

Night stitches the compound tight. The Mouth Fast persists: tongues held, little pantomimes replacing argument. In bed, Mira sleeps with her open palm on her stone like it might roll away. You face the wall because the drawing under your pillow is a magnet and your skull is iron.

A scrape wakes you—a quick, purposeful sound under the window. You slide out of bed and ease the latch. Cold breath pours in. On the path below, a lantern moves slow as a planet. You follow, soft-soled shoes silent on the boards, the stone in your sleeve tapping your wrist like a heart that’s climbed too high.

The lantern stops. Jungwon steps into its circle. He doesn’t look surprised to see you. He looks like a man who has laid a trap and found what he baited it for. He lifts the lantern just enough to catch your face without flaying you with light.

He puts a finger to his mouth—quiet—and crooks that same finger: come.

You should run. You go.

He takes you along the west path to a low, fenced plot you haven’t noticed in daylight, because in daylight everything looks like something else. Up close, the boards are stained darker than weather. He stops you with a hand on your sleeve. His grip is gentle; his hand is strong. “Do not speak,” he says, and for the first time today the command lands like care, not control.

He tilts the lantern over the fence. The light stratifies a pit maybe two meters long, maybe one deep, lined with rough timbers and crawling with the industry of decay. You see peels, stems, pot scrapings—normal compost—then catch on something pale threaded through like lace: cartilage? You squint, heart hammering, and in among the skins and stems you see hair—just a clump, just enough to be undeniable. The sour-metal stink under the rot answers a question you didn’t know you were asking until now.

You stagger, mute because the rule still binds your mouth. Jungwon’s hand rises like he planned for your body to try to leave you. He catches your elbow with two fingers and steadies you without pulling you closer. “Breathe,” he says, voice so low the pit swallows it.

You breathe. He watches your lungs move under your shirt as if measuring if they’ll keep their job.

“What is this,” you manage, a whisper that bruises the fast.

“Everything that isn’t needed,” he says. It is both the most honest sentence you’ve heard since you arrived and the worst one. “Don’t come here alone.”

“Why show me?”

His mouth tightens. He weighs the truth and hands you a ration. “Because you will go looking. Better you see what is true than what you can’t live through.”

He lifts the lantern away; the pit dissolves back into darkness. When he looks at you again, the composure you’ve seen him wear like a uniform slips an inch. “Next time,” he says, “wake me.”

“How?” It comes out harder than you intend. “Do I knock on the earth?”

“On my door.” He says it like a correction and a promise. “I’d rather carry you than find you down there with your throat open to the sky.”

You swallow. The stone in your sleeve digs your wrist bone.

He walks you back along the west path, keeping the lantern low so you don’t blind yourself and tumble. At the bottom of the dorm steps, he stops as if a line of salt has been poured between you. “Sleep,” he says. Then, almost grudgingly—no, carefully, like he fears generosity might teach you to expect it—“You did well.”

“You mean quiet,” you say.

“I mean you didn’t lie to yourself while you were looking.” He turns the lantern, and for a heartbeat your faces share a circle of light. It is not intimate, and it is.

Inside, the warm dark smells like bodies and disinfection. Mira turns in her sleep, bracelets whickering. Your hands shake. Not with the adrenaline of the pit—though that remains like a taste at the back of your throat—but with the realization that both men see you. Sunoo sees the mechanism; Jungwon sees the fracture line. You can’t decide which is worse.

The Mouth Fast breaks at dawn with a bell so soft it feels like a secret. Voices resume like a creek finding an old bed; people speak too loudly, then blush, then laugh at their own relief. Director Seo praises “compliance” as if it were a sacrament. In the refectory, mugs clack, spoons scrape. Words return as barter.

You don’t trust yours yet.

Sunoo flows through tables like sunlight convincing itself it’s holy. He catches your empty mug, pours tea, and sets it in front of you with a flourish that makes a few heads turn. “How did the silence fit?” he asks, lazy, interested. It isn’t small talk. It’s a probe shaped like kindness.

“Like wire,” you say.

He smiles, delighted—as if you’ve told him a secret about yourself he can use. “It looks good on you,” he says, and taps your river stone where it sits on the table as if he gave it to you, as if it obeys him too. “We have Talkback today. You and me.”

“Is that optional?”

“In principle,” he says. “In practice, most people prefer to be seen.” He leans in, lower voice. “You certainly do.”

He leaves before you can snap that you preferred to be alive, actually. Across the room, Jungwon stops at the threshold, takes the refectory in at a glance, and chooses a seat with his back to the wall. He eats fast, plain, as if food is fuel and surveillance is dessert. When he lifts his mug, you notice the fresh welt across the back of his hand—a thorn, yesterday, dragging its punctuation.

Talkback is held in a small room off the clinic, windowless, lit by a lamp that chooses flattery over truth. Sunoo sits too close, but because he knows what too close does to bodies, he leaves exactly enough air that you can fool yourself into thinking you could stand if you wanted to. He doesn’t touch you. He rests his forearms on his knees, hands open, posture full of a patience he wears like silk.

“What is the shape of your fear?” he asks, as if fear is polite enough to have geometry.

“Wide,” you say.

“Flat?”

“Deep.”

He grins. “Good. Honesty makes my job easier.” He looks at your mouth, then your hands, then your throat. “Last night you broke curfew.”

It isn’t a question. “I walked.”

“To the west path,” he says, savoring the corridor of it.

“Is that forbidden?”

“Not if you were with someone.”

You hold his gaze. You don’t look away. You don’t nod. You don’t give him Jungwon.

Sunoo’s smile returns, but thinner. “We don’t punish curiosity,” he says silkily. “We shape it.” He nods to your sleeve. “Keep the stone. I like how you sound when you hold it.”

“I didn’t speak.”

“You breathed differently,” he says, and you hate that you believe him. “This afternoon I want you in the greenhouse. We’ll do matching breath. I’ll keep count so you don’t have to.”

Your stomach remembers the pit and rolls. “What if I say no?”

“Then we’ll go slower,” he says, as if you asked him to make it sweeter. “That’s the kind of consent you like, isn’t it? The kind that arrives after your body learns the lesson.”

You stand because sitting feels like agreeing. He doesn’t stop you. He nods as if you’ve completed a task he set in his head.

“Good,” he says. “The roots are listening.”

Outside, the day is too bright in the way of mountains pretending to be gentle. You find Mira tending pots of kitchen herbs—mint, rosemary, a vicious little basil. “You look like you saw a ghost,” she says without looking up.

“I saw the compost,” you say.

She flinches so hard the basil shudders. “You don’t say it out loud,” she hisses, then checks herself, forces her voice calm again. “Names wake things.”

“Whose hair is in it?”

“Everyone’s,” she says. “Eventually.”

By late afternoon your muscles revolt, and stillness becomes a thing you have to hold down with both hands. In the greenhouse, Sunoo runs breath like a metronome. When he kneels behind a girl whose hands won’t stop shaking, he doesn’t touch her skin; he places his palm two inches away from her spine and waits. The girl’s shoulders ease; her breath learns his count. You hate him for it. You hate her relief. You hate that your body pays attention.

Jungwon moves along the rows with a bucket and a dull pruning blade, nicking stems, turning soil, resetting stakes. When a lamp pops and goes dim, he crosses to replace it without being called. On his way back, he passes near your mat—near, not past. The air shifts with him: sweat, iron, soil, a clean note like water running under rock. He doesn’t look down. He scratches the back of his wrist where a thorn welt cross-hatches older scars and says, as if the comment belongs to the room, “Some things only grow when you pretend you can’t see them.”

You don’t know if he means the plants, the people, or you.

Evening comes with teeth. The bell pulls everyone to the refectory; the sky sits heavy, swollen with weather that refuses to begin. Over dinner, Hana spills her tea and swears loudly enough that half the room jumps; then she laughs, tips her chin like she meant to do it, and glares at anyone who looks sorry on her behalf. Mr. Ko tells Taesun to stop feeding the worms like they’re pets; Taesun bares his teeth, half-smile, half warning. Nurse Min pockets a spoon someone bent into a hook. Director Seo watches it all with the small, sated smile of a zookeeper whose animals are thriving.

Night brings the first scream.

Not a long one. Not a movie howl. A single, keening note cut off hard, like a rope being cut. The compound freezes; forks stop halfway to mouths; breath holds. Sunoo is already on his feet, smile sharpened into usefulness. Jungwon’s chair scrapes; he’s moving before you can find your shoes.

They go toward the grove at a measured pace that says they already know what they’ll find. Director Seo lifts her hand. “Stay seated,” she says, and the command lands like weight on your shoulders. Mira’s fingers take yours under the table and squeeze so hard your knuckles grind. You squeeze back. Your mouth tastes like rosemary and fear.

You wait. The greenhouse sweats. The clock you aren’t allowed to see walks itself around the hour by the sound of your blood in your ears. When the door opens again, Sunoo comes in first, serene, coat unwrinkled. Jungwon follows with a bundled shape in his arms—a blanket, a softness of color, too long where a body should bend.

A gasp skips the room. “She fainted,” Sunoo says, which is both intolerably insufficient and the only story you’ll be allowed. “A cleansing reaction. She will rest. We will keep vigil over the names she surrendered.”

He doesn’t say who. Your mind fills the blank with the sleeping woman from breakfast, because that is who you fear for, and fear is a magnet. Jungwon carries the bundle past. You know how much weight that is—your body recognizes the set of his jaw, the economy of his gait. He does not look at you. He doesn’t look anywhere but the door to the clinic, as if any glance could spill what he’s holding.

The dining hall exhales like it’s been underwater too long. Director Seo claps once, neat. “We will not gossip,” she says. “We will not catastrophize. We will practice serenity.”

You don’t sleep. Not because you’re brave—because you’re scared correctly now, and scared correctly people stay awake. When you doze, you wake to the sensation that someone has put a leaf on your tongue and asked you to pray with it in your mouth. You spit into your sheet and find nothing. When you sit up, a shadow peels off the wall near the window and becomes Jungwon.

You nearly fling yourself out of bed. He doesn’t move, as if sudden gestures would spook you. He should not be in the dorms after lights; rules are their own religion here. He breaks this one like he breaks branches: cleanly, without apology.

“You left your shoes,” he says, low. He sets them at the foot of your bed, lined up, laces tucked. His voice is stripped of everything but function. “Don’t go barefoot again.”

“What happened?” you ask, whispering because anything louder might wake the dark.

“Don’t ask me,” he says, and for a breath you think he’s refusing. Then he adds, “Because I’ll tell you.” His gaze drags over your face, cataloging fine tremors, the cracked edge of your mouth, the way one hand fists in the sheet like rope. “Sleep,” he says. “You’ll need it.”

He is out the way he came, the door kissing its jamb like a secret.

You try to obey. The mountain presses its cold face to the window and listens. Somewhere, a lantern moves. Somewhere else, a man like a hymn kneels by a bed that is too light.

You put the river stone back in your sleeve and hold it against your pulse until the beat stops arguing with your bones. You remember the jar in Nurse Min’s clinic with the threadlike root curled at the bottom like a question mark. You picture Yejin’s hand drawing you with something under your skin you didn’t agree to carry.

Stillness was the promise. Obedience was the price. You have paid neither. Now the Garden pays attention.

And you, finally, are afraid.

_________

You wake with the taste of copper and rosemary slicked over your tongue, as if someone pressed a leaf there while you slept and whispered hold it. A welt has risen along your bandaged finger—thin, pale, almost pretty. When you press it, it flexes under the skin like something answering from underneath.

Breakfast is a choreography of clatter and eyes. Mira smiles too hard; her bracelets rattle out a code you can’t read. Taesun tips crumbs into his pocket with priestly concentration. Yejin’s crown of reeds has dried to a brittle halo; she draws with her pencil held like a knife. Hana sits mean and diamond-bright, daring the room to dull her edges. Mr. Ko’s spoon cuts the same path through porridge like a boatman refusing any other shore. Director Seo watches the surface of her tea the way people watch the sea for bodies.

“The Naming Rite will be held at sundown,” she announces, as if she’s asking for the salt. “Those selected have been notified.”

Sunoo lifts his eyes, and that’s your notification.

Mira’s fingers find your knee under the table and clamp. She shakes her head once, small, fast—refuse. You don’t know what refusal looks like here besides a story they will tell about you afterward.

“Drink,” Nurse Min says when you pass through the clinic to turn in your night report—how many hours asleep, how many awake, whether you dreamed of heat, teeth, drowning. She hands you a glass the green of pond water. You smell it, and it smells like lawn and iron. “Chlorophyll with a little hem,” she says, seeing your face. “Calms the heart.”

“Calms or slows?” Your voice scratches.

She cants her head. “Same action, different motive.” She glances at your finger. “Still itching?”

“It… moves,” you say, and the honesty makes your stomach pitch. “Like a thread.”

“Everything alive wants a home,” she replies. She peels the bandage with sure fingers. Underneath, the welt has subdivided into delicate veins, a fine network. Not veins. Veining. It looks like leaf. She presses the back of her glove along it; the pattern darkens, limned green under the skin. “Names need medium,” she repeats. “Keep your mouth closed in the greenhouse today. Even when you want to answer.”

You want to ask answer what, but Sunoo is in the doorway, dusk caught in the lamplight of his hair. He doesn’t knock; he glides in like permission. “Our new sprout,” he says, pleased to find you in a chair. “I’ll take her.”

Nurse Min’s mouth goes a little flatter. “She eats first.”

“Of course.” Sunoo’s smile doesn’t move. “Then we breathe.”

The greenhouse sweats. Heat lamps hum like insects; the glass with its rain of condensation blurs the mountain into a myth. Staff move among the rows with trays of soil sheets—thin paper seeded with something that glitters faintly when the light hits it wrong. “Embedded affirmations,” Sunoo tells the group. “You write what you’ll surrender. The seeds will carry it.”

Hana snorts. “Is the surrender refundable?”

Sunoo’s eyes quicken. “There’s always a transaction,” he says. “We just prefer you know the price.” He looks back to you. “Mat,” he says, and it isn’t a request.

You sit. He kneels behind you, palms hovering two inches from your ribs. No touch—just the sense of touch waiting. “Open your mouth,” he murmurs. The admonition from Nurse Min echoes; you clamp your lips. Sunoo’s pleased noise lands against your neck like breath. “Good. Breathe through your nose. In on four, out on six. I’ll count.”

His voice is a rope you have to grab to keep from slipping. When your breath shudders, he matches it; when it calms, he pursues. On the sixth cycle, something sweet pushes the air—lily, wet earth—and you remember the pit and want to be sick. “Stay,” he says, reading your recoil. “Stay where your body is. Don’t run from it. That’s where people rot.”

Across the rows, Jungwon replaces a cracked lamp with quick, sure hands. He doesn’t look at you until he does, a glance like a hand closing on the back of your neck. The air between you tightens. His forearms are netted with healed cuts, white against brown; a fresh welt crosses them like a red thread. When Sunoo says “out on six,” Jungwon turns the dial and the light hums obedient, and you wonder whether the whole building breathes to his count.

Yejin brings you a tray of seed-paper without being asked. When you reach, her gaze drops to your bandage. She moves the pencil like a blade and sketches the back of your hand: the delicate leaf veining, the suggestion of something wanting to break surface. She writes Not yet over the knuckles and slides the paper into your lap. Her mouth is a thin line; her eyes are large and dry and furious.

The day’s chores are smaller and meaner than yesterday’s. Scrub the condensation gutters. Rake. Haul sacks labeled Bone Meal that smell like old molars. Taesun sings under his breath in a language not meant for mouths and leaves a damp trail of crumbs along the east wall. Mr. Ko fetches and carries with blank efficiency, his face empty as a cleaned plate.

By late afternoon, a woman you know only as Auntie Hye—fiftyish, hair cut short for neatness, eyes that scan like a mother bird’s—begins to cough. At first it is dry and prim; then she hunches, pushes a hand to her chest and coughs wet. A ribbon of something bright pops free onto her palm. Petals. White. Tissue-thin and slick with saliva. A few guests laugh—nerves, delight, cruelty. Nurse Min is there before the room decides what to feel, hand under Auntie Hye’s chin, tissues ready. Hye coughs again, harder, and a clot of petals spills: red-tipped now, streaked. She hacks out a final cluster and sags. The tissues are sodden. The petals look like tongues.

“Pollination,” Sunoo says calmly. “Sometimes the body rehearses letting go by practicing bloom.”

Auntie Hye shakes her head, breath hitching. “I didn’t—” she starts.

Sunoo presses two fingers lightly to her throat. “You did.”

She closes her mouth.

Jungwon comes with a bucket and a flat spade; he scoops the petals into the bucket without expression. Your stomach tilts; you grip the bench until the wood prints itself into your palm. He doesn’t look at anyone. He takes the bucket toward the compost. You see his jawclench once when he passes the pit door and files that, like a photographed crime scene.

After the petals, other small horrors follow as if emboldened. A boy pulls his sleeve up to scratch and reveals a faint green tracery along his inner arm; when he scrubs at it, the skin reddens and puffs and the pattern brightens like a pressed leaf held to light. Mira slices a basil stem and it bleeds thin, clean sap; she runs her thumb along the cut and licks it without thinking, then startles at the taste and laughs too loudly. Taesun tips a paper cup into a drain, and a pale, slick worm writhes against the grate and splits into two thinner threads that both crawl the wrong way, toward his fingers. He coos like they’re babies and tucks them back into mud.

“Don’t feed your nightmares,” Nurse Min says without looking up from the woman whose mouth she swabs. “They grow fine on their own.”

By evening, the heat in the greenhouse feels like a hand that won’t lift. The lamps go low. Director Seo stands by the iron ribs with her clipboard like a prayerbook. “For the Naming Rite,” she says, “we welcome Sunoo as Voice and Jungwon as Hands.”

Voice and Hands. A division of power simple enough to live inside.

You are led—gently, unmistakably—toward the central bed, a rectangle of fresh loam bordered by smooth stones. Yejin edges after you, sketchbook clutched to her chest; Nurse Min blocks her with just a glance. “Not this,” Min murmurs. “Later.”

Mira steps forward—too fast—“I can go instead,” she says, smile like a knife wrapped in tissue.

Sunoo’s smile is silk on a nail. “We don’t barter names,” he says. “We harvest them.”

Your knees give. Not dramatic; a small buckling, the body remembering the ground. Sunoo’s hand is there without touching you, a near-weight at your shoulder. “Kneel,” he says, as if reminding you what your body already decided. “Head up. We face what we bring.”

Jungwon stands at the foot of the bed, shovel grounded. Close, his expression is the same flat steel as his blade. He looks at your throat the way carpenters look at walls: not hunger—assessment. When he speaks, his voice is small enough to belong only to the three of you. “Do you know what you’re giving?” he asks.

You try to say No. What comes out is “Something I can’t carry.”

“Good,” he says, and the word is not kindness. It’s calibration.

Sunoo’s fingers hover at your jaw, turning your face by the gravity of proximity. “Open,” he tells you, and your mouth obeys because your body recognizes a doctor’s tone even when it comes from someone who would rather be a priest. He places a petal on your tongue. It tastes like cold tea and a coin. “Hold,” he says. He waits. When you swallow despite yourself, his smile flares. “You see? The body knows ceremony even when the mind resists.”

He steps behind you. You feel his presence like a heat lamp. Jungwon moves to your side and holds out his hand. On his palm: a knife. Not sharp—its edge has been blunted until it’s a tongue of metal—but its point is honest. He waits until you meet his eyes; only then does he set the flat of the blade against your sternum. The steel is cool. Your skin fists under it.

“This is how we write it,” Sunoo says, and his breath touches the shell of your ear like a whispering moth. “Not deep. Not cruel. Not yet.”

The blade slides up without breaking skin, tracing between ribs, across the slow bell of breath—sternum, clavicle, the notch at your throat. The metal leaves a trail of gooseflesh; your pulse hammers against it like an animal trapped under the lid of a box. Jungwon’s other hand is steady at your shoulder, not pushing, not holding, just there, a second horizon the body can measure itself against.

“Name what cannot follow you,” Sunoo murmurs. It could be a real question. It could be a spell. Your mouth fills with the taste of flower and iron; words gather behind it like flies at meat.

You can’t say the fire; to say it would open something that the soil will keep. You say, “The last night.”

“Again,” Sunoo purrs.

“The last night,” you repeat, and the room tilts like a field under wind.

The congregation—guests in white, staff in linen—sways. Mira has both hands pressed to her lips. Taesun rocks in small, violent arcs. Yejin’s pencil moves; she draws you kneeling, two sets of hands marking you; she smudges the graphite so the air around you looks like breath or smoke.

The blade dips, lifts, comes to rest against your throat’s right side. You feel the exact spot where it would enter if it wanted to. Jungwon’s pulse is visible in his wrist; steady, heavier than yours. He moves the flat in a small crescent along the tendon, and your voice leaves you for a moment—pure reflex. A small, unpretty sound. Sunoo shivers behind you, pleased as if you performed a note he’d been coaching you toward.

“Do you understand the price?” Sunoo asks softly.

“No,” you say honestly.

“Beautiful,” he says, delighted. “No one ever does until after.”

He lifts the petal from your mouth with two fingers and lays it on your tongue again like communion. You hold it. Jungwon takes your left hand. His palm is rough and warm; soil lives in the whorls of his fingerprints. He pricks the pad of your finger with the very tip of the blunted knife, as if he wants to remind the blade of its older religion. A bead of blood swells, bright, neat. He turns your hand and presses that red to the seed-paper waiting in a shallow trench at the bed’s edge. Your blood bleeds into the paper like water into thirst.

“Now,” Sunoo says, voice dropped low enough to live in your bones, “we plant what you are not. So what you are can grow.”

Jungwon folds loam over the paper. The soil is cool even in this hothouse weather. It sucks at your finger when he presses your hand flat to it. Something moves underneath—something too quick for roots. Your stomach rocks. You try to pull back. Jungwon’s hand covers yours, firm as a yoke; Sunoo’s hand wraps your throat—not squeezing, just holding the column steady. You are pinned in two places that translate directly to obedience.

“Breathe,” Sunoo says.

You do. The soil under your hand warms like a mouth.

The congregation murmurs. Not words; the sound bodies make when they agree to a script. Director Seo watches like a reader flipping to the end to be sure it comes out as written. Nurse Min’s face has the set of a woman who’s decided to count a vein until morning.

The thing under the soil stills.

Jungwon lifts your hand and wipes the loam away with his thumb. The smear looks like war paint. Sunoo releases your throat and smooths his palm down the line his fingers left, a correction, an apology, a brand. He bends and whispers against your ear, “You belong to the ground,” and then, after a heartbeat, “and to us while you’re learning.”

His mouth never touches skin. The idea of it does.

The Rite closes with a bell that tastes like copper in your teeth. People file out as if stepping around a sleeping animal. Mira gets to you first, palms hot where she holds your face. “Drink water,” she hisses. “Don’t go to sleep. If you dream the name, it sticks.”

“I didn’t give it,” you say.

She laughs, a small animal sound. “You bled. That’s enough.”

Mr. Ko offers a clean handkerchief without meeting your eyes. Hana watches from a distance like a hawk deciding if a rabbit is worth stooping for when the field is full of easier meat. Taesun beams, mud on his lip, as if he’s just watched a very good wedding.

Yejin presses a drawing into your hand and vanishes. It’s you kneeling, hands marked, a line along your throat that is not a cut but knows where one would go. Over your shoulder, two shadows bend—one a heat-halo, one a blunt storm. Soon, she’s written. Don’t say yes with your mouth.

Night. The mountain holds its breath. The lamps in the greenhouse go black one by one until the glass is only a shape. You sit on your dorm bed and watch your hands not shake. Mira sleeps curled like a comma with her stone under her cheek. The drawing under your pillow warms to your scalp as if it wants to crawl into you.

A knock—not on the door. On the window, one knuckle, once. When you slide the frame, cold air pours in, and you think of Nurse Min’s keep your mouth closed in the greenhouse and keep it shut.

Jungwon stands below, lantern hooded, face lit just enough to make eyes and jaw. He tilts his head—come—and you go because your legs have learned this path. Out the back, down the steps, across the boards to the west path. He waits in the shadow of the shed where spades hang like a rack of tongues.

“Any dizziness? Nausea?” he asks, clinic-plain.

“Just… aware.” The word feels too small for your body’s rattled hum.

He grunts—approval. He reaches for your hand and turns the palm up. The loam under your nails has dried to fine grit. He rubs it away with his thumb, slow, methodical. It’s almost tender until you realize he is checking for changes—for the leaf-vein under your skin brightening, for anything moving that shouldn’t. When his thumb passes over the edge of your pulse, it jumps. He looks up sharply. You look away.

“You shouldn’t stay in the dorm tonight.” Matter-of-fact. “You’ll hear things like your name, and some of them will be for you and some won’t. You’re still soft. Soft things take impressions.”

“Where do I go?”

“My room.” Flat. Then, as if he heard how it sounds: “It’s safer. There are no plants there.”

“Is that true?”

“It’s true enough.” He waits. “Or go to the clinic and sit under Min’s lamp and let her count your breaths until morning.”

“Which would you pick,” you ask, because some part of you refuses to let him stand there and decide your body in his head without you in the room.

He takes too long to answer, then says, “The clinic is gentle.” A beat. “I am not.”

Wind combs the pines; the greenhouse ticks as it cools. Somewhere a raven laughs like a woman who knows your secrets and isn’t impressed.

“Choose,” he says quietly.

Sunoo’s shadow falls across the path before you can. He steps into the lantern’s circle like a storybook: pale wrists, clean hands, a smile that tells you exactly how he will use it. “Ah,” he says, soft delight. “My flower and my hands. I wondered where the night would put you.”

Jungwon does not step back. He also does not step forward. The lantern holds the three of you in a tight Venn where your breaths overlap. Sunoo tips his head, curious. “You can take her,” he says to Jungwon, which is to say I will let you. “But she’ll come back to me tasting like soil and fear, and we’ll start again from below.” He turns to you, voice honeyed and mean. “Or you can come with me and I’ll teach your body what calm feels like so you know when you’ve lost it.”

The polite violence of the options makes your stomach liquefy.

“Stop,” Jungwon says, and the word is a tool, not a plea.

Sunoo laughs softly. “The earth doesn’t stop growing just because you ask it gently.” He reaches, very slowly, and lifts your jaw with two fingers—not touching skin; his hand floats a whisper below it and your head lifts anyway, obedient to suggestion. “Show me your throat,” he says, and your body almost does it because it learned tonight and bodies like to repeat lessons. You hold yourself still out of spite. His smile warms. “Good girl.”

The words hit like a hand under your ribs. Jungwon’s breath changes. It darkens the air.

“Enough,” Jungwon says again, and hooks a finger in the lantern hood. He pulls it open. Light flares, pot-bright, brutal. The three of you blink; the world loses its beautiful edges and shows its seams. “Clinic,” he tells you.

Sunoo’s smile fades pixel by pixel until only his eyes shine. “For now,” he agrees. He steps in closer so there is no air between the three bodies but what breath can claim. He looks at Jungwon and speaks to you. “You’ll end up between us anyway,” he says, the prophecy flat, not cruel. “Why not learn the shape early.”

You should move. You should walk yourself to the nurse and let her count your lungs like prayer beads. Instead you stand very still while two men who have learned your pulse by different languages consider the currency of your fear.

Sunoo lifts his hand and stops a breath from your mouth. You feel the heat of him without the permission of touch. “I won’t kiss you,” he says, velvet and wicked. “Not yet.” He turns his palm and hovers over your throat, reading the rush there like a favorite book. “See what your body does with almost.”

Jungwon moves behind you so quietly the night forgets to mark his steps. He doesn’t touch you. His presence is so large it reads like contact anyway—the shape of him corralling air. You have the dizzy thought that if you leaned back, he would catch you, and if you leaned forward, Sunoo would open like a mouth.

“Breathe,” Sunoo whispers, and it isn’t instruction now; it’s a dare.

You do. The air leans with you. The world tightens to a triangle: lantern glare, the line of a blunted blade tucked into Jungwon’s belt, the faint copper on Sunoo’s knuckle where he touched your lip earlier with the petal.

“I said clinic,” Jungwon repeats, low enough to live at your spine.

“Make her say please,” Sunoo counters, amusement sweet as rot. “Our girl loves a ritual.”

“Don’t—” you start, and then stop, because the word tastes like surrender and you haven’t decided whose hands deserve it.

“Not tonight,” Jungwon says, and you understand: it isn’t mercy. It’s control deferred. He steps to your side, inserts a palm—warm, heavy—at your waist, not pulling, not pushing, just a point you can move along. Sunoo mirrors the motion on your other side without touching, an echo your nerves misread as contact. Together they guide you three steps, five, toward the clinic’s dim window—two gravities that agree for once.

At the threshold, Sunoo bends so close your ear warms. “Sleep,” he murmurs, the same command Jungwon uses like a blessing. “Dream of hands.” He smiles against the air where your skin ends. “Next time I’ll count for you while he holds you still.”

Jungwon’s hand tightens one notch at your waist, a warning, a promise, a brand pressed through clothes. “Next time,” he says, to Sunoo, to you, to the night that will keep at this until you’re rewritten, “I’ll decide who goes first.”

Nurse Min opens the clinic door before anyone knocks, lamp bright behind her like a little square sun. She takes in the triangle of bodies, the glint of the knife, the feral set of Sunoo’s mouth, the obedient steadiness of Jungwon’s hand at your side.

“Inside,” she says, and steps aside.

You pass between them—Sunoo’s almost-touch a heat across your throat; Jungwon’s real touch a line at your hip you could follow with your eyes closed—and cross into the light.

You do not kiss anyone. No one kisses you.

But as the door shuts and the mountain presses its ear to the glass to listen, you know it: your body already understands the shape they promised. It will remember. It will hunger.

And when it happens—when it really happens—it will not be an accident.

________

The clinic smelled of metal and mint. Nurse Min left you in a chair under her lamp until the feverish hum in your body dulled to a bearable pitch. She made you drink water, bitter and green as ditch weed, and held your wrist while your pulse rattled beneath her thumb. When you asked her if you were safe, she only said, “Nothing in a place like this is safe. At best, some things are safer than others.”

By the time she dismissed you, the compound had already gone to sleep. Mira was curled on her side in the dorm, bracelets stilled. You should have slept too. Instead you lay awake, tasting the memory of a petal pressed against your tongue, feeling the phantom weight of Jungwon’s hand steady at your waist, the ghost of Sunoo’s fingers just shy of your throat.

Your body remembered. It remembered too well.

When you finally slipped into the corridor, your bare feet soundless on the boards, it wasn’t to find air. It was because something in you had already decided that the ache would not stop on its own.

The greenhouse loomed against the night, ribs of iron and glass sweating mist. The lock had never been for people who wanted to stay out. You pushed the door and it sighed open, warm air rushing at you like a mouth.

He was waiting. Of course he was.

Sunoo leaned against a bench, sleeves rolled, pale wrists glowing under the lamps. His expression was the same one he’d worn when he laid the petal on your tongue earlier—delighted, expectant, like he had always known your body would come back to him.

“You breathe too loud when you lie down,” he murmured. “I could hear you from the other side of the hall.”

You should have left. You stepped closer instead.

Sunoo reached for you without touching, fingers tracing the air beside your cheek. That almost-contact burned hotter than heat itself. Your breath caught, and his smile sharpened. “See? Your body tells the truth. It remembers me already.”

His hand hovered down, stopping at the hollow of your throat. “Here,” he whispered. “Where the pulse lives.” He bent, mouth a whisper away from your skin, never quite sealing it. Your nerves screamed as if he’d kissed you. “You want me to touch you. That’s why you came.”

Your denial scraped your teeth but never left your tongue.

“Good girl,” he said, pleased at your silence. He turned you, pressing between your shoulder blades until your knees bent and you landed on the warm boards of the floor. “Stay open. Stay soft.”

His hands came at last—sliding along your thighs, parting them without rush, without doubt. He dragged his thumb along the cotton of your thin shorts, pressing until the damp there gave you away. “Blooming,” he said reverently, as if the word itself could coax you wider.

You gasped when he pressed harder, the friction maddening. He laughed low in his throat, pleased. “You’ve been waiting since the Rite, haven’t you? You swallowed the petal and your body begged for more.”

He tugged fabric aside with clinical precision, exposing you to the humid air. His fingers slicked easily through the wetness already gathered, and he made a sound of satisfaction that went straight to your gut. “So ready,” he crooned. “So obedient.”

Two fingers circled, teased, pressed—but never where you needed. He watched your hips shift, your breath stutter. “Say please,” he murmured.

“I—”

“Shh.” His free hand covered your mouth lightly, thumb grazing your lower lip. “Not with words. With your body.”

Your thighs trembled. You pushed into his hand, desperate. His smile widened. “There it is. Begging without speech.”

He slipped two fingers inside, slow, deliberate. Your back arched, a strangled sound caught behind his palm. He curled them just right, hitting the place that made you shiver, made your eyes roll back. “Yes,” he whispered against your ear. “That’s it. That’s how you bloom.”

His palm pressed harder over your mouth as your moans broke free. His rhythm quickened, fingers thrusting, scissoring, spreading you open as if he meant to plant something inside. Every push forced slick sounds into the greenhouse air. He bent low, lips brushing your temple, murmuring praises between each thrust: “Perfect. My good flower. Opening just for me. No one else will see you like this.”

Your orgasm came sudden, brutal—your whole body snapping tight around his hand, shuddering against him. He kept moving, dragging it out until you were gasping into his palm, thighs twitching.

When at last he withdrew, his fingers glistened. He lifted them to your lips, smearing wetness across them before pushing between. “Taste yourself,” he ordered softly. “Know what you are to me.”

Shame and hunger tangled in your chest. You sucked his fingers clean, and his eyes darkened, mouth parting as if he might finally kiss you. He didn’t. He pulled back just enough to leave you desperate, to make absence itself a cruelty.

“Blooming,” he whispered again, satisfied. “And tomorrow, you’ll be ready for the soil.”

The greenhouse door creaked. You jerked, Sunoo still crouched over you, his slick fingers withdrawing with deliberate slowness.

Jungwon stood in the doorway, lantern spilling gold over his dirt-streaked arms. His jaw tightened as his eyes tracked the wet shine on your lips, the way your legs trembled, the smug curve of Sunoo’s smile.

For a long, brutal moment, no one spoke. Then Jungwon stepped forward, shovel still in one hand, and his voice came out rough, dangerous.

“She’s mine next.”

The lamps hummed. The soil smelled of iron. Your heart beat against your throat like a trapped bird as the two men stared across you, and you realized the next time you were touched, it would be by both.

And you would not escape it.

______

The night you tried to run, the mountain gave you away.

The boards beneath your feet creaked, wet leaves clung to your calves, and the fog was a hand on your throat. You ran anyway. Past the dorms, past the glasshouse ribs glowing faintly from their lamps, down the west path where the ravens laughed like women who knew your secrets.

You thought the dark would cover you.

But the dark belonged to him.

A hand caught your wrist so hard you nearly went down. The lantern flared, and Jungwon’s face came out of the mist—eyes black, jaw locked, the muscle jumping with rage he didn’t bother to soften. He dragged you against him, chest heaving like you’d run into a wall that had learned how to breathe.

“Running,” he said, voice low and sharp as a spade. “After I told you not to.”

“I—”

“Quiet.” His grip on your wrist tightened until your bones ached. “Do you know what he did to you in there? Do you know what you smell like? Soil and him.” His other hand closed hard around your chin, forcing you to meet his eyes. His breath came hot, furious. “I told you not to let him touch you.”

Your protest was thin. “I didn’t—”

“You did.” He shoved you back against the rough bark of a pine. The trunk dug into your spine; his body crowded yours, heat and dirt and something mean. “You opened your mouth. You let him put his fingers in you.” His hand slid down your throat, pressing just enough to make your pulse throb under his palm. “Do you think that makes you his?”

“No—”

“No,” he repeated, mocking and brutal, pressing harder until your words broke into breath. His eyes raked you up and down like he was reading your body for lies. “You’re mine. If you’re soil, then I’m the one who plants.”

The knife appeared from his belt—not sharp, its edge long since blunted, but the point still honest. He held it flat against your belly, dragging it up under your shirt until the cold metal kissed the underside of your breast. You shivered, body jerking against the bark. His mouth twisted, equal parts fury and hunger.

“Scared?” he murmured. “Good. Fear makes roots dig deeper.”

He hooked the blade under the band of your shorts, pulling until the fabric stretched and then snapped. His hand shoved inside without pause, fingers rough, pushing into you like he meant to stake a claim. You gasped, the sound choking against the hand still at your throat.

“Wet,” he said, voice a growl, face close enough you could feel every word on your skin. “You’re soaked for me already. Even after him. Especially after him.” His fingers thrust harder, curling, relentless, forcing your body to answer him. “Say it. Say whose you are.”

You shook your head, too proud, too broken to give it.

His mouth curved cruel. “Then I’ll fuck it into you.”

He yanked your shorts down to your thighs, lifted you bodily against the tree, and shoved his hips between your legs. You clawed at his shoulders, half to push, half to hold on, but he pinned you easy, the knife’s flat pressed to your throat now like a brand. His cock pressed hot and thick against your entrance, grinding through the slick he’d found there, rubbing until you whined.

“You hear that?” he hissed, rolling his hips, dragging the head over your folds until obscene wet sounds filled the air. “Your body begging me in front of the whole fucking mountain.” He pushed in one brutal stroke, burying himself deep, forcing a cry from your throat. His teeth bared at the sound, savage triumph. “That’s it. Open up. Take me.”

He fucked you hard against the tree, every thrust jarring bark into your spine, every shove brutal and unrelenting. The knife never left your throat—flat, cold, reminding you what he could do if he wanted. His free hand gripped your hip so hard you knew you’d bruise, dragging you down onto him, using your body like it was already his.

“Mine,” he snarled against your ear, hips slamming. “Not his. Not anyone’s. Mine to fuck. Mine to plant. Mine to keep.” His pace grew rougher, desperate, jealousy bleeding into possession. “You’ll carry me. You’ll take my seed. You’ll remember whose cock fucked you open like this.”

Your moans tore free, high and broken, every thrust forcing them out. He laughed, breathless, mean. “Good little soil. Look at you—taking it. Clenching so tight you’ll never forget.”

When you came, it was with your whole body jerking, nails raking his back, his name spilling without permission. He fucked you through it, ruthless, using your climax to milk himself. With a final, brutal thrust, he came inside you, grinding deep, growling your name like a curse and a prayer.

He stayed pressed to you, chest heaving, the knife slipping down to rest against your collarbone. He didn’t soften. He didn’t let go. His mouth found your jaw, biting hard enough to leave a mark.

When he finally pulled out, slick running down your thighs, he yanked your shorts back up roughly, like covering you was a punishment. He grabbed your wrist again, dragging you toward the compound.

“You’re not sleeping in the dorms,” he said, voice iron. “You’re mine now. My room. My bed. No one else touches you.”

The lantern swung, throwing gold across the path. His grip never loosened. You stumbled after him, body raw, used, filled, the echo of his thrusts still beating through you.

And you knew he wasn’t bluffing.

______

Jungwon’s grip on your wrist was iron, dragging you through the silent hallways until the greenhouse lamps and dorm windows disappeared. His door slammed behind you, the bolt driven home with the finality of a lock on a coffin. His room was small, spare, stripped bare of comfort—just a bed, a chair, his tools. No flowers, no soil. Only him.

He shoved you onto the mattress like you weighed nothing. Your body jolted, still slick, still aching from what he’d already done. He stood over you, chest rising and falling hard, sweat at his temples, jaw clenched like a vice.

“You don’t go back to them,” he growled. “Not Mira, not Seo, and never him.” His eyes burned. “You’re mine.”

Your breath hitched; the word stuck in your throat.

A voice cut through the dark. “You’re wrong.”

The lantern on the desk flared, spilling its glow across pale wrists, white robes loosened at the chest, a mouth curved in that familiar, cruel delight. Sunoo. Already inside. Already waiting.

Jungwon stiffened, shoulders tensing like a predator finding another in his territory. “Get out.”

Sunoo ignored him. He stepped closer, his smile syrup-sweet but eyes sharp. “She doesn’t belong to you alone. Look at her.” His gaze slid over you where you trembled on the bed, your thighs pressed together, your lips parted from shallow breaths. “She’s terrified. She’s confused. She needs gentleness.” His tone softened, dripping like honey. “And you can’t give her that.”

“Gentle doesn’t keep her alive,” Jungwon snapped, stepping between you and him, shovel-callused fists at his sides. “Gentle lets her rot.”

“Alive?” Sunoo laughed, low and dangerous. “She’s not alive. She’s blooming. That’s what I make her.”

“Blooming,” Jungwon spat, “is just another word for open. And I’m the one inside her.”

The words made your stomach twist; heat and fear tangled until you couldn’t tell the difference. You tried to speak—stop, please stop—but your throat locked.

Sunoo’s gaze darted back to you, softening. He crouched, ignoring the way Jungwon loomed above him. His hand hovered just shy of your ankle, not touching—never touching—but the heat of him crawled up your skin. “Petal,” he whispered, “don’t be afraid. I’ll take care of you. I’ll show you how it feels to be cherished.” His lips parted, almost grazing your skin as he breathed you in. “Let me taste you.”

Jungwon’s growl shook the air. He seized your arm, yanking you back against his chest, his hand spread possessive across your stomach. His cock, still half-hard, pressed against your spine. “She’s mine. Mine to fuck. Mine to plant. Mine to keep.”

Your body shuddered. Fear, yes—but deeper, darker: want, shame, hunger you couldn’t smother.

Sunoo’s smile only widened. “Then let’s see who she opens for first.” He slid closer, slipping between your knees before Jungwon could stop him. His breath fanned over your thighs, hot and wet, and you gasped when he finally touched you—soft, reverent, his hands parting you like something fragile.

The contrast made you dizzy. Jungwon’s grip bruised; Sunoo’s mouth pressed feather-light kisses along the inside of your thigh, slow, teasing, as if every touch was worship. “Sweet,” he murmured, nose brushing close to the heat of you. “So sweet. I’ll make her sing.”

“Don’t you dare—” Jungwon started, but your body betrayed you, hips twitching toward Sunoo’s mouth, a whimper breaking past your lips.

That sound changed everything.

Jungwon froze, then snarled, shoving you down into the mattress, caging you with his body. One hand pinned your wrists above your head; the other tore your shirt open down the middle, fabric splitting under his strength. His mouth crashed to your throat, biting, marking, sucking bruises into your skin with furious precision.

Sunoo groaned at the sight, as if Jungwon’s violence only made you more beautiful. He leaned in, finally sealing his lips over your cunt, sucking hard, tongue lapping deep through your folds. The wet sounds filled the room, obscene, echoing against the bare walls.

You cried out, the noise muffled against Jungwon’s hand when he clapped it over your mouth. “Quiet,” he hissed, teeth at your jaw. “Don’t give him the satisfaction of hearing how much you love it.”

But Sunoo knew anyway. He moaned against you, tongue flicking your clit, fingers sliding inside with practiced ease, curling just right. He fed off every twitch, every muffled scream, every desperate roll of your hips. “See?” he said between licks, voice thick with arousal. “She opens for me. She’s blooming already.”

Jungwon pressed harder, grinding his cock against your hip through his pants, furious at your body’s betrayal, at the way your thighs trembled around Sunoo’s head. “She’s dripping because I fucked her raw,” he snarled. “All you’re doing is licking up what I left in her.”

The words made your body jerk, shame and desire hitting like lightning.

Sunoo pulled back just enough to look up at you, his mouth shining with your wetness, his eyes dark and soft. “You taste like need,” he whispered. He dragged his tongue slowly over your clit, savoring the way you cried out under Jungwon’s palm. “And you’ll remember I was the first one who made you come with his mouth.”

“Shut up,” Jungwon snapped. But his own hips rolled against you, his cock throbbing, desperate. His jealousy only sharpened his need.

You couldn’t fight it. You came hard, body arching, Sunoo’s mouth sucking your clit, Jungwon’s hand holding you down, his teeth biting at your throat. Your orgasm tore through you like the roots of something invasive, clawing deep, unstoppable.

They didn’t stop.

Sunoo licked you clean, gentle as a lover, humming like he was savoring wine. Jungwon bit harder, grinded rougher, his hand forcing your wrists deeper into the mattress. Both of them on you—one soft, one brutal—until you didn’t know whose name to scream.

And you understood, with raw clarity, that they weren’t fighting for you.

They were fighting through you.

When the shudders finally broke, you collapsed back, gasping, throat raw. Jungwon leaned down, lips brushing your ear, his voice a growl. “This is just the beginning. Next time I’m inside you while he’s in your mouth. We’ll see who you really belong to.”

Sunoo laughed softly, licking his lips clean of you. “She’ll belong to both.”

And for the first time, you realized he was right.

_____

Your body was still shaking when Jungwon yanked you upright, dragging you into his lap as if the bed belonged only to him. His thighs were iron beneath you, his chest hard against your spine. One arm locked around your waist, the other snared your throat, thick fingers spreading wide until his grip owned the column of your neck. He forced your head back, baring your mouth to him.

“You’ll taste me now,” he snarled, lips crashing into yours.

The kiss was brutal—teeth knocking, spit spilling. He shoved his tongue deep, choking you with it, swallowing every noise you tried to make. His palm pressed tighter at your throat until your pulse roared in your ears, until breath itself became something you had to beg him for. Drool slicked your chin, his tongue forcing yours down, his grip refusing to let you turn away. It was less a kiss than a violent claiming, his mouth fucking yours the way his cock had already fucked your body raw.

You gasped when he pulled back just enough to let air in, a string of spit hanging obscenely between your mouths. He licked it off your bottom lip, then spat into your mouth deliberately, cruelly, watching you swallow because you had no choice.

“Open,” he growled, forcing your jaw wider with his hand at your throat. “Good. That’s mine too. Every sound. Every swallow.”

Your vision blurred; your thighs squeezed together involuntarily. Terror and heat tangled until you couldn’t breathe for either.

And then Sunoo was there.

He crouched in front of you, hands sliding up your knees to part them wider, his smile infuriatingly calm even in violence. “My turn.”

“No,” Jungwon bit out, but Sunoo was already moving. He grabbed your chin, fingers digging in hard enough to bruise, and wrenched your head away from Jungwon’s mouth. Your neck snapped to the side, and before you could gasp, Sunoo’s lips were on yours.

It wasn’t tender. It was vicious. He sucked your bottom lip until it split, teeth biting down until pain shot bright, then licked the blood from your mouth as if it belonged to him. His tongue drove past your teeth, tasting everything Jungwon had left there, devouring it with obscene relish.

You moaned helplessly, the sound muffled between them.

Jungwon’s grip on your throat tightened, forcing your head back further, rage pouring off him like heat. “She’s mine.”

Sunoo broke the kiss just long enough to sneer against your wet mouth. “Then why is she kissing me back?” He pressed his tongue to yours again, slow and filthy, sucking until spit ran down your chin. Then he pulled back, wiped it with his thumb, and shoved the slick digit back between your lips. “Lick it clean. That’s mine now.”

Your mouth obeyed before your brain caught up.

Jungwon’s chest vibrated with a growl. He bent and bit your jaw, then your throat, leaving purple marks against Sunoo’s fingerprints. His hand clamped your neck harder, forcing you to gasp around Sunoo’s thumb.

“She’s choking on me,” Jungwon snarled. “Not you.”

Sunoo laughed low, mean. He leaned closer, his forehead pressing to yours, his other hand grabbing Jungwon’s wrist on your throat, not to stop it, but to squeeze it tighter. “Then let’s choke her together.”

The pressure doubled. Your eyes watered, spit pooling at the corner of your mouth, drooling down your chin as both of them held you, forced you open, forced you to take them. One mouth kissed you, sucked you, spat into you; the other bit, bruised, pressed your throat until stars danced.

You weren’t kissing anymore. You were being consumed.

And God help you—your body wanted more.

_______

They had you caged between them—Jungwon at your back, Sunoo at your front—two sets of hands closing every door your body might have tried to escape through.

Your pulse beat frantically against Jungwon’s palm at your throat. Sunoo’s fingers dug into your chin, keeping your face tipped up so you couldn’t hide. Their mouths had already ruined you, spit running down your jaw, bruises blooming on your throat and collarbone like dark flowers. Your chest rose too fast, every breath their permission, every sound something they stole from you.

“You see?” Sunoo whispered, voice as sweet as it was cruel. “She’s ready. She’s shaking for us.” His hand slid down, brushing your stomach, spreading lower. “The soil is wet.”

“She’s wet because I fucked her open,” Jungwon snapped against your ear, his breath harsh. “She’s mine to fill.” He ground his cock against your ass through his pants, thick and hard, a promise of what was coming. His teeth found your neck again, biting until your body arched despite yourself.

The two of them moved you as if you were theirs to arrange. Your thighs were forced wide over Sunoo’s lap, your back crushed to Jungwon’s chest. Rough hands tugged your ruined shorts away; cool air hit the slick heat between your legs. Sunoo hummed like a priest receiving an offering.

“Let me taste again.” He didn’t wait for permission. His mouth descended, sucking your clit into his mouth, tongue lapping at you until your eyes rolled back. His hands locked on your thighs, holding you open for him, his moans vibrating into your cunt.

Jungwon shoved your wrists down into the mattress, his cock rutting against you through fabric, his fury pressed into every grind. “Listen to her,” he growled. “Dripping for us. Begging without words.” He yanked his pants open, the blunt head of his cock dragging along your ass, smearing precum. “She’s going to take both. Right now.”

You sobbed, terror and need colliding until you couldn’t tell them apart. “I can’t—”

“You can,” Sunoo cut in smoothly, lifting his head, chin wet with your slick. He stroked your trembling thighs with a mockery of gentleness. “Your body’s already opening. We’ll guide you.” His eyes glimmered, half-devotion, half-madness. “You’ll bloom for us together.”

Jungwon spat into his palm, gripped his cock, and shoved it between your cheeks, rubbing the head against your tight hole until you whined. “Scared?” he hissed, his hand tightening at your throat. “Good. Fear makes you clench tighter.”

Sunoo’s fingers slid inside your cunt again, curling, coaxing, slicking you up for him. He looked up at you, his smile soft even as he stretched you ruthlessly. “Breathe, petal. I’ll be inside you soon. You’ll be so full you won’t remember how to be empty.”

When Sunoo lined himself up, pressing the head of his cock against your soaked entrance, Jungwon shoved his tip harder at your ass, both of them pushing at once. Your cry ripped the air as your body was forced to split, one cock stretching your cunt, the other pressing past the tight ring of muscle until you thought you’d break.

“Fuck,” Jungwon groaned, voice raw. “So tight. Gripping me like a fist.”

“She’s perfect,” Sunoo sighed, already sinking deeper, your walls convulsing around him. “Taking both of us. Our flower.”

It was too much. The stretch burned, overwhelming, obscene. You clawed at the sheets, eyes rolling back as both of them bottomed out, your body trembling violently with the force of being split in two. They didn’t give you time. Jungwon’s hips snapped forward first, brutal, pounding into your ass with the fury of jealousy. Sunoo met him stroke for stroke, slower, deeper, angling until every thrust speared your cunt exactly where it made you scream.

Pinned, stuffed, broken open—you were nothing but their vessel.

“Say it,” Jungwon snarled, hand squeezing your throat until your vision blurred. “Say you’re mine.”

“She’s ours,” Sunoo countered, kissing you, sucking the spit from your mouth, swallowing your gasps. “Tell us, petal. Tell us who you bloom for.”

Your answer was a sob, a whimper, a strangled cry as their cocks moved inside you, filling every inch, grinding against each other through the thin wall of your body until the sensation drove you half-mad.

“Fuck, I can feel him through you,” Jungwon groaned, rutting harder, holding you down as if you might try to run again. “But you’re squeezing me tighter. That’s how I know you’re mine.”

Sunoo’s tongue licked the tears from your cheeks. “She’s crying for me. Look at her. Look how she wants to be saved even while we ruin her.”

Your body convulsed around them, slick gushing down your thighs, every nerve alight. The pain blurred into pleasure until you were begging without words, your nails tearing the sheets, your cries spilling into their mouths as they fought to own your climax.

When you came, it was devastating—your cunt and ass clenching around them both, milking them, dragging them deeper. Jungwon groaned, teeth sinking into your shoulder as he spilled inside you, hot and overwhelming. Sunoo followed seconds later, filling your cunt until you were overflowing, cum dripping down your thighs, both of them holding you so tightly you couldn’t breathe.

They didn’t pull out. They stayed locked inside, cocks twitching, their breaths harsh against your skin.

Jungwon’s hand squeezed your throat one last time, forcing your eyes to his. “Say it,” he demanded, voice hoarse. “Say you’re planted in me.”

Sunoo kissed your cheek, softer but no less cruel. “Say you’ll bloom for us both.”

And you, too full to think, too wrecked to fight, whispered the only truth left in you:

“I can’t belong to just one.”

They smiled—different smiles, but the same hunger.

And you knew you’d never escape again.

_______

woah this was so diffecult to write SO IM SORRY IF IT ISNT THE BEST

THANK YOU FOR READING!!

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© si3rren 2025. all rights reserved.

[lollovern]

- The Garden Left to Rot -

enhypen masterlist

wattpad

inspired by this post

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groundskeeper!yang jungwon x guest!femreader x cult counselor!kim sunoo | obsessive romance | cult horror | forced devotion | ritualistic sex | jealousy and rivalry | fucked-up love triangle | knife kink | corrupted comfort | you will belong to someone eventually | DARK CONTENT AHEAD!!

wc: 14k

summary: You’re sent to a grief recovery retreat hidden in the mountains. But this isn’t therapy — it’s a cult blooming in blood and rot. Jungwon wants to bury you where no one else can touch you. Sunoo wants to crack you open until you bloom for him. Both say it’s healing. But it’s obsession.

warnings: extreme gore, threesome, cult rituals, body horror (flowers under skin, insect scenes), blood play, forced confinement, psychological manipulation, emotional degradation, knife play, religious delusion, obsessive behavior, toxic romance, dubcon themes, ritualistic sex, hallucinations, violence

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The van climbs until the road forgets how to be a road. Pines crowd close; fog slicks the windshield like breath on glass. By the time the driver kills the engine, your phone has been surrendered, the waiver signed, and your name—your real one—folded into a sealed envelope with your belongings.

A hand-painted sign leans crooked against a stone pillar: THE GARDEN.

Beneath it, smaller script: Let go. Become.

Everyone here is an adult—paperwork made that clear. Still, the cluster of arrivals huddle like freshmen. A woman in a bone-white coat stands at the gate, serene as a photograph. “Welcome,” she says. “I’m Director Seo. You won’t need last names here. You won’t need yesterday.” Her smile doesn’t reach her eyes. “We begin with stillness.”

Stillness smells like damp soil and rosemary. The compound spreads in tiers: a glasshouse ribbed with iron; dormitories with shuttered windows; a refectory where steam fogs the panes; a low clinic painted the color of milk. The greenhouse breathes—a pulse of heavy, sweet air each time the door opens. Inside, rows of lilies lean toward heat lamps; vines net the rafters; something rustles in the loam.

“Orientation,” says the boy who appears at Director Seo’s shoulder. He’s young—early twenties—with paper-clean features and the kind of smile people don’t realize is a blade until it’s already inside them. Kim Sunoo. His name tag says Counselor; the ribbon beneath it says Ritual Lead. “Shoes off in the greenhouse,” he adds lightly. “We keep the floors soft.”

Your shoes leave the ground. Cool boards. Warm mist. A bell rings once. The arrivals form a circle on woven mats; a dozen white-robed staff ghost the edges. A few guests have the shaved look of hospital discharge; others wear expensive emptiness like cologne.

“Here,” Sunoo says gently, “we do not share pasts. Only needs.” His gaze slips over faces and lands on you. Not a leer. A selection. “You may speak or sit in silence. Both are honest.”

“I need to sleep,” says a woman with chewed nails. “Like, three days.”

“I need to stop remembering,” a man answers, voice flat.

The girl beside you—twenty-two, maybe—says nothing. Yejin is stitched on her wristband. Her hands are ink-stained. She draws while people talk: a quick, vicious graphite—faces with petal-mouths; ribs like trellises. When you shift, she tilts her sketchbook so you can see the newest figure: a person kneeling in dirt, throat blooming with something that isn’t a flower.

“Beautiful,” Sunoo murmurs, as if he’s praising a child’s first recital. “You have a keen eye for transformation, Yejin.”

From across the greenhouse, someone drags burlap sacks along iron grates. Soil dark as coffee spills from a split seam and oozes across the floor. The man hauling the bags moves like he’s apologized to gravity and refuses to do it again. Yang Jungwon. Groundskeeper on his tag. Grey work shirt. Forearms nicked white with old cuts. He doesn’t look at the circle—doesn’t look at you—until he does, and then he doesn’t stop. Not curiosity. Assessment, like weighing a seed between finger and thumb and deciding if it will live in his earth.

Director Seo outlines rules in the smooth tone of a stewardess reciting crash procedures:

No personal histories in group.

No contact with family for the first fourteen days.

No unsupervised access to the greenhouse after dusk.

Do not remove plant material from designated zones.

What is given to the soil remains in the soil.

“That includes grief,” Sunoo says, almost playful. “Especially grief.”

Your dorm is clean in the way of hospital corridors and mortuaries. Two metal beds. Two lockers. A copy of a softbound booklet on each pillow: STILLNESS GUIDE. Your roommate arrives with a jangle of bracelets and the brittle cheer of someone who learned to smile as self-defense. Mira, 26, volunteer-turned-resident-mentor.

“Welcome-welcome,” she chirps, then lowers her voice. “Pro tip: keep your head down the first three days. They watch how you watch.”

“Who?”

“Everyone.” She flicks her gaze toward the window, where the greenhouse skeletons against dusk. “Especially him.” She means Sunoo—you can hear it in the soft, reverent way. “And the groundskeeper when it’s dark.” That last part is almost a warning.

The bell rings again. Dinner is broth that tastes like the inside of a leaf and bread dense with seeds. You eat at long tables while staff move among you like shepherds. Across from you, a jittery young man, Taesun—24, scars like cat-scratches up his wrists—piles his crusts and crumbles them methodically. He pockets a handful when he thinks no one sees.

“For the worms,” he whispers to the crumbs. “They get hungry at night.”

Mira nudges your knee under the table. “He feeds them behind the east wall,” she murmurs. “Says they keep the nightmares down if they’re busy.”

In the clinic after dinner, a nurse swabs your fingers where the paper edges of the waiver bit skin. Nurse Min is beautiful in the harsh way of women who have decided their faces are weapons. When she says “this will sting,” the consonants soften strangely; a long surgical scar splits the underside of her tongue. She catches you looking and lifts a brow that says yes, I am aware of my mouth. Then—almost tender—she tapes your knuckle with gauze printed with tiny flowers.

Back in the greenhouse, the first night session is called Surrender. The lamps buzz. Mist beads your eyelashes. Sunoo stands barefoot on the damp boards, sleeves rolled, voice a low waterfall.

“Close your eyes,” he says. “Name the weight you want the earth to hold for you. Don’t say it out loud. Let your body say it.”

Around you, bodies sway. Some cry. Some freeze. When you keep your eyes open, Sunoo notices. Of course he does.

“New sprout,” he says softly, close to your ear, and the nickname feels chosen, not random. “You don’t have to force stillness. It happens when the soil recognizes you.”

“Does it?” Your voice is hoarse from disuse and altitude.

“Always.” He smiles. Not kind. Not unkind. Satisfied. “The Garden knows its own.”

Across the rows, Jungwon kneels in the dirt, wrist-deep in loam, planting something without a label. He doesn’t follow Sunoo’s cadence; he follows his own. When one lamp flickers, he rises and fixes it with the swift, competent movements of someone who builds instead of asks. When he sits back, the soil clings to his fingers like shadow.

You should sleep. Instead you help Mira remake your beds with the stiff white sheets that smell faintly of bleach and rosemary. She keeps talking, because silence makes her hands shake.

“I came as a volunteer,” she says, tucking corners square. “Stayed as a patient. It’s easier when they tell you what to be.”

“What do they tell you?”

She smiles without humor. “A flower.” Her eyes slide to your bandaged hand. “Try not to bleed in the greenhouse. They don’t like that.”

“Why?”

“Because the soil remembers.”

At night the compound changes. Lights dim. The wind strips the pines and combs the glass with needles. You lie awake and count breaths—yours, Mira’s, the building’s—until you can’t bear numbers anymore.

You go out.

The air is colder than the dorm suggests. The greenhouse glows from within, a pulse behind fogged panes. Beyond the east wall, something moves with slow persistence. You follow the ripple of disturbed leaves to a break in the hedgerow and find Taesun kneeling with his pockets turned inside out, sowing crumbs into the leaf litter like a penitent farmer.

“The worms,” he says. “They hate hunger.”

“And if they’re hungry?”

“They crawl into you,” he says simply, and his eyes are not crazy; they’re convinced. “They’re looking for warmth.”

A lantern kindles behind you. “Curfew,” a voice says.

You turn. Jungwon holds the light up so it paints his face in bones and gold. Up close, his features soften—stillness without Sunoo’s practiced grace; a patient animal’s attention. The lantern makes a thicket of his lashes. He looks from you to Taesun to your bare feet on the cold boards.

“You’ll catch a chill,” he says to you, like it’s a personal offense. “Shoes. Now.”

You should resent the command. Instead, you feel the unreasonable urge to obey. You start toward the dorms.

“Not that way,” he says. “West path. Easier. Less slope.” He tips the lantern so the light doesn’t blind you while you pass. It’s a small courtesy. It also marks you—every guard on the walkway can see who broke curfew and who brought them back.

“Do you plant at night?” you ask, because silence around him feels like standing at a cliff’s edge and leaning a little too far.

“Always,” he says. He doesn’t volunteer more. His eyes drag briefly to your bandaged hand. “You left blood in the greenhouse.”

“I didn’t—”

He lifts two fingers, the gesture efficient and final. “The soil remembers.” His mouth twitches—not a smile, exactly; the ghost of one. “Mira talks too much.”

“Is that against the rules?”

“It’s against survival.”

He walks you to the dorm porch and stops at the bottom step like there’s an invisible line he won’t cross. The night carries pine resin and wet metal. You want to ask him what he plants without labels, what grows under lamps that mimic suns, why the staff wear rosaries made of seeds.

He says, low, “Don’t follow sounds you don’t understand.”

“Why?”

“Because some things here answer to being watched.” He tilts the lantern, and for a heartbeat you see something like a tenderness he hides even from himself. “Sleep.”

You try. You fail. When you finally slide under, it’s the shallow kind of rest that hears every hinge complain.

Morning stains the glasshouse pale gold. Breakfast is porridge and a shot glass of bitter green. “Chlorophyll,” Mira grimaces. “For purity. Or the aesthetic.” She scans the refectory like she’s counting exits. “There’ll be a Placement Walk after breakfast. Don’t volunteer. They love volunteers.”

“What is it?”

She cuts her eyes toward the greenhouse. “They take someone to the grove and ‘help them choose a garden name.’ Sometimes they come back with a wreath. Sometimes without their voice for a while.”

Director Seo taps her cup. “Today’s Placement Walk is for… Yejin.”

The graphite girl looks up, startled as a deer. Her pencil stills. Sunoo’s smile brightens by half a watt. “I’ll take her,” he offers, hand already extended. “I’ve seen her drawings. She understands transformation.”

If you didn’t sleep, you are alert now. Jungwon appears in the doorway like the building made him. His gaze flicks over the room, and when it lands on Yejin’s shaking knuckles, something barely visible tightens in his jaw.

“I’ll go with you,” he says to Sunoo without looking away from the girl.

“Of course,” Sunoo replies. Silk over steel. “Two witnesses. Very proper.”

They lead her out between them: the counselor with a palm light on her shoulder; the groundskeeper holding the door open so it doesn’t bite her. The room exhales when the door closes. Mira’s bracelets clink as her hands start to shake again.

“They’ll bring her back,” you say, because logic is a habit.

“Usually,” Mira says.

Taesun folds bread crumbs into his napkin with ritual care. “If the worms are fed.”

“Stop with the worms—”

He looks up, suddenly fiercer than his tremor allows. “This place eats. I just like to decide what it eats.”

You leave your spoon in your bowl. The porridge lurches in your gut like a tide. Through the greenhouse glass, you can’t see the grove, only the suggestion of trunks and a slit of path. Time grows teeth.

When they return, Yejin walks in her body like someone has moved the furniture. A crown of woven reeds presses her hair flat. There’s a smear of green at the corner of her mouth, like she’s chewed a leaf until it bled. She carries her sketchbook close to her chest as if it’s the last piece of herself no one has touched.

“What did you choose?” Director Seo asks.

Yejin’s voice is soft but intact. “Night-blooming cereus.”

“A flower that opens in darkness,” Sunoo says, pleased. “Perfect.”

Jungwon stands behind them, sleeves rolled to the elbow, forearms dirt-streaked. A single thorn scratches the back of his hand, a bright new welt. You don’t know why your chest warms at the proof that something here can still hurt them too.

As the room settles, Nurse Min touches your shoulder. “Consult,” she says, consonants rounded. In the clinic, she peels your bandage, checks the small cut, nods. “Fine.”

“Was the walk… normal?” you ask, too casual. “For Yejin.”

Nurse Min dabs salve with a gentleness that doesn’t fit her knife-edged face. “Normal is a shape you learn,” she says. “Here, it is round.” She taps your knuckle. “Don’t open yourself on purpose. Things may grow inside.”

“Like what?”

Her eyes flick briefly toward the greenhouse. “Names.”

By afternoon the schedule has you shoveling, watering, scrubbing, writing lines. I am ready to be less. You write it a hundred times until the words separate from meaning and become a pattern of stems and loops. Outside, Jungwon clears a new bed along the south wall. His shovel bites; his shoulders move with the reliable rhythm of practiced labor. A boy twice your size steps into his path and mutters something you can’t hear. Jungwon doesn’t raise his voice. He simply looks at the boy until the boy forgets how to stand where he’s standing and moves.

“Don’t stare,” Mira warns from beside you, but she’s staring too. “He notices.”

“He noticed last night,” you say.

Mira goes still. “You went out?”

“For air.”

“Air is how they catch you,” she whispers, and for the first time her cheer fails. “Promise me you won’t go alone again.”

You don’t promise. You also don’t say I don’t know who I am without alone.

At dusk, group again. Sunoo has you sit closer to him than yesterday. When you resist, he laughs softly, as if you’re charming rather than disobedient. “We sit where the light needs us,” he says. You wonder if that’s a rule or a line he likes. While others speak, he doesn’t look at them; he watches their hands, their throats, the wet edge of eyes. When your breath hitches at someone’s story, he turns his head sharply like a wolf hearing snow crack.

“What would you let go of?” he asks you, voice pitched so the rest of the circle hears only the question, not the ownership threaded through it.

You could say: the fire, the last call you ignored, the smell of burning hair. Instead, you say nothing. He accepts your silence as if it were obedience he taught you.

Outside the glass, Jungwon is a darker shape among dark shapes, moving a hose along the rows. When his head turns toward the circle, it isn’t to the whole; it is to you. He holds you there for a breath you feel in your wrists. Then he tips the hose, and water falls like rain on metal bones.

You sleep after midnight because your body ambushes you. You wake to weight. Not on you; in the air, a heaviness like weather. The greenhouse lights are out. The compound holds its breath.

Something is under your pillow.

You slide your hand beneath it and touch paper—the rough tooth of a sketchbook page. You draw it out under the dim nightlight and see yourself. Not flattering. Not cruel. Exact. You kneel on dark soil, mouth open, and something vines out—delicate stems laced with thorns. Hands—two sets—hold your shoulders lightly, possessively: one set with ink stains, one with dirt ground into the half moons of the nails. At the bottom, Yejin’s cramped script: “Some flowers only open when watched.”

Mira stirs. “What is it?”

“Art,” you say, and your voice surprises you with how steady it is.

“What kind?”

“Prophetic,” you answer, because the truth is an animal pacing the edge of the bed and you’re not ready to let it into your ribs yet.

You slide the drawing back under your pillow and close your eyes. Across the compound, the night shifts. In your mind, Sunoo’s smile threads petals through your tongue. In reality, Jungwon’s lantern skates once across the fogged panes, a slow-moving star. Two orbits, caught in the same sky, tightening.

Slow burn, the booklet promised. Healing begins when you stop resisting.

You do not stop.

You breathe. You listen to the soil remembering you.

And you wait.

______

Morning arrives with a whistle under the door and the faint itch of grit in your teeth, as if you’ve been speaking to the ground in your sleep. Breakfast is the same: porridge, a bitter green shot, tea that tastes like boiled bark. Mira counts sips, bracelets clinking like quiet alarms. Taesun crushes his toast to dust and pockets it, eyes bright with purpose. Yejin sits very still, crown of reeds damp against her hair, sketchbook closed for once like a door she’s guarding with her body.

Director Seo taps her cup. “Today begins the Mouth Fast,” she says, voice smooth as tile. “Speech is the first addiction. For twenty-four hours, we practice voicelessness. Carry your stone”—a monk in linen sets a bowl of river stones on each table—“and let it hold your words. Anyone who breaks the fast will do a double shift in the greenhouse trenches. Sunoo will lead stillness. Jungwon will direct labor.”

A murmur rises and dies, mouths pressing shut to prove eagerness. Mira puts a flat, oval stone in your palm. “Don’t lose it,” she whispers, already breaking the rule. “They’ll say the soil took your voice because you were careless.”

You tuck the stone into your sleeve and meet Sunoo’s eyes across the hall. He’s already watching—of course he is. The smile he gives you would be harmless if you hadn’t seen how he moves when he’s pleased: slower, closer, like a candle drawn to oxygen. Jungwon lingers by the service door with a clipboard and a coil of hose on his shoulder, scanning tables the way a shepherd counts sheep by the sound of their breathing.

Chores first. Outside, the air needles your lungs; the mountain wears its cold like a second skin. Jungwon assigns tasks without looking at his list. “Mira, refectory herbs. Taesun, east wall compost. Yejin, with Nurse Min in the clinic.” His gaze slides to you and steadies. “You—paths and drains. Stay out of the grove.” Not a suggestion.

You carry a stiff-bristled broom down stone paths glazed with last night’s dew. The greenhouse ribs glow under weak sun; from inside, lamps hum, and something leafy slaps damply as if it’s learned the shape of applause. By the east wall, Taesun kneels with a small shovel and a reverence that would be holy if it didn’t smell like rot.

He tips crumbs in a neat line, then pauses to show you something cupped in his palm: a white, blind tangle coiling in damp soil. Worms, yes, but too many knotted together, a living thread. He beams, proud. You force your lips into gratitude and keep sweeping. If you stop, you will hear them, and if you hear them, you will dream them.

A shadow falls across your broom. Jungwon holds out a pair of soft-soled garden shoes with the temporary patience of a man who prefers doing to explaining. “Your feet,” he says. “You bruise easily.”

You glance at your bare socks, damp to the ankle. “Is that a rule?”

“It’s a reality,” he says; the word lands like weight. He crouches without asking, sets the shoes on the path, and steps back, gaze down so you can decide if you’ll take his help. You put them on. They’re warm from his hands. He notices the lift of your breath and looks away so the noticing won’t embarrass you. When he straightens, his eyes snag on the river stone tucked in your sleeve. “Don’t drop that,” he says. “The ravens like to steal them.”

You arch a brow—Are you joking?—but he’s already moving, a steady, unshowy force among the clatter of chores.

By mid-morning the Mouth Fast is a taut cord running through the compound. The quiet isn’t peace; it’s suppression, and suppression hums. Sunoo runs stillness from the center of the greenhouse like a maestro conducting silence. He has you sit within his radius; you don’t know how you know that, but you do. When a guest’s shoulders begin to shake, his hand appears at the nape of their neck—just weight, just heat, just enough to persuade the body that obedience feels like care.

He comes to you last, when the lamps have warmed the panes to sweating. He kneels, not quite touching, gaze on your throat. “Your pulse is stubborn,” he says in a voice pitched for you alone. “It hates rhythm. I like that.” He brushes the air near your jawline, not touching, so you feel it anyway. “The stone will teach it obedience. If you’re good at listening.”

You hold his eyes and refuse to nod. He smiles, pleased with your defiance like a trainer who prefers wild animals because they make better trophies. “We’ll work on it,” he whispers, and stands.

After lunch—a bowl of broth filtered until flavor gives up—you’re pulled into the clinic with half a dozen others for “check-ins.” Nurse Min sits you on a stool and unwraps your finger. The cut is a thin mouth now, pink with newness. She touches a gloved finger to the gauze and sniffs it as if the body has a scent that changes when it’s lying.

“Does it itch?” she asks.

You hesitate. The truth is embarrassing. “Everything does,” you admit. “Under the skin. Like… like something wants out.”

“Something wants in,” she corrects mildly. She takes tweezers to the pad of your finger and draws out a hair-fine splinter you didn’t know was there. It isn’t wood—it’s pale and sappy, flexing like a root in the air. She drops it in a jar and screws the lid tight. “Names need medium,” she says. “Don’t let anyone put theirs under your skin.”

“Is that medical advice?”

“It’s survival.” She tapes a fresh bandage printed with tiny leaves, then, softer, “If you start tasting flowers, spit.”

You leave the clinic with your mouth dry as chalk. On the steps, Yejin waits like a shadow that forgot to attach to a body. She presses a folded paper to your palm and flits off before you can unfold it. In the corner of the page, her fast, lethal graphite: you in profile, throat open, something like a stem ghosting up under the jaw. In the negative space behind you, two silhouettes—Sunoo’s soft edges; Jungwon’s blunt solidity—blur toward one another without touching. Underneath, her careful script: Not yet. But soon.

The Mouth Fast bends afternoon into a colder shape. Without words, people show who they are. Mira hums under her breath and taps her stone against her teeth like a bead. Taesun counts breath with his fingers on his ribs. A new arrival—Hana, thirty and jewel-hard—walks like a woman who refuses to ask permission from the air. An older man, Mr. Ko, rows his spoon through soup with the concentration of a man pretending there is a river and a boat that can take him off this mountain.

At dusk, Director Seo calls for the Seed Burial. “We surrender what we’ve hoarded,” she says, and volunteers step forward with small slips of paper seeded with something that will sprout if the soil wants it. They kneel, press the papers into a rectangle of fresh-turned earth, and cover them with a thin skin of loam. The lamps go low. Sunoo stands at their backs. Jungwon stands at their front, shovel grounded like a staff.

You don’t move. You have nothing to bury you can stand to name.

A woman you recognize from orientation—the one who needed three days of sleep—places both palms flat on the soil like it’s someone she loves. Her breath hitches once; she swallows whatever it shook loose. As the last handful of earth covers the names, something beneath the surface shifts. Not the modest swell of seeds drinking. A shove from below.

The crowd stills. You feel it again—a push. The soil flexes and sighs, grains settling. Someone’s hand jerks back as if bitten. Sunoo’s smile does not change, which means it changes. “The ground recognizes an offering,” he says pleasantly. “Stand, flowers. Let the dark do what it’s for.”

Jungwon’s eyes are on the dirt, not the people. His jaw flexes once, twice. You have the sharp, childish thought—He hears it too—and the relief that follows is so naked you almost miss the fear riding it.

Night stitches the compound tight. The Mouth Fast persists: tongues held, little pantomimes replacing argument. In bed, Mira sleeps with her open palm on her stone like it might roll away. You face the wall because the drawing under your pillow is a magnet and your skull is iron.

A scrape wakes you—a quick, purposeful sound under the window. You slide out of bed and ease the latch. Cold breath pours in. On the path below, a lantern moves slow as a planet. You follow, soft-soled shoes silent on the boards, the stone in your sleeve tapping your wrist like a heart that’s climbed too high.

The lantern stops. Jungwon steps into its circle. He doesn’t look surprised to see you. He looks like a man who has laid a trap and found what he baited it for. He lifts the lantern just enough to catch your face without flaying you with light.

He puts a finger to his mouth—quiet—and crooks that same finger: come.

You should run. You go.

He takes you along the west path to a low, fenced plot you haven’t noticed in daylight, because in daylight everything looks like something else. Up close, the boards are stained darker than weather. He stops you with a hand on your sleeve. His grip is gentle; his hand is strong. “Do not speak,” he says, and for the first time today the command lands like care, not control.

He tilts the lantern over the fence. The light stratifies a pit maybe two meters long, maybe one deep, lined with rough timbers and crawling with the industry of decay. You see peels, stems, pot scrapings—normal compost—then catch on something pale threaded through like lace: cartilage? You squint, heart hammering, and in among the skins and stems you see hair—just a clump, just enough to be undeniable. The sour-metal stink under the rot answers a question you didn’t know you were asking until now.

You stagger, mute because the rule still binds your mouth. Jungwon’s hand rises like he planned for your body to try to leave you. He catches your elbow with two fingers and steadies you without pulling you closer. “Breathe,” he says, voice so low the pit swallows it.

You breathe. He watches your lungs move under your shirt as if measuring if they’ll keep their job.

“What is this,” you manage, a whisper that bruises the fast.

“Everything that isn’t needed,” he says. It is both the most honest sentence you’ve heard since you arrived and the worst one. “Don’t come here alone.”

“Why show me?”

His mouth tightens. He weighs the truth and hands you a ration. “Because you will go looking. Better you see what is true than what you can’t live through.”

He lifts the lantern away; the pit dissolves back into darkness. When he looks at you again, the composure you’ve seen him wear like a uniform slips an inch. “Next time,” he says, “wake me.”

“How?” It comes out harder than you intend. “Do I knock on the earth?”

“On my door.” He says it like a correction and a promise. “I’d rather carry you than find you down there with your throat open to the sky.”

You swallow. The stone in your sleeve digs your wrist bone.

He walks you back along the west path, keeping the lantern low so you don’t blind yourself and tumble. At the bottom of the dorm steps, he stops as if a line of salt has been poured between you. “Sleep,” he says. Then, almost grudgingly—no, carefully, like he fears generosity might teach you to expect it—“You did well.”

“You mean quiet,” you say.

“I mean you didn’t lie to yourself while you were looking.” He turns the lantern, and for a heartbeat your faces share a circle of light. It is not intimate, and it is.

Inside, the warm dark smells like bodies and disinfection. Mira turns in her sleep, bracelets whickering. Your hands shake. Not with the adrenaline of the pit—though that remains like a taste at the back of your throat—but with the realization that both men see you. Sunoo sees the mechanism; Jungwon sees the fracture line. You can’t decide which is worse.

The Mouth Fast breaks at dawn with a bell so soft it feels like a secret. Voices resume like a creek finding an old bed; people speak too loudly, then blush, then laugh at their own relief. Director Seo praises “compliance” as if it were a sacrament. In the refectory, mugs clack, spoons scrape. Words return as barter.

You don’t trust yours yet.

Sunoo flows through tables like sunlight convincing itself it’s holy. He catches your empty mug, pours tea, and sets it in front of you with a flourish that makes a few heads turn. “How did the silence fit?” he asks, lazy, interested. It isn’t small talk. It’s a probe shaped like kindness.

“Like wire,” you say.

He smiles, delighted—as if you’ve told him a secret about yourself he can use. “It looks good on you,” he says, and taps your river stone where it sits on the table as if he gave it to you, as if it obeys him too. “We have Talkback today. You and me.”

“Is that optional?”

“In principle,” he says. “In practice, most people prefer to be seen.” He leans in, lower voice. “You certainly do.”

He leaves before you can snap that you preferred to be alive, actually. Across the room, Jungwon stops at the threshold, takes the refectory in at a glance, and chooses a seat with his back to the wall. He eats fast, plain, as if food is fuel and surveillance is dessert. When he lifts his mug, you notice the fresh welt across the back of his hand—a thorn, yesterday, dragging its punctuation.

Talkback is held in a small room off the clinic, windowless, lit by a lamp that chooses flattery over truth. Sunoo sits too close, but because he knows what too close does to bodies, he leaves exactly enough air that you can fool yourself into thinking you could stand if you wanted to. He doesn’t touch you. He rests his forearms on his knees, hands open, posture full of a patience he wears like silk.

“What is the shape of your fear?” he asks, as if fear is polite enough to have geometry.

“Wide,” you say.

“Flat?”

“Deep.”

He grins. “Good. Honesty makes my job easier.” He looks at your mouth, then your hands, then your throat. “Last night you broke curfew.”

It isn’t a question. “I walked.”

“To the west path,” he says, savoring the corridor of it.

“Is that forbidden?”

“Not if you were with someone.”

You hold his gaze. You don’t look away. You don’t nod. You don’t give him Jungwon.

Sunoo’s smile returns, but thinner. “We don’t punish curiosity,” he says silkily. “We shape it.” He nods to your sleeve. “Keep the stone. I like how you sound when you hold it.”

“I didn’t speak.”

“You breathed differently,” he says, and you hate that you believe him. “This afternoon I want you in the greenhouse. We’ll do matching breath. I’ll keep count so you don’t have to.”

Your stomach remembers the pit and rolls. “What if I say no?”

“Then we’ll go slower,” he says, as if you asked him to make it sweeter. “That’s the kind of consent you like, isn’t it? The kind that arrives after your body learns the lesson.”

You stand because sitting feels like agreeing. He doesn’t stop you. He nods as if you’ve completed a task he set in his head.

“Good,” he says. “The roots are listening.”

Outside, the day is too bright in the way of mountains pretending to be gentle. You find Mira tending pots of kitchen herbs—mint, rosemary, a vicious little basil. “You look like you saw a ghost,” she says without looking up.

“I saw the compost,” you say.

She flinches so hard the basil shudders. “You don’t say it out loud,” she hisses, then checks herself, forces her voice calm again. “Names wake things.”

“Whose hair is in it?”

“Everyone’s,” she says. “Eventually.”

By late afternoon your muscles revolt, and stillness becomes a thing you have to hold down with both hands. In the greenhouse, Sunoo runs breath like a metronome. When he kneels behind a girl whose hands won’t stop shaking, he doesn’t touch her skin; he places his palm two inches away from her spine and waits. The girl’s shoulders ease; her breath learns his count. You hate him for it. You hate her relief. You hate that your body pays attention.

Jungwon moves along the rows with a bucket and a dull pruning blade, nicking stems, turning soil, resetting stakes. When a lamp pops and goes dim, he crosses to replace it without being called. On his way back, he passes near your mat—near, not past. The air shifts with him: sweat, iron, soil, a clean note like water running under rock. He doesn’t look down. He scratches the back of his wrist where a thorn welt cross-hatches older scars and says, as if the comment belongs to the room, “Some things only grow when you pretend you can’t see them.”

You don’t know if he means the plants, the people, or you.

Evening comes with teeth. The bell pulls everyone to the refectory; the sky sits heavy, swollen with weather that refuses to begin. Over dinner, Hana spills her tea and swears loudly enough that half the room jumps; then she laughs, tips her chin like she meant to do it, and glares at anyone who looks sorry on her behalf. Mr. Ko tells Taesun to stop feeding the worms like they’re pets; Taesun bares his teeth, half-smile, half warning. Nurse Min pockets a spoon someone bent into a hook. Director Seo watches it all with the small, sated smile of a zookeeper whose animals are thriving.

Night brings the first scream.

Not a long one. Not a movie howl. A single, keening note cut off hard, like a rope being cut. The compound freezes; forks stop halfway to mouths; breath holds. Sunoo is already on his feet, smile sharpened into usefulness. Jungwon’s chair scrapes; he’s moving before you can find your shoes.

They go toward the grove at a measured pace that says they already know what they’ll find. Director Seo lifts her hand. “Stay seated,” she says, and the command lands like weight on your shoulders. Mira’s fingers take yours under the table and squeeze so hard your knuckles grind. You squeeze back. Your mouth tastes like rosemary and fear.

You wait. The greenhouse sweats. The clock you aren’t allowed to see walks itself around the hour by the sound of your blood in your ears. When the door opens again, Sunoo comes in first, serene, coat unwrinkled. Jungwon follows with a bundled shape in his arms—a blanket, a softness of color, too long where a body should bend.

A gasp skips the room. “She fainted,” Sunoo says, which is both intolerably insufficient and the only story you’ll be allowed. “A cleansing reaction. She will rest. We will keep vigil over the names she surrendered.”

He doesn’t say who. Your mind fills the blank with the sleeping woman from breakfast, because that is who you fear for, and fear is a magnet. Jungwon carries the bundle past. You know how much weight that is—your body recognizes the set of his jaw, the economy of his gait. He does not look at you. He doesn’t look anywhere but the door to the clinic, as if any glance could spill what he’s holding.

The dining hall exhales like it’s been underwater too long. Director Seo claps once, neat. “We will not gossip,” she says. “We will not catastrophize. We will practice serenity.”

You don’t sleep. Not because you’re brave—because you’re scared correctly now, and scared correctly people stay awake. When you doze, you wake to the sensation that someone has put a leaf on your tongue and asked you to pray with it in your mouth. You spit into your sheet and find nothing. When you sit up, a shadow peels off the wall near the window and becomes Jungwon.

You nearly fling yourself out of bed. He doesn’t move, as if sudden gestures would spook you. He should not be in the dorms after lights; rules are their own religion here. He breaks this one like he breaks branches: cleanly, without apology.

“You left your shoes,” he says, low. He sets them at the foot of your bed, lined up, laces tucked. His voice is stripped of everything but function. “Don’t go barefoot again.”

“What happened?” you ask, whispering because anything louder might wake the dark.

“Don’t ask me,” he says, and for a breath you think he’s refusing. Then he adds, “Because I’ll tell you.” His gaze drags over your face, cataloging fine tremors, the cracked edge of your mouth, the way one hand fists in the sheet like rope. “Sleep,” he says. “You’ll need it.”

He is out the way he came, the door kissing its jamb like a secret.

You try to obey. The mountain presses its cold face to the window and listens. Somewhere, a lantern moves. Somewhere else, a man like a hymn kneels by a bed that is too light.

You put the river stone back in your sleeve and hold it against your pulse until the beat stops arguing with your bones. You remember the jar in Nurse Min’s clinic with the threadlike root curled at the bottom like a question mark. You picture Yejin’s hand drawing you with something under your skin you didn’t agree to carry.

Stillness was the promise. Obedience was the price. You have paid neither. Now the Garden pays attention.

And you, finally, are afraid.

_________

You wake with the taste of copper and rosemary slicked over your tongue, as if someone pressed a leaf there while you slept and whispered hold it. A welt has risen along your bandaged finger—thin, pale, almost pretty. When you press it, it flexes under the skin like something answering from underneath.

Breakfast is a choreography of clatter and eyes. Mira smiles too hard; her bracelets rattle out a code you can’t read. Taesun tips crumbs into his pocket with priestly concentration. Yejin’s crown of reeds has dried to a brittle halo; she draws with her pencil held like a knife. Hana sits mean and diamond-bright, daring the room to dull her edges. Mr. Ko’s spoon cuts the same path through porridge like a boatman refusing any other shore. Director Seo watches the surface of her tea the way people watch the sea for bodies.

“The Naming Rite will be held at sundown,” she announces, as if she’s asking for the salt. “Those selected have been notified.”

Sunoo lifts his eyes, and that’s your notification.

Mira’s fingers find your knee under the table and clamp. She shakes her head once, small, fast—refuse. You don’t know what refusal looks like here besides a story they will tell about you afterward.

“Drink,” Nurse Min says when you pass through the clinic to turn in your night report—how many hours asleep, how many awake, whether you dreamed of heat, teeth, drowning. She hands you a glass the green of pond water. You smell it, and it smells like lawn and iron. “Chlorophyll with a little hem,” she says, seeing your face. “Calms the heart.”

“Calms or slows?” Your voice scratches.

She cants her head. “Same action, different motive.” She glances at your finger. “Still itching?”

“It… moves,” you say, and the honesty makes your stomach pitch. “Like a thread.”

“Everything alive wants a home,” she replies. She peels the bandage with sure fingers. Underneath, the welt has subdivided into delicate veins, a fine network. Not veins. Veining. It looks like leaf. She presses the back of her glove along it; the pattern darkens, limned green under the skin. “Names need medium,” she repeats. “Keep your mouth closed in the greenhouse today. Even when you want to answer.”

You want to ask answer what, but Sunoo is in the doorway, dusk caught in the lamplight of his hair. He doesn’t knock; he glides in like permission. “Our new sprout,” he says, pleased to find you in a chair. “I’ll take her.”

Nurse Min’s mouth goes a little flatter. “She eats first.”

“Of course.” Sunoo’s smile doesn’t move. “Then we breathe.”

The greenhouse sweats. Heat lamps hum like insects; the glass with its rain of condensation blurs the mountain into a myth. Staff move among the rows with trays of soil sheets—thin paper seeded with something that glitters faintly when the light hits it wrong. “Embedded affirmations,” Sunoo tells the group. “You write what you’ll surrender. The seeds will carry it.”

Hana snorts. “Is the surrender refundable?”

Sunoo’s eyes quicken. “There’s always a transaction,” he says. “We just prefer you know the price.” He looks back to you. “Mat,” he says, and it isn’t a request.

You sit. He kneels behind you, palms hovering two inches from your ribs. No touch—just the sense of touch waiting. “Open your mouth,” he murmurs. The admonition from Nurse Min echoes; you clamp your lips. Sunoo’s pleased noise lands against your neck like breath. “Good. Breathe through your nose. In on four, out on six. I’ll count.”

His voice is a rope you have to grab to keep from slipping. When your breath shudders, he matches it; when it calms, he pursues. On the sixth cycle, something sweet pushes the air—lily, wet earth—and you remember the pit and want to be sick. “Stay,” he says, reading your recoil. “Stay where your body is. Don’t run from it. That’s where people rot.”

Across the rows, Jungwon replaces a cracked lamp with quick, sure hands. He doesn’t look at you until he does, a glance like a hand closing on the back of your neck. The air between you tightens. His forearms are netted with healed cuts, white against brown; a fresh welt crosses them like a red thread. When Sunoo says “out on six,” Jungwon turns the dial and the light hums obedient, and you wonder whether the whole building breathes to his count.

Yejin brings you a tray of seed-paper without being asked. When you reach, her gaze drops to your bandage. She moves the pencil like a blade and sketches the back of your hand: the delicate leaf veining, the suggestion of something wanting to break surface. She writes Not yet over the knuckles and slides the paper into your lap. Her mouth is a thin line; her eyes are large and dry and furious.

The day’s chores are smaller and meaner than yesterday’s. Scrub the condensation gutters. Rake. Haul sacks labeled Bone Meal that smell like old molars. Taesun sings under his breath in a language not meant for mouths and leaves a damp trail of crumbs along the east wall. Mr. Ko fetches and carries with blank efficiency, his face empty as a cleaned plate.

By late afternoon, a woman you know only as Auntie Hye—fiftyish, hair cut short for neatness, eyes that scan like a mother bird’s—begins to cough. At first it is dry and prim; then she hunches, pushes a hand to her chest and coughs wet. A ribbon of something bright pops free onto her palm. Petals. White. Tissue-thin and slick with saliva. A few guests laugh—nerves, delight, cruelty. Nurse Min is there before the room decides what to feel, hand under Auntie Hye’s chin, tissues ready. Hye coughs again, harder, and a clot of petals spills: red-tipped now, streaked. She hacks out a final cluster and sags. The tissues are sodden. The petals look like tongues.

“Pollination,” Sunoo says calmly. “Sometimes the body rehearses letting go by practicing bloom.”

Auntie Hye shakes her head, breath hitching. “I didn’t—” she starts.

Sunoo presses two fingers lightly to her throat. “You did.”

She closes her mouth.

Jungwon comes with a bucket and a flat spade; he scoops the petals into the bucket without expression. Your stomach tilts; you grip the bench until the wood prints itself into your palm. He doesn’t look at anyone. He takes the bucket toward the compost. You see his jawclench once when he passes the pit door and files that, like a photographed crime scene.

After the petals, other small horrors follow as if emboldened. A boy pulls his sleeve up to scratch and reveals a faint green tracery along his inner arm; when he scrubs at it, the skin reddens and puffs and the pattern brightens like a pressed leaf held to light. Mira slices a basil stem and it bleeds thin, clean sap; she runs her thumb along the cut and licks it without thinking, then startles at the taste and laughs too loudly. Taesun tips a paper cup into a drain, and a pale, slick worm writhes against the grate and splits into two thinner threads that both crawl the wrong way, toward his fingers. He coos like they’re babies and tucks them back into mud.

“Don’t feed your nightmares,” Nurse Min says without looking up from the woman whose mouth she swabs. “They grow fine on their own.”

By evening, the heat in the greenhouse feels like a hand that won’t lift. The lamps go low. Director Seo stands by the iron ribs with her clipboard like a prayerbook. “For the Naming Rite,” she says, “we welcome Sunoo as Voice and Jungwon as Hands.”

Voice and Hands. A division of power simple enough to live inside.

You are led—gently, unmistakably—toward the central bed, a rectangle of fresh loam bordered by smooth stones. Yejin edges after you, sketchbook clutched to her chest; Nurse Min blocks her with just a glance. “Not this,” Min murmurs. “Later.”

Mira steps forward—too fast—“I can go instead,” she says, smile like a knife wrapped in tissue.

Sunoo’s smile is silk on a nail. “We don’t barter names,” he says. “We harvest them.”

Your knees give. Not dramatic; a small buckling, the body remembering the ground. Sunoo’s hand is there without touching you, a near-weight at your shoulder. “Kneel,” he says, as if reminding you what your body already decided. “Head up. We face what we bring.”

Jungwon stands at the foot of the bed, shovel grounded. Close, his expression is the same flat steel as his blade. He looks at your throat the way carpenters look at walls: not hunger—assessment. When he speaks, his voice is small enough to belong only to the three of you. “Do you know what you’re giving?” he asks.

You try to say No. What comes out is “Something I can’t carry.”

“Good,” he says, and the word is not kindness. It’s calibration.

Sunoo’s fingers hover at your jaw, turning your face by the gravity of proximity. “Open,” he tells you, and your mouth obeys because your body recognizes a doctor’s tone even when it comes from someone who would rather be a priest. He places a petal on your tongue. It tastes like cold tea and a coin. “Hold,” he says. He waits. When you swallow despite yourself, his smile flares. “You see? The body knows ceremony even when the mind resists.”

He steps behind you. You feel his presence like a heat lamp. Jungwon moves to your side and holds out his hand. On his palm: a knife. Not sharp—its edge has been blunted until it’s a tongue of metal—but its point is honest. He waits until you meet his eyes; only then does he set the flat of the blade against your sternum. The steel is cool. Your skin fists under it.

“This is how we write it,” Sunoo says, and his breath touches the shell of your ear like a whispering moth. “Not deep. Not cruel. Not yet.”

The blade slides up without breaking skin, tracing between ribs, across the slow bell of breath—sternum, clavicle, the notch at your throat. The metal leaves a trail of gooseflesh; your pulse hammers against it like an animal trapped under the lid of a box. Jungwon’s other hand is steady at your shoulder, not pushing, not holding, just there, a second horizon the body can measure itself against.

“Name what cannot follow you,” Sunoo murmurs. It could be a real question. It could be a spell. Your mouth fills with the taste of flower and iron; words gather behind it like flies at meat.

You can’t say the fire; to say it would open something that the soil will keep. You say, “The last night.”

“Again,” Sunoo purrs.

“The last night,” you repeat, and the room tilts like a field under wind.

The congregation—guests in white, staff in linen—sways. Mira has both hands pressed to her lips. Taesun rocks in small, violent arcs. Yejin’s pencil moves; she draws you kneeling, two sets of hands marking you; she smudges the graphite so the air around you looks like breath or smoke.

The blade dips, lifts, comes to rest against your throat’s right side. You feel the exact spot where it would enter if it wanted to. Jungwon’s pulse is visible in his wrist; steady, heavier than yours. He moves the flat in a small crescent along the tendon, and your voice leaves you for a moment—pure reflex. A small, unpretty sound. Sunoo shivers behind you, pleased as if you performed a note he’d been coaching you toward.

“Do you understand the price?” Sunoo asks softly.

“No,” you say honestly.

“Beautiful,” he says, delighted. “No one ever does until after.”

He lifts the petal from your mouth with two fingers and lays it on your tongue again like communion. You hold it. Jungwon takes your left hand. His palm is rough and warm; soil lives in the whorls of his fingerprints. He pricks the pad of your finger with the very tip of the blunted knife, as if he wants to remind the blade of its older religion. A bead of blood swells, bright, neat. He turns your hand and presses that red to the seed-paper waiting in a shallow trench at the bed’s edge. Your blood bleeds into the paper like water into thirst.

“Now,” Sunoo says, voice dropped low enough to live in your bones, “we plant what you are not. So what you are can grow.”

Jungwon folds loam over the paper. The soil is cool even in this hothouse weather. It sucks at your finger when he presses your hand flat to it. Something moves underneath—something too quick for roots. Your stomach rocks. You try to pull back. Jungwon’s hand covers yours, firm as a yoke; Sunoo’s hand wraps your throat—not squeezing, just holding the column steady. You are pinned in two places that translate directly to obedience.

“Breathe,” Sunoo says.

You do. The soil under your hand warms like a mouth.

The congregation murmurs. Not words; the sound bodies make when they agree to a script. Director Seo watches like a reader flipping to the end to be sure it comes out as written. Nurse Min’s face has the set of a woman who’s decided to count a vein until morning.

The thing under the soil stills.

Jungwon lifts your hand and wipes the loam away with his thumb. The smear looks like war paint. Sunoo releases your throat and smooths his palm down the line his fingers left, a correction, an apology, a brand. He bends and whispers against your ear, “You belong to the ground,” and then, after a heartbeat, “and to us while you’re learning.”

His mouth never touches skin. The idea of it does.

The Rite closes with a bell that tastes like copper in your teeth. People file out as if stepping around a sleeping animal. Mira gets to you first, palms hot where she holds your face. “Drink water,” she hisses. “Don’t go to sleep. If you dream the name, it sticks.”

“I didn’t give it,” you say.

She laughs, a small animal sound. “You bled. That’s enough.”

Mr. Ko offers a clean handkerchief without meeting your eyes. Hana watches from a distance like a hawk deciding if a rabbit is worth stooping for when the field is full of easier meat. Taesun beams, mud on his lip, as if he’s just watched a very good wedding.

Yejin presses a drawing into your hand and vanishes. It’s you kneeling, hands marked, a line along your throat that is not a cut but knows where one would go. Over your shoulder, two shadows bend—one a heat-halo, one a blunt storm. Soon, she’s written. Don’t say yes with your mouth.

Night. The mountain holds its breath. The lamps in the greenhouse go black one by one until the glass is only a shape. You sit on your dorm bed and watch your hands not shake. Mira sleeps curled like a comma with her stone under her cheek. The drawing under your pillow warms to your scalp as if it wants to crawl into you.

A knock—not on the door. On the window, one knuckle, once. When you slide the frame, cold air pours in, and you think of Nurse Min’s keep your mouth closed in the greenhouse and keep it shut.

Jungwon stands below, lantern hooded, face lit just enough to make eyes and jaw. He tilts his head—come—and you go because your legs have learned this path. Out the back, down the steps, across the boards to the west path. He waits in the shadow of the shed where spades hang like a rack of tongues.

“Any dizziness? Nausea?” he asks, clinic-plain.

“Just… aware.” The word feels too small for your body’s rattled hum.

He grunts—approval. He reaches for your hand and turns the palm up. The loam under your nails has dried to fine grit. He rubs it away with his thumb, slow, methodical. It’s almost tender until you realize he is checking for changes—for the leaf-vein under your skin brightening, for anything moving that shouldn’t. When his thumb passes over the edge of your pulse, it jumps. He looks up sharply. You look away.

“You shouldn’t stay in the dorm tonight.” Matter-of-fact. “You’ll hear things like your name, and some of them will be for you and some won’t. You’re still soft. Soft things take impressions.”

“Where do I go?”

“My room.” Flat. Then, as if he heard how it sounds: “It’s safer. There are no plants there.”

“Is that true?”

“It’s true enough.” He waits. “Or go to the clinic and sit under Min’s lamp and let her count your breaths until morning.”

“Which would you pick,” you ask, because some part of you refuses to let him stand there and decide your body in his head without you in the room.

He takes too long to answer, then says, “The clinic is gentle.” A beat. “I am not.”

Wind combs the pines; the greenhouse ticks as it cools. Somewhere a raven laughs like a woman who knows your secrets and isn’t impressed.

“Choose,” he says quietly.

Sunoo’s shadow falls across the path before you can. He steps into the lantern’s circle like a storybook: pale wrists, clean hands, a smile that tells you exactly how he will use it. “Ah,” he says, soft delight. “My flower and my hands. I wondered where the night would put you.”

Jungwon does not step back. He also does not step forward. The lantern holds the three of you in a tight Venn where your breaths overlap. Sunoo tips his head, curious. “You can take her,” he says to Jungwon, which is to say I will let you. “But she’ll come back to me tasting like soil and fear, and we’ll start again from below.” He turns to you, voice honeyed and mean. “Or you can come with me and I’ll teach your body what calm feels like so you know when you’ve lost it.”

The polite violence of the options makes your stomach liquefy.

“Stop,” Jungwon says, and the word is a tool, not a plea.

Sunoo laughs softly. “The earth doesn’t stop growing just because you ask it gently.” He reaches, very slowly, and lifts your jaw with two fingers—not touching skin; his hand floats a whisper below it and your head lifts anyway, obedient to suggestion. “Show me your throat,” he says, and your body almost does it because it learned tonight and bodies like to repeat lessons. You hold yourself still out of spite. His smile warms. “Good girl.”

The words hit like a hand under your ribs. Jungwon’s breath changes. It darkens the air.

“Enough,” Jungwon says again, and hooks a finger in the lantern hood. He pulls it open. Light flares, pot-bright, brutal. The three of you blink; the world loses its beautiful edges and shows its seams. “Clinic,” he tells you.

Sunoo’s smile fades pixel by pixel until only his eyes shine. “For now,” he agrees. He steps in closer so there is no air between the three bodies but what breath can claim. He looks at Jungwon and speaks to you. “You’ll end up between us anyway,” he says, the prophecy flat, not cruel. “Why not learn the shape early.”

You should move. You should walk yourself to the nurse and let her count your lungs like prayer beads. Instead you stand very still while two men who have learned your pulse by different languages consider the currency of your fear.

Sunoo lifts his hand and stops a breath from your mouth. You feel the heat of him without the permission of touch. “I won’t kiss you,” he says, velvet and wicked. “Not yet.” He turns his palm and hovers over your throat, reading the rush there like a favorite book. “See what your body does with almost.”

Jungwon moves behind you so quietly the night forgets to mark his steps. He doesn’t touch you. His presence is so large it reads like contact anyway—the shape of him corralling air. You have the dizzy thought that if you leaned back, he would catch you, and if you leaned forward, Sunoo would open like a mouth.

“Breathe,” Sunoo whispers, and it isn’t instruction now; it’s a dare.

You do. The air leans with you. The world tightens to a triangle: lantern glare, the line of a blunted blade tucked into Jungwon’s belt, the faint copper on Sunoo’s knuckle where he touched your lip earlier with the petal.

“I said clinic,” Jungwon repeats, low enough to live at your spine.

“Make her say please,” Sunoo counters, amusement sweet as rot. “Our girl loves a ritual.”

“Don’t—” you start, and then stop, because the word tastes like surrender and you haven’t decided whose hands deserve it.

“Not tonight,” Jungwon says, and you understand: it isn’t mercy. It’s control deferred. He steps to your side, inserts a palm—warm, heavy—at your waist, not pulling, not pushing, just a point you can move along. Sunoo mirrors the motion on your other side without touching, an echo your nerves misread as contact. Together they guide you three steps, five, toward the clinic’s dim window—two gravities that agree for once.

At the threshold, Sunoo bends so close your ear warms. “Sleep,” he murmurs, the same command Jungwon uses like a blessing. “Dream of hands.” He smiles against the air where your skin ends. “Next time I’ll count for you while he holds you still.”

Jungwon’s hand tightens one notch at your waist, a warning, a promise, a brand pressed through clothes. “Next time,” he says, to Sunoo, to you, to the night that will keep at this until you’re rewritten, “I’ll decide who goes first.”

Nurse Min opens the clinic door before anyone knocks, lamp bright behind her like a little square sun. She takes in the triangle of bodies, the glint of the knife, the feral set of Sunoo’s mouth, the obedient steadiness of Jungwon’s hand at your side.

“Inside,” she says, and steps aside.

You pass between them—Sunoo’s almost-touch a heat across your throat; Jungwon’s real touch a line at your hip you could follow with your eyes closed—and cross into the light.

You do not kiss anyone. No one kisses you.

But as the door shuts and the mountain presses its ear to the glass to listen, you know it: your body already understands the shape they promised. It will remember. It will hunger.

And when it happens—when it really happens—it will not be an accident.

________

The clinic smelled of metal and mint. Nurse Min left you in a chair under her lamp until the feverish hum in your body dulled to a bearable pitch. She made you drink water, bitter and green as ditch weed, and held your wrist while your pulse rattled beneath her thumb. When you asked her if you were safe, she only said, “Nothing in a place like this is safe. At best, some things are safer than others.”

By the time she dismissed you, the compound had already gone to sleep. Mira was curled on her side in the dorm, bracelets stilled. You should have slept too. Instead you lay awake, tasting the memory of a petal pressed against your tongue, feeling the phantom weight of Jungwon’s hand steady at your waist, the ghost of Sunoo’s fingers just shy of your throat.

Your body remembered. It remembered too well.

When you finally slipped into the corridor, your bare feet soundless on the boards, it wasn’t to find air. It was because something in you had already decided that the ache would not stop on its own.

The greenhouse loomed against the night, ribs of iron and glass sweating mist. The lock had never been for people who wanted to stay out. You pushed the door and it sighed open, warm air rushing at you like a mouth.

He was waiting. Of course he was.

Sunoo leaned against a bench, sleeves rolled, pale wrists glowing under the lamps. His expression was the same one he’d worn when he laid the petal on your tongue earlier—delighted, expectant, like he had always known your body would come back to him.

“You breathe too loud when you lie down,” he murmured. “I could hear you from the other side of the hall.”

You should have left. You stepped closer instead.

Sunoo reached for you without touching, fingers tracing the air beside your cheek. That almost-contact burned hotter than heat itself. Your breath caught, and his smile sharpened. “See? Your body tells the truth. It remembers me already.”

His hand hovered down, stopping at the hollow of your throat. “Here,” he whispered. “Where the pulse lives.” He bent, mouth a whisper away from your skin, never quite sealing it. Your nerves screamed as if he’d kissed you. “You want me to touch you. That’s why you came.”

Your denial scraped your teeth but never left your tongue.

“Good girl,” he said, pleased at your silence. He turned you, pressing between your shoulder blades until your knees bent and you landed on the warm boards of the floor. “Stay open. Stay soft.”

His hands came at last—sliding along your thighs, parting them without rush, without doubt. He dragged his thumb along the cotton of your thin shorts, pressing until the damp there gave you away. “Blooming,” he said reverently, as if the word itself could coax you wider.

You gasped when he pressed harder, the friction maddening. He laughed low in his throat, pleased. “You’ve been waiting since the Rite, haven’t you? You swallowed the petal and your body begged for more.”

He tugged fabric aside with clinical precision, exposing you to the humid air. His fingers slicked easily through the wetness already gathered, and he made a sound of satisfaction that went straight to your gut. “So ready,” he crooned. “So obedient.”

Two fingers circled, teased, pressed—but never where you needed. He watched your hips shift, your breath stutter. “Say please,” he murmured.

“I—”

“Shh.” His free hand covered your mouth lightly, thumb grazing your lower lip. “Not with words. With your body.”

Your thighs trembled. You pushed into his hand, desperate. His smile widened. “There it is. Begging without speech.”

He slipped two fingers inside, slow, deliberate. Your back arched, a strangled sound caught behind his palm. He curled them just right, hitting the place that made you shiver, made your eyes roll back. “Yes,” he whispered against your ear. “That’s it. That’s how you bloom.”

His palm pressed harder over your mouth as your moans broke free. His rhythm quickened, fingers thrusting, scissoring, spreading you open as if he meant to plant something inside. Every push forced slick sounds into the greenhouse air. He bent low, lips brushing your temple, murmuring praises between each thrust: “Perfect. My good flower. Opening just for me. No one else will see you like this.”

Your orgasm came sudden, brutal—your whole body snapping tight around his hand, shuddering against him. He kept moving, dragging it out until you were gasping into his palm, thighs twitching.

When at last he withdrew, his fingers glistened. He lifted them to your lips, smearing wetness across them before pushing between. “Taste yourself,” he ordered softly. “Know what you are to me.”

Shame and hunger tangled in your chest. You sucked his fingers clean, and his eyes darkened, mouth parting as if he might finally kiss you. He didn’t. He pulled back just enough to leave you desperate, to make absence itself a cruelty.

“Blooming,” he whispered again, satisfied. “And tomorrow, you’ll be ready for the soil.”

The greenhouse door creaked. You jerked, Sunoo still crouched over you, his slick fingers withdrawing with deliberate slowness.

Jungwon stood in the doorway, lantern spilling gold over his dirt-streaked arms. His jaw tightened as his eyes tracked the wet shine on your lips, the way your legs trembled, the smug curve of Sunoo’s smile.

For a long, brutal moment, no one spoke. Then Jungwon stepped forward, shovel still in one hand, and his voice came out rough, dangerous.

“She’s mine next.”

The lamps hummed. The soil smelled of iron. Your heart beat against your throat like a trapped bird as the two men stared across you, and you realized the next time you were touched, it would be by both.

And you would not escape it.

______

The night you tried to run, the mountain gave you away.

The boards beneath your feet creaked, wet leaves clung to your calves, and the fog was a hand on your throat. You ran anyway. Past the dorms, past the glasshouse ribs glowing faintly from their lamps, down the west path where the ravens laughed like women who knew your secrets.

You thought the dark would cover you.

But the dark belonged to him.

A hand caught your wrist so hard you nearly went down. The lantern flared, and Jungwon’s face came out of the mist—eyes black, jaw locked, the muscle jumping with rage he didn’t bother to soften. He dragged you against him, chest heaving like you’d run into a wall that had learned how to breathe.

“Running,” he said, voice low and sharp as a spade. “After I told you not to.”

“I—”

“Quiet.” His grip on your wrist tightened until your bones ached. “Do you know what he did to you in there? Do you know what you smell like? Soil and him.” His other hand closed hard around your chin, forcing you to meet his eyes. His breath came hot, furious. “I told you not to let him touch you.”

Your protest was thin. “I didn’t—”

“You did.” He shoved you back against the rough bark of a pine. The trunk dug into your spine; his body crowded yours, heat and dirt and something mean. “You opened your mouth. You let him put his fingers in you.” His hand slid down your throat, pressing just enough to make your pulse throb under his palm. “Do you think that makes you his?”

“No—”

“No,” he repeated, mocking and brutal, pressing harder until your words broke into breath. His eyes raked you up and down like he was reading your body for lies. “You’re mine. If you’re soil, then I’m the one who plants.”

The knife appeared from his belt—not sharp, its edge long since blunted, but the point still honest. He held it flat against your belly, dragging it up under your shirt until the cold metal kissed the underside of your breast. You shivered, body jerking against the bark. His mouth twisted, equal parts fury and hunger.

“Scared?” he murmured. “Good. Fear makes roots dig deeper.”

He hooked the blade under the band of your shorts, pulling until the fabric stretched and then snapped. His hand shoved inside without pause, fingers rough, pushing into you like he meant to stake a claim. You gasped, the sound choking against the hand still at your throat.

“Wet,” he said, voice a growl, face close enough you could feel every word on your skin. “You’re soaked for me already. Even after him. Especially after him.” His fingers thrust harder, curling, relentless, forcing your body to answer him. “Say it. Say whose you are.”

You shook your head, too proud, too broken to give it.

His mouth curved cruel. “Then I’ll fuck it into you.”

He yanked your shorts down to your thighs, lifted you bodily against the tree, and shoved his hips between your legs. You clawed at his shoulders, half to push, half to hold on, but he pinned you easy, the knife’s flat pressed to your throat now like a brand. His cock pressed hot and thick against your entrance, grinding through the slick he’d found there, rubbing until you whined.

“You hear that?” he hissed, rolling his hips, dragging the head over your folds until obscene wet sounds filled the air. “Your body begging me in front of the whole fucking mountain.” He pushed in one brutal stroke, burying himself deep, forcing a cry from your throat. His teeth bared at the sound, savage triumph. “That’s it. Open up. Take me.”

He fucked you hard against the tree, every thrust jarring bark into your spine, every shove brutal and unrelenting. The knife never left your throat—flat, cold, reminding you what he could do if he wanted. His free hand gripped your hip so hard you knew you’d bruise, dragging you down onto him, using your body like it was already his.

“Mine,” he snarled against your ear, hips slamming. “Not his. Not anyone’s. Mine to fuck. Mine to plant. Mine to keep.” His pace grew rougher, desperate, jealousy bleeding into possession. “You’ll carry me. You’ll take my seed. You’ll remember whose cock fucked you open like this.”

Your moans tore free, high and broken, every thrust forcing them out. He laughed, breathless, mean. “Good little soil. Look at you—taking it. Clenching so tight you’ll never forget.”

When you came, it was with your whole body jerking, nails raking his back, his name spilling without permission. He fucked you through it, ruthless, using your climax to milk himself. With a final, brutal thrust, he came inside you, grinding deep, growling your name like a curse and a prayer.

He stayed pressed to you, chest heaving, the knife slipping down to rest against your collarbone. He didn’t soften. He didn’t let go. His mouth found your jaw, biting hard enough to leave a mark.

When he finally pulled out, slick running down your thighs, he yanked your shorts back up roughly, like covering you was a punishment. He grabbed your wrist again, dragging you toward the compound.

“You’re not sleeping in the dorms,” he said, voice iron. “You’re mine now. My room. My bed. No one else touches you.”

The lantern swung, throwing gold across the path. His grip never loosened. You stumbled after him, body raw, used, filled, the echo of his thrusts still beating through you.

And you knew he wasn’t bluffing.

______

Jungwon’s grip on your wrist was iron, dragging you through the silent hallways until the greenhouse lamps and dorm windows disappeared. His door slammed behind you, the bolt driven home with the finality of a lock on a coffin. His room was small, spare, stripped bare of comfort—just a bed, a chair, his tools. No flowers, no soil. Only him.

He shoved you onto the mattress like you weighed nothing. Your body jolted, still slick, still aching from what he’d already done. He stood over you, chest rising and falling hard, sweat at his temples, jaw clenched like a vice.

“You don’t go back to them,” he growled. “Not Mira, not Seo, and never him.” His eyes burned. “You’re mine.”

Your breath hitched; the word stuck in your throat.

A voice cut through the dark. “You’re wrong.”

The lantern on the desk flared, spilling its glow across pale wrists, white robes loosened at the chest, a mouth curved in that familiar, cruel delight. Sunoo. Already inside. Already waiting.

Jungwon stiffened, shoulders tensing like a predator finding another in his territory. “Get out.”

Sunoo ignored him. He stepped closer, his smile syrup-sweet but eyes sharp. “She doesn’t belong to you alone. Look at her.” His gaze slid over you where you trembled on the bed, your thighs pressed together, your lips parted from shallow breaths. “She’s terrified. She’s confused. She needs gentleness.” His tone softened, dripping like honey. “And you can’t give her that.”

“Gentle doesn’t keep her alive,” Jungwon snapped, stepping between you and him, shovel-callused fists at his sides. “Gentle lets her rot.”

“Alive?” Sunoo laughed, low and dangerous. “She’s not alive. She’s blooming. That’s what I make her.”

“Blooming,” Jungwon spat, “is just another word for open. And I’m the one inside her.”

The words made your stomach twist; heat and fear tangled until you couldn’t tell the difference. You tried to speak—stop, please stop—but your throat locked.

Sunoo’s gaze darted back to you, softening. He crouched, ignoring the way Jungwon loomed above him. His hand hovered just shy of your ankle, not touching—never touching—but the heat of him crawled up your skin. “Petal,” he whispered, “don’t be afraid. I’ll take care of you. I’ll show you how it feels to be cherished.” His lips parted, almost grazing your skin as he breathed you in. “Let me taste you.”

Jungwon’s growl shook the air. He seized your arm, yanking you back against his chest, his hand spread possessive across your stomach. His cock, still half-hard, pressed against your spine. “She’s mine. Mine to fuck. Mine to plant. Mine to keep.”

Your body shuddered. Fear, yes—but deeper, darker: want, shame, hunger you couldn’t smother.

Sunoo’s smile only widened. “Then let’s see who she opens for first.” He slid closer, slipping between your knees before Jungwon could stop him. His breath fanned over your thighs, hot and wet, and you gasped when he finally touched you—soft, reverent, his hands parting you like something fragile.

The contrast made you dizzy. Jungwon’s grip bruised; Sunoo’s mouth pressed feather-light kisses along the inside of your thigh, slow, teasing, as if every touch was worship. “Sweet,” he murmured, nose brushing close to the heat of you. “So sweet. I’ll make her sing.”

“Don’t you dare—” Jungwon started, but your body betrayed you, hips twitching toward Sunoo’s mouth, a whimper breaking past your lips.

That sound changed everything.

Jungwon froze, then snarled, shoving you down into the mattress, caging you with his body. One hand pinned your wrists above your head; the other tore your shirt open down the middle, fabric splitting under his strength. His mouth crashed to your throat, biting, marking, sucking bruises into your skin with furious precision.

Sunoo groaned at the sight, as if Jungwon’s violence only made you more beautiful. He leaned in, finally sealing his lips over your cunt, sucking hard, tongue lapping deep through your folds. The wet sounds filled the room, obscene, echoing against the bare walls.

You cried out, the noise muffled against Jungwon’s hand when he clapped it over your mouth. “Quiet,” he hissed, teeth at your jaw. “Don’t give him the satisfaction of hearing how much you love it.”

But Sunoo knew anyway. He moaned against you, tongue flicking your clit, fingers sliding inside with practiced ease, curling just right. He fed off every twitch, every muffled scream, every desperate roll of your hips. “See?” he said between licks, voice thick with arousal. “She opens for me. She’s blooming already.”

Jungwon pressed harder, grinding his cock against your hip through his pants, furious at your body’s betrayal, at the way your thighs trembled around Sunoo’s head. “She’s dripping because I fucked her raw,” he snarled. “All you’re doing is licking up what I left in her.”

The words made your body jerk, shame and desire hitting like lightning.

Sunoo pulled back just enough to look up at you, his mouth shining with your wetness, his eyes dark and soft. “You taste like need,” he whispered. He dragged his tongue slowly over your clit, savoring the way you cried out under Jungwon’s palm. “And you’ll remember I was the first one who made you come with his mouth.”

“Shut up,” Jungwon snapped. But his own hips rolled against you, his cock throbbing, desperate. His jealousy only sharpened his need.

You couldn’t fight it. You came hard, body arching, Sunoo’s mouth sucking your clit, Jungwon’s hand holding you down, his teeth biting at your throat. Your orgasm tore through you like the roots of something invasive, clawing deep, unstoppable.

They didn’t stop.

Sunoo licked you clean, gentle as a lover, humming like he was savoring wine. Jungwon bit harder, grinded rougher, his hand forcing your wrists deeper into the mattress. Both of them on you—one soft, one brutal—until you didn’t know whose name to scream.

And you understood, with raw clarity, that they weren’t fighting for you.

They were fighting through you.

When the shudders finally broke, you collapsed back, gasping, throat raw. Jungwon leaned down, lips brushing your ear, his voice a growl. “This is just the beginning. Next time I’m inside you while he’s in your mouth. We’ll see who you really belong to.”

Sunoo laughed softly, licking his lips clean of you. “She’ll belong to both.”

And for the first time, you realized he was right.

_____

Your body was still shaking when Jungwon yanked you upright, dragging you into his lap as if the bed belonged only to him. His thighs were iron beneath you, his chest hard against your spine. One arm locked around your waist, the other snared your throat, thick fingers spreading wide until his grip owned the column of your neck. He forced your head back, baring your mouth to him.

“You’ll taste me now,” he snarled, lips crashing into yours.

The kiss was brutal—teeth knocking, spit spilling. He shoved his tongue deep, choking you with it, swallowing every noise you tried to make. His palm pressed tighter at your throat until your pulse roared in your ears, until breath itself became something you had to beg him for. Drool slicked your chin, his tongue forcing yours down, his grip refusing to let you turn away. It was less a kiss than a violent claiming, his mouth fucking yours the way his cock had already fucked your body raw.

You gasped when he pulled back just enough to let air in, a string of spit hanging obscenely between your mouths. He licked it off your bottom lip, then spat into your mouth deliberately, cruelly, watching you swallow because you had no choice.

“Open,” he growled, forcing your jaw wider with his hand at your throat. “Good. That’s mine too. Every sound. Every swallow.”

Your vision blurred; your thighs squeezed together involuntarily. Terror and heat tangled until you couldn’t breathe for either.

And then Sunoo was there.

He crouched in front of you, hands sliding up your knees to part them wider, his smile infuriatingly calm even in violence. “My turn.”

“No,” Jungwon bit out, but Sunoo was already moving. He grabbed your chin, fingers digging in hard enough to bruise, and wrenched your head away from Jungwon’s mouth. Your neck snapped to the side, and before you could gasp, Sunoo’s lips were on yours.

It wasn’t tender. It was vicious. He sucked your bottom lip until it split, teeth biting down until pain shot bright, then licked the blood from your mouth as if it belonged to him. His tongue drove past your teeth, tasting everything Jungwon had left there, devouring it with obscene relish.

You moaned helplessly, the sound muffled between them.

Jungwon’s grip on your throat tightened, forcing your head back further, rage pouring off him like heat. “She’s mine.”

Sunoo broke the kiss just long enough to sneer against your wet mouth. “Then why is she kissing me back?” He pressed his tongue to yours again, slow and filthy, sucking until spit ran down your chin. Then he pulled back, wiped it with his thumb, and shoved the slick digit back between your lips. “Lick it clean. That’s mine now.”

Your mouth obeyed before your brain caught up.

Jungwon’s chest vibrated with a growl. He bent and bit your jaw, then your throat, leaving purple marks against Sunoo’s fingerprints. His hand clamped your neck harder, forcing you to gasp around Sunoo’s thumb.

“She’s choking on me,” Jungwon snarled. “Not you.”

Sunoo laughed low, mean. He leaned closer, his forehead pressing to yours, his other hand grabbing Jungwon’s wrist on your throat, not to stop it, but to squeeze it tighter. “Then let’s choke her together.”

The pressure doubled. Your eyes watered, spit pooling at the corner of your mouth, drooling down your chin as both of them held you, forced you open, forced you to take them. One mouth kissed you, sucked you, spat into you; the other bit, bruised, pressed your throat until stars danced.

You weren’t kissing anymore. You were being consumed.

And God help you—your body wanted more.

_______

They had you caged between them—Jungwon at your back, Sunoo at your front—two sets of hands closing every door your body might have tried to escape through.

Your pulse beat frantically against Jungwon’s palm at your throat. Sunoo’s fingers dug into your chin, keeping your face tipped up so you couldn’t hide. Their mouths had already ruined you, spit running down your jaw, bruises blooming on your throat and collarbone like dark flowers. Your chest rose too fast, every breath their permission, every sound something they stole from you.

“You see?” Sunoo whispered, voice as sweet as it was cruel. “She’s ready. She’s shaking for us.” His hand slid down, brushing your stomach, spreading lower. “The soil is wet.”

“She’s wet because I fucked her open,” Jungwon snapped against your ear, his breath harsh. “She’s mine to fill.” He ground his cock against your ass through his pants, thick and hard, a promise of what was coming. His teeth found your neck again, biting until your body arched despite yourself.

The two of them moved you as if you were theirs to arrange. Your thighs were forced wide over Sunoo’s lap, your back crushed to Jungwon’s chest. Rough hands tugged your ruined shorts away; cool air hit the slick heat between your legs. Sunoo hummed like a priest receiving an offering.

“Let me taste again.” He didn’t wait for permission. His mouth descended, sucking your clit into his mouth, tongue lapping at you until your eyes rolled back. His hands locked on your thighs, holding you open for him, his moans vibrating into your cunt.

Jungwon shoved your wrists down into the mattress, his cock rutting against you through fabric, his fury pressed into every grind. “Listen to her,” he growled. “Dripping for us. Begging without words.” He yanked his pants open, the blunt head of his cock dragging along your ass, smearing precum. “She’s going to take both. Right now.”

You sobbed, terror and need colliding until you couldn’t tell them apart. “I can’t—”

“You can,” Sunoo cut in smoothly, lifting his head, chin wet with your slick. He stroked your trembling thighs with a mockery of gentleness. “Your body’s already opening. We’ll guide you.” His eyes glimmered, half-devotion, half-madness. “You’ll bloom for us together.”

Jungwon spat into his palm, gripped his cock, and shoved it between your cheeks, rubbing the head against your tight hole until you whined. “Scared?” he hissed, his hand tightening at your throat. “Good. Fear makes you clench tighter.”

Sunoo’s fingers slid inside your cunt again, curling, coaxing, slicking you up for him. He looked up at you, his smile soft even as he stretched you ruthlessly. “Breathe, petal. I’ll be inside you soon. You’ll be so full you won’t remember how to be empty.”

When Sunoo lined himself up, pressing the head of his cock against your soaked entrance, Jungwon shoved his tip harder at your ass, both of them pushing at once. Your cry ripped the air as your body was forced to split, one cock stretching your cunt, the other pressing past the tight ring of muscle until you thought you’d break.

“Fuck,” Jungwon groaned, voice raw. “So tight. Gripping me like a fist.”

“She’s perfect,” Sunoo sighed, already sinking deeper, your walls convulsing around him. “Taking both of us. Our flower.”

It was too much. The stretch burned, overwhelming, obscene. You clawed at the sheets, eyes rolling back as both of them bottomed out, your body trembling violently with the force of being split in two. They didn’t give you time. Jungwon’s hips snapped forward first, brutal, pounding into your ass with the fury of jealousy. Sunoo met him stroke for stroke, slower, deeper, angling until every thrust speared your cunt exactly where it made you scream.

Pinned, stuffed, broken open—you were nothing but their vessel.

“Say it,” Jungwon snarled, hand squeezing your throat until your vision blurred. “Say you’re mine.”

“She’s ours,” Sunoo countered, kissing you, sucking the spit from your mouth, swallowing your gasps. “Tell us, petal. Tell us who you bloom for.”

Your answer was a sob, a whimper, a strangled cry as their cocks moved inside you, filling every inch, grinding against each other through the thin wall of your body until the sensation drove you half-mad.

“Fuck, I can feel him through you,” Jungwon groaned, rutting harder, holding you down as if you might try to run again. “But you’re squeezing me tighter. That’s how I know you’re mine.”

Sunoo’s tongue licked the tears from your cheeks. “She’s crying for me. Look at her. Look how she wants to be saved even while we ruin her.”

Your body convulsed around them, slick gushing down your thighs, every nerve alight. The pain blurred into pleasure until you were begging without words, your nails tearing the sheets, your cries spilling into their mouths as they fought to own your climax.

When you came, it was devastating—your cunt and ass clenching around them both, milking them, dragging them deeper. Jungwon groaned, teeth sinking into your shoulder as he spilled inside you, hot and overwhelming. Sunoo followed seconds later, filling your cunt until you were overflowing, cum dripping down your thighs, both of them holding you so tightly you couldn’t breathe.

They didn’t pull out. They stayed locked inside, cocks twitching, their breaths harsh against your skin.

Jungwon’s hand squeezed your throat one last time, forcing your eyes to his. “Say it,” he demanded, voice hoarse. “Say you’re planted in me.”

Sunoo kissed your cheek, softer but no less cruel. “Say you’ll bloom for us both.”

And you, too full to think, too wrecked to fight, whispered the only truth left in you:

“I can’t belong to just one.”

They smiled—different smiles, but the same hunger.

And you knew you’d never escape again.

_______

woah this was so diffecult to write SO IM SORRY IF IT ISNT THE BEST

THANK YOU FOR READING!!

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[lollovern]

- The Garden Left to Rot -

enhypen masterlist

wattpad

inspired by this post

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groundskeeper!yang jungwon x guest!femreader x cult counselor!kim sunoo | obsessive romance | cult horror | forced devotion | ritualistic sex | jealousy and rivalry | fucked-up love triangle | knife kink | corrupted comfort | you will belong to someone eventually | DARK CONTENT AHEAD!!

wc: 14k

summary: You’re sent to a grief recovery retreat hidden in the mountains. But this isn’t therapy — it’s a cult blooming in blood and rot. Jungwon wants to bury you where no one else can touch you. Sunoo wants to crack you open until you bloom for him. Both say it’s healing. But it’s obsession.

warnings: extreme gore, threesome, cult rituals, body horror (flowers under skin, insect scenes), blood play, forced confinement, psychological manipulation, emotional degradation, knife play, religious delusion, obsessive behavior, toxic romance, dubcon themes, ritualistic sex, hallucinations, violence

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The van climbs until the road forgets how to be a road. Pines crowd close; fog slicks the windshield like breath on glass. By the time the driver kills the engine, your phone has been surrendered, the waiver signed, and your name—your real one—folded into a sealed envelope with your belongings.

A hand-painted sign leans crooked against a stone pillar: THE GARDEN.

Beneath it, smaller script: Let go. Become.

Everyone here is an adult—paperwork made that clear. Still, the cluster of arrivals huddle like freshmen. A woman in a bone-white coat stands at the gate, serene as a photograph. “Welcome,” she says. “I’m Director Seo. You won’t need last names here. You won’t need yesterday.” Her smile doesn’t reach her eyes. “We begin with stillness.”

Stillness smells like damp soil and rosemary. The compound spreads in tiers: a glasshouse ribbed with iron; dormitories with shuttered windows; a refectory where steam fogs the panes; a low clinic painted the color of milk. The greenhouse breathes—a pulse of heavy, sweet air each time the door opens. Inside, rows of lilies lean toward heat lamps; vines net the rafters; something rustles in the loam.

“Orientation,” says the boy who appears at Director Seo’s shoulder. He’s young—early twenties—with paper-clean features and the kind of smile people don’t realize is a blade until it’s already inside them. Kim Sunoo. His name tag says Counselor; the ribbon beneath it says Ritual Lead. “Shoes off in the greenhouse,” he adds lightly. “We keep the floors soft.”

Your shoes leave the ground. Cool boards. Warm mist. A bell rings once. The arrivals form a circle on woven mats; a dozen white-robed staff ghost the edges. A few guests have the shaved look of hospital discharge; others wear expensive emptiness like cologne.

“Here,” Sunoo says gently, “we do not share pasts. Only needs.” His gaze slips over faces and lands on you. Not a leer. A selection. “You may speak or sit in silence. Both are honest.”

“I need to sleep,” says a woman with chewed nails. “Like, three days.”

“I need to stop remembering,” a man answers, voice flat.

The girl beside you—twenty-two, maybe—says nothing. Yejin is stitched on her wristband. Her hands are ink-stained. She draws while people talk: a quick, vicious graphite—faces with petal-mouths; ribs like trellises. When you shift, she tilts her sketchbook so you can see the newest figure: a person kneeling in dirt, throat blooming with something that isn’t a flower.

“Beautiful,” Sunoo murmurs, as if he’s praising a child’s first recital. “You have a keen eye for transformation, Yejin.”

From across the greenhouse, someone drags burlap sacks along iron grates. Soil dark as coffee spills from a split seam and oozes across the floor. The man hauling the bags moves like he’s apologized to gravity and refuses to do it again. Yang Jungwon. Groundskeeper on his tag. Grey work shirt. Forearms nicked white with old cuts. He doesn’t look at the circle—doesn’t look at you—until he does, and then he doesn’t stop. Not curiosity. Assessment, like weighing a seed between finger and thumb and deciding if it will live in his earth.

Director Seo outlines rules in the smooth tone of a stewardess reciting crash procedures:

No personal histories in group.

No contact with family for the first fourteen days.

No unsupervised access to the greenhouse after dusk.

Do not remove plant material from designated zones.

What is given to the soil remains in the soil.

“That includes grief,” Sunoo says, almost playful. “Especially grief.”

Your dorm is clean in the way of hospital corridors and mortuaries. Two metal beds. Two lockers. A copy of a softbound booklet on each pillow: STILLNESS GUIDE. Your roommate arrives with a jangle of bracelets and the brittle cheer of someone who learned to smile as self-defense. Mira, 26, volunteer-turned-resident-mentor.

“Welcome-welcome,” she chirps, then lowers her voice. “Pro tip: keep your head down the first three days. They watch how you watch.”

“Who?”

“Everyone.” She flicks her gaze toward the window, where the greenhouse skeletons against dusk. “Especially him.” She means Sunoo—you can hear it in the soft, reverent way. “And the groundskeeper when it’s dark.” That last part is almost a warning.

The bell rings again. Dinner is broth that tastes like the inside of a leaf and bread dense with seeds. You eat at long tables while staff move among you like shepherds. Across from you, a jittery young man, Taesun—24, scars like cat-scratches up his wrists—piles his crusts and crumbles them methodically. He pockets a handful when he thinks no one sees.

“For the worms,” he whispers to the crumbs. “They get hungry at night.”

Mira nudges your knee under the table. “He feeds them behind the east wall,” she murmurs. “Says they keep the nightmares down if they’re busy.”

In the clinic after dinner, a nurse swabs your fingers where the paper edges of the waiver bit skin. Nurse Min is beautiful in the harsh way of women who have decided their faces are weapons. When she says “this will sting,” the consonants soften strangely; a long surgical scar splits the underside of her tongue. She catches you looking and lifts a brow that says yes, I am aware of my mouth. Then—almost tender—she tapes your knuckle with gauze printed with tiny flowers.

Back in the greenhouse, the first night session is called Surrender. The lamps buzz. Mist beads your eyelashes. Sunoo stands barefoot on the damp boards, sleeves rolled, voice a low waterfall.

“Close your eyes,” he says. “Name the weight you want the earth to hold for you. Don’t say it out loud. Let your body say it.”

Around you, bodies sway. Some cry. Some freeze. When you keep your eyes open, Sunoo notices. Of course he does.

“New sprout,” he says softly, close to your ear, and the nickname feels chosen, not random. “You don’t have to force stillness. It happens when the soil recognizes you.”

“Does it?” Your voice is hoarse from disuse and altitude.

“Always.” He smiles. Not kind. Not unkind. Satisfied. “The Garden knows its own.”

Across the rows, Jungwon kneels in the dirt, wrist-deep in loam, planting something without a label. He doesn’t follow Sunoo’s cadence; he follows his own. When one lamp flickers, he rises and fixes it with the swift, competent movements of someone who builds instead of asks. When he sits back, the soil clings to his fingers like shadow.

You should sleep. Instead you help Mira remake your beds with the stiff white sheets that smell faintly of bleach and rosemary. She keeps talking, because silence makes her hands shake.

“I came as a volunteer,” she says, tucking corners square. “Stayed as a patient. It’s easier when they tell you what to be.”

“What do they tell you?”

She smiles without humor. “A flower.” Her eyes slide to your bandaged hand. “Try not to bleed in the greenhouse. They don’t like that.”

“Why?”

“Because the soil remembers.”

At night the compound changes. Lights dim. The wind strips the pines and combs the glass with needles. You lie awake and count breaths—yours, Mira’s, the building’s—until you can’t bear numbers anymore.

You go out.

The air is colder than the dorm suggests. The greenhouse glows from within, a pulse behind fogged panes. Beyond the east wall, something moves with slow persistence. You follow the ripple of disturbed leaves to a break in the hedgerow and find Taesun kneeling with his pockets turned inside out, sowing crumbs into the leaf litter like a penitent farmer.

“The worms,” he says. “They hate hunger.”

“And if they’re hungry?”

“They crawl into you,” he says simply, and his eyes are not crazy; they’re convinced. “They’re looking for warmth.”

A lantern kindles behind you. “Curfew,” a voice says.

You turn. Jungwon holds the light up so it paints his face in bones and gold. Up close, his features soften—stillness without Sunoo’s practiced grace; a patient animal’s attention. The lantern makes a thicket of his lashes. He looks from you to Taesun to your bare feet on the cold boards.

“You’ll catch a chill,” he says to you, like it’s a personal offense. “Shoes. Now.”

You should resent the command. Instead, you feel the unreasonable urge to obey. You start toward the dorms.

“Not that way,” he says. “West path. Easier. Less slope.” He tips the lantern so the light doesn’t blind you while you pass. It’s a small courtesy. It also marks you—every guard on the walkway can see who broke curfew and who brought them back.

“Do you plant at night?” you ask, because silence around him feels like standing at a cliff’s edge and leaning a little too far.

“Always,” he says. He doesn’t volunteer more. His eyes drag briefly to your bandaged hand. “You left blood in the greenhouse.”

“I didn’t—”

He lifts two fingers, the gesture efficient and final. “The soil remembers.” His mouth twitches—not a smile, exactly; the ghost of one. “Mira talks too much.”

“Is that against the rules?”

“It’s against survival.”

He walks you to the dorm porch and stops at the bottom step like there’s an invisible line he won’t cross. The night carries pine resin and wet metal. You want to ask him what he plants without labels, what grows under lamps that mimic suns, why the staff wear rosaries made of seeds.

He says, low, “Don’t follow sounds you don’t understand.”

“Why?”

“Because some things here answer to being watched.” He tilts the lantern, and for a heartbeat you see something like a tenderness he hides even from himself. “Sleep.”

You try. You fail. When you finally slide under, it’s the shallow kind of rest that hears every hinge complain.

Morning stains the glasshouse pale gold. Breakfast is porridge and a shot glass of bitter green. “Chlorophyll,” Mira grimaces. “For purity. Or the aesthetic.” She scans the refectory like she’s counting exits. “There’ll be a Placement Walk after breakfast. Don’t volunteer. They love volunteers.”

“What is it?”

She cuts her eyes toward the greenhouse. “They take someone to the grove and ‘help them choose a garden name.’ Sometimes they come back with a wreath. Sometimes without their voice for a while.”

Director Seo taps her cup. “Today’s Placement Walk is for… Yejin.”

The graphite girl looks up, startled as a deer. Her pencil stills. Sunoo’s smile brightens by half a watt. “I’ll take her,” he offers, hand already extended. “I’ve seen her drawings. She understands transformation.”

If you didn’t sleep, you are alert now. Jungwon appears in the doorway like the building made him. His gaze flicks over the room, and when it lands on Yejin’s shaking knuckles, something barely visible tightens in his jaw.

“I’ll go with you,” he says to Sunoo without looking away from the girl.

“Of course,” Sunoo replies. Silk over steel. “Two witnesses. Very proper.”

They lead her out between them: the counselor with a palm light on her shoulder; the groundskeeper holding the door open so it doesn’t bite her. The room exhales when the door closes. Mira’s bracelets clink as her hands start to shake again.

“They’ll bring her back,” you say, because logic is a habit.

“Usually,” Mira says.

Taesun folds bread crumbs into his napkin with ritual care. “If the worms are fed.”

“Stop with the worms—”

He looks up, suddenly fiercer than his tremor allows. “This place eats. I just like to decide what it eats.”

You leave your spoon in your bowl. The porridge lurches in your gut like a tide. Through the greenhouse glass, you can’t see the grove, only the suggestion of trunks and a slit of path. Time grows teeth.

When they return, Yejin walks in her body like someone has moved the furniture. A crown of woven reeds presses her hair flat. There’s a smear of green at the corner of her mouth, like she’s chewed a leaf until it bled. She carries her sketchbook close to her chest as if it’s the last piece of herself no one has touched.

“What did you choose?” Director Seo asks.

Yejin’s voice is soft but intact. “Night-blooming cereus.”

“A flower that opens in darkness,” Sunoo says, pleased. “Perfect.”

Jungwon stands behind them, sleeves rolled to the elbow, forearms dirt-streaked. A single thorn scratches the back of his hand, a bright new welt. You don’t know why your chest warms at the proof that something here can still hurt them too.

As the room settles, Nurse Min touches your shoulder. “Consult,” she says, consonants rounded. In the clinic, she peels your bandage, checks the small cut, nods. “Fine.”

“Was the walk… normal?” you ask, too casual. “For Yejin.”

Nurse Min dabs salve with a gentleness that doesn’t fit her knife-edged face. “Normal is a shape you learn,” she says. “Here, it is round.” She taps your knuckle. “Don’t open yourself on purpose. Things may grow inside.”

“Like what?”

Her eyes flick briefly toward the greenhouse. “Names.”

By afternoon the schedule has you shoveling, watering, scrubbing, writing lines. I am ready to be less. You write it a hundred times until the words separate from meaning and become a pattern of stems and loops. Outside, Jungwon clears a new bed along the south wall. His shovel bites; his shoulders move with the reliable rhythm of practiced labor. A boy twice your size steps into his path and mutters something you can’t hear. Jungwon doesn’t raise his voice. He simply looks at the boy until the boy forgets how to stand where he’s standing and moves.

“Don’t stare,” Mira warns from beside you, but she’s staring too. “He notices.”

“He noticed last night,” you say.

Mira goes still. “You went out?”

“For air.”

“Air is how they catch you,” she whispers, and for the first time her cheer fails. “Promise me you won’t go alone again.”

You don’t promise. You also don’t say I don’t know who I am without alone.

At dusk, group again. Sunoo has you sit closer to him than yesterday. When you resist, he laughs softly, as if you’re charming rather than disobedient. “We sit where the light needs us,” he says. You wonder if that’s a rule or a line he likes. While others speak, he doesn’t look at them; he watches their hands, their throats, the wet edge of eyes. When your breath hitches at someone’s story, he turns his head sharply like a wolf hearing snow crack.

“What would you let go of?” he asks you, voice pitched so the rest of the circle hears only the question, not the ownership threaded through it.

You could say: the fire, the last call you ignored, the smell of burning hair. Instead, you say nothing. He accepts your silence as if it were obedience he taught you.

Outside the glass, Jungwon is a darker shape among dark shapes, moving a hose along the rows. When his head turns toward the circle, it isn’t to the whole; it is to you. He holds you there for a breath you feel in your wrists. Then he tips the hose, and water falls like rain on metal bones.

You sleep after midnight because your body ambushes you. You wake to weight. Not on you; in the air, a heaviness like weather. The greenhouse lights are out. The compound holds its breath.

Something is under your pillow.

You slide your hand beneath it and touch paper—the rough tooth of a sketchbook page. You draw it out under the dim nightlight and see yourself. Not flattering. Not cruel. Exact. You kneel on dark soil, mouth open, and something vines out—delicate stems laced with thorns. Hands—two sets—hold your shoulders lightly, possessively: one set with ink stains, one with dirt ground into the half moons of the nails. At the bottom, Yejin’s cramped script: “Some flowers only open when watched.”

Mira stirs. “What is it?”

“Art,” you say, and your voice surprises you with how steady it is.

“What kind?”

“Prophetic,” you answer, because the truth is an animal pacing the edge of the bed and you’re not ready to let it into your ribs yet.

You slide the drawing back under your pillow and close your eyes. Across the compound, the night shifts. In your mind, Sunoo’s smile threads petals through your tongue. In reality, Jungwon’s lantern skates once across the fogged panes, a slow-moving star. Two orbits, caught in the same sky, tightening.

Slow burn, the booklet promised. Healing begins when you stop resisting.

You do not stop.

You breathe. You listen to the soil remembering you.

And you wait.

______

Morning arrives with a whistle under the door and the faint itch of grit in your teeth, as if you’ve been speaking to the ground in your sleep. Breakfast is the same: porridge, a bitter green shot, tea that tastes like boiled bark. Mira counts sips, bracelets clinking like quiet alarms. Taesun crushes his toast to dust and pockets it, eyes bright with purpose. Yejin sits very still, crown of reeds damp against her hair, sketchbook closed for once like a door she’s guarding with her body.

Director Seo taps her cup. “Today begins the Mouth Fast,” she says, voice smooth as tile. “Speech is the first addiction. For twenty-four hours, we practice voicelessness. Carry your stone”—a monk in linen sets a bowl of river stones on each table—“and let it hold your words. Anyone who breaks the fast will do a double shift in the greenhouse trenches. Sunoo will lead stillness. Jungwon will direct labor.”

A murmur rises and dies, mouths pressing shut to prove eagerness. Mira puts a flat, oval stone in your palm. “Don’t lose it,” she whispers, already breaking the rule. “They’ll say the soil took your voice because you were careless.”

You tuck the stone into your sleeve and meet Sunoo’s eyes across the hall. He’s already watching—of course he is. The smile he gives you would be harmless if you hadn’t seen how he moves when he’s pleased: slower, closer, like a candle drawn to oxygen. Jungwon lingers by the service door with a clipboard and a coil of hose on his shoulder, scanning tables the way a shepherd counts sheep by the sound of their breathing.

Chores first. Outside, the air needles your lungs; the mountain wears its cold like a second skin. Jungwon assigns tasks without looking at his list. “Mira, refectory herbs. Taesun, east wall compost. Yejin, with Nurse Min in the clinic.” His gaze slides to you and steadies. “You—paths and drains. Stay out of the grove.” Not a suggestion.

You carry a stiff-bristled broom down stone paths glazed with last night’s dew. The greenhouse ribs glow under weak sun; from inside, lamps hum, and something leafy slaps damply as if it’s learned the shape of applause. By the east wall, Taesun kneels with a small shovel and a reverence that would be holy if it didn’t smell like rot.

He tips crumbs in a neat line, then pauses to show you something cupped in his palm: a white, blind tangle coiling in damp soil. Worms, yes, but too many knotted together, a living thread. He beams, proud. You force your lips into gratitude and keep sweeping. If you stop, you will hear them, and if you hear them, you will dream them.

A shadow falls across your broom. Jungwon holds out a pair of soft-soled garden shoes with the temporary patience of a man who prefers doing to explaining. “Your feet,” he says. “You bruise easily.”

You glance at your bare socks, damp to the ankle. “Is that a rule?”

“It’s a reality,” he says; the word lands like weight. He crouches without asking, sets the shoes on the path, and steps back, gaze down so you can decide if you’ll take his help. You put them on. They’re warm from his hands. He notices the lift of your breath and looks away so the noticing won’t embarrass you. When he straightens, his eyes snag on the river stone tucked in your sleeve. “Don’t drop that,” he says. “The ravens like to steal them.”

You arch a brow—Are you joking?—but he’s already moving, a steady, unshowy force among the clatter of chores.

By mid-morning the Mouth Fast is a taut cord running through the compound. The quiet isn’t peace; it’s suppression, and suppression hums. Sunoo runs stillness from the center of the greenhouse like a maestro conducting silence. He has you sit within his radius; you don’t know how you know that, but you do. When a guest’s shoulders begin to shake, his hand appears at the nape of their neck—just weight, just heat, just enough to persuade the body that obedience feels like care.

He comes to you last, when the lamps have warmed the panes to sweating. He kneels, not quite touching, gaze on your throat. “Your pulse is stubborn,” he says in a voice pitched for you alone. “It hates rhythm. I like that.” He brushes the air near your jawline, not touching, so you feel it anyway. “The stone will teach it obedience. If you’re good at listening.”

You hold his eyes and refuse to nod. He smiles, pleased with your defiance like a trainer who prefers wild animals because they make better trophies. “We’ll work on it,” he whispers, and stands.

After lunch—a bowl of broth filtered until flavor gives up—you’re pulled into the clinic with half a dozen others for “check-ins.” Nurse Min sits you on a stool and unwraps your finger. The cut is a thin mouth now, pink with newness. She touches a gloved finger to the gauze and sniffs it as if the body has a scent that changes when it’s lying.

“Does it itch?” she asks.

You hesitate. The truth is embarrassing. “Everything does,” you admit. “Under the skin. Like… like something wants out.”

“Something wants in,” she corrects mildly. She takes tweezers to the pad of your finger and draws out a hair-fine splinter you didn’t know was there. It isn’t wood—it’s pale and sappy, flexing like a root in the air. She drops it in a jar and screws the lid tight. “Names need medium,” she says. “Don’t let anyone put theirs under your skin.”

“Is that medical advice?”

“It’s survival.” She tapes a fresh bandage printed with tiny leaves, then, softer, “If you start tasting flowers, spit.”

You leave the clinic with your mouth dry as chalk. On the steps, Yejin waits like a shadow that forgot to attach to a body. She presses a folded paper to your palm and flits off before you can unfold it. In the corner of the page, her fast, lethal graphite: you in profile, throat open, something like a stem ghosting up under the jaw. In the negative space behind you, two silhouettes—Sunoo’s soft edges; Jungwon’s blunt solidity—blur toward one another without touching. Underneath, her careful script: Not yet. But soon.

The Mouth Fast bends afternoon into a colder shape. Without words, people show who they are. Mira hums under her breath and taps her stone against her teeth like a bead. Taesun counts breath with his fingers on his ribs. A new arrival—Hana, thirty and jewel-hard—walks like a woman who refuses to ask permission from the air. An older man, Mr. Ko, rows his spoon through soup with the concentration of a man pretending there is a river and a boat that can take him off this mountain.

At dusk, Director Seo calls for the Seed Burial. “We surrender what we’ve hoarded,” she says, and volunteers step forward with small slips of paper seeded with something that will sprout if the soil wants it. They kneel, press the papers into a rectangle of fresh-turned earth, and cover them with a thin skin of loam. The lamps go low. Sunoo stands at their backs. Jungwon stands at their front, shovel grounded like a staff.

You don’t move. You have nothing to bury you can stand to name.

A woman you recognize from orientation—the one who needed three days of sleep—places both palms flat on the soil like it’s someone she loves. Her breath hitches once; she swallows whatever it shook loose. As the last handful of earth covers the names, something beneath the surface shifts. Not the modest swell of seeds drinking. A shove from below.

The crowd stills. You feel it again—a push. The soil flexes and sighs, grains settling. Someone’s hand jerks back as if bitten. Sunoo’s smile does not change, which means it changes. “The ground recognizes an offering,” he says pleasantly. “Stand, flowers. Let the dark do what it’s for.”

Jungwon’s eyes are on the dirt, not the people. His jaw flexes once, twice. You have the sharp, childish thought—He hears it too—and the relief that follows is so naked you almost miss the fear riding it.

Night stitches the compound tight. The Mouth Fast persists: tongues held, little pantomimes replacing argument. In bed, Mira sleeps with her open palm on her stone like it might roll away. You face the wall because the drawing under your pillow is a magnet and your skull is iron.

A scrape wakes you—a quick, purposeful sound under the window. You slide out of bed and ease the latch. Cold breath pours in. On the path below, a lantern moves slow as a planet. You follow, soft-soled shoes silent on the boards, the stone in your sleeve tapping your wrist like a heart that’s climbed too high.

The lantern stops. Jungwon steps into its circle. He doesn’t look surprised to see you. He looks like a man who has laid a trap and found what he baited it for. He lifts the lantern just enough to catch your face without flaying you with light.

He puts a finger to his mouth—quiet—and crooks that same finger: come.

You should run. You go.

He takes you along the west path to a low, fenced plot you haven’t noticed in daylight, because in daylight everything looks like something else. Up close, the boards are stained darker than weather. He stops you with a hand on your sleeve. His grip is gentle; his hand is strong. “Do not speak,” he says, and for the first time today the command lands like care, not control.

He tilts the lantern over the fence. The light stratifies a pit maybe two meters long, maybe one deep, lined with rough timbers and crawling with the industry of decay. You see peels, stems, pot scrapings—normal compost—then catch on something pale threaded through like lace: cartilage? You squint, heart hammering, and in among the skins and stems you see hair—just a clump, just enough to be undeniable. The sour-metal stink under the rot answers a question you didn’t know you were asking until now.

You stagger, mute because the rule still binds your mouth. Jungwon’s hand rises like he planned for your body to try to leave you. He catches your elbow with two fingers and steadies you without pulling you closer. “Breathe,” he says, voice so low the pit swallows it.

You breathe. He watches your lungs move under your shirt as if measuring if they’ll keep their job.

“What is this,” you manage, a whisper that bruises the fast.

“Everything that isn’t needed,” he says. It is both the most honest sentence you’ve heard since you arrived and the worst one. “Don’t come here alone.”

“Why show me?”

His mouth tightens. He weighs the truth and hands you a ration. “Because you will go looking. Better you see what is true than what you can’t live through.”

He lifts the lantern away; the pit dissolves back into darkness. When he looks at you again, the composure you’ve seen him wear like a uniform slips an inch. “Next time,” he says, “wake me.”

“How?” It comes out harder than you intend. “Do I knock on the earth?”

“On my door.” He says it like a correction and a promise. “I’d rather carry you than find you down there with your throat open to the sky.”

You swallow. The stone in your sleeve digs your wrist bone.

He walks you back along the west path, keeping the lantern low so you don’t blind yourself and tumble. At the bottom of the dorm steps, he stops as if a line of salt has been poured between you. “Sleep,” he says. Then, almost grudgingly—no, carefully, like he fears generosity might teach you to expect it—“You did well.”

“You mean quiet,” you say.

“I mean you didn’t lie to yourself while you were looking.” He turns the lantern, and for a heartbeat your faces share a circle of light. It is not intimate, and it is.

Inside, the warm dark smells like bodies and disinfection. Mira turns in her sleep, bracelets whickering. Your hands shake. Not with the adrenaline of the pit—though that remains like a taste at the back of your throat—but with the realization that both men see you. Sunoo sees the mechanism; Jungwon sees the fracture line. You can’t decide which is worse.

The Mouth Fast breaks at dawn with a bell so soft it feels like a secret. Voices resume like a creek finding an old bed; people speak too loudly, then blush, then laugh at their own relief. Director Seo praises “compliance” as if it were a sacrament. In the refectory, mugs clack, spoons scrape. Words return as barter.

You don’t trust yours yet.

Sunoo flows through tables like sunlight convincing itself it’s holy. He catches your empty mug, pours tea, and sets it in front of you with a flourish that makes a few heads turn. “How did the silence fit?” he asks, lazy, interested. It isn’t small talk. It’s a probe shaped like kindness.

“Like wire,” you say.

He smiles, delighted—as if you’ve told him a secret about yourself he can use. “It looks good on you,” he says, and taps your river stone where it sits on the table as if he gave it to you, as if it obeys him too. “We have Talkback today. You and me.”

“Is that optional?”

“In principle,” he says. “In practice, most people prefer to be seen.” He leans in, lower voice. “You certainly do.”

He leaves before you can snap that you preferred to be alive, actually. Across the room, Jungwon stops at the threshold, takes the refectory in at a glance, and chooses a seat with his back to the wall. He eats fast, plain, as if food is fuel and surveillance is dessert. When he lifts his mug, you notice the fresh welt across the back of his hand—a thorn, yesterday, dragging its punctuation.

Talkback is held in a small room off the clinic, windowless, lit by a lamp that chooses flattery over truth. Sunoo sits too close, but because he knows what too close does to bodies, he leaves exactly enough air that you can fool yourself into thinking you could stand if you wanted to. He doesn’t touch you. He rests his forearms on his knees, hands open, posture full of a patience he wears like silk.

“What is the shape of your fear?” he asks, as if fear is polite enough to have geometry.

“Wide,” you say.

“Flat?”

“Deep.”

He grins. “Good. Honesty makes my job easier.” He looks at your mouth, then your hands, then your throat. “Last night you broke curfew.”

It isn’t a question. “I walked.”

“To the west path,” he says, savoring the corridor of it.

“Is that forbidden?”

“Not if you were with someone.”

You hold his gaze. You don’t look away. You don’t nod. You don’t give him Jungwon.

Sunoo’s smile returns, but thinner. “We don’t punish curiosity,” he says silkily. “We shape it.” He nods to your sleeve. “Keep the stone. I like how you sound when you hold it.”

“I didn’t speak.”

“You breathed differently,” he says, and you hate that you believe him. “This afternoon I want you in the greenhouse. We’ll do matching breath. I’ll keep count so you don’t have to.”

Your stomach remembers the pit and rolls. “What if I say no?”

“Then we’ll go slower,” he says, as if you asked him to make it sweeter. “That’s the kind of consent you like, isn’t it? The kind that arrives after your body learns the lesson.”

You stand because sitting feels like agreeing. He doesn’t stop you. He nods as if you’ve completed a task he set in his head.

“Good,” he says. “The roots are listening.”

Outside, the day is too bright in the way of mountains pretending to be gentle. You find Mira tending pots of kitchen herbs—mint, rosemary, a vicious little basil. “You look like you saw a ghost,” she says without looking up.

“I saw the compost,” you say.

She flinches so hard the basil shudders. “You don’t say it out loud,” she hisses, then checks herself, forces her voice calm again. “Names wake things.”

“Whose hair is in it?”

“Everyone’s,” she says. “Eventually.”

By late afternoon your muscles revolt, and stillness becomes a thing you have to hold down with both hands. In the greenhouse, Sunoo runs breath like a metronome. When he kneels behind a girl whose hands won’t stop shaking, he doesn’t touch her skin; he places his palm two inches away from her spine and waits. The girl’s shoulders ease; her breath learns his count. You hate him for it. You hate her relief. You hate that your body pays attention.

Jungwon moves along the rows with a bucket and a dull pruning blade, nicking stems, turning soil, resetting stakes. When a lamp pops and goes dim, he crosses to replace it without being called. On his way back, he passes near your mat—near, not past. The air shifts with him: sweat, iron, soil, a clean note like water running under rock. He doesn’t look down. He scratches the back of his wrist where a thorn welt cross-hatches older scars and says, as if the comment belongs to the room, “Some things only grow when you pretend you can’t see them.”

You don’t know if he means the plants, the people, or you.

Evening comes with teeth. The bell pulls everyone to the refectory; the sky sits heavy, swollen with weather that refuses to begin. Over dinner, Hana spills her tea and swears loudly enough that half the room jumps; then she laughs, tips her chin like she meant to do it, and glares at anyone who looks sorry on her behalf. Mr. Ko tells Taesun to stop feeding the worms like they’re pets; Taesun bares his teeth, half-smile, half warning. Nurse Min pockets a spoon someone bent into a hook. Director Seo watches it all with the small, sated smile of a zookeeper whose animals are thriving.

Night brings the first scream.

Not a long one. Not a movie howl. A single, keening note cut off hard, like a rope being cut. The compound freezes; forks stop halfway to mouths; breath holds. Sunoo is already on his feet, smile sharpened into usefulness. Jungwon’s chair scrapes; he’s moving before you can find your shoes.

They go toward the grove at a measured pace that says they already know what they’ll find. Director Seo lifts her hand. “Stay seated,” she says, and the command lands like weight on your shoulders. Mira’s fingers take yours under the table and squeeze so hard your knuckles grind. You squeeze back. Your mouth tastes like rosemary and fear.

You wait. The greenhouse sweats. The clock you aren’t allowed to see walks itself around the hour by the sound of your blood in your ears. When the door opens again, Sunoo comes in first, serene, coat unwrinkled. Jungwon follows with a bundled shape in his arms—a blanket, a softness of color, too long where a body should bend.

A gasp skips the room. “She fainted,” Sunoo says, which is both intolerably insufficient and the only story you’ll be allowed. “A cleansing reaction. She will rest. We will keep vigil over the names she surrendered.”

He doesn’t say who. Your mind fills the blank with the sleeping woman from breakfast, because that is who you fear for, and fear is a magnet. Jungwon carries the bundle past. You know how much weight that is—your body recognizes the set of his jaw, the economy of his gait. He does not look at you. He doesn’t look anywhere but the door to the clinic, as if any glance could spill what he’s holding.

The dining hall exhales like it’s been underwater too long. Director Seo claps once, neat. “We will not gossip,” she says. “We will not catastrophize. We will practice serenity.”

You don’t sleep. Not because you’re brave—because you’re scared correctly now, and scared correctly people stay awake. When you doze, you wake to the sensation that someone has put a leaf on your tongue and asked you to pray with it in your mouth. You spit into your sheet and find nothing. When you sit up, a shadow peels off the wall near the window and becomes Jungwon.

You nearly fling yourself out of bed. He doesn’t move, as if sudden gestures would spook you. He should not be in the dorms after lights; rules are their own religion here. He breaks this one like he breaks branches: cleanly, without apology.

“You left your shoes,” he says, low. He sets them at the foot of your bed, lined up, laces tucked. His voice is stripped of everything but function. “Don’t go barefoot again.”

“What happened?” you ask, whispering because anything louder might wake the dark.

“Don’t ask me,” he says, and for a breath you think he’s refusing. Then he adds, “Because I’ll tell you.” His gaze drags over your face, cataloging fine tremors, the cracked edge of your mouth, the way one hand fists in the sheet like rope. “Sleep,” he says. “You’ll need it.”

He is out the way he came, the door kissing its jamb like a secret.

You try to obey. The mountain presses its cold face to the window and listens. Somewhere, a lantern moves. Somewhere else, a man like a hymn kneels by a bed that is too light.

You put the river stone back in your sleeve and hold it against your pulse until the beat stops arguing with your bones. You remember the jar in Nurse Min’s clinic with the threadlike root curled at the bottom like a question mark. You picture Yejin’s hand drawing you with something under your skin you didn’t agree to carry.

Stillness was the promise. Obedience was the price. You have paid neither. Now the Garden pays attention.

And you, finally, are afraid.

_________

You wake with the taste of copper and rosemary slicked over your tongue, as if someone pressed a leaf there while you slept and whispered hold it. A welt has risen along your bandaged finger—thin, pale, almost pretty. When you press it, it flexes under the skin like something answering from underneath.

Breakfast is a choreography of clatter and eyes. Mira smiles too hard; her bracelets rattle out a code you can’t read. Taesun tips crumbs into his pocket with priestly concentration. Yejin’s crown of reeds has dried to a brittle halo; she draws with her pencil held like a knife. Hana sits mean and diamond-bright, daring the room to dull her edges. Mr. Ko’s spoon cuts the same path through porridge like a boatman refusing any other shore. Director Seo watches the surface of her tea the way people watch the sea for bodies.

“The Naming Rite will be held at sundown,” she announces, as if she’s asking for the salt. “Those selected have been notified.”

Sunoo lifts his eyes, and that’s your notification.

Mira’s fingers find your knee under the table and clamp. She shakes her head once, small, fast—refuse. You don’t know what refusal looks like here besides a story they will tell about you afterward.

“Drink,” Nurse Min says when you pass through the clinic to turn in your night report—how many hours asleep, how many awake, whether you dreamed of heat, teeth, drowning. She hands you a glass the green of pond water. You smell it, and it smells like lawn and iron. “Chlorophyll with a little hem,” she says, seeing your face. “Calms the heart.”

“Calms or slows?” Your voice scratches.

She cants her head. “Same action, different motive.” She glances at your finger. “Still itching?”

“It… moves,” you say, and the honesty makes your stomach pitch. “Like a thread.”

“Everything alive wants a home,” she replies. She peels the bandage with sure fingers. Underneath, the welt has subdivided into delicate veins, a fine network. Not veins. Veining. It looks like leaf. She presses the back of her glove along it; the pattern darkens, limned green under the skin. “Names need medium,” she repeats. “Keep your mouth closed in the greenhouse today. Even when you want to answer.”

You want to ask answer what, but Sunoo is in the doorway, dusk caught in the lamplight of his hair. He doesn’t knock; he glides in like permission. “Our new sprout,” he says, pleased to find you in a chair. “I’ll take her.”

Nurse Min’s mouth goes a little flatter. “She eats first.”

“Of course.” Sunoo’s smile doesn’t move. “Then we breathe.”

The greenhouse sweats. Heat lamps hum like insects; the glass with its rain of condensation blurs the mountain into a myth. Staff move among the rows with trays of soil sheets—thin paper seeded with something that glitters faintly when the light hits it wrong. “Embedded affirmations,” Sunoo tells the group. “You write what you’ll surrender. The seeds will carry it.”

Hana snorts. “Is the surrender refundable?”

Sunoo’s eyes quicken. “There’s always a transaction,” he says. “We just prefer you know the price.” He looks back to you. “Mat,” he says, and it isn’t a request.

You sit. He kneels behind you, palms hovering two inches from your ribs. No touch—just the sense of touch waiting. “Open your mouth,” he murmurs. The admonition from Nurse Min echoes; you clamp your lips. Sunoo’s pleased noise lands against your neck like breath. “Good. Breathe through your nose. In on four, out on six. I’ll count.”

His voice is a rope you have to grab to keep from slipping. When your breath shudders, he matches it; when it calms, he pursues. On the sixth cycle, something sweet pushes the air—lily, wet earth—and you remember the pit and want to be sick. “Stay,” he says, reading your recoil. “Stay where your body is. Don’t run from it. That’s where people rot.”

Across the rows, Jungwon replaces a cracked lamp with quick, sure hands. He doesn’t look at you until he does, a glance like a hand closing on the back of your neck. The air between you tightens. His forearms are netted with healed cuts, white against brown; a fresh welt crosses them like a red thread. When Sunoo says “out on six,” Jungwon turns the dial and the light hums obedient, and you wonder whether the whole building breathes to his count.

Yejin brings you a tray of seed-paper without being asked. When you reach, her gaze drops to your bandage. She moves the pencil like a blade and sketches the back of your hand: the delicate leaf veining, the suggestion of something wanting to break surface. She writes Not yet over the knuckles and slides the paper into your lap. Her mouth is a thin line; her eyes are large and dry and furious.

The day’s chores are smaller and meaner than yesterday’s. Scrub the condensation gutters. Rake. Haul sacks labeled Bone Meal that smell like old molars. Taesun sings under his breath in a language not meant for mouths and leaves a damp trail of crumbs along the east wall. Mr. Ko fetches and carries with blank efficiency, his face empty as a cleaned plate.

By late afternoon, a woman you know only as Auntie Hye—fiftyish, hair cut short for neatness, eyes that scan like a mother bird’s—begins to cough. At first it is dry and prim; then she hunches, pushes a hand to her chest and coughs wet. A ribbon of something bright pops free onto her palm. Petals. White. Tissue-thin and slick with saliva. A few guests laugh—nerves, delight, cruelty. Nurse Min is there before the room decides what to feel, hand under Auntie Hye’s chin, tissues ready. Hye coughs again, harder, and a clot of petals spills: red-tipped now, streaked. She hacks out a final cluster and sags. The tissues are sodden. The petals look like tongues.

“Pollination,” Sunoo says calmly. “Sometimes the body rehearses letting go by practicing bloom.”

Auntie Hye shakes her head, breath hitching. “I didn’t—” she starts.

Sunoo presses two fingers lightly to her throat. “You did.”

She closes her mouth.

Jungwon comes with a bucket and a flat spade; he scoops the petals into the bucket without expression. Your stomach tilts; you grip the bench until the wood prints itself into your palm. He doesn’t look at anyone. He takes the bucket toward the compost. You see his jawclench once when he passes the pit door and files that, like a photographed crime scene.

After the petals, other small horrors follow as if emboldened. A boy pulls his sleeve up to scratch and reveals a faint green tracery along his inner arm; when he scrubs at it, the skin reddens and puffs and the pattern brightens like a pressed leaf held to light. Mira slices a basil stem and it bleeds thin, clean sap; she runs her thumb along the cut and licks it without thinking, then startles at the taste and laughs too loudly. Taesun tips a paper cup into a drain, and a pale, slick worm writhes against the grate and splits into two thinner threads that both crawl the wrong way, toward his fingers. He coos like they’re babies and tucks them back into mud.

“Don’t feed your nightmares,” Nurse Min says without looking up from the woman whose mouth she swabs. “They grow fine on their own.”

By evening, the heat in the greenhouse feels like a hand that won’t lift. The lamps go low. Director Seo stands by the iron ribs with her clipboard like a prayerbook. “For the Naming Rite,” she says, “we welcome Sunoo as Voice and Jungwon as Hands.”

Voice and Hands. A division of power simple enough to live inside.

You are led—gently, unmistakably—toward the central bed, a rectangle of fresh loam bordered by smooth stones. Yejin edges after you, sketchbook clutched to her chest; Nurse Min blocks her with just a glance. “Not this,” Min murmurs. “Later.”

Mira steps forward—too fast—“I can go instead,” she says, smile like a knife wrapped in tissue.

Sunoo’s smile is silk on a nail. “We don’t barter names,” he says. “We harvest them.”

Your knees give. Not dramatic; a small buckling, the body remembering the ground. Sunoo’s hand is there without touching you, a near-weight at your shoulder. “Kneel,” he says, as if reminding you what your body already decided. “Head up. We face what we bring.”

Jungwon stands at the foot of the bed, shovel grounded. Close, his expression is the same flat steel as his blade. He looks at your throat the way carpenters look at walls: not hunger—assessment. When he speaks, his voice is small enough to belong only to the three of you. “Do you know what you’re giving?” he asks.

You try to say No. What comes out is “Something I can’t carry.”

“Good,” he says, and the word is not kindness. It’s calibration.

Sunoo’s fingers hover at your jaw, turning your face by the gravity of proximity. “Open,” he tells you, and your mouth obeys because your body recognizes a doctor’s tone even when it comes from someone who would rather be a priest. He places a petal on your tongue. It tastes like cold tea and a coin. “Hold,” he says. He waits. When you swallow despite yourself, his smile flares. “You see? The body knows ceremony even when the mind resists.”

He steps behind you. You feel his presence like a heat lamp. Jungwon moves to your side and holds out his hand. On his palm: a knife. Not sharp—its edge has been blunted until it’s a tongue of metal—but its point is honest. He waits until you meet his eyes; only then does he set the flat of the blade against your sternum. The steel is cool. Your skin fists under it.

“This is how we write it,” Sunoo says, and his breath touches the shell of your ear like a whispering moth. “Not deep. Not cruel. Not yet.”

The blade slides up without breaking skin, tracing between ribs, across the slow bell of breath—sternum, clavicle, the notch at your throat. The metal leaves a trail of gooseflesh; your pulse hammers against it like an animal trapped under the lid of a box. Jungwon’s other hand is steady at your shoulder, not pushing, not holding, just there, a second horizon the body can measure itself against.

“Name what cannot follow you,” Sunoo murmurs. It could be a real question. It could be a spell. Your mouth fills with the taste of flower and iron; words gather behind it like flies at meat.

You can’t say the fire; to say it would open something that the soil will keep. You say, “The last night.”

“Again,” Sunoo purrs.

“The last night,” you repeat, and the room tilts like a field under wind.

The congregation—guests in white, staff in linen—sways. Mira has both hands pressed to her lips. Taesun rocks in small, violent arcs. Yejin’s pencil moves; she draws you kneeling, two sets of hands marking you; she smudges the graphite so the air around you looks like breath or smoke.

The blade dips, lifts, comes to rest against your throat’s right side. You feel the exact spot where it would enter if it wanted to. Jungwon’s pulse is visible in his wrist; steady, heavier than yours. He moves the flat in a small crescent along the tendon, and your voice leaves you for a moment—pure reflex. A small, unpretty sound. Sunoo shivers behind you, pleased as if you performed a note he’d been coaching you toward.

“Do you understand the price?” Sunoo asks softly.

“No,” you say honestly.

“Beautiful,” he says, delighted. “No one ever does until after.”

He lifts the petal from your mouth with two fingers and lays it on your tongue again like communion. You hold it. Jungwon takes your left hand. His palm is rough and warm; soil lives in the whorls of his fingerprints. He pricks the pad of your finger with the very tip of the blunted knife, as if he wants to remind the blade of its older religion. A bead of blood swells, bright, neat. He turns your hand and presses that red to the seed-paper waiting in a shallow trench at the bed’s edge. Your blood bleeds into the paper like water into thirst.

“Now,” Sunoo says, voice dropped low enough to live in your bones, “we plant what you are not. So what you are can grow.”

Jungwon folds loam over the paper. The soil is cool even in this hothouse weather. It sucks at your finger when he presses your hand flat to it. Something moves underneath—something too quick for roots. Your stomach rocks. You try to pull back. Jungwon’s hand covers yours, firm as a yoke; Sunoo’s hand wraps your throat—not squeezing, just holding the column steady. You are pinned in two places that translate directly to obedience.

“Breathe,” Sunoo says.

You do. The soil under your hand warms like a mouth.

The congregation murmurs. Not words; the sound bodies make when they agree to a script. Director Seo watches like a reader flipping to the end to be sure it comes out as written. Nurse Min’s face has the set of a woman who’s decided to count a vein until morning.

The thing under the soil stills.

Jungwon lifts your hand and wipes the loam away with his thumb. The smear looks like war paint. Sunoo releases your throat and smooths his palm down the line his fingers left, a correction, an apology, a brand. He bends and whispers against your ear, “You belong to the ground,” and then, after a heartbeat, “and to us while you’re learning.”

His mouth never touches skin. The idea of it does.

The Rite closes with a bell that tastes like copper in your teeth. People file out as if stepping around a sleeping animal. Mira gets to you first, palms hot where she holds your face. “Drink water,” she hisses. “Don’t go to sleep. If you dream the name, it sticks.”

“I didn’t give it,” you say.

She laughs, a small animal sound. “You bled. That’s enough.”

Mr. Ko offers a clean handkerchief without meeting your eyes. Hana watches from a distance like a hawk deciding if a rabbit is worth stooping for when the field is full of easier meat. Taesun beams, mud on his lip, as if he’s just watched a very good wedding.

Yejin presses a drawing into your hand and vanishes. It’s you kneeling, hands marked, a line along your throat that is not a cut but knows where one would go. Over your shoulder, two shadows bend—one a heat-halo, one a blunt storm. Soon, she’s written. Don’t say yes with your mouth.

Night. The mountain holds its breath. The lamps in the greenhouse go black one by one until the glass is only a shape. You sit on your dorm bed and watch your hands not shake. Mira sleeps curled like a comma with her stone under her cheek. The drawing under your pillow warms to your scalp as if it wants to crawl into you.

A knock—not on the door. On the window, one knuckle, once. When you slide the frame, cold air pours in, and you think of Nurse Min’s keep your mouth closed in the greenhouse and keep it shut.

Jungwon stands below, lantern hooded, face lit just enough to make eyes and jaw. He tilts his head—come—and you go because your legs have learned this path. Out the back, down the steps, across the boards to the west path. He waits in the shadow of the shed where spades hang like a rack of tongues.

“Any dizziness? Nausea?” he asks, clinic-plain.

“Just… aware.” The word feels too small for your body’s rattled hum.

He grunts—approval. He reaches for your hand and turns the palm up. The loam under your nails has dried to fine grit. He rubs it away with his thumb, slow, methodical. It’s almost tender until you realize he is checking for changes—for the leaf-vein under your skin brightening, for anything moving that shouldn’t. When his thumb passes over the edge of your pulse, it jumps. He looks up sharply. You look away.

“You shouldn’t stay in the dorm tonight.” Matter-of-fact. “You’ll hear things like your name, and some of them will be for you and some won’t. You’re still soft. Soft things take impressions.”

“Where do I go?”

“My room.” Flat. Then, as if he heard how it sounds: “It’s safer. There are no plants there.”

“Is that true?”

“It’s true enough.” He waits. “Or go to the clinic and sit under Min’s lamp and let her count your breaths until morning.”

“Which would you pick,” you ask, because some part of you refuses to let him stand there and decide your body in his head without you in the room.

He takes too long to answer, then says, “The clinic is gentle.” A beat. “I am not.”

Wind combs the pines; the greenhouse ticks as it cools. Somewhere a raven laughs like a woman who knows your secrets and isn’t impressed.

“Choose,” he says quietly.

Sunoo’s shadow falls across the path before you can. He steps into the lantern’s circle like a storybook: pale wrists, clean hands, a smile that tells you exactly how he will use it. “Ah,” he says, soft delight. “My flower and my hands. I wondered where the night would put you.”

Jungwon does not step back. He also does not step forward. The lantern holds the three of you in a tight Venn where your breaths overlap. Sunoo tips his head, curious. “You can take her,” he says to Jungwon, which is to say I will let you. “But she’ll come back to me tasting like soil and fear, and we’ll start again from below.” He turns to you, voice honeyed and mean. “Or you can come with me and I’ll teach your body what calm feels like so you know when you’ve lost it.”

The polite violence of the options makes your stomach liquefy.

“Stop,” Jungwon says, and the word is a tool, not a plea.

Sunoo laughs softly. “The earth doesn’t stop growing just because you ask it gently.” He reaches, very slowly, and lifts your jaw with two fingers—not touching skin; his hand floats a whisper below it and your head lifts anyway, obedient to suggestion. “Show me your throat,” he says, and your body almost does it because it learned tonight and bodies like to repeat lessons. You hold yourself still out of spite. His smile warms. “Good girl.”

The words hit like a hand under your ribs. Jungwon’s breath changes. It darkens the air.

“Enough,” Jungwon says again, and hooks a finger in the lantern hood. He pulls it open. Light flares, pot-bright, brutal. The three of you blink; the world loses its beautiful edges and shows its seams. “Clinic,” he tells you.

Sunoo’s smile fades pixel by pixel until only his eyes shine. “For now,” he agrees. He steps in closer so there is no air between the three bodies but what breath can claim. He looks at Jungwon and speaks to you. “You’ll end up between us anyway,” he says, the prophecy flat, not cruel. “Why not learn the shape early.”

You should move. You should walk yourself to the nurse and let her count your lungs like prayer beads. Instead you stand very still while two men who have learned your pulse by different languages consider the currency of your fear.

Sunoo lifts his hand and stops a breath from your mouth. You feel the heat of him without the permission of touch. “I won’t kiss you,” he says, velvet and wicked. “Not yet.” He turns his palm and hovers over your throat, reading the rush there like a favorite book. “See what your body does with almost.”

Jungwon moves behind you so quietly the night forgets to mark his steps. He doesn’t touch you. His presence is so large it reads like contact anyway—the shape of him corralling air. You have the dizzy thought that if you leaned back, he would catch you, and if you leaned forward, Sunoo would open like a mouth.

“Breathe,” Sunoo whispers, and it isn’t instruction now; it’s a dare.

You do. The air leans with you. The world tightens to a triangle: lantern glare, the line of a blunted blade tucked into Jungwon’s belt, the faint copper on Sunoo’s knuckle where he touched your lip earlier with the petal.

“I said clinic,” Jungwon repeats, low enough to live at your spine.

“Make her say please,” Sunoo counters, amusement sweet as rot. “Our girl loves a ritual.”

“Don’t—” you start, and then stop, because the word tastes like surrender and you haven’t decided whose hands deserve it.

“Not tonight,” Jungwon says, and you understand: it isn’t mercy. It’s control deferred. He steps to your side, inserts a palm—warm, heavy—at your waist, not pulling, not pushing, just a point you can move along. Sunoo mirrors the motion on your other side without touching, an echo your nerves misread as contact. Together they guide you three steps, five, toward the clinic’s dim window—two gravities that agree for once.

At the threshold, Sunoo bends so close your ear warms. “Sleep,” he murmurs, the same command Jungwon uses like a blessing. “Dream of hands.” He smiles against the air where your skin ends. “Next time I’ll count for you while he holds you still.”

Jungwon’s hand tightens one notch at your waist, a warning, a promise, a brand pressed through clothes. “Next time,” he says, to Sunoo, to you, to the night that will keep at this until you’re rewritten, “I’ll decide who goes first.”

Nurse Min opens the clinic door before anyone knocks, lamp bright behind her like a little square sun. She takes in the triangle of bodies, the glint of the knife, the feral set of Sunoo’s mouth, the obedient steadiness of Jungwon’s hand at your side.

“Inside,” she says, and steps aside.

You pass between them—Sunoo’s almost-touch a heat across your throat; Jungwon’s real touch a line at your hip you could follow with your eyes closed—and cross into the light.

You do not kiss anyone. No one kisses you.

But as the door shuts and the mountain presses its ear to the glass to listen, you know it: your body already understands the shape they promised. It will remember. It will hunger.

And when it happens—when it really happens—it will not be an accident.

________

The clinic smelled of metal and mint. Nurse Min left you in a chair under her lamp until the feverish hum in your body dulled to a bearable pitch. She made you drink water, bitter and green as ditch weed, and held your wrist while your pulse rattled beneath her thumb. When you asked her if you were safe, she only said, “Nothing in a place like this is safe. At best, some things are safer than others.”

By the time she dismissed you, the compound had already gone to sleep. Mira was curled on her side in the dorm, bracelets stilled. You should have slept too. Instead you lay awake, tasting the memory of a petal pressed against your tongue, feeling the phantom weight of Jungwon’s hand steady at your waist, the ghost of Sunoo’s fingers just shy of your throat.

Your body remembered. It remembered too well.

When you finally slipped into the corridor, your bare feet soundless on the boards, it wasn’t to find air. It was because something in you had already decided that the ache would not stop on its own.

The greenhouse loomed against the night, ribs of iron and glass sweating mist. The lock had never been for people who wanted to stay out. You pushed the door and it sighed open, warm air rushing at you like a mouth.

He was waiting. Of course he was.

Sunoo leaned against a bench, sleeves rolled, pale wrists glowing under the lamps. His expression was the same one he’d worn when he laid the petal on your tongue earlier—delighted, expectant, like he had always known your body would come back to him.

“You breathe too loud when you lie down,” he murmured. “I could hear you from the other side of the hall.”

You should have left. You stepped closer instead.

Sunoo reached for you without touching, fingers tracing the air beside your cheek. That almost-contact burned hotter than heat itself. Your breath caught, and his smile sharpened. “See? Your body tells the truth. It remembers me already.”

His hand hovered down, stopping at the hollow of your throat. “Here,” he whispered. “Where the pulse lives.” He bent, mouth a whisper away from your skin, never quite sealing it. Your nerves screamed as if he’d kissed you. “You want me to touch you. That’s why you came.”

Your denial scraped your teeth but never left your tongue.

“Good girl,” he said, pleased at your silence. He turned you, pressing between your shoulder blades until your knees bent and you landed on the warm boards of the floor. “Stay open. Stay soft.”

His hands came at last—sliding along your thighs, parting them without rush, without doubt. He dragged his thumb along the cotton of your thin shorts, pressing until the damp there gave you away. “Blooming,” he said reverently, as if the word itself could coax you wider.

You gasped when he pressed harder, the friction maddening. He laughed low in his throat, pleased. “You’ve been waiting since the Rite, haven’t you? You swallowed the petal and your body begged for more.”

He tugged fabric aside with clinical precision, exposing you to the humid air. His fingers slicked easily through the wetness already gathered, and he made a sound of satisfaction that went straight to your gut. “So ready,” he crooned. “So obedient.”

Two fingers circled, teased, pressed—but never where you needed. He watched your hips shift, your breath stutter. “Say please,” he murmured.

“I—”

“Shh.” His free hand covered your mouth lightly, thumb grazing your lower lip. “Not with words. With your body.”

Your thighs trembled. You pushed into his hand, desperate. His smile widened. “There it is. Begging without speech.”

He slipped two fingers inside, slow, deliberate. Your back arched, a strangled sound caught behind his palm. He curled them just right, hitting the place that made you shiver, made your eyes roll back. “Yes,” he whispered against your ear. “That’s it. That’s how you bloom.”

His palm pressed harder over your mouth as your moans broke free. His rhythm quickened, fingers thrusting, scissoring, spreading you open as if he meant to plant something inside. Every push forced slick sounds into the greenhouse air. He bent low, lips brushing your temple, murmuring praises between each thrust: “Perfect. My good flower. Opening just for me. No one else will see you like this.”

Your orgasm came sudden, brutal—your whole body snapping tight around his hand, shuddering against him. He kept moving, dragging it out until you were gasping into his palm, thighs twitching.

When at last he withdrew, his fingers glistened. He lifted them to your lips, smearing wetness across them before pushing between. “Taste yourself,” he ordered softly. “Know what you are to me.”

Shame and hunger tangled in your chest. You sucked his fingers clean, and his eyes darkened, mouth parting as if he might finally kiss you. He didn’t. He pulled back just enough to leave you desperate, to make absence itself a cruelty.

“Blooming,” he whispered again, satisfied. “And tomorrow, you’ll be ready for the soil.”

The greenhouse door creaked. You jerked, Sunoo still crouched over you, his slick fingers withdrawing with deliberate slowness.

Jungwon stood in the doorway, lantern spilling gold over his dirt-streaked arms. His jaw tightened as his eyes tracked the wet shine on your lips, the way your legs trembled, the smug curve of Sunoo’s smile.

For a long, brutal moment, no one spoke. Then Jungwon stepped forward, shovel still in one hand, and his voice came out rough, dangerous.

“She’s mine next.”

The lamps hummed. The soil smelled of iron. Your heart beat against your throat like a trapped bird as the two men stared across you, and you realized the next time you were touched, it would be by both.

And you would not escape it.

______

The night you tried to run, the mountain gave you away.

The boards beneath your feet creaked, wet leaves clung to your calves, and the fog was a hand on your throat. You ran anyway. Past the dorms, past the glasshouse ribs glowing faintly from their lamps, down the west path where the ravens laughed like women who knew your secrets.

You thought the dark would cover you.

But the dark belonged to him.

A hand caught your wrist so hard you nearly went down. The lantern flared, and Jungwon’s face came out of the mist—eyes black, jaw locked, the muscle jumping with rage he didn’t bother to soften. He dragged you against him, chest heaving like you’d run into a wall that had learned how to breathe.

“Running,” he said, voice low and sharp as a spade. “After I told you not to.”

“I—”

“Quiet.” His grip on your wrist tightened until your bones ached. “Do you know what he did to you in there? Do you know what you smell like? Soil and him.” His other hand closed hard around your chin, forcing you to meet his eyes. His breath came hot, furious. “I told you not to let him touch you.”

Your protest was thin. “I didn’t—”

“You did.” He shoved you back against the rough bark of a pine. The trunk dug into your spine; his body crowded yours, heat and dirt and something mean. “You opened your mouth. You let him put his fingers in you.” His hand slid down your throat, pressing just enough to make your pulse throb under his palm. “Do you think that makes you his?”

“No—”

“No,” he repeated, mocking and brutal, pressing harder until your words broke into breath. His eyes raked you up and down like he was reading your body for lies. “You’re mine. If you’re soil, then I’m the one who plants.”

The knife appeared from his belt—not sharp, its edge long since blunted, but the point still honest. He held it flat against your belly, dragging it up under your shirt until the cold metal kissed the underside of your breast. You shivered, body jerking against the bark. His mouth twisted, equal parts fury and hunger.

“Scared?” he murmured. “Good. Fear makes roots dig deeper.”

He hooked the blade under the band of your shorts, pulling until the fabric stretched and then snapped. His hand shoved inside without pause, fingers rough, pushing into you like he meant to stake a claim. You gasped, the sound choking against the hand still at your throat.

“Wet,” he said, voice a growl, face close enough you could feel every word on your skin. “You’re soaked for me already. Even after him. Especially after him.” His fingers thrust harder, curling, relentless, forcing your body to answer him. “Say it. Say whose you are.”

You shook your head, too proud, too broken to give it.

His mouth curved cruel. “Then I’ll fuck it into you.”

He yanked your shorts down to your thighs, lifted you bodily against the tree, and shoved his hips between your legs. You clawed at his shoulders, half to push, half to hold on, but he pinned you easy, the knife’s flat pressed to your throat now like a brand. His cock pressed hot and thick against your entrance, grinding through the slick he’d found there, rubbing until you whined.

“You hear that?” he hissed, rolling his hips, dragging the head over your folds until obscene wet sounds filled the air. “Your body begging me in front of the whole fucking mountain.” He pushed in one brutal stroke, burying himself deep, forcing a cry from your throat. His teeth bared at the sound, savage triumph. “That’s it. Open up. Take me.”

He fucked you hard against the tree, every thrust jarring bark into your spine, every shove brutal and unrelenting. The knife never left your throat—flat, cold, reminding you what he could do if he wanted. His free hand gripped your hip so hard you knew you’d bruise, dragging you down onto him, using your body like it was already his.

“Mine,” he snarled against your ear, hips slamming. “Not his. Not anyone’s. Mine to fuck. Mine to plant. Mine to keep.” His pace grew rougher, desperate, jealousy bleeding into possession. “You’ll carry me. You’ll take my seed. You’ll remember whose cock fucked you open like this.”

Your moans tore free, high and broken, every thrust forcing them out. He laughed, breathless, mean. “Good little soil. Look at you—taking it. Clenching so tight you’ll never forget.”

When you came, it was with your whole body jerking, nails raking his back, his name spilling without permission. He fucked you through it, ruthless, using your climax to milk himself. With a final, brutal thrust, he came inside you, grinding deep, growling your name like a curse and a prayer.

He stayed pressed to you, chest heaving, the knife slipping down to rest against your collarbone. He didn’t soften. He didn’t let go. His mouth found your jaw, biting hard enough to leave a mark.

When he finally pulled out, slick running down your thighs, he yanked your shorts back up roughly, like covering you was a punishment. He grabbed your wrist again, dragging you toward the compound.

“You’re not sleeping in the dorms,” he said, voice iron. “You’re mine now. My room. My bed. No one else touches you.”

The lantern swung, throwing gold across the path. His grip never loosened. You stumbled after him, body raw, used, filled, the echo of his thrusts still beating through you.

And you knew he wasn’t bluffing.

______

Jungwon’s grip on your wrist was iron, dragging you through the silent hallways until the greenhouse lamps and dorm windows disappeared. His door slammed behind you, the bolt driven home with the finality of a lock on a coffin. His room was small, spare, stripped bare of comfort—just a bed, a chair, his tools. No flowers, no soil. Only him.

He shoved you onto the mattress like you weighed nothing. Your body jolted, still slick, still aching from what he’d already done. He stood over you, chest rising and falling hard, sweat at his temples, jaw clenched like a vice.

“You don’t go back to them,” he growled. “Not Mira, not Seo, and never him.” His eyes burned. “You’re mine.”

Your breath hitched; the word stuck in your throat.

A voice cut through the dark. “You’re wrong.”

The lantern on the desk flared, spilling its glow across pale wrists, white robes loosened at the chest, a mouth curved in that familiar, cruel delight. Sunoo. Already inside. Already waiting.

Jungwon stiffened, shoulders tensing like a predator finding another in his territory. “Get out.”

Sunoo ignored him. He stepped closer, his smile syrup-sweet but eyes sharp. “She doesn’t belong to you alone. Look at her.” His gaze slid over you where you trembled on the bed, your thighs pressed together, your lips parted from shallow breaths. “She’s terrified. She’s confused. She needs gentleness.” His tone softened, dripping like honey. “And you can’t give her that.”

“Gentle doesn’t keep her alive,” Jungwon snapped, stepping between you and him, shovel-callused fists at his sides. “Gentle lets her rot.”

“Alive?” Sunoo laughed, low and dangerous. “She’s not alive. She’s blooming. That’s what I make her.”

“Blooming,” Jungwon spat, “is just another word for open. And I’m the one inside her.”

The words made your stomach twist; heat and fear tangled until you couldn’t tell the difference. You tried to speak—stop, please stop—but your throat locked.

Sunoo’s gaze darted back to you, softening. He crouched, ignoring the way Jungwon loomed above him. His hand hovered just shy of your ankle, not touching—never touching—but the heat of him crawled up your skin. “Petal,” he whispered, “don’t be afraid. I’ll take care of you. I’ll show you how it feels to be cherished.” His lips parted, almost grazing your skin as he breathed you in. “Let me taste you.”

Jungwon’s growl shook the air. He seized your arm, yanking you back against his chest, his hand spread possessive across your stomach. His cock, still half-hard, pressed against your spine. “She’s mine. Mine to fuck. Mine to plant. Mine to keep.”

Your body shuddered. Fear, yes—but deeper, darker: want, shame, hunger you couldn’t smother.

Sunoo’s smile only widened. “Then let’s see who she opens for first.” He slid closer, slipping between your knees before Jungwon could stop him. His breath fanned over your thighs, hot and wet, and you gasped when he finally touched you—soft, reverent, his hands parting you like something fragile.

The contrast made you dizzy. Jungwon’s grip bruised; Sunoo’s mouth pressed feather-light kisses along the inside of your thigh, slow, teasing, as if every touch was worship. “Sweet,” he murmured, nose brushing close to the heat of you. “So sweet. I’ll make her sing.”

“Don’t you dare—” Jungwon started, but your body betrayed you, hips twitching toward Sunoo’s mouth, a whimper breaking past your lips.

That sound changed everything.

Jungwon froze, then snarled, shoving you down into the mattress, caging you with his body. One hand pinned your wrists above your head; the other tore your shirt open down the middle, fabric splitting under his strength. His mouth crashed to your throat, biting, marking, sucking bruises into your skin with furious precision.

Sunoo groaned at the sight, as if Jungwon’s violence only made you more beautiful. He leaned in, finally sealing his lips over your cunt, sucking hard, tongue lapping deep through your folds. The wet sounds filled the room, obscene, echoing against the bare walls.

You cried out, the noise muffled against Jungwon’s hand when he clapped it over your mouth. “Quiet,” he hissed, teeth at your jaw. “Don’t give him the satisfaction of hearing how much you love it.”

But Sunoo knew anyway. He moaned against you, tongue flicking your clit, fingers sliding inside with practiced ease, curling just right. He fed off every twitch, every muffled scream, every desperate roll of your hips. “See?” he said between licks, voice thick with arousal. “She opens for me. She’s blooming already.”

Jungwon pressed harder, grinding his cock against your hip through his pants, furious at your body’s betrayal, at the way your thighs trembled around Sunoo’s head. “She’s dripping because I fucked her raw,” he snarled. “All you’re doing is licking up what I left in her.”

The words made your body jerk, shame and desire hitting like lightning.

Sunoo pulled back just enough to look up at you, his mouth shining with your wetness, his eyes dark and soft. “You taste like need,” he whispered. He dragged his tongue slowly over your clit, savoring the way you cried out under Jungwon’s palm. “And you’ll remember I was the first one who made you come with his mouth.”

“Shut up,” Jungwon snapped. But his own hips rolled against you, his cock throbbing, desperate. His jealousy only sharpened his need.

You couldn’t fight it. You came hard, body arching, Sunoo’s mouth sucking your clit, Jungwon’s hand holding you down, his teeth biting at your throat. Your orgasm tore through you like the roots of something invasive, clawing deep, unstoppable.

They didn’t stop.

Sunoo licked you clean, gentle as a lover, humming like he was savoring wine. Jungwon bit harder, grinded rougher, his hand forcing your wrists deeper into the mattress. Both of them on you—one soft, one brutal—until you didn’t know whose name to scream.

And you understood, with raw clarity, that they weren’t fighting for you.

They were fighting through you.

When the shudders finally broke, you collapsed back, gasping, throat raw. Jungwon leaned down, lips brushing your ear, his voice a growl. “This is just the beginning. Next time I’m inside you while he’s in your mouth. We’ll see who you really belong to.”

Sunoo laughed softly, licking his lips clean of you. “She’ll belong to both.”

And for the first time, you realized he was right.

_____

Your body was still shaking when Jungwon yanked you upright, dragging you into his lap as if the bed belonged only to him. His thighs were iron beneath you, his chest hard against your spine. One arm locked around your waist, the other snared your throat, thick fingers spreading wide until his grip owned the column of your neck. He forced your head back, baring your mouth to him.

“You’ll taste me now,” he snarled, lips crashing into yours.

The kiss was brutal—teeth knocking, spit spilling. He shoved his tongue deep, choking you with it, swallowing every noise you tried to make. His palm pressed tighter at your throat until your pulse roared in your ears, until breath itself became something you had to beg him for. Drool slicked your chin, his tongue forcing yours down, his grip refusing to let you turn away. It was less a kiss than a violent claiming, his mouth fucking yours the way his cock had already fucked your body raw.

You gasped when he pulled back just enough to let air in, a string of spit hanging obscenely between your mouths. He licked it off your bottom lip, then spat into your mouth deliberately, cruelly, watching you swallow because you had no choice.

“Open,” he growled, forcing your jaw wider with his hand at your throat. “Good. That’s mine too. Every sound. Every swallow.”

Your vision blurred; your thighs squeezed together involuntarily. Terror and heat tangled until you couldn’t breathe for either.

And then Sunoo was there.

He crouched in front of you, hands sliding up your knees to part them wider, his smile infuriatingly calm even in violence. “My turn.”

“No,” Jungwon bit out, but Sunoo was already moving. He grabbed your chin, fingers digging in hard enough to bruise, and wrenched your head away from Jungwon’s mouth. Your neck snapped to the side, and before you could gasp, Sunoo’s lips were on yours.

It wasn’t tender. It was vicious. He sucked your bottom lip until it split, teeth biting down until pain shot bright, then licked the blood from your mouth as if it belonged to him. His tongue drove past your teeth, tasting everything Jungwon had left there, devouring it with obscene relish.

You moaned helplessly, the sound muffled between them.

Jungwon’s grip on your throat tightened, forcing your head back further, rage pouring off him like heat. “She’s mine.”

Sunoo broke the kiss just long enough to sneer against your wet mouth. “Then why is she kissing me back?” He pressed his tongue to yours again, slow and filthy, sucking until spit ran down your chin. Then he pulled back, wiped it with his thumb, and shoved the slick digit back between your lips. “Lick it clean. That’s mine now.”

Your mouth obeyed before your brain caught up.

Jungwon’s chest vibrated with a growl. He bent and bit your jaw, then your throat, leaving purple marks against Sunoo’s fingerprints. His hand clamped your neck harder, forcing you to gasp around Sunoo’s thumb.

“She’s choking on me,” Jungwon snarled. “Not you.”

Sunoo laughed low, mean. He leaned closer, his forehead pressing to yours, his other hand grabbing Jungwon’s wrist on your throat, not to stop it, but to squeeze it tighter. “Then let’s choke her together.”

The pressure doubled. Your eyes watered, spit pooling at the corner of your mouth, drooling down your chin as both of them held you, forced you open, forced you to take them. One mouth kissed you, sucked you, spat into you; the other bit, bruised, pressed your throat until stars danced.

You weren’t kissing anymore. You were being consumed.

And God help you—your body wanted more.

_______

They had you caged between them—Jungwon at your back, Sunoo at your front—two sets of hands closing every door your body might have tried to escape through.

Your pulse beat frantically against Jungwon’s palm at your throat. Sunoo’s fingers dug into your chin, keeping your face tipped up so you couldn’t hide. Their mouths had already ruined you, spit running down your jaw, bruises blooming on your throat and collarbone like dark flowers. Your chest rose too fast, every breath their permission, every sound something they stole from you.

“You see?” Sunoo whispered, voice as sweet as it was cruel. “She’s ready. She’s shaking for us.” His hand slid down, brushing your stomach, spreading lower. “The soil is wet.”

“She’s wet because I fucked her open,” Jungwon snapped against your ear, his breath harsh. “She’s mine to fill.” He ground his cock against your ass through his pants, thick and hard, a promise of what was coming. His teeth found your neck again, biting until your body arched despite yourself.

The two of them moved you as if you were theirs to arrange. Your thighs were forced wide over Sunoo’s lap, your back crushed to Jungwon’s chest. Rough hands tugged your ruined shorts away; cool air hit the slick heat between your legs. Sunoo hummed like a priest receiving an offering.

“Let me taste again.” He didn’t wait for permission. His mouth descended, sucking your clit into his mouth, tongue lapping at you until your eyes rolled back. His hands locked on your thighs, holding you open for him, his moans vibrating into your cunt.

Jungwon shoved your wrists down into the mattress, his cock rutting against you through fabric, his fury pressed into every grind. “Listen to her,” he growled. “Dripping for us. Begging without words.” He yanked his pants open, the blunt head of his cock dragging along your ass, smearing precum. “She’s going to take both. Right now.”

You sobbed, terror and need colliding until you couldn’t tell them apart. “I can’t—”

“You can,” Sunoo cut in smoothly, lifting his head, chin wet with your slick. He stroked your trembling thighs with a mockery of gentleness. “Your body’s already opening. We’ll guide you.” His eyes glimmered, half-devotion, half-madness. “You’ll bloom for us together.”

Jungwon spat into his palm, gripped his cock, and shoved it between your cheeks, rubbing the head against your tight hole until you whined. “Scared?” he hissed, his hand tightening at your throat. “Good. Fear makes you clench tighter.”

Sunoo’s fingers slid inside your cunt again, curling, coaxing, slicking you up for him. He looked up at you, his smile soft even as he stretched you ruthlessly. “Breathe, petal. I’ll be inside you soon. You’ll be so full you won’t remember how to be empty.”

When Sunoo lined himself up, pressing the head of his cock against your soaked entrance, Jungwon shoved his tip harder at your ass, both of them pushing at once. Your cry ripped the air as your body was forced to split, one cock stretching your cunt, the other pressing past the tight ring of muscle until you thought you’d break.

“Fuck,” Jungwon groaned, voice raw. “So tight. Gripping me like a fist.”

“She’s perfect,” Sunoo sighed, already sinking deeper, your walls convulsing around him. “Taking both of us. Our flower.”

It was too much. The stretch burned, overwhelming, obscene. You clawed at the sheets, eyes rolling back as both of them bottomed out, your body trembling violently with the force of being split in two. They didn’t give you time. Jungwon’s hips snapped forward first, brutal, pounding into your ass with the fury of jealousy. Sunoo met him stroke for stroke, slower, deeper, angling until every thrust speared your cunt exactly where it made you scream.

Pinned, stuffed, broken open—you were nothing but their vessel.

“Say it,” Jungwon snarled, hand squeezing your throat until your vision blurred. “Say you’re mine.”

“She’s ours,” Sunoo countered, kissing you, sucking the spit from your mouth, swallowing your gasps. “Tell us, petal. Tell us who you bloom for.”

Your answer was a sob, a whimper, a strangled cry as their cocks moved inside you, filling every inch, grinding against each other through the thin wall of your body until the sensation drove you half-mad.

“Fuck, I can feel him through you,” Jungwon groaned, rutting harder, holding you down as if you might try to run again. “But you’re squeezing me tighter. That’s how I know you’re mine.”

Sunoo’s tongue licked the tears from your cheeks. “She’s crying for me. Look at her. Look how she wants to be saved even while we ruin her.”

Your body convulsed around them, slick gushing down your thighs, every nerve alight. The pain blurred into pleasure until you were begging without words, your nails tearing the sheets, your cries spilling into their mouths as they fought to own your climax.

When you came, it was devastating—your cunt and ass clenching around them both, milking them, dragging them deeper. Jungwon groaned, teeth sinking into your shoulder as he spilled inside you, hot and overwhelming. Sunoo followed seconds later, filling your cunt until you were overflowing, cum dripping down your thighs, both of them holding you so tightly you couldn’t breathe.

They didn’t pull out. They stayed locked inside, cocks twitching, their breaths harsh against your skin.

Jungwon’s hand squeezed your throat one last time, forcing your eyes to his. “Say it,” he demanded, voice hoarse. “Say you’re planted in me.”

Sunoo kissed your cheek, softer but no less cruel. “Say you’ll bloom for us both.”

And you, too full to think, too wrecked to fight, whispered the only truth left in you:

“I can’t belong to just one.”

They smiled—different smiles, but the same hunger.

And you knew you’d never escape again.

_______

woah this was so diffecult to write SO IM SORRY IF IT ISNT THE BEST

THANK YOU FOR READING!!

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[lollovern]

- The Garden Left to Rot -

enhypen masterlist

wattpad

inspired by this post

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groundskeeper!yang jungwon x guest!femreader x cult counselor!kim sunoo | obsessive romance | cult horror | forced devotion | ritualistic sex | jealousy and rivalry | fucked-up love triangle | knife kink | corrupted comfort | you will belong to someone eventually | DARK CONTENT AHEAD!!

wc: 14k

summary: You’re sent to a grief recovery retreat hidden in the mountains. But this isn’t therapy — it’s a cult blooming in blood and rot. Jungwon wants to bury you where no one else can touch you. Sunoo wants to crack you open until you bloom for him. Both say it’s healing. But it’s obsession.

warnings: extreme gore, threesome, cult rituals, body horror (flowers under skin, insect scenes), blood play, forced confinement, psychological manipulation, emotional degradation, knife play, religious delusion, obsessive behavior, toxic romance, dubcon themes, ritualistic sex, hallucinations, violence

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The van climbs until the road forgets how to be a road. Pines crowd close; fog slicks the windshield like breath on glass. By the time the driver kills the engine, your phone has been surrendered, the waiver signed, and your name—your real one—folded into a sealed envelope with your belongings.

A hand-painted sign leans crooked against a stone pillar: THE GARDEN.

Beneath it, smaller script: Let go. Become.

Everyone here is an adult—paperwork made that clear. Still, the cluster of arrivals huddle like freshmen. A woman in a bone-white coat stands at the gate, serene as a photograph. “Welcome,” she says. “I’m Director Seo. You won’t need last names here. You won’t need yesterday.” Her smile doesn’t reach her eyes. “We begin with stillness.”

Stillness smells like damp soil and rosemary. The compound spreads in tiers: a glasshouse ribbed with iron; dormitories with shuttered windows; a refectory where steam fogs the panes; a low clinic painted the color of milk. The greenhouse breathes—a pulse of heavy, sweet air each time the door opens. Inside, rows of lilies lean toward heat lamps; vines net the rafters; something rustles in the loam.

“Orientation,” says the boy who appears at Director Seo’s shoulder. He’s young—early twenties—with paper-clean features and the kind of smile people don’t realize is a blade until it’s already inside them. Kim Sunoo. His name tag says Counselor; the ribbon beneath it says Ritual Lead. “Shoes off in the greenhouse,” he adds lightly. “We keep the floors soft.”

Your shoes leave the ground. Cool boards. Warm mist. A bell rings once. The arrivals form a circle on woven mats; a dozen white-robed staff ghost the edges. A few guests have the shaved look of hospital discharge; others wear expensive emptiness like cologne.

“Here,” Sunoo says gently, “we do not share pasts. Only needs.” His gaze slips over faces and lands on you. Not a leer. A selection. “You may speak or sit in silence. Both are honest.”

“I need to sleep,” says a woman with chewed nails. “Like, three days.”

“I need to stop remembering,” a man answers, voice flat.

The girl beside you—twenty-two, maybe—says nothing. Yejin is stitched on her wristband. Her hands are ink-stained. She draws while people talk: a quick, vicious graphite—faces with petal-mouths; ribs like trellises. When you shift, she tilts her sketchbook so you can see the newest figure: a person kneeling in dirt, throat blooming with something that isn’t a flower.

“Beautiful,” Sunoo murmurs, as if he’s praising a child’s first recital. “You have a keen eye for transformation, Yejin.”

From across the greenhouse, someone drags burlap sacks along iron grates. Soil dark as coffee spills from a split seam and oozes across the floor. The man hauling the bags moves like he’s apologized to gravity and refuses to do it again. Yang Jungwon. Groundskeeper on his tag. Grey work shirt. Forearms nicked white with old cuts. He doesn’t look at the circle—doesn’t look at you—until he does, and then he doesn’t stop. Not curiosity. Assessment, like weighing a seed between finger and thumb and deciding if it will live in his earth.

Director Seo outlines rules in the smooth tone of a stewardess reciting crash procedures:

No personal histories in group.

No contact with family for the first fourteen days.

No unsupervised access to the greenhouse after dusk.

Do not remove plant material from designated zones.

What is given to the soil remains in the soil.

“That includes grief,” Sunoo says, almost playful. “Especially grief.”

Your dorm is clean in the way of hospital corridors and mortuaries. Two metal beds. Two lockers. A copy of a softbound booklet on each pillow: STILLNESS GUIDE. Your roommate arrives with a jangle of bracelets and the brittle cheer of someone who learned to smile as self-defense. Mira, 26, volunteer-turned-resident-mentor.

“Welcome-welcome,” she chirps, then lowers her voice. “Pro tip: keep your head down the first three days. They watch how you watch.”

“Who?”

“Everyone.” She flicks her gaze toward the window, where the greenhouse skeletons against dusk. “Especially him.” She means Sunoo—you can hear it in the soft, reverent way. “And the groundskeeper when it’s dark.” That last part is almost a warning.

The bell rings again. Dinner is broth that tastes like the inside of a leaf and bread dense with seeds. You eat at long tables while staff move among you like shepherds. Across from you, a jittery young man, Taesun—24, scars like cat-scratches up his wrists—piles his crusts and crumbles them methodically. He pockets a handful when he thinks no one sees.

“For the worms,” he whispers to the crumbs. “They get hungry at night.”

Mira nudges your knee under the table. “He feeds them behind the east wall,” she murmurs. “Says they keep the nightmares down if they’re busy.”

In the clinic after dinner, a nurse swabs your fingers where the paper edges of the waiver bit skin. Nurse Min is beautiful in the harsh way of women who have decided their faces are weapons. When she says “this will sting,” the consonants soften strangely; a long surgical scar splits the underside of her tongue. She catches you looking and lifts a brow that says yes, I am aware of my mouth. Then—almost tender—she tapes your knuckle with gauze printed with tiny flowers.

Back in the greenhouse, the first night session is called Surrender. The lamps buzz. Mist beads your eyelashes. Sunoo stands barefoot on the damp boards, sleeves rolled, voice a low waterfall.

“Close your eyes,” he says. “Name the weight you want the earth to hold for you. Don’t say it out loud. Let your body say it.”

Around you, bodies sway. Some cry. Some freeze. When you keep your eyes open, Sunoo notices. Of course he does.

“New sprout,” he says softly, close to your ear, and the nickname feels chosen, not random. “You don’t have to force stillness. It happens when the soil recognizes you.”

“Does it?” Your voice is hoarse from disuse and altitude.

“Always.” He smiles. Not kind. Not unkind. Satisfied. “The Garden knows its own.”

Across the rows, Jungwon kneels in the dirt, wrist-deep in loam, planting something without a label. He doesn’t follow Sunoo’s cadence; he follows his own. When one lamp flickers, he rises and fixes it with the swift, competent movements of someone who builds instead of asks. When he sits back, the soil clings to his fingers like shadow.

You should sleep. Instead you help Mira remake your beds with the stiff white sheets that smell faintly of bleach and rosemary. She keeps talking, because silence makes her hands shake.

“I came as a volunteer,” she says, tucking corners square. “Stayed as a patient. It’s easier when they tell you what to be.”

“What do they tell you?”

She smiles without humor. “A flower.” Her eyes slide to your bandaged hand. “Try not to bleed in the greenhouse. They don’t like that.”

“Why?”

“Because the soil remembers.”

At night the compound changes. Lights dim. The wind strips the pines and combs the glass with needles. You lie awake and count breaths—yours, Mira’s, the building’s—until you can’t bear numbers anymore.

You go out.

The air is colder than the dorm suggests. The greenhouse glows from within, a pulse behind fogged panes. Beyond the east wall, something moves with slow persistence. You follow the ripple of disturbed leaves to a break in the hedgerow and find Taesun kneeling with his pockets turned inside out, sowing crumbs into the leaf litter like a penitent farmer.

“The worms,” he says. “They hate hunger.”

“And if they’re hungry?”

“They crawl into you,” he says simply, and his eyes are not crazy; they’re convinced. “They’re looking for warmth.”

A lantern kindles behind you. “Curfew,” a voice says.

You turn. Jungwon holds the light up so it paints his face in bones and gold. Up close, his features soften—stillness without Sunoo’s practiced grace; a patient animal’s attention. The lantern makes a thicket of his lashes. He looks from you to Taesun to your bare feet on the cold boards.

“You’ll catch a chill,” he says to you, like it’s a personal offense. “Shoes. Now.”

You should resent the command. Instead, you feel the unreasonable urge to obey. You start toward the dorms.

“Not that way,” he says. “West path. Easier. Less slope.” He tips the lantern so the light doesn’t blind you while you pass. It’s a small courtesy. It also marks you—every guard on the walkway can see who broke curfew and who brought them back.

“Do you plant at night?” you ask, because silence around him feels like standing at a cliff’s edge and leaning a little too far.

“Always,” he says. He doesn’t volunteer more. His eyes drag briefly to your bandaged hand. “You left blood in the greenhouse.”

“I didn’t—”

He lifts two fingers, the gesture efficient and final. “The soil remembers.” His mouth twitches—not a smile, exactly; the ghost of one. “Mira talks too much.”

“Is that against the rules?”

“It’s against survival.”

He walks you to the dorm porch and stops at the bottom step like there’s an invisible line he won’t cross. The night carries pine resin and wet metal. You want to ask him what he plants without labels, what grows under lamps that mimic suns, why the staff wear rosaries made of seeds.

He says, low, “Don’t follow sounds you don’t understand.”

“Why?”

“Because some things here answer to being watched.” He tilts the lantern, and for a heartbeat you see something like a tenderness he hides even from himself. “Sleep.”

You try. You fail. When you finally slide under, it’s the shallow kind of rest that hears every hinge complain.

Morning stains the glasshouse pale gold. Breakfast is porridge and a shot glass of bitter green. “Chlorophyll,” Mira grimaces. “For purity. Or the aesthetic.” She scans the refectory like she’s counting exits. “There’ll be a Placement Walk after breakfast. Don’t volunteer. They love volunteers.”

“What is it?”

She cuts her eyes toward the greenhouse. “They take someone to the grove and ‘help them choose a garden name.’ Sometimes they come back with a wreath. Sometimes without their voice for a while.”

Director Seo taps her cup. “Today’s Placement Walk is for… Yejin.”

The graphite girl looks up, startled as a deer. Her pencil stills. Sunoo’s smile brightens by half a watt. “I’ll take her,” he offers, hand already extended. “I’ve seen her drawings. She understands transformation.”

If you didn’t sleep, you are alert now. Jungwon appears in the doorway like the building made him. His gaze flicks over the room, and when it lands on Yejin’s shaking knuckles, something barely visible tightens in his jaw.

“I’ll go with you,” he says to Sunoo without looking away from the girl.

“Of course,” Sunoo replies. Silk over steel. “Two witnesses. Very proper.”

They lead her out between them: the counselor with a palm light on her shoulder; the groundskeeper holding the door open so it doesn’t bite her. The room exhales when the door closes. Mira’s bracelets clink as her hands start to shake again.

“They’ll bring her back,” you say, because logic is a habit.

“Usually,” Mira says.

Taesun folds bread crumbs into his napkin with ritual care. “If the worms are fed.”

“Stop with the worms—”

He looks up, suddenly fiercer than his tremor allows. “This place eats. I just like to decide what it eats.”

You leave your spoon in your bowl. The porridge lurches in your gut like a tide. Through the greenhouse glass, you can’t see the grove, only the suggestion of trunks and a slit of path. Time grows teeth.

When they return, Yejin walks in her body like someone has moved the furniture. A crown of woven reeds presses her hair flat. There’s a smear of green at the corner of her mouth, like she’s chewed a leaf until it bled. She carries her sketchbook close to her chest as if it’s the last piece of herself no one has touched.

“What did you choose?” Director Seo asks.

Yejin’s voice is soft but intact. “Night-blooming cereus.”

“A flower that opens in darkness,” Sunoo says, pleased. “Perfect.”

Jungwon stands behind them, sleeves rolled to the elbow, forearms dirt-streaked. A single thorn scratches the back of his hand, a bright new welt. You don’t know why your chest warms at the proof that something here can still hurt them too.

As the room settles, Nurse Min touches your shoulder. “Consult,” she says, consonants rounded. In the clinic, she peels your bandage, checks the small cut, nods. “Fine.”

“Was the walk… normal?” you ask, too casual. “For Yejin.”

Nurse Min dabs salve with a gentleness that doesn’t fit her knife-edged face. “Normal is a shape you learn,” she says. “Here, it is round.” She taps your knuckle. “Don’t open yourself on purpose. Things may grow inside.”

“Like what?”

Her eyes flick briefly toward the greenhouse. “Names.”

By afternoon the schedule has you shoveling, watering, scrubbing, writing lines. I am ready to be less. You write it a hundred times until the words separate from meaning and become a pattern of stems and loops. Outside, Jungwon clears a new bed along the south wall. His shovel bites; his shoulders move with the reliable rhythm of practiced labor. A boy twice your size steps into his path and mutters something you can’t hear. Jungwon doesn’t raise his voice. He simply looks at the boy until the boy forgets how to stand where he’s standing and moves.

“Don’t stare,” Mira warns from beside you, but she’s staring too. “He notices.”

“He noticed last night,” you say.

Mira goes still. “You went out?”

“For air.”

“Air is how they catch you,” she whispers, and for the first time her cheer fails. “Promise me you won’t go alone again.”

You don’t promise. You also don’t say I don’t know who I am without alone.

At dusk, group again. Sunoo has you sit closer to him than yesterday. When you resist, he laughs softly, as if you’re charming rather than disobedient. “We sit where the light needs us,” he says. You wonder if that’s a rule or a line he likes. While others speak, he doesn’t look at them; he watches their hands, their throats, the wet edge of eyes. When your breath hitches at someone’s story, he turns his head sharply like a wolf hearing snow crack.

“What would you let go of?” he asks you, voice pitched so the rest of the circle hears only the question, not the ownership threaded through it.

You could say: the fire, the last call you ignored, the smell of burning hair. Instead, you say nothing. He accepts your silence as if it were obedience he taught you.

Outside the glass, Jungwon is a darker shape among dark shapes, moving a hose along the rows. When his head turns toward the circle, it isn’t to the whole; it is to you. He holds you there for a breath you feel in your wrists. Then he tips the hose, and water falls like rain on metal bones.

You sleep after midnight because your body ambushes you. You wake to weight. Not on you; in the air, a heaviness like weather. The greenhouse lights are out. The compound holds its breath.

Something is under your pillow.

You slide your hand beneath it and touch paper—the rough tooth of a sketchbook page. You draw it out under the dim nightlight and see yourself. Not flattering. Not cruel. Exact. You kneel on dark soil, mouth open, and something vines out—delicate stems laced with thorns. Hands—two sets—hold your shoulders lightly, possessively: one set with ink stains, one with dirt ground into the half moons of the nails. At the bottom, Yejin’s cramped script: “Some flowers only open when watched.”

Mira stirs. “What is it?”

“Art,” you say, and your voice surprises you with how steady it is.

“What kind?”

“Prophetic,” you answer, because the truth is an animal pacing the edge of the bed and you’re not ready to let it into your ribs yet.

You slide the drawing back under your pillow and close your eyes. Across the compound, the night shifts. In your mind, Sunoo’s smile threads petals through your tongue. In reality, Jungwon’s lantern skates once across the fogged panes, a slow-moving star. Two orbits, caught in the same sky, tightening.

Slow burn, the booklet promised. Healing begins when you stop resisting.

You do not stop.

You breathe. You listen to the soil remembering you.

And you wait.

______

Morning arrives with a whistle under the door and the faint itch of grit in your teeth, as if you’ve been speaking to the ground in your sleep. Breakfast is the same: porridge, a bitter green shot, tea that tastes like boiled bark. Mira counts sips, bracelets clinking like quiet alarms. Taesun crushes his toast to dust and pockets it, eyes bright with purpose. Yejin sits very still, crown of reeds damp against her hair, sketchbook closed for once like a door she’s guarding with her body.

Director Seo taps her cup. “Today begins the Mouth Fast,” she says, voice smooth as tile. “Speech is the first addiction. For twenty-four hours, we practice voicelessness. Carry your stone”—a monk in linen sets a bowl of river stones on each table—“and let it hold your words. Anyone who breaks the fast will do a double shift in the greenhouse trenches. Sunoo will lead stillness. Jungwon will direct labor.”

A murmur rises and dies, mouths pressing shut to prove eagerness. Mira puts a flat, oval stone in your palm. “Don’t lose it,” she whispers, already breaking the rule. “They’ll say the soil took your voice because you were careless.”

You tuck the stone into your sleeve and meet Sunoo’s eyes across the hall. He’s already watching—of course he is. The smile he gives you would be harmless if you hadn’t seen how he moves when he’s pleased: slower, closer, like a candle drawn to oxygen. Jungwon lingers by the service door with a clipboard and a coil of hose on his shoulder, scanning tables the way a shepherd counts sheep by the sound of their breathing.

Chores first. Outside, the air needles your lungs; the mountain wears its cold like a second skin. Jungwon assigns tasks without looking at his list. “Mira, refectory herbs. Taesun, east wall compost. Yejin, with Nurse Min in the clinic.” His gaze slides to you and steadies. “You—paths and drains. Stay out of the grove.” Not a suggestion.

You carry a stiff-bristled broom down stone paths glazed with last night’s dew. The greenhouse ribs glow under weak sun; from inside, lamps hum, and something leafy slaps damply as if it’s learned the shape of applause. By the east wall, Taesun kneels with a small shovel and a reverence that would be holy if it didn’t smell like rot.

He tips crumbs in a neat line, then pauses to show you something cupped in his palm: a white, blind tangle coiling in damp soil. Worms, yes, but too many knotted together, a living thread. He beams, proud. You force your lips into gratitude and keep sweeping. If you stop, you will hear them, and if you hear them, you will dream them.

A shadow falls across your broom. Jungwon holds out a pair of soft-soled garden shoes with the temporary patience of a man who prefers doing to explaining. “Your feet,” he says. “You bruise easily.”

You glance at your bare socks, damp to the ankle. “Is that a rule?”

“It’s a reality,” he says; the word lands like weight. He crouches without asking, sets the shoes on the path, and steps back, gaze down so you can decide if you’ll take his help. You put them on. They’re warm from his hands. He notices the lift of your breath and looks away so the noticing won’t embarrass you. When he straightens, his eyes snag on the river stone tucked in your sleeve. “Don’t drop that,” he says. “The ravens like to steal them.”

You arch a brow—Are you joking?—but he’s already moving, a steady, unshowy force among the clatter of chores.

By mid-morning the Mouth Fast is a taut cord running through the compound. The quiet isn’t peace; it’s suppression, and suppression hums. Sunoo runs stillness from the center of the greenhouse like a maestro conducting silence. He has you sit within his radius; you don’t know how you know that, but you do. When a guest’s shoulders begin to shake, his hand appears at the nape of their neck—just weight, just heat, just enough to persuade the body that obedience feels like care.

He comes to you last, when the lamps have warmed the panes to sweating. He kneels, not quite touching, gaze on your throat. “Your pulse is stubborn,” he says in a voice pitched for you alone. “It hates rhythm. I like that.” He brushes the air near your jawline, not touching, so you feel it anyway. “The stone will teach it obedience. If you’re good at listening.”

You hold his eyes and refuse to nod. He smiles, pleased with your defiance like a trainer who prefers wild animals because they make better trophies. “We’ll work on it,” he whispers, and stands.

After lunch—a bowl of broth filtered until flavor gives up—you’re pulled into the clinic with half a dozen others for “check-ins.” Nurse Min sits you on a stool and unwraps your finger. The cut is a thin mouth now, pink with newness. She touches a gloved finger to the gauze and sniffs it as if the body has a scent that changes when it’s lying.

“Does it itch?” she asks.

You hesitate. The truth is embarrassing. “Everything does,” you admit. “Under the skin. Like… like something wants out.”

“Something wants in,” she corrects mildly. She takes tweezers to the pad of your finger and draws out a hair-fine splinter you didn’t know was there. It isn’t wood—it’s pale and sappy, flexing like a root in the air. She drops it in a jar and screws the lid tight. “Names need medium,” she says. “Don’t let anyone put theirs under your skin.”

“Is that medical advice?”

“It’s survival.” She tapes a fresh bandage printed with tiny leaves, then, softer, “If you start tasting flowers, spit.”

You leave the clinic with your mouth dry as chalk. On the steps, Yejin waits like a shadow that forgot to attach to a body. She presses a folded paper to your palm and flits off before you can unfold it. In the corner of the page, her fast, lethal graphite: you in profile, throat open, something like a stem ghosting up under the jaw. In the negative space behind you, two silhouettes—Sunoo’s soft edges; Jungwon’s blunt solidity—blur toward one another without touching. Underneath, her careful script: Not yet. But soon.

The Mouth Fast bends afternoon into a colder shape. Without words, people show who they are. Mira hums under her breath and taps her stone against her teeth like a bead. Taesun counts breath with his fingers on his ribs. A new arrival—Hana, thirty and jewel-hard—walks like a woman who refuses to ask permission from the air. An older man, Mr. Ko, rows his spoon through soup with the concentration of a man pretending there is a river and a boat that can take him off this mountain.

At dusk, Director Seo calls for the Seed Burial. “We surrender what we’ve hoarded,” she says, and volunteers step forward with small slips of paper seeded with something that will sprout if the soil wants it. They kneel, press the papers into a rectangle of fresh-turned earth, and cover them with a thin skin of loam. The lamps go low. Sunoo stands at their backs. Jungwon stands at their front, shovel grounded like a staff.

You don’t move. You have nothing to bury you can stand to name.

A woman you recognize from orientation—the one who needed three days of sleep—places both palms flat on the soil like it’s someone she loves. Her breath hitches once; she swallows whatever it shook loose. As the last handful of earth covers the names, something beneath the surface shifts. Not the modest swell of seeds drinking. A shove from below.

The crowd stills. You feel it again—a push. The soil flexes and sighs, grains settling. Someone’s hand jerks back as if bitten. Sunoo’s smile does not change, which means it changes. “The ground recognizes an offering,” he says pleasantly. “Stand, flowers. Let the dark do what it’s for.”

Jungwon’s eyes are on the dirt, not the people. His jaw flexes once, twice. You have the sharp, childish thought—He hears it too—and the relief that follows is so naked you almost miss the fear riding it.

Night stitches the compound tight. The Mouth Fast persists: tongues held, little pantomimes replacing argument. In bed, Mira sleeps with her open palm on her stone like it might roll away. You face the wall because the drawing under your pillow is a magnet and your skull is iron.

A scrape wakes you—a quick, purposeful sound under the window. You slide out of bed and ease the latch. Cold breath pours in. On the path below, a lantern moves slow as a planet. You follow, soft-soled shoes silent on the boards, the stone in your sleeve tapping your wrist like a heart that’s climbed too high.

The lantern stops. Jungwon steps into its circle. He doesn’t look surprised to see you. He looks like a man who has laid a trap and found what he baited it for. He lifts the lantern just enough to catch your face without flaying you with light.

He puts a finger to his mouth—quiet—and crooks that same finger: come.

You should run. You go.

He takes you along the west path to a low, fenced plot you haven’t noticed in daylight, because in daylight everything looks like something else. Up close, the boards are stained darker than weather. He stops you with a hand on your sleeve. His grip is gentle; his hand is strong. “Do not speak,” he says, and for the first time today the command lands like care, not control.

He tilts the lantern over the fence. The light stratifies a pit maybe two meters long, maybe one deep, lined with rough timbers and crawling with the industry of decay. You see peels, stems, pot scrapings—normal compost—then catch on something pale threaded through like lace: cartilage? You squint, heart hammering, and in among the skins and stems you see hair—just a clump, just enough to be undeniable. The sour-metal stink under the rot answers a question you didn’t know you were asking until now.

You stagger, mute because the rule still binds your mouth. Jungwon’s hand rises like he planned for your body to try to leave you. He catches your elbow with two fingers and steadies you without pulling you closer. “Breathe,” he says, voice so low the pit swallows it.

You breathe. He watches your lungs move under your shirt as if measuring if they’ll keep their job.

“What is this,” you manage, a whisper that bruises the fast.

“Everything that isn’t needed,” he says. It is both the most honest sentence you’ve heard since you arrived and the worst one. “Don’t come here alone.”

“Why show me?”

His mouth tightens. He weighs the truth and hands you a ration. “Because you will go looking. Better you see what is true than what you can’t live through.”

He lifts the lantern away; the pit dissolves back into darkness. When he looks at you again, the composure you’ve seen him wear like a uniform slips an inch. “Next time,” he says, “wake me.”

“How?” It comes out harder than you intend. “Do I knock on the earth?”

“On my door.” He says it like a correction and a promise. “I’d rather carry you than find you down there with your throat open to the sky.”

You swallow. The stone in your sleeve digs your wrist bone.

He walks you back along the west path, keeping the lantern low so you don’t blind yourself and tumble. At the bottom of the dorm steps, he stops as if a line of salt has been poured between you. “Sleep,” he says. Then, almost grudgingly—no, carefully, like he fears generosity might teach you to expect it—“You did well.”

“You mean quiet,” you say.

“I mean you didn’t lie to yourself while you were looking.” He turns the lantern, and for a heartbeat your faces share a circle of light. It is not intimate, and it is.

Inside, the warm dark smells like bodies and disinfection. Mira turns in her sleep, bracelets whickering. Your hands shake. Not with the adrenaline of the pit—though that remains like a taste at the back of your throat—but with the realization that both men see you. Sunoo sees the mechanism; Jungwon sees the fracture line. You can’t decide which is worse.

The Mouth Fast breaks at dawn with a bell so soft it feels like a secret. Voices resume like a creek finding an old bed; people speak too loudly, then blush, then laugh at their own relief. Director Seo praises “compliance” as if it were a sacrament. In the refectory, mugs clack, spoons scrape. Words return as barter.

You don’t trust yours yet.

Sunoo flows through tables like sunlight convincing itself it’s holy. He catches your empty mug, pours tea, and sets it in front of you with a flourish that makes a few heads turn. “How did the silence fit?” he asks, lazy, interested. It isn’t small talk. It’s a probe shaped like kindness.

“Like wire,” you say.

He smiles, delighted—as if you’ve told him a secret about yourself he can use. “It looks good on you,” he says, and taps your river stone where it sits on the table as if he gave it to you, as if it obeys him too. “We have Talkback today. You and me.”

“Is that optional?”

“In principle,” he says. “In practice, most people prefer to be seen.” He leans in, lower voice. “You certainly do.”

He leaves before you can snap that you preferred to be alive, actually. Across the room, Jungwon stops at the threshold, takes the refectory in at a glance, and chooses a seat with his back to the wall. He eats fast, plain, as if food is fuel and surveillance is dessert. When he lifts his mug, you notice the fresh welt across the back of his hand—a thorn, yesterday, dragging its punctuation.

Talkback is held in a small room off the clinic, windowless, lit by a lamp that chooses flattery over truth. Sunoo sits too close, but because he knows what too close does to bodies, he leaves exactly enough air that you can fool yourself into thinking you could stand if you wanted to. He doesn’t touch you. He rests his forearms on his knees, hands open, posture full of a patience he wears like silk.

“What is the shape of your fear?” he asks, as if fear is polite enough to have geometry.

“Wide,” you say.

“Flat?”

“Deep.”

He grins. “Good. Honesty makes my job easier.” He looks at your mouth, then your hands, then your throat. “Last night you broke curfew.”

It isn’t a question. “I walked.”

“To the west path,” he says, savoring the corridor of it.

“Is that forbidden?”

“Not if you were with someone.”

You hold his gaze. You don’t look away. You don’t nod. You don’t give him Jungwon.

Sunoo’s smile returns, but thinner. “We don’t punish curiosity,” he says silkily. “We shape it.” He nods to your sleeve. “Keep the stone. I like how you sound when you hold it.”

“I didn’t speak.”

“You breathed differently,” he says, and you hate that you believe him. “This afternoon I want you in the greenhouse. We’ll do matching breath. I’ll keep count so you don’t have to.”

Your stomach remembers the pit and rolls. “What if I say no?”

“Then we’ll go slower,” he says, as if you asked him to make it sweeter. “That’s the kind of consent you like, isn’t it? The kind that arrives after your body learns the lesson.”

You stand because sitting feels like agreeing. He doesn’t stop you. He nods as if you’ve completed a task he set in his head.

“Good,” he says. “The roots are listening.”

Outside, the day is too bright in the way of mountains pretending to be gentle. You find Mira tending pots of kitchen herbs—mint, rosemary, a vicious little basil. “You look like you saw a ghost,” she says without looking up.

“I saw the compost,” you say.

She flinches so hard the basil shudders. “You don’t say it out loud,” she hisses, then checks herself, forces her voice calm again. “Names wake things.”

“Whose hair is in it?”

“Everyone’s,” she says. “Eventually.”

By late afternoon your muscles revolt, and stillness becomes a thing you have to hold down with both hands. In the greenhouse, Sunoo runs breath like a metronome. When he kneels behind a girl whose hands won’t stop shaking, he doesn’t touch her skin; he places his palm two inches away from her spine and waits. The girl’s shoulders ease; her breath learns his count. You hate him for it. You hate her relief. You hate that your body pays attention.

Jungwon moves along the rows with a bucket and a dull pruning blade, nicking stems, turning soil, resetting stakes. When a lamp pops and goes dim, he crosses to replace it without being called. On his way back, he passes near your mat—near, not past. The air shifts with him: sweat, iron, soil, a clean note like water running under rock. He doesn’t look down. He scratches the back of his wrist where a thorn welt cross-hatches older scars and says, as if the comment belongs to the room, “Some things only grow when you pretend you can’t see them.”

You don’t know if he means the plants, the people, or you.

Evening comes with teeth. The bell pulls everyone to the refectory; the sky sits heavy, swollen with weather that refuses to begin. Over dinner, Hana spills her tea and swears loudly enough that half the room jumps; then she laughs, tips her chin like she meant to do it, and glares at anyone who looks sorry on her behalf. Mr. Ko tells Taesun to stop feeding the worms like they’re pets; Taesun bares his teeth, half-smile, half warning. Nurse Min pockets a spoon someone bent into a hook. Director Seo watches it all with the small, sated smile of a zookeeper whose animals are thriving.

Night brings the first scream.

Not a long one. Not a movie howl. A single, keening note cut off hard, like a rope being cut. The compound freezes; forks stop halfway to mouths; breath holds. Sunoo is already on his feet, smile sharpened into usefulness. Jungwon’s chair scrapes; he’s moving before you can find your shoes.

They go toward the grove at a measured pace that says they already know what they’ll find. Director Seo lifts her hand. “Stay seated,” she says, and the command lands like weight on your shoulders. Mira’s fingers take yours under the table and squeeze so hard your knuckles grind. You squeeze back. Your mouth tastes like rosemary and fear.

You wait. The greenhouse sweats. The clock you aren’t allowed to see walks itself around the hour by the sound of your blood in your ears. When the door opens again, Sunoo comes in first, serene, coat unwrinkled. Jungwon follows with a bundled shape in his arms—a blanket, a softness of color, too long where a body should bend.

A gasp skips the room. “She fainted,” Sunoo says, which is both intolerably insufficient and the only story you’ll be allowed. “A cleansing reaction. She will rest. We will keep vigil over the names she surrendered.”

He doesn’t say who. Your mind fills the blank with the sleeping woman from breakfast, because that is who you fear for, and fear is a magnet. Jungwon carries the bundle past. You know how much weight that is—your body recognizes the set of his jaw, the economy of his gait. He does not look at you. He doesn’t look anywhere but the door to the clinic, as if any glance could spill what he’s holding.

The dining hall exhales like it’s been underwater too long. Director Seo claps once, neat. “We will not gossip,” she says. “We will not catastrophize. We will practice serenity.”

You don’t sleep. Not because you’re brave—because you’re scared correctly now, and scared correctly people stay awake. When you doze, you wake to the sensation that someone has put a leaf on your tongue and asked you to pray with it in your mouth. You spit into your sheet and find nothing. When you sit up, a shadow peels off the wall near the window and becomes Jungwon.

You nearly fling yourself out of bed. He doesn’t move, as if sudden gestures would spook you. He should not be in the dorms after lights; rules are their own religion here. He breaks this one like he breaks branches: cleanly, without apology.

“You left your shoes,” he says, low. He sets them at the foot of your bed, lined up, laces tucked. His voice is stripped of everything but function. “Don’t go barefoot again.”

“What happened?” you ask, whispering because anything louder might wake the dark.

“Don’t ask me,” he says, and for a breath you think he’s refusing. Then he adds, “Because I’ll tell you.” His gaze drags over your face, cataloging fine tremors, the cracked edge of your mouth, the way one hand fists in the sheet like rope. “Sleep,” he says. “You’ll need it.”

He is out the way he came, the door kissing its jamb like a secret.

You try to obey. The mountain presses its cold face to the window and listens. Somewhere, a lantern moves. Somewhere else, a man like a hymn kneels by a bed that is too light.

You put the river stone back in your sleeve and hold it against your pulse until the beat stops arguing with your bones. You remember the jar in Nurse Min’s clinic with the threadlike root curled at the bottom like a question mark. You picture Yejin’s hand drawing you with something under your skin you didn’t agree to carry.

Stillness was the promise. Obedience was the price. You have paid neither. Now the Garden pays attention.

And you, finally, are afraid.

_________

You wake with the taste of copper and rosemary slicked over your tongue, as if someone pressed a leaf there while you slept and whispered hold it. A welt has risen along your bandaged finger—thin, pale, almost pretty. When you press it, it flexes under the skin like something answering from underneath.

Breakfast is a choreography of clatter and eyes. Mira smiles too hard; her bracelets rattle out a code you can’t read. Taesun tips crumbs into his pocket with priestly concentration. Yejin’s crown of reeds has dried to a brittle halo; she draws with her pencil held like a knife. Hana sits mean and diamond-bright, daring the room to dull her edges. Mr. Ko’s spoon cuts the same path through porridge like a boatman refusing any other shore. Director Seo watches the surface of her tea the way people watch the sea for bodies.

“The Naming Rite will be held at sundown,” she announces, as if she’s asking for the salt. “Those selected have been notified.”

Sunoo lifts his eyes, and that’s your notification.

Mira’s fingers find your knee under the table and clamp. She shakes her head once, small, fast—refuse. You don’t know what refusal looks like here besides a story they will tell about you afterward.

“Drink,” Nurse Min says when you pass through the clinic to turn in your night report—how many hours asleep, how many awake, whether you dreamed of heat, teeth, drowning. She hands you a glass the green of pond water. You smell it, and it smells like lawn and iron. “Chlorophyll with a little hem,” she says, seeing your face. “Calms the heart.”

“Calms or slows?” Your voice scratches.

She cants her head. “Same action, different motive.” She glances at your finger. “Still itching?”

“It… moves,” you say, and the honesty makes your stomach pitch. “Like a thread.”

“Everything alive wants a home,” she replies. She peels the bandage with sure fingers. Underneath, the welt has subdivided into delicate veins, a fine network. Not veins. Veining. It looks like leaf. She presses the back of her glove along it; the pattern darkens, limned green under the skin. “Names need medium,” she repeats. “Keep your mouth closed in the greenhouse today. Even when you want to answer.”

You want to ask answer what, but Sunoo is in the doorway, dusk caught in the lamplight of his hair. He doesn’t knock; he glides in like permission. “Our new sprout,” he says, pleased to find you in a chair. “I’ll take her.”

Nurse Min’s mouth goes a little flatter. “She eats first.”

“Of course.” Sunoo’s smile doesn’t move. “Then we breathe.”

The greenhouse sweats. Heat lamps hum like insects; the glass with its rain of condensation blurs the mountain into a myth. Staff move among the rows with trays of soil sheets—thin paper seeded with something that glitters faintly when the light hits it wrong. “Embedded affirmations,” Sunoo tells the group. “You write what you’ll surrender. The seeds will carry it.”

Hana snorts. “Is the surrender refundable?”

Sunoo’s eyes quicken. “There’s always a transaction,” he says. “We just prefer you know the price.” He looks back to you. “Mat,” he says, and it isn’t a request.

You sit. He kneels behind you, palms hovering two inches from your ribs. No touch—just the sense of touch waiting. “Open your mouth,” he murmurs. The admonition from Nurse Min echoes; you clamp your lips. Sunoo’s pleased noise lands against your neck like breath. “Good. Breathe through your nose. In on four, out on six. I’ll count.”

His voice is a rope you have to grab to keep from slipping. When your breath shudders, he matches it; when it calms, he pursues. On the sixth cycle, something sweet pushes the air—lily, wet earth—and you remember the pit and want to be sick. “Stay,” he says, reading your recoil. “Stay where your body is. Don’t run from it. That’s where people rot.”

Across the rows, Jungwon replaces a cracked lamp with quick, sure hands. He doesn’t look at you until he does, a glance like a hand closing on the back of your neck. The air between you tightens. His forearms are netted with healed cuts, white against brown; a fresh welt crosses them like a red thread. When Sunoo says “out on six,” Jungwon turns the dial and the light hums obedient, and you wonder whether the whole building breathes to his count.

Yejin brings you a tray of seed-paper without being asked. When you reach, her gaze drops to your bandage. She moves the pencil like a blade and sketches the back of your hand: the delicate leaf veining, the suggestion of something wanting to break surface. She writes Not yet over the knuckles and slides the paper into your lap. Her mouth is a thin line; her eyes are large and dry and furious.

The day’s chores are smaller and meaner than yesterday’s. Scrub the condensation gutters. Rake. Haul sacks labeled Bone Meal that smell like old molars. Taesun sings under his breath in a language not meant for mouths and leaves a damp trail of crumbs along the east wall. Mr. Ko fetches and carries with blank efficiency, his face empty as a cleaned plate.

By late afternoon, a woman you know only as Auntie Hye—fiftyish, hair cut short for neatness, eyes that scan like a mother bird’s—begins to cough. At first it is dry and prim; then she hunches, pushes a hand to her chest and coughs wet. A ribbon of something bright pops free onto her palm. Petals. White. Tissue-thin and slick with saliva. A few guests laugh—nerves, delight, cruelty. Nurse Min is there before the room decides what to feel, hand under Auntie Hye’s chin, tissues ready. Hye coughs again, harder, and a clot of petals spills: red-tipped now, streaked. She hacks out a final cluster and sags. The tissues are sodden. The petals look like tongues.

“Pollination,” Sunoo says calmly. “Sometimes the body rehearses letting go by practicing bloom.”

Auntie Hye shakes her head, breath hitching. “I didn’t—” she starts.

Sunoo presses two fingers lightly to her throat. “You did.”

She closes her mouth.

Jungwon comes with a bucket and a flat spade; he scoops the petals into the bucket without expression. Your stomach tilts; you grip the bench until the wood prints itself into your palm. He doesn’t look at anyone. He takes the bucket toward the compost. You see his jawclench once when he passes the pit door and files that, like a photographed crime scene.

After the petals, other small horrors follow as if emboldened. A boy pulls his sleeve up to scratch and reveals a faint green tracery along his inner arm; when he scrubs at it, the skin reddens and puffs and the pattern brightens like a pressed leaf held to light. Mira slices a basil stem and it bleeds thin, clean sap; she runs her thumb along the cut and licks it without thinking, then startles at the taste and laughs too loudly. Taesun tips a paper cup into a drain, and a pale, slick worm writhes against the grate and splits into two thinner threads that both crawl the wrong way, toward his fingers. He coos like they’re babies and tucks them back into mud.

“Don’t feed your nightmares,” Nurse Min says without looking up from the woman whose mouth she swabs. “They grow fine on their own.”

By evening, the heat in the greenhouse feels like a hand that won’t lift. The lamps go low. Director Seo stands by the iron ribs with her clipboard like a prayerbook. “For the Naming Rite,” she says, “we welcome Sunoo as Voice and Jungwon as Hands.”

Voice and Hands. A division of power simple enough to live inside.

You are led—gently, unmistakably—toward the central bed, a rectangle of fresh loam bordered by smooth stones. Yejin edges after you, sketchbook clutched to her chest; Nurse Min blocks her with just a glance. “Not this,” Min murmurs. “Later.”

Mira steps forward—too fast—“I can go instead,” she says, smile like a knife wrapped in tissue.

Sunoo’s smile is silk on a nail. “We don’t barter names,” he says. “We harvest them.”

Your knees give. Not dramatic; a small buckling, the body remembering the ground. Sunoo’s hand is there without touching you, a near-weight at your shoulder. “Kneel,” he says, as if reminding you what your body already decided. “Head up. We face what we bring.”

Jungwon stands at the foot of the bed, shovel grounded. Close, his expression is the same flat steel as his blade. He looks at your throat the way carpenters look at walls: not hunger—assessment. When he speaks, his voice is small enough to belong only to the three of you. “Do you know what you’re giving?” he asks.

You try to say No. What comes out is “Something I can’t carry.”

“Good,” he says, and the word is not kindness. It’s calibration.

Sunoo’s fingers hover at your jaw, turning your face by the gravity of proximity. “Open,” he tells you, and your mouth obeys because your body recognizes a doctor’s tone even when it comes from someone who would rather be a priest. He places a petal on your tongue. It tastes like cold tea and a coin. “Hold,” he says. He waits. When you swallow despite yourself, his smile flares. “You see? The body knows ceremony even when the mind resists.”

He steps behind you. You feel his presence like a heat lamp. Jungwon moves to your side and holds out his hand. On his palm: a knife. Not sharp—its edge has been blunted until it’s a tongue of metal—but its point is honest. He waits until you meet his eyes; only then does he set the flat of the blade against your sternum. The steel is cool. Your skin fists under it.

“This is how we write it,” Sunoo says, and his breath touches the shell of your ear like a whispering moth. “Not deep. Not cruel. Not yet.”

The blade slides up without breaking skin, tracing between ribs, across the slow bell of breath—sternum, clavicle, the notch at your throat. The metal leaves a trail of gooseflesh; your pulse hammers against it like an animal trapped under the lid of a box. Jungwon’s other hand is steady at your shoulder, not pushing, not holding, just there, a second horizon the body can measure itself against.

“Name what cannot follow you,” Sunoo murmurs. It could be a real question. It could be a spell. Your mouth fills with the taste of flower and iron; words gather behind it like flies at meat.

You can’t say the fire; to say it would open something that the soil will keep. You say, “The last night.”

“Again,” Sunoo purrs.

“The last night,” you repeat, and the room tilts like a field under wind.

The congregation—guests in white, staff in linen—sways. Mira has both hands pressed to her lips. Taesun rocks in small, violent arcs. Yejin’s pencil moves; she draws you kneeling, two sets of hands marking you; she smudges the graphite so the air around you looks like breath or smoke.

The blade dips, lifts, comes to rest against your throat’s right side. You feel the exact spot where it would enter if it wanted to. Jungwon’s pulse is visible in his wrist; steady, heavier than yours. He moves the flat in a small crescent along the tendon, and your voice leaves you for a moment—pure reflex. A small, unpretty sound. Sunoo shivers behind you, pleased as if you performed a note he’d been coaching you toward.

“Do you understand the price?” Sunoo asks softly.

“No,” you say honestly.

“Beautiful,” he says, delighted. “No one ever does until after.”

He lifts the petal from your mouth with two fingers and lays it on your tongue again like communion. You hold it. Jungwon takes your left hand. His palm is rough and warm; soil lives in the whorls of his fingerprints. He pricks the pad of your finger with the very tip of the blunted knife, as if he wants to remind the blade of its older religion. A bead of blood swells, bright, neat. He turns your hand and presses that red to the seed-paper waiting in a shallow trench at the bed’s edge. Your blood bleeds into the paper like water into thirst.

“Now,” Sunoo says, voice dropped low enough to live in your bones, “we plant what you are not. So what you are can grow.”

Jungwon folds loam over the paper. The soil is cool even in this hothouse weather. It sucks at your finger when he presses your hand flat to it. Something moves underneath—something too quick for roots. Your stomach rocks. You try to pull back. Jungwon’s hand covers yours, firm as a yoke; Sunoo’s hand wraps your throat—not squeezing, just holding the column steady. You are pinned in two places that translate directly to obedience.

“Breathe,” Sunoo says.

You do. The soil under your hand warms like a mouth.

The congregation murmurs. Not words; the sound bodies make when they agree to a script. Director Seo watches like a reader flipping to the end to be sure it comes out as written. Nurse Min’s face has the set of a woman who’s decided to count a vein until morning.

The thing under the soil stills.

Jungwon lifts your hand and wipes the loam away with his thumb. The smear looks like war paint. Sunoo releases your throat and smooths his palm down the line his fingers left, a correction, an apology, a brand. He bends and whispers against your ear, “You belong to the ground,” and then, after a heartbeat, “and to us while you’re learning.”

His mouth never touches skin. The idea of it does.

The Rite closes with a bell that tastes like copper in your teeth. People file out as if stepping around a sleeping animal. Mira gets to you first, palms hot where she holds your face. “Drink water,” she hisses. “Don’t go to sleep. If you dream the name, it sticks.”

“I didn’t give it,” you say.

She laughs, a small animal sound. “You bled. That’s enough.”

Mr. Ko offers a clean handkerchief without meeting your eyes. Hana watches from a distance like a hawk deciding if a rabbit is worth stooping for when the field is full of easier meat. Taesun beams, mud on his lip, as if he’s just watched a very good wedding.

Yejin presses a drawing into your hand and vanishes. It’s you kneeling, hands marked, a line along your throat that is not a cut but knows where one would go. Over your shoulder, two shadows bend—one a heat-halo, one a blunt storm. Soon, she’s written. Don’t say yes with your mouth.

Night. The mountain holds its breath. The lamps in the greenhouse go black one by one until the glass is only a shape. You sit on your dorm bed and watch your hands not shake. Mira sleeps curled like a comma with her stone under her cheek. The drawing under your pillow warms to your scalp as if it wants to crawl into you.

A knock—not on the door. On the window, one knuckle, once. When you slide the frame, cold air pours in, and you think of Nurse Min’s keep your mouth closed in the greenhouse and keep it shut.

Jungwon stands below, lantern hooded, face lit just enough to make eyes and jaw. He tilts his head—come—and you go because your legs have learned this path. Out the back, down the steps, across the boards to the west path. He waits in the shadow of the shed where spades hang like a rack of tongues.

“Any dizziness? Nausea?” he asks, clinic-plain.

“Just… aware.” The word feels too small for your body’s rattled hum.

He grunts—approval. He reaches for your hand and turns the palm up. The loam under your nails has dried to fine grit. He rubs it away with his thumb, slow, methodical. It’s almost tender until you realize he is checking for changes—for the leaf-vein under your skin brightening, for anything moving that shouldn’t. When his thumb passes over the edge of your pulse, it jumps. He looks up sharply. You look away.

“You shouldn’t stay in the dorm tonight.” Matter-of-fact. “You’ll hear things like your name, and some of them will be for you and some won’t. You’re still soft. Soft things take impressions.”

“Where do I go?”

“My room.” Flat. Then, as if he heard how it sounds: “It’s safer. There are no plants there.”

“Is that true?”

“It’s true enough.” He waits. “Or go to the clinic and sit under Min’s lamp and let her count your breaths until morning.”

“Which would you pick,” you ask, because some part of you refuses to let him stand there and decide your body in his head without you in the room.

He takes too long to answer, then says, “The clinic is gentle.” A beat. “I am not.”

Wind combs the pines; the greenhouse ticks as it cools. Somewhere a raven laughs like a woman who knows your secrets and isn’t impressed.

“Choose,” he says quietly.

Sunoo’s shadow falls across the path before you can. He steps into the lantern’s circle like a storybook: pale wrists, clean hands, a smile that tells you exactly how he will use it. “Ah,” he says, soft delight. “My flower and my hands. I wondered where the night would put you.”

Jungwon does not step back. He also does not step forward. The lantern holds the three of you in a tight Venn where your breaths overlap. Sunoo tips his head, curious. “You can take her,” he says to Jungwon, which is to say I will let you. “But she’ll come back to me tasting like soil and fear, and we’ll start again from below.” He turns to you, voice honeyed and mean. “Or you can come with me and I’ll teach your body what calm feels like so you know when you’ve lost it.”

The polite violence of the options makes your stomach liquefy.

“Stop,” Jungwon says, and the word is a tool, not a plea.

Sunoo laughs softly. “The earth doesn’t stop growing just because you ask it gently.” He reaches, very slowly, and lifts your jaw with two fingers—not touching skin; his hand floats a whisper below it and your head lifts anyway, obedient to suggestion. “Show me your throat,” he says, and your body almost does it because it learned tonight and bodies like to repeat lessons. You hold yourself still out of spite. His smile warms. “Good girl.”

The words hit like a hand under your ribs. Jungwon’s breath changes. It darkens the air.

“Enough,” Jungwon says again, and hooks a finger in the lantern hood. He pulls it open. Light flares, pot-bright, brutal. The three of you blink; the world loses its beautiful edges and shows its seams. “Clinic,” he tells you.

Sunoo’s smile fades pixel by pixel until only his eyes shine. “For now,” he agrees. He steps in closer so there is no air between the three bodies but what breath can claim. He looks at Jungwon and speaks to you. “You’ll end up between us anyway,” he says, the prophecy flat, not cruel. “Why not learn the shape early.”

You should move. You should walk yourself to the nurse and let her count your lungs like prayer beads. Instead you stand very still while two men who have learned your pulse by different languages consider the currency of your fear.

Sunoo lifts his hand and stops a breath from your mouth. You feel the heat of him without the permission of touch. “I won’t kiss you,” he says, velvet and wicked. “Not yet.” He turns his palm and hovers over your throat, reading the rush there like a favorite book. “See what your body does with almost.”

Jungwon moves behind you so quietly the night forgets to mark his steps. He doesn’t touch you. His presence is so large it reads like contact anyway—the shape of him corralling air. You have the dizzy thought that if you leaned back, he would catch you, and if you leaned forward, Sunoo would open like a mouth.

“Breathe,” Sunoo whispers, and it isn’t instruction now; it’s a dare.

You do. The air leans with you. The world tightens to a triangle: lantern glare, the line of a blunted blade tucked into Jungwon’s belt, the faint copper on Sunoo’s knuckle where he touched your lip earlier with the petal.

“I said clinic,” Jungwon repeats, low enough to live at your spine.

“Make her say please,” Sunoo counters, amusement sweet as rot. “Our girl loves a ritual.”

“Don’t—” you start, and then stop, because the word tastes like surrender and you haven’t decided whose hands deserve it.

“Not tonight,” Jungwon says, and you understand: it isn’t mercy. It’s control deferred. He steps to your side, inserts a palm—warm, heavy—at your waist, not pulling, not pushing, just a point you can move along. Sunoo mirrors the motion on your other side without touching, an echo your nerves misread as contact. Together they guide you three steps, five, toward the clinic’s dim window—two gravities that agree for once.

At the threshold, Sunoo bends so close your ear warms. “Sleep,” he murmurs, the same command Jungwon uses like a blessing. “Dream of hands.” He smiles against the air where your skin ends. “Next time I’ll count for you while he holds you still.”

Jungwon’s hand tightens one notch at your waist, a warning, a promise, a brand pressed through clothes. “Next time,” he says, to Sunoo, to you, to the night that will keep at this until you’re rewritten, “I’ll decide who goes first.”

Nurse Min opens the clinic door before anyone knocks, lamp bright behind her like a little square sun. She takes in the triangle of bodies, the glint of the knife, the feral set of Sunoo’s mouth, the obedient steadiness of Jungwon’s hand at your side.

“Inside,” she says, and steps aside.

You pass between them—Sunoo’s almost-touch a heat across your throat; Jungwon’s real touch a line at your hip you could follow with your eyes closed—and cross into the light.

You do not kiss anyone. No one kisses you.

But as the door shuts and the mountain presses its ear to the glass to listen, you know it: your body already understands the shape they promised. It will remember. It will hunger.

And when it happens—when it really happens—it will not be an accident.

________

The clinic smelled of metal and mint. Nurse Min left you in a chair under her lamp until the feverish hum in your body dulled to a bearable pitch. She made you drink water, bitter and green as ditch weed, and held your wrist while your pulse rattled beneath her thumb. When you asked her if you were safe, she only said, “Nothing in a place like this is safe. At best, some things are safer than others.”

By the time she dismissed you, the compound had already gone to sleep. Mira was curled on her side in the dorm, bracelets stilled. You should have slept too. Instead you lay awake, tasting the memory of a petal pressed against your tongue, feeling the phantom weight of Jungwon’s hand steady at your waist, the ghost of Sunoo’s fingers just shy of your throat.

Your body remembered. It remembered too well.

When you finally slipped into the corridor, your bare feet soundless on the boards, it wasn’t to find air. It was because something in you had already decided that the ache would not stop on its own.

The greenhouse loomed against the night, ribs of iron and glass sweating mist. The lock had never been for people who wanted to stay out. You pushed the door and it sighed open, warm air rushing at you like a mouth.

He was waiting. Of course he was.

Sunoo leaned against a bench, sleeves rolled, pale wrists glowing under the lamps. His expression was the same one he’d worn when he laid the petal on your tongue earlier—delighted, expectant, like he had always known your body would come back to him.

“You breathe too loud when you lie down,” he murmured. “I could hear you from the other side of the hall.”

You should have left. You stepped closer instead.

Sunoo reached for you without touching, fingers tracing the air beside your cheek. That almost-contact burned hotter than heat itself. Your breath caught, and his smile sharpened. “See? Your body tells the truth. It remembers me already.”

His hand hovered down, stopping at the hollow of your throat. “Here,” he whispered. “Where the pulse lives.” He bent, mouth a whisper away from your skin, never quite sealing it. Your nerves screamed as if he’d kissed you. “You want me to touch you. That’s why you came.”

Your denial scraped your teeth but never left your tongue.

“Good girl,” he said, pleased at your silence. He turned you, pressing between your shoulder blades until your knees bent and you landed on the warm boards of the floor. “Stay open. Stay soft.”

His hands came at last—sliding along your thighs, parting them without rush, without doubt. He dragged his thumb along the cotton of your thin shorts, pressing until the damp there gave you away. “Blooming,” he said reverently, as if the word itself could coax you wider.

You gasped when he pressed harder, the friction maddening. He laughed low in his throat, pleased. “You’ve been waiting since the Rite, haven’t you? You swallowed the petal and your body begged for more.”

He tugged fabric aside with clinical precision, exposing you to the humid air. His fingers slicked easily through the wetness already gathered, and he made a sound of satisfaction that went straight to your gut. “So ready,” he crooned. “So obedient.”

Two fingers circled, teased, pressed—but never where you needed. He watched your hips shift, your breath stutter. “Say please,” he murmured.

“I—”

“Shh.” His free hand covered your mouth lightly, thumb grazing your lower lip. “Not with words. With your body.”

Your thighs trembled. You pushed into his hand, desperate. His smile widened. “There it is. Begging without speech.”

He slipped two fingers inside, slow, deliberate. Your back arched, a strangled sound caught behind his palm. He curled them just right, hitting the place that made you shiver, made your eyes roll back. “Yes,” he whispered against your ear. “That’s it. That’s how you bloom.”

His palm pressed harder over your mouth as your moans broke free. His rhythm quickened, fingers thrusting, scissoring, spreading you open as if he meant to plant something inside. Every push forced slick sounds into the greenhouse air. He bent low, lips brushing your temple, murmuring praises between each thrust: “Perfect. My good flower. Opening just for me. No one else will see you like this.”

Your orgasm came sudden, brutal—your whole body snapping tight around his hand, shuddering against him. He kept moving, dragging it out until you were gasping into his palm, thighs twitching.

When at last he withdrew, his fingers glistened. He lifted them to your lips, smearing wetness across them before pushing between. “Taste yourself,” he ordered softly. “Know what you are to me.”

Shame and hunger tangled in your chest. You sucked his fingers clean, and his eyes darkened, mouth parting as if he might finally kiss you. He didn’t. He pulled back just enough to leave you desperate, to make absence itself a cruelty.

“Blooming,” he whispered again, satisfied. “And tomorrow, you’ll be ready for the soil.”

The greenhouse door creaked. You jerked, Sunoo still crouched over you, his slick fingers withdrawing with deliberate slowness.

Jungwon stood in the doorway, lantern spilling gold over his dirt-streaked arms. His jaw tightened as his eyes tracked the wet shine on your lips, the way your legs trembled, the smug curve of Sunoo’s smile.

For a long, brutal moment, no one spoke. Then Jungwon stepped forward, shovel still in one hand, and his voice came out rough, dangerous.

“She’s mine next.”

The lamps hummed. The soil smelled of iron. Your heart beat against your throat like a trapped bird as the two men stared across you, and you realized the next time you were touched, it would be by both.

And you would not escape it.

______

The night you tried to run, the mountain gave you away.

The boards beneath your feet creaked, wet leaves clung to your calves, and the fog was a hand on your throat. You ran anyway. Past the dorms, past the glasshouse ribs glowing faintly from their lamps, down the west path where the ravens laughed like women who knew your secrets.

You thought the dark would cover you.

But the dark belonged to him.

A hand caught your wrist so hard you nearly went down. The lantern flared, and Jungwon’s face came out of the mist—eyes black, jaw locked, the muscle jumping with rage he didn’t bother to soften. He dragged you against him, chest heaving like you’d run into a wall that had learned how to breathe.

“Running,” he said, voice low and sharp as a spade. “After I told you not to.”

“I—”

“Quiet.” His grip on your wrist tightened until your bones ached. “Do you know what he did to you in there? Do you know what you smell like? Soil and him.” His other hand closed hard around your chin, forcing you to meet his eyes. His breath came hot, furious. “I told you not to let him touch you.”

Your protest was thin. “I didn’t—”

“You did.” He shoved you back against the rough bark of a pine. The trunk dug into your spine; his body crowded yours, heat and dirt and something mean. “You opened your mouth. You let him put his fingers in you.” His hand slid down your throat, pressing just enough to make your pulse throb under his palm. “Do you think that makes you his?”

“No—”

“No,” he repeated, mocking and brutal, pressing harder until your words broke into breath. His eyes raked you up and down like he was reading your body for lies. “You’re mine. If you’re soil, then I’m the one who plants.”

The knife appeared from his belt—not sharp, its edge long since blunted, but the point still honest. He held it flat against your belly, dragging it up under your shirt until the cold metal kissed the underside of your breast. You shivered, body jerking against the bark. His mouth twisted, equal parts fury and hunger.

“Scared?” he murmured. “Good. Fear makes roots dig deeper.”

He hooked the blade under the band of your shorts, pulling until the fabric stretched and then snapped. His hand shoved inside without pause, fingers rough, pushing into you like he meant to stake a claim. You gasped, the sound choking against the hand still at your throat.

“Wet,” he said, voice a growl, face close enough you could feel every word on your skin. “You’re soaked for me already. Even after him. Especially after him.” His fingers thrust harder, curling, relentless, forcing your body to answer him. “Say it. Say whose you are.”

You shook your head, too proud, too broken to give it.

His mouth curved cruel. “Then I’ll fuck it into you.”

He yanked your shorts down to your thighs, lifted you bodily against the tree, and shoved his hips between your legs. You clawed at his shoulders, half to push, half to hold on, but he pinned you easy, the knife’s flat pressed to your throat now like a brand. His cock pressed hot and thick against your entrance, grinding through the slick he’d found there, rubbing until you whined.

“You hear that?” he hissed, rolling his hips, dragging the head over your folds until obscene wet sounds filled the air. “Your body begging me in front of the whole fucking mountain.” He pushed in one brutal stroke, burying himself deep, forcing a cry from your throat. His teeth bared at the sound, savage triumph. “That’s it. Open up. Take me.”

He fucked you hard against the tree, every thrust jarring bark into your spine, every shove brutal and unrelenting. The knife never left your throat—flat, cold, reminding you what he could do if he wanted. His free hand gripped your hip so hard you knew you’d bruise, dragging you down onto him, using your body like it was already his.

“Mine,” he snarled against your ear, hips slamming. “Not his. Not anyone’s. Mine to fuck. Mine to plant. Mine to keep.” His pace grew rougher, desperate, jealousy bleeding into possession. “You’ll carry me. You’ll take my seed. You’ll remember whose cock fucked you open like this.”

Your moans tore free, high and broken, every thrust forcing them out. He laughed, breathless, mean. “Good little soil. Look at you—taking it. Clenching so tight you’ll never forget.”

When you came, it was with your whole body jerking, nails raking his back, his name spilling without permission. He fucked you through it, ruthless, using your climax to milk himself. With a final, brutal thrust, he came inside you, grinding deep, growling your name like a curse and a prayer.

He stayed pressed to you, chest heaving, the knife slipping down to rest against your collarbone. He didn’t soften. He didn’t let go. His mouth found your jaw, biting hard enough to leave a mark.

When he finally pulled out, slick running down your thighs, he yanked your shorts back up roughly, like covering you was a punishment. He grabbed your wrist again, dragging you toward the compound.

“You’re not sleeping in the dorms,” he said, voice iron. “You’re mine now. My room. My bed. No one else touches you.”

The lantern swung, throwing gold across the path. His grip never loosened. You stumbled after him, body raw, used, filled, the echo of his thrusts still beating through you.

And you knew he wasn’t bluffing.

______

Jungwon’s grip on your wrist was iron, dragging you through the silent hallways until the greenhouse lamps and dorm windows disappeared. His door slammed behind you, the bolt driven home with the finality of a lock on a coffin. His room was small, spare, stripped bare of comfort—just a bed, a chair, his tools. No flowers, no soil. Only him.

He shoved you onto the mattress like you weighed nothing. Your body jolted, still slick, still aching from what he’d already done. He stood over you, chest rising and falling hard, sweat at his temples, jaw clenched like a vice.

“You don’t go back to them,” he growled. “Not Mira, not Seo, and never him.” His eyes burned. “You’re mine.”

Your breath hitched; the word stuck in your throat.

A voice cut through the dark. “You’re wrong.”

The lantern on the desk flared, spilling its glow across pale wrists, white robes loosened at the chest, a mouth curved in that familiar, cruel delight. Sunoo. Already inside. Already waiting.

Jungwon stiffened, shoulders tensing like a predator finding another in his territory. “Get out.”

Sunoo ignored him. He stepped closer, his smile syrup-sweet but eyes sharp. “She doesn’t belong to you alone. Look at her.” His gaze slid over you where you trembled on the bed, your thighs pressed together, your lips parted from shallow breaths. “She’s terrified. She’s confused. She needs gentleness.” His tone softened, dripping like honey. “And you can’t give her that.”

“Gentle doesn’t keep her alive,” Jungwon snapped, stepping between you and him, shovel-callused fists at his sides. “Gentle lets her rot.”

“Alive?” Sunoo laughed, low and dangerous. “She’s not alive. She’s blooming. That’s what I make her.”

“Blooming,” Jungwon spat, “is just another word for open. And I’m the one inside her.”

The words made your stomach twist; heat and fear tangled until you couldn’t tell the difference. You tried to speak—stop, please stop—but your throat locked.

Sunoo’s gaze darted back to you, softening. He crouched, ignoring the way Jungwon loomed above him. His hand hovered just shy of your ankle, not touching—never touching—but the heat of him crawled up your skin. “Petal,” he whispered, “don’t be afraid. I’ll take care of you. I’ll show you how it feels to be cherished.” His lips parted, almost grazing your skin as he breathed you in. “Let me taste you.”

Jungwon’s growl shook the air. He seized your arm, yanking you back against his chest, his hand spread possessive across your stomach. His cock, still half-hard, pressed against your spine. “She’s mine. Mine to fuck. Mine to plant. Mine to keep.”

Your body shuddered. Fear, yes—but deeper, darker: want, shame, hunger you couldn’t smother.

Sunoo’s smile only widened. “Then let’s see who she opens for first.” He slid closer, slipping between your knees before Jungwon could stop him. His breath fanned over your thighs, hot and wet, and you gasped when he finally touched you—soft, reverent, his hands parting you like something fragile.

The contrast made you dizzy. Jungwon’s grip bruised; Sunoo’s mouth pressed feather-light kisses along the inside of your thigh, slow, teasing, as if every touch was worship. “Sweet,” he murmured, nose brushing close to the heat of you. “So sweet. I’ll make her sing.”

“Don’t you dare—” Jungwon started, but your body betrayed you, hips twitching toward Sunoo’s mouth, a whimper breaking past your lips.

That sound changed everything.

Jungwon froze, then snarled, shoving you down into the mattress, caging you with his body. One hand pinned your wrists above your head; the other tore your shirt open down the middle, fabric splitting under his strength. His mouth crashed to your throat, biting, marking, sucking bruises into your skin with furious precision.

Sunoo groaned at the sight, as if Jungwon’s violence only made you more beautiful. He leaned in, finally sealing his lips over your cunt, sucking hard, tongue lapping deep through your folds. The wet sounds filled the room, obscene, echoing against the bare walls.

You cried out, the noise muffled against Jungwon’s hand when he clapped it over your mouth. “Quiet,” he hissed, teeth at your jaw. “Don’t give him the satisfaction of hearing how much you love it.”

But Sunoo knew anyway. He moaned against you, tongue flicking your clit, fingers sliding inside with practiced ease, curling just right. He fed off every twitch, every muffled scream, every desperate roll of your hips. “See?” he said between licks, voice thick with arousal. “She opens for me. She’s blooming already.”

Jungwon pressed harder, grinding his cock against your hip through his pants, furious at your body’s betrayal, at the way your thighs trembled around Sunoo’s head. “She’s dripping because I fucked her raw,” he snarled. “All you’re doing is licking up what I left in her.”

The words made your body jerk, shame and desire hitting like lightning.

Sunoo pulled back just enough to look up at you, his mouth shining with your wetness, his eyes dark and soft. “You taste like need,” he whispered. He dragged his tongue slowly over your clit, savoring the way you cried out under Jungwon’s palm. “And you’ll remember I was the first one who made you come with his mouth.”

“Shut up,” Jungwon snapped. But his own hips rolled against you, his cock throbbing, desperate. His jealousy only sharpened his need.

You couldn’t fight it. You came hard, body arching, Sunoo’s mouth sucking your clit, Jungwon’s hand holding you down, his teeth biting at your throat. Your orgasm tore through you like the roots of something invasive, clawing deep, unstoppable.

They didn’t stop.

Sunoo licked you clean, gentle as a lover, humming like he was savoring wine. Jungwon bit harder, grinded rougher, his hand forcing your wrists deeper into the mattress. Both of them on you—one soft, one brutal—until you didn’t know whose name to scream.

And you understood, with raw clarity, that they weren’t fighting for you.

They were fighting through you.

When the shudders finally broke, you collapsed back, gasping, throat raw. Jungwon leaned down, lips brushing your ear, his voice a growl. “This is just the beginning. Next time I’m inside you while he’s in your mouth. We’ll see who you really belong to.”

Sunoo laughed softly, licking his lips clean of you. “She’ll belong to both.”

And for the first time, you realized he was right.

_____

Your body was still shaking when Jungwon yanked you upright, dragging you into his lap as if the bed belonged only to him. His thighs were iron beneath you, his chest hard against your spine. One arm locked around your waist, the other snared your throat, thick fingers spreading wide until his grip owned the column of your neck. He forced your head back, baring your mouth to him.

“You’ll taste me now,” he snarled, lips crashing into yours.

The kiss was brutal—teeth knocking, spit spilling. He shoved his tongue deep, choking you with it, swallowing every noise you tried to make. His palm pressed tighter at your throat until your pulse roared in your ears, until breath itself became something you had to beg him for. Drool slicked your chin, his tongue forcing yours down, his grip refusing to let you turn away. It was less a kiss than a violent claiming, his mouth fucking yours the way his cock had already fucked your body raw.

You gasped when he pulled back just enough to let air in, a string of spit hanging obscenely between your mouths. He licked it off your bottom lip, then spat into your mouth deliberately, cruelly, watching you swallow because you had no choice.

“Open,” he growled, forcing your jaw wider with his hand at your throat. “Good. That’s mine too. Every sound. Every swallow.”

Your vision blurred; your thighs squeezed together involuntarily. Terror and heat tangled until you couldn’t breathe for either.

And then Sunoo was there.

He crouched in front of you, hands sliding up your knees to part them wider, his smile infuriatingly calm even in violence. “My turn.”

“No,” Jungwon bit out, but Sunoo was already moving. He grabbed your chin, fingers digging in hard enough to bruise, and wrenched your head away from Jungwon’s mouth. Your neck snapped to the side, and before you could gasp, Sunoo’s lips were on yours.

It wasn’t tender. It was vicious. He sucked your bottom lip until it split, teeth biting down until pain shot bright, then licked the blood from your mouth as if it belonged to him. His tongue drove past your teeth, tasting everything Jungwon had left there, devouring it with obscene relish.

You moaned helplessly, the sound muffled between them.

Jungwon’s grip on your throat tightened, forcing your head back further, rage pouring off him like heat. “She’s mine.”

Sunoo broke the kiss just long enough to sneer against your wet mouth. “Then why is she kissing me back?” He pressed his tongue to yours again, slow and filthy, sucking until spit ran down your chin. Then he pulled back, wiped it with his thumb, and shoved the slick digit back between your lips. “Lick it clean. That’s mine now.”

Your mouth obeyed before your brain caught up.

Jungwon’s chest vibrated with a growl. He bent and bit your jaw, then your throat, leaving purple marks against Sunoo’s fingerprints. His hand clamped your neck harder, forcing you to gasp around Sunoo’s thumb.

“She’s choking on me,” Jungwon snarled. “Not you.”

Sunoo laughed low, mean. He leaned closer, his forehead pressing to yours, his other hand grabbing Jungwon’s wrist on your throat, not to stop it, but to squeeze it tighter. “Then let’s choke her together.”

The pressure doubled. Your eyes watered, spit pooling at the corner of your mouth, drooling down your chin as both of them held you, forced you open, forced you to take them. One mouth kissed you, sucked you, spat into you; the other bit, bruised, pressed your throat until stars danced.

You weren’t kissing anymore. You were being consumed.

And God help you—your body wanted more.

_______

They had you caged between them—Jungwon at your back, Sunoo at your front—two sets of hands closing every door your body might have tried to escape through.

Your pulse beat frantically against Jungwon’s palm at your throat. Sunoo’s fingers dug into your chin, keeping your face tipped up so you couldn’t hide. Their mouths had already ruined you, spit running down your jaw, bruises blooming on your throat and collarbone like dark flowers. Your chest rose too fast, every breath their permission, every sound something they stole from you.

“You see?” Sunoo whispered, voice as sweet as it was cruel. “She’s ready. She’s shaking for us.” His hand slid down, brushing your stomach, spreading lower. “The soil is wet.”

“She’s wet because I fucked her open,” Jungwon snapped against your ear, his breath harsh. “She’s mine to fill.” He ground his cock against your ass through his pants, thick and hard, a promise of what was coming. His teeth found your neck again, biting until your body arched despite yourself.

The two of them moved you as if you were theirs to arrange. Your thighs were forced wide over Sunoo’s lap, your back crushed to Jungwon’s chest. Rough hands tugged your ruined shorts away; cool air hit the slick heat between your legs. Sunoo hummed like a priest receiving an offering.

“Let me taste again.” He didn’t wait for permission. His mouth descended, sucking your clit into his mouth, tongue lapping at you until your eyes rolled back. His hands locked on your thighs, holding you open for him, his moans vibrating into your cunt.

Jungwon shoved your wrists down into the mattress, his cock rutting against you through fabric, his fury pressed into every grind. “Listen to her,” he growled. “Dripping for us. Begging without words.” He yanked his pants open, the blunt head of his cock dragging along your ass, smearing precum. “She’s going to take both. Right now.”

You sobbed, terror and need colliding until you couldn’t tell them apart. “I can’t—”

“You can,” Sunoo cut in smoothly, lifting his head, chin wet with your slick. He stroked your trembling thighs with a mockery of gentleness. “Your body’s already opening. We’ll guide you.” His eyes glimmered, half-devotion, half-madness. “You’ll bloom for us together.”

Jungwon spat into his palm, gripped his cock, and shoved it between your cheeks, rubbing the head against your tight hole until you whined. “Scared?” he hissed, his hand tightening at your throat. “Good. Fear makes you clench tighter.”

Sunoo’s fingers slid inside your cunt again, curling, coaxing, slicking you up for him. He looked up at you, his smile soft even as he stretched you ruthlessly. “Breathe, petal. I’ll be inside you soon. You’ll be so full you won’t remember how to be empty.”

When Sunoo lined himself up, pressing the head of his cock against your soaked entrance, Jungwon shoved his tip harder at your ass, both of them pushing at once. Your cry ripped the air as your body was forced to split, one cock stretching your cunt, the other pressing past the tight ring of muscle until you thought you’d break.

“Fuck,” Jungwon groaned, voice raw. “So tight. Gripping me like a fist.”

“She’s perfect,” Sunoo sighed, already sinking deeper, your walls convulsing around him. “Taking both of us. Our flower.”

It was too much. The stretch burned, overwhelming, obscene. You clawed at the sheets, eyes rolling back as both of them bottomed out, your body trembling violently with the force of being split in two. They didn’t give you time. Jungwon’s hips snapped forward first, brutal, pounding into your ass with the fury of jealousy. Sunoo met him stroke for stroke, slower, deeper, angling until every thrust speared your cunt exactly where it made you scream.

Pinned, stuffed, broken open—you were nothing but their vessel.

“Say it,” Jungwon snarled, hand squeezing your throat until your vision blurred. “Say you’re mine.”

“She’s ours,” Sunoo countered, kissing you, sucking the spit from your mouth, swallowing your gasps. “Tell us, petal. Tell us who you bloom for.”

Your answer was a sob, a whimper, a strangled cry as their cocks moved inside you, filling every inch, grinding against each other through the thin wall of your body until the sensation drove you half-mad.

“Fuck, I can feel him through you,” Jungwon groaned, rutting harder, holding you down as if you might try to run again. “But you’re squeezing me tighter. That’s how I know you’re mine.”

Sunoo’s tongue licked the tears from your cheeks. “She’s crying for me. Look at her. Look how she wants to be saved even while we ruin her.”

Your body convulsed around them, slick gushing down your thighs, every nerve alight. The pain blurred into pleasure until you were begging without words, your nails tearing the sheets, your cries spilling into their mouths as they fought to own your climax.

When you came, it was devastating—your cunt and ass clenching around them both, milking them, dragging them deeper. Jungwon groaned, teeth sinking into your shoulder as he spilled inside you, hot and overwhelming. Sunoo followed seconds later, filling your cunt until you were overflowing, cum dripping down your thighs, both of them holding you so tightly you couldn’t breathe.

They didn’t pull out. They stayed locked inside, cocks twitching, their breaths harsh against your skin.

Jungwon’s hand squeezed your throat one last time, forcing your eyes to his. “Say it,” he demanded, voice hoarse. “Say you’re planted in me.”

Sunoo kissed your cheek, softer but no less cruel. “Say you’ll bloom for us both.”

And you, too full to think, too wrecked to fight, whispered the only truth left in you:

“I can’t belong to just one.”

They smiled—different smiles, but the same hunger.

And you knew you’d never escape again.

_______

woah this was so diffecult to write SO IM SORRY IF IT ISNT THE BEST

THANK YOU FOR READING!!

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[lollovern]

- The Garden Left to Rot -

enhypen masterlist

wattpad

inspired by this post

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groundskeeper!yang jungwon x guest!femreader x cult counselor!kim sunoo | obsessive romance | cult horror | forced devotion | ritualistic sex | jealousy and rivalry | fucked-up love triangle | knife kink | corrupted comfort | you will belong to someone eventually | DARK CONTENT AHEAD!!

wc: 14k

summary: You’re sent to a grief recovery retreat hidden in the mountains. But this isn’t therapy — it’s a cult blooming in blood and rot. Jungwon wants to bury you where no one else can touch you. Sunoo wants to crack you open until you bloom for him. Both say it’s healing. But it’s obsession.

warnings: extreme gore, threesome, cult rituals, body horror (flowers under skin, insect scenes), blood play, forced confinement, psychological manipulation, emotional degradation, knife play, religious delusion, obsessive behavior, toxic romance, dubcon themes, ritualistic sex, hallucinations, violence

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The van climbs until the road forgets how to be a road. Pines crowd close; fog slicks the windshield like breath on glass. By the time the driver kills the engine, your phone has been surrendered, the waiver signed, and your name—your real one—folded into a sealed envelope with your belongings.

A hand-painted sign leans crooked against a stone pillar: THE GARDEN.

Beneath it, smaller script: Let go. Become.

Everyone here is an adult—paperwork made that clear. Still, the cluster of arrivals huddle like freshmen. A woman in a bone-white coat stands at the gate, serene as a photograph. “Welcome,” she says. “I’m Director Seo. You won’t need last names here. You won’t need yesterday.” Her smile doesn’t reach her eyes. “We begin with stillness.”

Stillness smells like damp soil and rosemary. The compound spreads in tiers: a glasshouse ribbed with iron; dormitories with shuttered windows; a refectory where steam fogs the panes; a low clinic painted the color of milk. The greenhouse breathes—a pulse of heavy, sweet air each time the door opens. Inside, rows of lilies lean toward heat lamps; vines net the rafters; something rustles in the loam.

“Orientation,” says the boy who appears at Director Seo’s shoulder. He’s young—early twenties—with paper-clean features and the kind of smile people don’t realize is a blade until it’s already inside them. Kim Sunoo. His name tag says Counselor; the ribbon beneath it says Ritual Lead. “Shoes off in the greenhouse,” he adds lightly. “We keep the floors soft.”

Your shoes leave the ground. Cool boards. Warm mist. A bell rings once. The arrivals form a circle on woven mats; a dozen white-robed staff ghost the edges. A few guests have the shaved look of hospital discharge; others wear expensive emptiness like cologne.

“Here,” Sunoo says gently, “we do not share pasts. Only needs.” His gaze slips over faces and lands on you. Not a leer. A selection. “You may speak or sit in silence. Both are honest.”

“I need to sleep,” says a woman with chewed nails. “Like, three days.”

“I need to stop remembering,” a man answers, voice flat.

The girl beside you—twenty-two, maybe—says nothing. Yejin is stitched on her wristband. Her hands are ink-stained. She draws while people talk: a quick, vicious graphite—faces with petal-mouths; ribs like trellises. When you shift, she tilts her sketchbook so you can see the newest figure: a person kneeling in dirt, throat blooming with something that isn’t a flower.

“Beautiful,” Sunoo murmurs, as if he’s praising a child’s first recital. “You have a keen eye for transformation, Yejin.”

From across the greenhouse, someone drags burlap sacks along iron grates. Soil dark as coffee spills from a split seam and oozes across the floor. The man hauling the bags moves like he’s apologized to gravity and refuses to do it again. Yang Jungwon. Groundskeeper on his tag. Grey work shirt. Forearms nicked white with old cuts. He doesn’t look at the circle—doesn’t look at you—until he does, and then he doesn’t stop. Not curiosity. Assessment, like weighing a seed between finger and thumb and deciding if it will live in his earth.

Director Seo outlines rules in the smooth tone of a stewardess reciting crash procedures:

No personal histories in group.

No contact with family for the first fourteen days.

No unsupervised access to the greenhouse after dusk.

Do not remove plant material from designated zones.

What is given to the soil remains in the soil.

“That includes grief,” Sunoo says, almost playful. “Especially grief.”

Your dorm is clean in the way of hospital corridors and mortuaries. Two metal beds. Two lockers. A copy of a softbound booklet on each pillow: STILLNESS GUIDE. Your roommate arrives with a jangle of bracelets and the brittle cheer of someone who learned to smile as self-defense. Mira, 26, volunteer-turned-resident-mentor.

“Welcome-welcome,” she chirps, then lowers her voice. “Pro tip: keep your head down the first three days. They watch how you watch.”

“Who?”

“Everyone.” She flicks her gaze toward the window, where the greenhouse skeletons against dusk. “Especially him.” She means Sunoo—you can hear it in the soft, reverent way. “And the groundskeeper when it’s dark.” That last part is almost a warning.

The bell rings again. Dinner is broth that tastes like the inside of a leaf and bread dense with seeds. You eat at long tables while staff move among you like shepherds. Across from you, a jittery young man, Taesun—24, scars like cat-scratches up his wrists—piles his crusts and crumbles them methodically. He pockets a handful when he thinks no one sees.

“For the worms,” he whispers to the crumbs. “They get hungry at night.”

Mira nudges your knee under the table. “He feeds them behind the east wall,” she murmurs. “Says they keep the nightmares down if they’re busy.”

In the clinic after dinner, a nurse swabs your fingers where the paper edges of the waiver bit skin. Nurse Min is beautiful in the harsh way of women who have decided their faces are weapons. When she says “this will sting,” the consonants soften strangely; a long surgical scar splits the underside of her tongue. She catches you looking and lifts a brow that says yes, I am aware of my mouth. Then—almost tender—she tapes your knuckle with gauze printed with tiny flowers.

Back in the greenhouse, the first night session is called Surrender. The lamps buzz. Mist beads your eyelashes. Sunoo stands barefoot on the damp boards, sleeves rolled, voice a low waterfall.

“Close your eyes,” he says. “Name the weight you want the earth to hold for you. Don’t say it out loud. Let your body say it.”

Around you, bodies sway. Some cry. Some freeze. When you keep your eyes open, Sunoo notices. Of course he does.

“New sprout,” he says softly, close to your ear, and the nickname feels chosen, not random. “You don’t have to force stillness. It happens when the soil recognizes you.”

“Does it?” Your voice is hoarse from disuse and altitude.

“Always.” He smiles. Not kind. Not unkind. Satisfied. “The Garden knows its own.”

Across the rows, Jungwon kneels in the dirt, wrist-deep in loam, planting something without a label. He doesn’t follow Sunoo’s cadence; he follows his own. When one lamp flickers, he rises and fixes it with the swift, competent movements of someone who builds instead of asks. When he sits back, the soil clings to his fingers like shadow.

You should sleep. Instead you help Mira remake your beds with the stiff white sheets that smell faintly of bleach and rosemary. She keeps talking, because silence makes her hands shake.

“I came as a volunteer,” she says, tucking corners square. “Stayed as a patient. It’s easier when they tell you what to be.”

“What do they tell you?”

She smiles without humor. “A flower.” Her eyes slide to your bandaged hand. “Try not to bleed in the greenhouse. They don’t like that.”

“Why?”

“Because the soil remembers.”

At night the compound changes. Lights dim. The wind strips the pines and combs the glass with needles. You lie awake and count breaths—yours, Mira’s, the building’s—until you can’t bear numbers anymore.

You go out.

The air is colder than the dorm suggests. The greenhouse glows from within, a pulse behind fogged panes. Beyond the east wall, something moves with slow persistence. You follow the ripple of disturbed leaves to a break in the hedgerow and find Taesun kneeling with his pockets turned inside out, sowing crumbs into the leaf litter like a penitent farmer.

“The worms,” he says. “They hate hunger.”

“And if they’re hungry?”

“They crawl into you,” he says simply, and his eyes are not crazy; they’re convinced. “They’re looking for warmth.”

A lantern kindles behind you. “Curfew,” a voice says.

You turn. Jungwon holds the light up so it paints his face in bones and gold. Up close, his features soften—stillness without Sunoo’s practiced grace; a patient animal’s attention. The lantern makes a thicket of his lashes. He looks from you to Taesun to your bare feet on the cold boards.

“You’ll catch a chill,” he says to you, like it’s a personal offense. “Shoes. Now.”

You should resent the command. Instead, you feel the unreasonable urge to obey. You start toward the dorms.

“Not that way,” he says. “West path. Easier. Less slope.” He tips the lantern so the light doesn’t blind you while you pass. It’s a small courtesy. It also marks you—every guard on the walkway can see who broke curfew and who brought them back.

“Do you plant at night?” you ask, because silence around him feels like standing at a cliff’s edge and leaning a little too far.

“Always,” he says. He doesn’t volunteer more. His eyes drag briefly to your bandaged hand. “You left blood in the greenhouse.”

“I didn’t—”

He lifts two fingers, the gesture efficient and final. “The soil remembers.” His mouth twitches—not a smile, exactly; the ghost of one. “Mira talks too much.”

“Is that against the rules?”

“It’s against survival.”

He walks you to the dorm porch and stops at the bottom step like there’s an invisible line he won’t cross. The night carries pine resin and wet metal. You want to ask him what he plants without labels, what grows under lamps that mimic suns, why the staff wear rosaries made of seeds.

He says, low, “Don’t follow sounds you don’t understand.”

“Why?”

“Because some things here answer to being watched.” He tilts the lantern, and for a heartbeat you see something like a tenderness he hides even from himself. “Sleep.”

You try. You fail. When you finally slide under, it’s the shallow kind of rest that hears every hinge complain.

Morning stains the glasshouse pale gold. Breakfast is porridge and a shot glass of bitter green. “Chlorophyll,” Mira grimaces. “For purity. Or the aesthetic.” She scans the refectory like she’s counting exits. “There’ll be a Placement Walk after breakfast. Don’t volunteer. They love volunteers.”

“What is it?”

She cuts her eyes toward the greenhouse. “They take someone to the grove and ‘help them choose a garden name.’ Sometimes they come back with a wreath. Sometimes without their voice for a while.”

Director Seo taps her cup. “Today’s Placement Walk is for… Yejin.”

The graphite girl looks up, startled as a deer. Her pencil stills. Sunoo’s smile brightens by half a watt. “I’ll take her,” he offers, hand already extended. “I’ve seen her drawings. She understands transformation.”

If you didn’t sleep, you are alert now. Jungwon appears in the doorway like the building made him. His gaze flicks over the room, and when it lands on Yejin’s shaking knuckles, something barely visible tightens in his jaw.

“I’ll go with you,” he says to Sunoo without looking away from the girl.

“Of course,” Sunoo replies. Silk over steel. “Two witnesses. Very proper.”

They lead her out between them: the counselor with a palm light on her shoulder; the groundskeeper holding the door open so it doesn’t bite her. The room exhales when the door closes. Mira’s bracelets clink as her hands start to shake again.

“They’ll bring her back,” you say, because logic is a habit.

“Usually,” Mira says.

Taesun folds bread crumbs into his napkin with ritual care. “If the worms are fed.”

“Stop with the worms—”

He looks up, suddenly fiercer than his tremor allows. “This place eats. I just like to decide what it eats.”

You leave your spoon in your bowl. The porridge lurches in your gut like a tide. Through the greenhouse glass, you can’t see the grove, only the suggestion of trunks and a slit of path. Time grows teeth.

When they return, Yejin walks in her body like someone has moved the furniture. A crown of woven reeds presses her hair flat. There’s a smear of green at the corner of her mouth, like she’s chewed a leaf until it bled. She carries her sketchbook close to her chest as if it’s the last piece of herself no one has touched.

“What did you choose?” Director Seo asks.

Yejin’s voice is soft but intact. “Night-blooming cereus.”

“A flower that opens in darkness,” Sunoo says, pleased. “Perfect.”

Jungwon stands behind them, sleeves rolled to the elbow, forearms dirt-streaked. A single thorn scratches the back of his hand, a bright new welt. You don’t know why your chest warms at the proof that something here can still hurt them too.

As the room settles, Nurse Min touches your shoulder. “Consult,” she says, consonants rounded. In the clinic, she peels your bandage, checks the small cut, nods. “Fine.”

“Was the walk… normal?” you ask, too casual. “For Yejin.”

Nurse Min dabs salve with a gentleness that doesn’t fit her knife-edged face. “Normal is a shape you learn,” she says. “Here, it is round.” She taps your knuckle. “Don’t open yourself on purpose. Things may grow inside.”

“Like what?”

Her eyes flick briefly toward the greenhouse. “Names.”

By afternoon the schedule has you shoveling, watering, scrubbing, writing lines. I am ready to be less. You write it a hundred times until the words separate from meaning and become a pattern of stems and loops. Outside, Jungwon clears a new bed along the south wall. His shovel bites; his shoulders move with the reliable rhythm of practiced labor. A boy twice your size steps into his path and mutters something you can’t hear. Jungwon doesn’t raise his voice. He simply looks at the boy until the boy forgets how to stand where he’s standing and moves.

“Don’t stare,” Mira warns from beside you, but she’s staring too. “He notices.”

“He noticed last night,” you say.

Mira goes still. “You went out?”

“For air.”

“Air is how they catch you,” she whispers, and for the first time her cheer fails. “Promise me you won’t go alone again.”

You don’t promise. You also don’t say I don’t know who I am without alone.

At dusk, group again. Sunoo has you sit closer to him than yesterday. When you resist, he laughs softly, as if you’re charming rather than disobedient. “We sit where the light needs us,” he says. You wonder if that’s a rule or a line he likes. While others speak, he doesn’t look at them; he watches their hands, their throats, the wet edge of eyes. When your breath hitches at someone’s story, he turns his head sharply like a wolf hearing snow crack.

“What would you let go of?” he asks you, voice pitched so the rest of the circle hears only the question, not the ownership threaded through it.

You could say: the fire, the last call you ignored, the smell of burning hair. Instead, you say nothing. He accepts your silence as if it were obedience he taught you.

Outside the glass, Jungwon is a darker shape among dark shapes, moving a hose along the rows. When his head turns toward the circle, it isn’t to the whole; it is to you. He holds you there for a breath you feel in your wrists. Then he tips the hose, and water falls like rain on metal bones.

You sleep after midnight because your body ambushes you. You wake to weight. Not on you; in the air, a heaviness like weather. The greenhouse lights are out. The compound holds its breath.

Something is under your pillow.

You slide your hand beneath it and touch paper—the rough tooth of a sketchbook page. You draw it out under the dim nightlight and see yourself. Not flattering. Not cruel. Exact. You kneel on dark soil, mouth open, and something vines out—delicate stems laced with thorns. Hands—two sets—hold your shoulders lightly, possessively: one set with ink stains, one with dirt ground into the half moons of the nails. At the bottom, Yejin’s cramped script: “Some flowers only open when watched.”

Mira stirs. “What is it?”

“Art,” you say, and your voice surprises you with how steady it is.

“What kind?”

“Prophetic,” you answer, because the truth is an animal pacing the edge of the bed and you’re not ready to let it into your ribs yet.

You slide the drawing back under your pillow and close your eyes. Across the compound, the night shifts. In your mind, Sunoo’s smile threads petals through your tongue. In reality, Jungwon’s lantern skates once across the fogged panes, a slow-moving star. Two orbits, caught in the same sky, tightening.

Slow burn, the booklet promised. Healing begins when you stop resisting.

You do not stop.

You breathe. You listen to the soil remembering you.

And you wait.

______

Morning arrives with a whistle under the door and the faint itch of grit in your teeth, as if you’ve been speaking to the ground in your sleep. Breakfast is the same: porridge, a bitter green shot, tea that tastes like boiled bark. Mira counts sips, bracelets clinking like quiet alarms. Taesun crushes his toast to dust and pockets it, eyes bright with purpose. Yejin sits very still, crown of reeds damp against her hair, sketchbook closed for once like a door she’s guarding with her body.

Director Seo taps her cup. “Today begins the Mouth Fast,” she says, voice smooth as tile. “Speech is the first addiction. For twenty-four hours, we practice voicelessness. Carry your stone”—a monk in linen sets a bowl of river stones on each table—“and let it hold your words. Anyone who breaks the fast will do a double shift in the greenhouse trenches. Sunoo will lead stillness. Jungwon will direct labor.”

A murmur rises and dies, mouths pressing shut to prove eagerness. Mira puts a flat, oval stone in your palm. “Don’t lose it,” she whispers, already breaking the rule. “They’ll say the soil took your voice because you were careless.”

You tuck the stone into your sleeve and meet Sunoo’s eyes across the hall. He’s already watching—of course he is. The smile he gives you would be harmless if you hadn’t seen how he moves when he’s pleased: slower, closer, like a candle drawn to oxygen. Jungwon lingers by the service door with a clipboard and a coil of hose on his shoulder, scanning tables the way a shepherd counts sheep by the sound of their breathing.

Chores first. Outside, the air needles your lungs; the mountain wears its cold like a second skin. Jungwon assigns tasks without looking at his list. “Mira, refectory herbs. Taesun, east wall compost. Yejin, with Nurse Min in the clinic.” His gaze slides to you and steadies. “You—paths and drains. Stay out of the grove.” Not a suggestion.

You carry a stiff-bristled broom down stone paths glazed with last night’s dew. The greenhouse ribs glow under weak sun; from inside, lamps hum, and something leafy slaps damply as if it’s learned the shape of applause. By the east wall, Taesun kneels with a small shovel and a reverence that would be holy if it didn’t smell like rot.

He tips crumbs in a neat line, then pauses to show you something cupped in his palm: a white, blind tangle coiling in damp soil. Worms, yes, but too many knotted together, a living thread. He beams, proud. You force your lips into gratitude and keep sweeping. If you stop, you will hear them, and if you hear them, you will dream them.

A shadow falls across your broom. Jungwon holds out a pair of soft-soled garden shoes with the temporary patience of a man who prefers doing to explaining. “Your feet,” he says. “You bruise easily.”

You glance at your bare socks, damp to the ankle. “Is that a rule?”

“It’s a reality,” he says; the word lands like weight. He crouches without asking, sets the shoes on the path, and steps back, gaze down so you can decide if you’ll take his help. You put them on. They’re warm from his hands. He notices the lift of your breath and looks away so the noticing won’t embarrass you. When he straightens, his eyes snag on the river stone tucked in your sleeve. “Don’t drop that,” he says. “The ravens like to steal them.”

You arch a brow—Are you joking?—but he’s already moving, a steady, unshowy force among the clatter of chores.

By mid-morning the Mouth Fast is a taut cord running through the compound. The quiet isn’t peace; it’s suppression, and suppression hums. Sunoo runs stillness from the center of the greenhouse like a maestro conducting silence. He has you sit within his radius; you don’t know how you know that, but you do. When a guest’s shoulders begin to shake, his hand appears at the nape of their neck—just weight, just heat, just enough to persuade the body that obedience feels like care.

He comes to you last, when the lamps have warmed the panes to sweating. He kneels, not quite touching, gaze on your throat. “Your pulse is stubborn,” he says in a voice pitched for you alone. “It hates rhythm. I like that.” He brushes the air near your jawline, not touching, so you feel it anyway. “The stone will teach it obedience. If you’re good at listening.”

You hold his eyes and refuse to nod. He smiles, pleased with your defiance like a trainer who prefers wild animals because they make better trophies. “We’ll work on it,” he whispers, and stands.

After lunch—a bowl of broth filtered until flavor gives up—you’re pulled into the clinic with half a dozen others for “check-ins.” Nurse Min sits you on a stool and unwraps your finger. The cut is a thin mouth now, pink with newness. She touches a gloved finger to the gauze and sniffs it as if the body has a scent that changes when it’s lying.

“Does it itch?” she asks.

You hesitate. The truth is embarrassing. “Everything does,” you admit. “Under the skin. Like… like something wants out.”

“Something wants in,” she corrects mildly. She takes tweezers to the pad of your finger and draws out a hair-fine splinter you didn’t know was there. It isn’t wood—it’s pale and sappy, flexing like a root in the air. She drops it in a jar and screws the lid tight. “Names need medium,” she says. “Don’t let anyone put theirs under your skin.”

“Is that medical advice?”

“It’s survival.” She tapes a fresh bandage printed with tiny leaves, then, softer, “If you start tasting flowers, spit.”

You leave the clinic with your mouth dry as chalk. On the steps, Yejin waits like a shadow that forgot to attach to a body. She presses a folded paper to your palm and flits off before you can unfold it. In the corner of the page, her fast, lethal graphite: you in profile, throat open, something like a stem ghosting up under the jaw. In the negative space behind you, two silhouettes—Sunoo’s soft edges; Jungwon’s blunt solidity—blur toward one another without touching. Underneath, her careful script: Not yet. But soon.

The Mouth Fast bends afternoon into a colder shape. Without words, people show who they are. Mira hums under her breath and taps her stone against her teeth like a bead. Taesun counts breath with his fingers on his ribs. A new arrival—Hana, thirty and jewel-hard—walks like a woman who refuses to ask permission from the air. An older man, Mr. Ko, rows his spoon through soup with the concentration of a man pretending there is a river and a boat that can take him off this mountain.

At dusk, Director Seo calls for the Seed Burial. “We surrender what we’ve hoarded,” she says, and volunteers step forward with small slips of paper seeded with something that will sprout if the soil wants it. They kneel, press the papers into a rectangle of fresh-turned earth, and cover them with a thin skin of loam. The lamps go low. Sunoo stands at their backs. Jungwon stands at their front, shovel grounded like a staff.

You don’t move. You have nothing to bury you can stand to name.

A woman you recognize from orientation—the one who needed three days of sleep—places both palms flat on the soil like it’s someone she loves. Her breath hitches once; she swallows whatever it shook loose. As the last handful of earth covers the names, something beneath the surface shifts. Not the modest swell of seeds drinking. A shove from below.

The crowd stills. You feel it again—a push. The soil flexes and sighs, grains settling. Someone’s hand jerks back as if bitten. Sunoo’s smile does not change, which means it changes. “The ground recognizes an offering,” he says pleasantly. “Stand, flowers. Let the dark do what it’s for.”

Jungwon’s eyes are on the dirt, not the people. His jaw flexes once, twice. You have the sharp, childish thought—He hears it too—and the relief that follows is so naked you almost miss the fear riding it.

Night stitches the compound tight. The Mouth Fast persists: tongues held, little pantomimes replacing argument. In bed, Mira sleeps with her open palm on her stone like it might roll away. You face the wall because the drawing under your pillow is a magnet and your skull is iron.

A scrape wakes you—a quick, purposeful sound under the window. You slide out of bed and ease the latch. Cold breath pours in. On the path below, a lantern moves slow as a planet. You follow, soft-soled shoes silent on the boards, the stone in your sleeve tapping your wrist like a heart that’s climbed too high.

The lantern stops. Jungwon steps into its circle. He doesn’t look surprised to see you. He looks like a man who has laid a trap and found what he baited it for. He lifts the lantern just enough to catch your face without flaying you with light.

He puts a finger to his mouth—quiet—and crooks that same finger: come.

You should run. You go.

He takes you along the west path to a low, fenced plot you haven’t noticed in daylight, because in daylight everything looks like something else. Up close, the boards are stained darker than weather. He stops you with a hand on your sleeve. His grip is gentle; his hand is strong. “Do not speak,” he says, and for the first time today the command lands like care, not control.

He tilts the lantern over the fence. The light stratifies a pit maybe two meters long, maybe one deep, lined with rough timbers and crawling with the industry of decay. You see peels, stems, pot scrapings—normal compost—then catch on something pale threaded through like lace: cartilage? You squint, heart hammering, and in among the skins and stems you see hair—just a clump, just enough to be undeniable. The sour-metal stink under the rot answers a question you didn’t know you were asking until now.

You stagger, mute because the rule still binds your mouth. Jungwon’s hand rises like he planned for your body to try to leave you. He catches your elbow with two fingers and steadies you without pulling you closer. “Breathe,” he says, voice so low the pit swallows it.

You breathe. He watches your lungs move under your shirt as if measuring if they’ll keep their job.

“What is this,” you manage, a whisper that bruises the fast.

“Everything that isn’t needed,” he says. It is both the most honest sentence you’ve heard since you arrived and the worst one. “Don’t come here alone.”

“Why show me?”

His mouth tightens. He weighs the truth and hands you a ration. “Because you will go looking. Better you see what is true than what you can’t live through.”

He lifts the lantern away; the pit dissolves back into darkness. When he looks at you again, the composure you’ve seen him wear like a uniform slips an inch. “Next time,” he says, “wake me.”

“How?” It comes out harder than you intend. “Do I knock on the earth?”

“On my door.” He says it like a correction and a promise. “I’d rather carry you than find you down there with your throat open to the sky.”

You swallow. The stone in your sleeve digs your wrist bone.

He walks you back along the west path, keeping the lantern low so you don’t blind yourself and tumble. At the bottom of the dorm steps, he stops as if a line of salt has been poured between you. “Sleep,” he says. Then, almost grudgingly—no, carefully, like he fears generosity might teach you to expect it—“You did well.”

“You mean quiet,” you say.

“I mean you didn’t lie to yourself while you were looking.” He turns the lantern, and for a heartbeat your faces share a circle of light. It is not intimate, and it is.

Inside, the warm dark smells like bodies and disinfection. Mira turns in her sleep, bracelets whickering. Your hands shake. Not with the adrenaline of the pit—though that remains like a taste at the back of your throat—but with the realization that both men see you. Sunoo sees the mechanism; Jungwon sees the fracture line. You can’t decide which is worse.

The Mouth Fast breaks at dawn with a bell so soft it feels like a secret. Voices resume like a creek finding an old bed; people speak too loudly, then blush, then laugh at their own relief. Director Seo praises “compliance” as if it were a sacrament. In the refectory, mugs clack, spoons scrape. Words return as barter.

You don’t trust yours yet.

Sunoo flows through tables like sunlight convincing itself it’s holy. He catches your empty mug, pours tea, and sets it in front of you with a flourish that makes a few heads turn. “How did the silence fit?” he asks, lazy, interested. It isn’t small talk. It’s a probe shaped like kindness.

“Like wire,” you say.

He smiles, delighted—as if you’ve told him a secret about yourself he can use. “It looks good on you,” he says, and taps your river stone where it sits on the table as if he gave it to you, as if it obeys him too. “We have Talkback today. You and me.”

“Is that optional?”

“In principle,” he says. “In practice, most people prefer to be seen.” He leans in, lower voice. “You certainly do.”

He leaves before you can snap that you preferred to be alive, actually. Across the room, Jungwon stops at the threshold, takes the refectory in at a glance, and chooses a seat with his back to the wall. He eats fast, plain, as if food is fuel and surveillance is dessert. When he lifts his mug, you notice the fresh welt across the back of his hand—a thorn, yesterday, dragging its punctuation.

Talkback is held in a small room off the clinic, windowless, lit by a lamp that chooses flattery over truth. Sunoo sits too close, but because he knows what too close does to bodies, he leaves exactly enough air that you can fool yourself into thinking you could stand if you wanted to. He doesn’t touch you. He rests his forearms on his knees, hands open, posture full of a patience he wears like silk.

“What is the shape of your fear?” he asks, as if fear is polite enough to have geometry.

“Wide,” you say.

“Flat?”

“Deep.”

He grins. “Good. Honesty makes my job easier.” He looks at your mouth, then your hands, then your throat. “Last night you broke curfew.”

It isn’t a question. “I walked.”

“To the west path,” he says, savoring the corridor of it.

“Is that forbidden?”

“Not if you were with someone.”

You hold his gaze. You don’t look away. You don’t nod. You don’t give him Jungwon.

Sunoo’s smile returns, but thinner. “We don’t punish curiosity,” he says silkily. “We shape it.” He nods to your sleeve. “Keep the stone. I like how you sound when you hold it.”

“I didn’t speak.”

“You breathed differently,” he says, and you hate that you believe him. “This afternoon I want you in the greenhouse. We’ll do matching breath. I’ll keep count so you don’t have to.”

Your stomach remembers the pit and rolls. “What if I say no?”

“Then we’ll go slower,” he says, as if you asked him to make it sweeter. “That’s the kind of consent you like, isn’t it? The kind that arrives after your body learns the lesson.”

You stand because sitting feels like agreeing. He doesn’t stop you. He nods as if you’ve completed a task he set in his head.

“Good,” he says. “The roots are listening.”

Outside, the day is too bright in the way of mountains pretending to be gentle. You find Mira tending pots of kitchen herbs—mint, rosemary, a vicious little basil. “You look like you saw a ghost,” she says without looking up.

“I saw the compost,” you say.

She flinches so hard the basil shudders. “You don’t say it out loud,” she hisses, then checks herself, forces her voice calm again. “Names wake things.”

“Whose hair is in it?”

“Everyone’s,” she says. “Eventually.”

By late afternoon your muscles revolt, and stillness becomes a thing you have to hold down with both hands. In the greenhouse, Sunoo runs breath like a metronome. When he kneels behind a girl whose hands won’t stop shaking, he doesn’t touch her skin; he places his palm two inches away from her spine and waits. The girl’s shoulders ease; her breath learns his count. You hate him for it. You hate her relief. You hate that your body pays attention.

Jungwon moves along the rows with a bucket and a dull pruning blade, nicking stems, turning soil, resetting stakes. When a lamp pops and goes dim, he crosses to replace it without being called. On his way back, he passes near your mat—near, not past. The air shifts with him: sweat, iron, soil, a clean note like water running under rock. He doesn’t look down. He scratches the back of his wrist where a thorn welt cross-hatches older scars and says, as if the comment belongs to the room, “Some things only grow when you pretend you can’t see them.”

You don’t know if he means the plants, the people, or you.

Evening comes with teeth. The bell pulls everyone to the refectory; the sky sits heavy, swollen with weather that refuses to begin. Over dinner, Hana spills her tea and swears loudly enough that half the room jumps; then she laughs, tips her chin like she meant to do it, and glares at anyone who looks sorry on her behalf. Mr. Ko tells Taesun to stop feeding the worms like they’re pets; Taesun bares his teeth, half-smile, half warning. Nurse Min pockets a spoon someone bent into a hook. Director Seo watches it all with the small, sated smile of a zookeeper whose animals are thriving.

Night brings the first scream.

Not a long one. Not a movie howl. A single, keening note cut off hard, like a rope being cut. The compound freezes; forks stop halfway to mouths; breath holds. Sunoo is already on his feet, smile sharpened into usefulness. Jungwon’s chair scrapes; he’s moving before you can find your shoes.

They go toward the grove at a measured pace that says they already know what they’ll find. Director Seo lifts her hand. “Stay seated,” she says, and the command lands like weight on your shoulders. Mira’s fingers take yours under the table and squeeze so hard your knuckles grind. You squeeze back. Your mouth tastes like rosemary and fear.

You wait. The greenhouse sweats. The clock you aren’t allowed to see walks itself around the hour by the sound of your blood in your ears. When the door opens again, Sunoo comes in first, serene, coat unwrinkled. Jungwon follows with a bundled shape in his arms—a blanket, a softness of color, too long where a body should bend.

A gasp skips the room. “She fainted,” Sunoo says, which is both intolerably insufficient and the only story you’ll be allowed. “A cleansing reaction. She will rest. We will keep vigil over the names she surrendered.”

He doesn’t say who. Your mind fills the blank with the sleeping woman from breakfast, because that is who you fear for, and fear is a magnet. Jungwon carries the bundle past. You know how much weight that is—your body recognizes the set of his jaw, the economy of his gait. He does not look at you. He doesn’t look anywhere but the door to the clinic, as if any glance could spill what he’s holding.

The dining hall exhales like it’s been underwater too long. Director Seo claps once, neat. “We will not gossip,” she says. “We will not catastrophize. We will practice serenity.”

You don’t sleep. Not because you’re brave—because you’re scared correctly now, and scared correctly people stay awake. When you doze, you wake to the sensation that someone has put a leaf on your tongue and asked you to pray with it in your mouth. You spit into your sheet and find nothing. When you sit up, a shadow peels off the wall near the window and becomes Jungwon.

You nearly fling yourself out of bed. He doesn’t move, as if sudden gestures would spook you. He should not be in the dorms after lights; rules are their own religion here. He breaks this one like he breaks branches: cleanly, without apology.

“You left your shoes,” he says, low. He sets them at the foot of your bed, lined up, laces tucked. His voice is stripped of everything but function. “Don’t go barefoot again.”

“What happened?” you ask, whispering because anything louder might wake the dark.

“Don’t ask me,” he says, and for a breath you think he’s refusing. Then he adds, “Because I’ll tell you.” His gaze drags over your face, cataloging fine tremors, the cracked edge of your mouth, the way one hand fists in the sheet like rope. “Sleep,” he says. “You’ll need it.”

He is out the way he came, the door kissing its jamb like a secret.

You try to obey. The mountain presses its cold face to the window and listens. Somewhere, a lantern moves. Somewhere else, a man like a hymn kneels by a bed that is too light.

You put the river stone back in your sleeve and hold it against your pulse until the beat stops arguing with your bones. You remember the jar in Nurse Min’s clinic with the threadlike root curled at the bottom like a question mark. You picture Yejin’s hand drawing you with something under your skin you didn’t agree to carry.

Stillness was the promise. Obedience was the price. You have paid neither. Now the Garden pays attention.

And you, finally, are afraid.

_________

You wake with the taste of copper and rosemary slicked over your tongue, as if someone pressed a leaf there while you slept and whispered hold it. A welt has risen along your bandaged finger—thin, pale, almost pretty. When you press it, it flexes under the skin like something answering from underneath.

Breakfast is a choreography of clatter and eyes. Mira smiles too hard; her bracelets rattle out a code you can’t read. Taesun tips crumbs into his pocket with priestly concentration. Yejin’s crown of reeds has dried to a brittle halo; she draws with her pencil held like a knife. Hana sits mean and diamond-bright, daring the room to dull her edges. Mr. Ko’s spoon cuts the same path through porridge like a boatman refusing any other shore. Director Seo watches the surface of her tea the way people watch the sea for bodies.

“The Naming Rite will be held at sundown,” she announces, as if she’s asking for the salt. “Those selected have been notified.”

Sunoo lifts his eyes, and that’s your notification.

Mira’s fingers find your knee under the table and clamp. She shakes her head once, small, fast—refuse. You don’t know what refusal looks like here besides a story they will tell about you afterward.

“Drink,” Nurse Min says when you pass through the clinic to turn in your night report—how many hours asleep, how many awake, whether you dreamed of heat, teeth, drowning. She hands you a glass the green of pond water. You smell it, and it smells like lawn and iron. “Chlorophyll with a little hem,” she says, seeing your face. “Calms the heart.”

“Calms or slows?” Your voice scratches.

She cants her head. “Same action, different motive.” She glances at your finger. “Still itching?”

“It… moves,” you say, and the honesty makes your stomach pitch. “Like a thread.”

“Everything alive wants a home,” she replies. She peels the bandage with sure fingers. Underneath, the welt has subdivided into delicate veins, a fine network. Not veins. Veining. It looks like leaf. She presses the back of her glove along it; the pattern darkens, limned green under the skin. “Names need medium,” she repeats. “Keep your mouth closed in the greenhouse today. Even when you want to answer.”

You want to ask answer what, but Sunoo is in the doorway, dusk caught in the lamplight of his hair. He doesn’t knock; he glides in like permission. “Our new sprout,” he says, pleased to find you in a chair. “I’ll take her.”

Nurse Min’s mouth goes a little flatter. “She eats first.”

“Of course.” Sunoo’s smile doesn’t move. “Then we breathe.”

The greenhouse sweats. Heat lamps hum like insects; the glass with its rain of condensation blurs the mountain into a myth. Staff move among the rows with trays of soil sheets—thin paper seeded with something that glitters faintly when the light hits it wrong. “Embedded affirmations,” Sunoo tells the group. “You write what you’ll surrender. The seeds will carry it.”

Hana snorts. “Is the surrender refundable?”

Sunoo’s eyes quicken. “There’s always a transaction,” he says. “We just prefer you know the price.” He looks back to you. “Mat,” he says, and it isn’t a request.

You sit. He kneels behind you, palms hovering two inches from your ribs. No touch—just the sense of touch waiting. “Open your mouth,” he murmurs. The admonition from Nurse Min echoes; you clamp your lips. Sunoo’s pleased noise lands against your neck like breath. “Good. Breathe through your nose. In on four, out on six. I’ll count.”

His voice is a rope you have to grab to keep from slipping. When your breath shudders, he matches it; when it calms, he pursues. On the sixth cycle, something sweet pushes the air—lily, wet earth—and you remember the pit and want to be sick. “Stay,” he says, reading your recoil. “Stay where your body is. Don’t run from it. That’s where people rot.”

Across the rows, Jungwon replaces a cracked lamp with quick, sure hands. He doesn’t look at you until he does, a glance like a hand closing on the back of your neck. The air between you tightens. His forearms are netted with healed cuts, white against brown; a fresh welt crosses them like a red thread. When Sunoo says “out on six,” Jungwon turns the dial and the light hums obedient, and you wonder whether the whole building breathes to his count.

Yejin brings you a tray of seed-paper without being asked. When you reach, her gaze drops to your bandage. She moves the pencil like a blade and sketches the back of your hand: the delicate leaf veining, the suggestion of something wanting to break surface. She writes Not yet over the knuckles and slides the paper into your lap. Her mouth is a thin line; her eyes are large and dry and furious.

The day’s chores are smaller and meaner than yesterday’s. Scrub the condensation gutters. Rake. Haul sacks labeled Bone Meal that smell like old molars. Taesun sings under his breath in a language not meant for mouths and leaves a damp trail of crumbs along the east wall. Mr. Ko fetches and carries with blank efficiency, his face empty as a cleaned plate.

By late afternoon, a woman you know only as Auntie Hye—fiftyish, hair cut short for neatness, eyes that scan like a mother bird’s—begins to cough. At first it is dry and prim; then she hunches, pushes a hand to her chest and coughs wet. A ribbon of something bright pops free onto her palm. Petals. White. Tissue-thin and slick with saliva. A few guests laugh—nerves, delight, cruelty. Nurse Min is there before the room decides what to feel, hand under Auntie Hye’s chin, tissues ready. Hye coughs again, harder, and a clot of petals spills: red-tipped now, streaked. She hacks out a final cluster and sags. The tissues are sodden. The petals look like tongues.

“Pollination,” Sunoo says calmly. “Sometimes the body rehearses letting go by practicing bloom.”

Auntie Hye shakes her head, breath hitching. “I didn’t—” she starts.

Sunoo presses two fingers lightly to her throat. “You did.”

She closes her mouth.

Jungwon comes with a bucket and a flat spade; he scoops the petals into the bucket without expression. Your stomach tilts; you grip the bench until the wood prints itself into your palm. He doesn’t look at anyone. He takes the bucket toward the compost. You see his jawclench once when he passes the pit door and files that, like a photographed crime scene.

After the petals, other small horrors follow as if emboldened. A boy pulls his sleeve up to scratch and reveals a faint green tracery along his inner arm; when he scrubs at it, the skin reddens and puffs and the pattern brightens like a pressed leaf held to light. Mira slices a basil stem and it bleeds thin, clean sap; she runs her thumb along the cut and licks it without thinking, then startles at the taste and laughs too loudly. Taesun tips a paper cup into a drain, and a pale, slick worm writhes against the grate and splits into two thinner threads that both crawl the wrong way, toward his fingers. He coos like they’re babies and tucks them back into mud.

“Don’t feed your nightmares,” Nurse Min says without looking up from the woman whose mouth she swabs. “They grow fine on their own.”

By evening, the heat in the greenhouse feels like a hand that won’t lift. The lamps go low. Director Seo stands by the iron ribs with her clipboard like a prayerbook. “For the Naming Rite,” she says, “we welcome Sunoo as Voice and Jungwon as Hands.”

Voice and Hands. A division of power simple enough to live inside.

You are led—gently, unmistakably—toward the central bed, a rectangle of fresh loam bordered by smooth stones. Yejin edges after you, sketchbook clutched to her chest; Nurse Min blocks her with just a glance. “Not this,” Min murmurs. “Later.”

Mira steps forward—too fast—“I can go instead,” she says, smile like a knife wrapped in tissue.

Sunoo’s smile is silk on a nail. “We don’t barter names,” he says. “We harvest them.”

Your knees give. Not dramatic; a small buckling, the body remembering the ground. Sunoo’s hand is there without touching you, a near-weight at your shoulder. “Kneel,” he says, as if reminding you what your body already decided. “Head up. We face what we bring.”

Jungwon stands at the foot of the bed, shovel grounded. Close, his expression is the same flat steel as his blade. He looks at your throat the way carpenters look at walls: not hunger—assessment. When he speaks, his voice is small enough to belong only to the three of you. “Do you know what you’re giving?” he asks.

You try to say No. What comes out is “Something I can’t carry.”

“Good,” he says, and the word is not kindness. It’s calibration.

Sunoo’s fingers hover at your jaw, turning your face by the gravity of proximity. “Open,” he tells you, and your mouth obeys because your body recognizes a doctor’s tone even when it comes from someone who would rather be a priest. He places a petal on your tongue. It tastes like cold tea and a coin. “Hold,” he says. He waits. When you swallow despite yourself, his smile flares. “You see? The body knows ceremony even when the mind resists.”

He steps behind you. You feel his presence like a heat lamp. Jungwon moves to your side and holds out his hand. On his palm: a knife. Not sharp—its edge has been blunted until it’s a tongue of metal—but its point is honest. He waits until you meet his eyes; only then does he set the flat of the blade against your sternum. The steel is cool. Your skin fists under it.

“This is how we write it,” Sunoo says, and his breath touches the shell of your ear like a whispering moth. “Not deep. Not cruel. Not yet.”

The blade slides up without breaking skin, tracing between ribs, across the slow bell of breath—sternum, clavicle, the notch at your throat. The metal leaves a trail of gooseflesh; your pulse hammers against it like an animal trapped under the lid of a box. Jungwon’s other hand is steady at your shoulder, not pushing, not holding, just there, a second horizon the body can measure itself against.

“Name what cannot follow you,” Sunoo murmurs. It could be a real question. It could be a spell. Your mouth fills with the taste of flower and iron; words gather behind it like flies at meat.

You can’t say the fire; to say it would open something that the soil will keep. You say, “The last night.”

“Again,” Sunoo purrs.

“The last night,” you repeat, and the room tilts like a field under wind.

The congregation—guests in white, staff in linen—sways. Mira has both hands pressed to her lips. Taesun rocks in small, violent arcs. Yejin’s pencil moves; she draws you kneeling, two sets of hands marking you; she smudges the graphite so the air around you looks like breath or smoke.

The blade dips, lifts, comes to rest against your throat’s right side. You feel the exact spot where it would enter if it wanted to. Jungwon’s pulse is visible in his wrist; steady, heavier than yours. He moves the flat in a small crescent along the tendon, and your voice leaves you for a moment—pure reflex. A small, unpretty sound. Sunoo shivers behind you, pleased as if you performed a note he’d been coaching you toward.

“Do you understand the price?” Sunoo asks softly.

“No,” you say honestly.

“Beautiful,” he says, delighted. “No one ever does until after.”

He lifts the petal from your mouth with two fingers and lays it on your tongue again like communion. You hold it. Jungwon takes your left hand. His palm is rough and warm; soil lives in the whorls of his fingerprints. He pricks the pad of your finger with the very tip of the blunted knife, as if he wants to remind the blade of its older religion. A bead of blood swells, bright, neat. He turns your hand and presses that red to the seed-paper waiting in a shallow trench at the bed’s edge. Your blood bleeds into the paper like water into thirst.

“Now,” Sunoo says, voice dropped low enough to live in your bones, “we plant what you are not. So what you are can grow.”

Jungwon folds loam over the paper. The soil is cool even in this hothouse weather. It sucks at your finger when he presses your hand flat to it. Something moves underneath—something too quick for roots. Your stomach rocks. You try to pull back. Jungwon’s hand covers yours, firm as a yoke; Sunoo’s hand wraps your throat—not squeezing, just holding the column steady. You are pinned in two places that translate directly to obedience.

“Breathe,” Sunoo says.

You do. The soil under your hand warms like a mouth.

The congregation murmurs. Not words; the sound bodies make when they agree to a script. Director Seo watches like a reader flipping to the end to be sure it comes out as written. Nurse Min’s face has the set of a woman who’s decided to count a vein until morning.

The thing under the soil stills.

Jungwon lifts your hand and wipes the loam away with his thumb. The smear looks like war paint. Sunoo releases your throat and smooths his palm down the line his fingers left, a correction, an apology, a brand. He bends and whispers against your ear, “You belong to the ground,” and then, after a heartbeat, “and to us while you’re learning.”

His mouth never touches skin. The idea of it does.

The Rite closes with a bell that tastes like copper in your teeth. People file out as if stepping around a sleeping animal. Mira gets to you first, palms hot where she holds your face. “Drink water,” she hisses. “Don’t go to sleep. If you dream the name, it sticks.”

“I didn’t give it,” you say.

She laughs, a small animal sound. “You bled. That’s enough.”

Mr. Ko offers a clean handkerchief without meeting your eyes. Hana watches from a distance like a hawk deciding if a rabbit is worth stooping for when the field is full of easier meat. Taesun beams, mud on his lip, as if he’s just watched a very good wedding.

Yejin presses a drawing into your hand and vanishes. It’s you kneeling, hands marked, a line along your throat that is not a cut but knows where one would go. Over your shoulder, two shadows bend—one a heat-halo, one a blunt storm. Soon, she’s written. Don’t say yes with your mouth.

Night. The mountain holds its breath. The lamps in the greenhouse go black one by one until the glass is only a shape. You sit on your dorm bed and watch your hands not shake. Mira sleeps curled like a comma with her stone under her cheek. The drawing under your pillow warms to your scalp as if it wants to crawl into you.

A knock—not on the door. On the window, one knuckle, once. When you slide the frame, cold air pours in, and you think of Nurse Min’s keep your mouth closed in the greenhouse and keep it shut.

Jungwon stands below, lantern hooded, face lit just enough to make eyes and jaw. He tilts his head—come—and you go because your legs have learned this path. Out the back, down the steps, across the boards to the west path. He waits in the shadow of the shed where spades hang like a rack of tongues.

“Any dizziness? Nausea?” he asks, clinic-plain.

“Just… aware.” The word feels too small for your body’s rattled hum.

He grunts—approval. He reaches for your hand and turns the palm up. The loam under your nails has dried to fine grit. He rubs it away with his thumb, slow, methodical. It’s almost tender until you realize he is checking for changes—for the leaf-vein under your skin brightening, for anything moving that shouldn’t. When his thumb passes over the edge of your pulse, it jumps. He looks up sharply. You look away.

“You shouldn’t stay in the dorm tonight.” Matter-of-fact. “You’ll hear things like your name, and some of them will be for you and some won’t. You’re still soft. Soft things take impressions.”

“Where do I go?”

“My room.” Flat. Then, as if he heard how it sounds: “It’s safer. There are no plants there.”

“Is that true?”

“It’s true enough.” He waits. “Or go to the clinic and sit under Min’s lamp and let her count your breaths until morning.”

“Which would you pick,” you ask, because some part of you refuses to let him stand there and decide your body in his head without you in the room.

He takes too long to answer, then says, “The clinic is gentle.” A beat. “I am not.”

Wind combs the pines; the greenhouse ticks as it cools. Somewhere a raven laughs like a woman who knows your secrets and isn’t impressed.

“Choose,” he says quietly.

Sunoo’s shadow falls across the path before you can. He steps into the lantern’s circle like a storybook: pale wrists, clean hands, a smile that tells you exactly how he will use it. “Ah,” he says, soft delight. “My flower and my hands. I wondered where the night would put you.”

Jungwon does not step back. He also does not step forward. The lantern holds the three of you in a tight Venn where your breaths overlap. Sunoo tips his head, curious. “You can take her,” he says to Jungwon, which is to say I will let you. “But she’ll come back to me tasting like soil and fear, and we’ll start again from below.” He turns to you, voice honeyed and mean. “Or you can come with me and I’ll teach your body what calm feels like so you know when you’ve lost it.”

The polite violence of the options makes your stomach liquefy.

“Stop,” Jungwon says, and the word is a tool, not a plea.

Sunoo laughs softly. “The earth doesn’t stop growing just because you ask it gently.” He reaches, very slowly, and lifts your jaw with two fingers—not touching skin; his hand floats a whisper below it and your head lifts anyway, obedient to suggestion. “Show me your throat,” he says, and your body almost does it because it learned tonight and bodies like to repeat lessons. You hold yourself still out of spite. His smile warms. “Good girl.”

The words hit like a hand under your ribs. Jungwon’s breath changes. It darkens the air.

“Enough,” Jungwon says again, and hooks a finger in the lantern hood. He pulls it open. Light flares, pot-bright, brutal. The three of you blink; the world loses its beautiful edges and shows its seams. “Clinic,” he tells you.

Sunoo’s smile fades pixel by pixel until only his eyes shine. “For now,” he agrees. He steps in closer so there is no air between the three bodies but what breath can claim. He looks at Jungwon and speaks to you. “You’ll end up between us anyway,” he says, the prophecy flat, not cruel. “Why not learn the shape early.”

You should move. You should walk yourself to the nurse and let her count your lungs like prayer beads. Instead you stand very still while two men who have learned your pulse by different languages consider the currency of your fear.

Sunoo lifts his hand and stops a breath from your mouth. You feel the heat of him without the permission of touch. “I won’t kiss you,” he says, velvet and wicked. “Not yet.” He turns his palm and hovers over your throat, reading the rush there like a favorite book. “See what your body does with almost.”

Jungwon moves behind you so quietly the night forgets to mark his steps. He doesn’t touch you. His presence is so large it reads like contact anyway—the shape of him corralling air. You have the dizzy thought that if you leaned back, he would catch you, and if you leaned forward, Sunoo would open like a mouth.

“Breathe,” Sunoo whispers, and it isn’t instruction now; it’s a dare.

You do. The air leans with you. The world tightens to a triangle: lantern glare, the line of a blunted blade tucked into Jungwon’s belt, the faint copper on Sunoo’s knuckle where he touched your lip earlier with the petal.

“I said clinic,” Jungwon repeats, low enough to live at your spine.

“Make her say please,” Sunoo counters, amusement sweet as rot. “Our girl loves a ritual.”

“Don’t—” you start, and then stop, because the word tastes like surrender and you haven’t decided whose hands deserve it.

“Not tonight,” Jungwon says, and you understand: it isn’t mercy. It’s control deferred. He steps to your side, inserts a palm—warm, heavy—at your waist, not pulling, not pushing, just a point you can move along. Sunoo mirrors the motion on your other side without touching, an echo your nerves misread as contact. Together they guide you three steps, five, toward the clinic’s dim window—two gravities that agree for once.

At the threshold, Sunoo bends so close your ear warms. “Sleep,” he murmurs, the same command Jungwon uses like a blessing. “Dream of hands.” He smiles against the air where your skin ends. “Next time I’ll count for you while he holds you still.”

Jungwon’s hand tightens one notch at your waist, a warning, a promise, a brand pressed through clothes. “Next time,” he says, to Sunoo, to you, to the night that will keep at this until you’re rewritten, “I’ll decide who goes first.”

Nurse Min opens the clinic door before anyone knocks, lamp bright behind her like a little square sun. She takes in the triangle of bodies, the glint of the knife, the feral set of Sunoo’s mouth, the obedient steadiness of Jungwon’s hand at your side.

“Inside,” she says, and steps aside.

You pass between them—Sunoo’s almost-touch a heat across your throat; Jungwon’s real touch a line at your hip you could follow with your eyes closed—and cross into the light.

You do not kiss anyone. No one kisses you.

But as the door shuts and the mountain presses its ear to the glass to listen, you know it: your body already understands the shape they promised. It will remember. It will hunger.

And when it happens—when it really happens—it will not be an accident.

________

The clinic smelled of metal and mint. Nurse Min left you in a chair under her lamp until the feverish hum in your body dulled to a bearable pitch. She made you drink water, bitter and green as ditch weed, and held your wrist while your pulse rattled beneath her thumb. When you asked her if you were safe, she only said, “Nothing in a place like this is safe. At best, some things are safer than others.”

By the time she dismissed you, the compound had already gone to sleep. Mira was curled on her side in the dorm, bracelets stilled. You should have slept too. Instead you lay awake, tasting the memory of a petal pressed against your tongue, feeling the phantom weight of Jungwon’s hand steady at your waist, the ghost of Sunoo’s fingers just shy of your throat.

Your body remembered. It remembered too well.

When you finally slipped into the corridor, your bare feet soundless on the boards, it wasn’t to find air. It was because something in you had already decided that the ache would not stop on its own.

The greenhouse loomed against the night, ribs of iron and glass sweating mist. The lock had never been for people who wanted to stay out. You pushed the door and it sighed open, warm air rushing at you like a mouth.

He was waiting. Of course he was.

Sunoo leaned against a bench, sleeves rolled, pale wrists glowing under the lamps. His expression was the same one he’d worn when he laid the petal on your tongue earlier—delighted, expectant, like he had always known your body would come back to him.

“You breathe too loud when you lie down,” he murmured. “I could hear you from the other side of the hall.”

You should have left. You stepped closer instead.

Sunoo reached for you without touching, fingers tracing the air beside your cheek. That almost-contact burned hotter than heat itself. Your breath caught, and his smile sharpened. “See? Your body tells the truth. It remembers me already.”

His hand hovered down, stopping at the hollow of your throat. “Here,” he whispered. “Where the pulse lives.” He bent, mouth a whisper away from your skin, never quite sealing it. Your nerves screamed as if he’d kissed you. “You want me to touch you. That’s why you came.”

Your denial scraped your teeth but never left your tongue.

“Good girl,” he said, pleased at your silence. He turned you, pressing between your shoulder blades until your knees bent and you landed on the warm boards of the floor. “Stay open. Stay soft.”

His hands came at last—sliding along your thighs, parting them without rush, without doubt. He dragged his thumb along the cotton of your thin shorts, pressing until the damp there gave you away. “Blooming,” he said reverently, as if the word itself could coax you wider.

You gasped when he pressed harder, the friction maddening. He laughed low in his throat, pleased. “You’ve been waiting since the Rite, haven’t you? You swallowed the petal and your body begged for more.”

He tugged fabric aside with clinical precision, exposing you to the humid air. His fingers slicked easily through the wetness already gathered, and he made a sound of satisfaction that went straight to your gut. “So ready,” he crooned. “So obedient.”

Two fingers circled, teased, pressed—but never where you needed. He watched your hips shift, your breath stutter. “Say please,” he murmured.

“I—”

“Shh.” His free hand covered your mouth lightly, thumb grazing your lower lip. “Not with words. With your body.”

Your thighs trembled. You pushed into his hand, desperate. His smile widened. “There it is. Begging without speech.”

He slipped two fingers inside, slow, deliberate. Your back arched, a strangled sound caught behind his palm. He curled them just right, hitting the place that made you shiver, made your eyes roll back. “Yes,” he whispered against your ear. “That’s it. That’s how you bloom.”

His palm pressed harder over your mouth as your moans broke free. His rhythm quickened, fingers thrusting, scissoring, spreading you open as if he meant to plant something inside. Every push forced slick sounds into the greenhouse air. He bent low, lips brushing your temple, murmuring praises between each thrust: “Perfect. My good flower. Opening just for me. No one else will see you like this.”

Your orgasm came sudden, brutal—your whole body snapping tight around his hand, shuddering against him. He kept moving, dragging it out until you were gasping into his palm, thighs twitching.

When at last he withdrew, his fingers glistened. He lifted them to your lips, smearing wetness across them before pushing between. “Taste yourself,” he ordered softly. “Know what you are to me.”

Shame and hunger tangled in your chest. You sucked his fingers clean, and his eyes darkened, mouth parting as if he might finally kiss you. He didn’t. He pulled back just enough to leave you desperate, to make absence itself a cruelty.

“Blooming,” he whispered again, satisfied. “And tomorrow, you’ll be ready for the soil.”

The greenhouse door creaked. You jerked, Sunoo still crouched over you, his slick fingers withdrawing with deliberate slowness.

Jungwon stood in the doorway, lantern spilling gold over his dirt-streaked arms. His jaw tightened as his eyes tracked the wet shine on your lips, the way your legs trembled, the smug curve of Sunoo’s smile.

For a long, brutal moment, no one spoke. Then Jungwon stepped forward, shovel still in one hand, and his voice came out rough, dangerous.

“She’s mine next.”

The lamps hummed. The soil smelled of iron. Your heart beat against your throat like a trapped bird as the two men stared across you, and you realized the next time you were touched, it would be by both.

And you would not escape it.

______

The night you tried to run, the mountain gave you away.

The boards beneath your feet creaked, wet leaves clung to your calves, and the fog was a hand on your throat. You ran anyway. Past the dorms, past the glasshouse ribs glowing faintly from their lamps, down the west path where the ravens laughed like women who knew your secrets.

You thought the dark would cover you.

But the dark belonged to him.

A hand caught your wrist so hard you nearly went down. The lantern flared, and Jungwon’s face came out of the mist—eyes black, jaw locked, the muscle jumping with rage he didn’t bother to soften. He dragged you against him, chest heaving like you’d run into a wall that had learned how to breathe.

“Running,” he said, voice low and sharp as a spade. “After I told you not to.”

“I—”

“Quiet.” His grip on your wrist tightened until your bones ached. “Do you know what he did to you in there? Do you know what you smell like? Soil and him.” His other hand closed hard around your chin, forcing you to meet his eyes. His breath came hot, furious. “I told you not to let him touch you.”

Your protest was thin. “I didn’t—”

“You did.” He shoved you back against the rough bark of a pine. The trunk dug into your spine; his body crowded yours, heat and dirt and something mean. “You opened your mouth. You let him put his fingers in you.” His hand slid down your throat, pressing just enough to make your pulse throb under his palm. “Do you think that makes you his?”

“No—”

“No,” he repeated, mocking and brutal, pressing harder until your words broke into breath. His eyes raked you up and down like he was reading your body for lies. “You’re mine. If you’re soil, then I’m the one who plants.”

The knife appeared from his belt—not sharp, its edge long since blunted, but the point still honest. He held it flat against your belly, dragging it up under your shirt until the cold metal kissed the underside of your breast. You shivered, body jerking against the bark. His mouth twisted, equal parts fury and hunger.

“Scared?” he murmured. “Good. Fear makes roots dig deeper.”

He hooked the blade under the band of your shorts, pulling until the fabric stretched and then snapped. His hand shoved inside without pause, fingers rough, pushing into you like he meant to stake a claim. You gasped, the sound choking against the hand still at your throat.

“Wet,” he said, voice a growl, face close enough you could feel every word on your skin. “You’re soaked for me already. Even after him. Especially after him.” His fingers thrust harder, curling, relentless, forcing your body to answer him. “Say it. Say whose you are.”

You shook your head, too proud, too broken to give it.

His mouth curved cruel. “Then I’ll fuck it into you.”

He yanked your shorts down to your thighs, lifted you bodily against the tree, and shoved his hips between your legs. You clawed at his shoulders, half to push, half to hold on, but he pinned you easy, the knife’s flat pressed to your throat now like a brand. His cock pressed hot and thick against your entrance, grinding through the slick he’d found there, rubbing until you whined.

“You hear that?” he hissed, rolling his hips, dragging the head over your folds until obscene wet sounds filled the air. “Your body begging me in front of the whole fucking mountain.” He pushed in one brutal stroke, burying himself deep, forcing a cry from your throat. His teeth bared at the sound, savage triumph. “That’s it. Open up. Take me.”

He fucked you hard against the tree, every thrust jarring bark into your spine, every shove brutal and unrelenting. The knife never left your throat—flat, cold, reminding you what he could do if he wanted. His free hand gripped your hip so hard you knew you’d bruise, dragging you down onto him, using your body like it was already his.

“Mine,” he snarled against your ear, hips slamming. “Not his. Not anyone’s. Mine to fuck. Mine to plant. Mine to keep.” His pace grew rougher, desperate, jealousy bleeding into possession. “You’ll carry me. You’ll take my seed. You’ll remember whose cock fucked you open like this.”

Your moans tore free, high and broken, every thrust forcing them out. He laughed, breathless, mean. “Good little soil. Look at you—taking it. Clenching so tight you’ll never forget.”

When you came, it was with your whole body jerking, nails raking his back, his name spilling without permission. He fucked you through it, ruthless, using your climax to milk himself. With a final, brutal thrust, he came inside you, grinding deep, growling your name like a curse and a prayer.

He stayed pressed to you, chest heaving, the knife slipping down to rest against your collarbone. He didn’t soften. He didn’t let go. His mouth found your jaw, biting hard enough to leave a mark.

When he finally pulled out, slick running down your thighs, he yanked your shorts back up roughly, like covering you was a punishment. He grabbed your wrist again, dragging you toward the compound.

“You’re not sleeping in the dorms,” he said, voice iron. “You’re mine now. My room. My bed. No one else touches you.”

The lantern swung, throwing gold across the path. His grip never loosened. You stumbled after him, body raw, used, filled, the echo of his thrusts still beating through you.

And you knew he wasn’t bluffing.

______

Jungwon’s grip on your wrist was iron, dragging you through the silent hallways until the greenhouse lamps and dorm windows disappeared. His door slammed behind you, the bolt driven home with the finality of a lock on a coffin. His room was small, spare, stripped bare of comfort—just a bed, a chair, his tools. No flowers, no soil. Only him.

He shoved you onto the mattress like you weighed nothing. Your body jolted, still slick, still aching from what he’d already done. He stood over you, chest rising and falling hard, sweat at his temples, jaw clenched like a vice.

“You don’t go back to them,” he growled. “Not Mira, not Seo, and never him.” His eyes burned. “You’re mine.”

Your breath hitched; the word stuck in your throat.

A voice cut through the dark. “You’re wrong.”

The lantern on the desk flared, spilling its glow across pale wrists, white robes loosened at the chest, a mouth curved in that familiar, cruel delight. Sunoo. Already inside. Already waiting.

Jungwon stiffened, shoulders tensing like a predator finding another in his territory. “Get out.”

Sunoo ignored him. He stepped closer, his smile syrup-sweet but eyes sharp. “She doesn’t belong to you alone. Look at her.” His gaze slid over you where you trembled on the bed, your thighs pressed together, your lips parted from shallow breaths. “She’s terrified. She’s confused. She needs gentleness.” His tone softened, dripping like honey. “And you can’t give her that.”

“Gentle doesn’t keep her alive,” Jungwon snapped, stepping between you and him, shovel-callused fists at his sides. “Gentle lets her rot.”

“Alive?” Sunoo laughed, low and dangerous. “She’s not alive. She’s blooming. That’s what I make her.”

“Blooming,” Jungwon spat, “is just another word for open. And I’m the one inside her.”

The words made your stomach twist; heat and fear tangled until you couldn’t tell the difference. You tried to speak—stop, please stop—but your throat locked.

Sunoo’s gaze darted back to you, softening. He crouched, ignoring the way Jungwon loomed above him. His hand hovered just shy of your ankle, not touching—never touching—but the heat of him crawled up your skin. “Petal,” he whispered, “don’t be afraid. I’ll take care of you. I’ll show you how it feels to be cherished.” His lips parted, almost grazing your skin as he breathed you in. “Let me taste you.”

Jungwon’s growl shook the air. He seized your arm, yanking you back against his chest, his hand spread possessive across your stomach. His cock, still half-hard, pressed against your spine. “She’s mine. Mine to fuck. Mine to plant. Mine to keep.”

Your body shuddered. Fear, yes—but deeper, darker: want, shame, hunger you couldn’t smother.

Sunoo’s smile only widened. “Then let’s see who she opens for first.” He slid closer, slipping between your knees before Jungwon could stop him. His breath fanned over your thighs, hot and wet, and you gasped when he finally touched you—soft, reverent, his hands parting you like something fragile.

The contrast made you dizzy. Jungwon’s grip bruised; Sunoo’s mouth pressed feather-light kisses along the inside of your thigh, slow, teasing, as if every touch was worship. “Sweet,” he murmured, nose brushing close to the heat of you. “So sweet. I’ll make her sing.”

“Don’t you dare—” Jungwon started, but your body betrayed you, hips twitching toward Sunoo’s mouth, a whimper breaking past your lips.

That sound changed everything.

Jungwon froze, then snarled, shoving you down into the mattress, caging you with his body. One hand pinned your wrists above your head; the other tore your shirt open down the middle, fabric splitting under his strength. His mouth crashed to your throat, biting, marking, sucking bruises into your skin with furious precision.

Sunoo groaned at the sight, as if Jungwon’s violence only made you more beautiful. He leaned in, finally sealing his lips over your cunt, sucking hard, tongue lapping deep through your folds. The wet sounds filled the room, obscene, echoing against the bare walls.

You cried out, the noise muffled against Jungwon’s hand when he clapped it over your mouth. “Quiet,” he hissed, teeth at your jaw. “Don’t give him the satisfaction of hearing how much you love it.”

But Sunoo knew anyway. He moaned against you, tongue flicking your clit, fingers sliding inside with practiced ease, curling just right. He fed off every twitch, every muffled scream, every desperate roll of your hips. “See?” he said between licks, voice thick with arousal. “She opens for me. She’s blooming already.”

Jungwon pressed harder, grinding his cock against your hip through his pants, furious at your body’s betrayal, at the way your thighs trembled around Sunoo’s head. “She’s dripping because I fucked her raw,” he snarled. “All you’re doing is licking up what I left in her.”

The words made your body jerk, shame and desire hitting like lightning.

Sunoo pulled back just enough to look up at you, his mouth shining with your wetness, his eyes dark and soft. “You taste like need,” he whispered. He dragged his tongue slowly over your clit, savoring the way you cried out under Jungwon’s palm. “And you’ll remember I was the first one who made you come with his mouth.”

“Shut up,” Jungwon snapped. But his own hips rolled against you, his cock throbbing, desperate. His jealousy only sharpened his need.

You couldn’t fight it. You came hard, body arching, Sunoo’s mouth sucking your clit, Jungwon’s hand holding you down, his teeth biting at your throat. Your orgasm tore through you like the roots of something invasive, clawing deep, unstoppable.

They didn’t stop.

Sunoo licked you clean, gentle as a lover, humming like he was savoring wine. Jungwon bit harder, grinded rougher, his hand forcing your wrists deeper into the mattress. Both of them on you—one soft, one brutal—until you didn’t know whose name to scream.

And you understood, with raw clarity, that they weren’t fighting for you.

They were fighting through you.

When the shudders finally broke, you collapsed back, gasping, throat raw. Jungwon leaned down, lips brushing your ear, his voice a growl. “This is just the beginning. Next time I’m inside you while he’s in your mouth. We’ll see who you really belong to.”

Sunoo laughed softly, licking his lips clean of you. “She’ll belong to both.”

And for the first time, you realized he was right.

_____

Your body was still shaking when Jungwon yanked you upright, dragging you into his lap as if the bed belonged only to him. His thighs were iron beneath you, his chest hard against your spine. One arm locked around your waist, the other snared your throat, thick fingers spreading wide until his grip owned the column of your neck. He forced your head back, baring your mouth to him.

“You’ll taste me now,” he snarled, lips crashing into yours.

The kiss was brutal—teeth knocking, spit spilling. He shoved his tongue deep, choking you with it, swallowing every noise you tried to make. His palm pressed tighter at your throat until your pulse roared in your ears, until breath itself became something you had to beg him for. Drool slicked your chin, his tongue forcing yours down, his grip refusing to let you turn away. It was less a kiss than a violent claiming, his mouth fucking yours the way his cock had already fucked your body raw.

You gasped when he pulled back just enough to let air in, a string of spit hanging obscenely between your mouths. He licked it off your bottom lip, then spat into your mouth deliberately, cruelly, watching you swallow because you had no choice.

“Open,” he growled, forcing your jaw wider with his hand at your throat. “Good. That’s mine too. Every sound. Every swallow.”

Your vision blurred; your thighs squeezed together involuntarily. Terror and heat tangled until you couldn’t breathe for either.

And then Sunoo was there.

He crouched in front of you, hands sliding up your knees to part them wider, his smile infuriatingly calm even in violence. “My turn.”

“No,” Jungwon bit out, but Sunoo was already moving. He grabbed your chin, fingers digging in hard enough to bruise, and wrenched your head away from Jungwon’s mouth. Your neck snapped to the side, and before you could gasp, Sunoo’s lips were on yours.

It wasn’t tender. It was vicious. He sucked your bottom lip until it split, teeth biting down until pain shot bright, then licked the blood from your mouth as if it belonged to him. His tongue drove past your teeth, tasting everything Jungwon had left there, devouring it with obscene relish.

You moaned helplessly, the sound muffled between them.

Jungwon’s grip on your throat tightened, forcing your head back further, rage pouring off him like heat. “She’s mine.”

Sunoo broke the kiss just long enough to sneer against your wet mouth. “Then why is she kissing me back?” He pressed his tongue to yours again, slow and filthy, sucking until spit ran down your chin. Then he pulled back, wiped it with his thumb, and shoved the slick digit back between your lips. “Lick it clean. That’s mine now.”

Your mouth obeyed before your brain caught up.

Jungwon’s chest vibrated with a growl. He bent and bit your jaw, then your throat, leaving purple marks against Sunoo’s fingerprints. His hand clamped your neck harder, forcing you to gasp around Sunoo’s thumb.

“She’s choking on me,” Jungwon snarled. “Not you.”

Sunoo laughed low, mean. He leaned closer, his forehead pressing to yours, his other hand grabbing Jungwon’s wrist on your throat, not to stop it, but to squeeze it tighter. “Then let’s choke her together.”

The pressure doubled. Your eyes watered, spit pooling at the corner of your mouth, drooling down your chin as both of them held you, forced you open, forced you to take them. One mouth kissed you, sucked you, spat into you; the other bit, bruised, pressed your throat until stars danced.

You weren’t kissing anymore. You were being consumed.

And God help you—your body wanted more.

_______

They had you caged between them—Jungwon at your back, Sunoo at your front—two sets of hands closing every door your body might have tried to escape through.

Your pulse beat frantically against Jungwon’s palm at your throat. Sunoo’s fingers dug into your chin, keeping your face tipped up so you couldn’t hide. Their mouths had already ruined you, spit running down your jaw, bruises blooming on your throat and collarbone like dark flowers. Your chest rose too fast, every breath their permission, every sound something they stole from you.

“You see?” Sunoo whispered, voice as sweet as it was cruel. “She’s ready. She’s shaking for us.” His hand slid down, brushing your stomach, spreading lower. “The soil is wet.”

“She’s wet because I fucked her open,” Jungwon snapped against your ear, his breath harsh. “She’s mine to fill.” He ground his cock against your ass through his pants, thick and hard, a promise of what was coming. His teeth found your neck again, biting until your body arched despite yourself.

The two of them moved you as if you were theirs to arrange. Your thighs were forced wide over Sunoo’s lap, your back crushed to Jungwon’s chest. Rough hands tugged your ruined shorts away; cool air hit the slick heat between your legs. Sunoo hummed like a priest receiving an offering.

“Let me taste again.” He didn’t wait for permission. His mouth descended, sucking your clit into his mouth, tongue lapping at you until your eyes rolled back. His hands locked on your thighs, holding you open for him, his moans vibrating into your cunt.

Jungwon shoved your wrists down into the mattress, his cock rutting against you through fabric, his fury pressed into every grind. “Listen to her,” he growled. “Dripping for us. Begging without words.” He yanked his pants open, the blunt head of his cock dragging along your ass, smearing precum. “She’s going to take both. Right now.”

You sobbed, terror and need colliding until you couldn’t tell them apart. “I can’t—”

“You can,” Sunoo cut in smoothly, lifting his head, chin wet with your slick. He stroked your trembling thighs with a mockery of gentleness. “Your body’s already opening. We’ll guide you.” His eyes glimmered, half-devotion, half-madness. “You’ll bloom for us together.”

Jungwon spat into his palm, gripped his cock, and shoved it between your cheeks, rubbing the head against your tight hole until you whined. “Scared?” he hissed, his hand tightening at your throat. “Good. Fear makes you clench tighter.”

Sunoo’s fingers slid inside your cunt again, curling, coaxing, slicking you up for him. He looked up at you, his smile soft even as he stretched you ruthlessly. “Breathe, petal. I’ll be inside you soon. You’ll be so full you won’t remember how to be empty.”

When Sunoo lined himself up, pressing the head of his cock against your soaked entrance, Jungwon shoved his tip harder at your ass, both of them pushing at once. Your cry ripped the air as your body was forced to split, one cock stretching your cunt, the other pressing past the tight ring of muscle until you thought you’d break.

“Fuck,” Jungwon groaned, voice raw. “So tight. Gripping me like a fist.”

“She’s perfect,” Sunoo sighed, already sinking deeper, your walls convulsing around him. “Taking both of us. Our flower.”

It was too much. The stretch burned, overwhelming, obscene. You clawed at the sheets, eyes rolling back as both of them bottomed out, your body trembling violently with the force of being split in two. They didn’t give you time. Jungwon’s hips snapped forward first, brutal, pounding into your ass with the fury of jealousy. Sunoo met him stroke for stroke, slower, deeper, angling until every thrust speared your cunt exactly where it made you scream.

Pinned, stuffed, broken open—you were nothing but their vessel.

“Say it,” Jungwon snarled, hand squeezing your throat until your vision blurred. “Say you’re mine.”

“She’s ours,” Sunoo countered, kissing you, sucking the spit from your mouth, swallowing your gasps. “Tell us, petal. Tell us who you bloom for.”

Your answer was a sob, a whimper, a strangled cry as their cocks moved inside you, filling every inch, grinding against each other through the thin wall of your body until the sensation drove you half-mad.

“Fuck, I can feel him through you,” Jungwon groaned, rutting harder, holding you down as if you might try to run again. “But you’re squeezing me tighter. That’s how I know you’re mine.”

Sunoo’s tongue licked the tears from your cheeks. “She’s crying for me. Look at her. Look how she wants to be saved even while we ruin her.”

Your body convulsed around them, slick gushing down your thighs, every nerve alight. The pain blurred into pleasure until you were begging without words, your nails tearing the sheets, your cries spilling into their mouths as they fought to own your climax.

When you came, it was devastating—your cunt and ass clenching around them both, milking them, dragging them deeper. Jungwon groaned, teeth sinking into your shoulder as he spilled inside you, hot and overwhelming. Sunoo followed seconds later, filling your cunt until you were overflowing, cum dripping down your thighs, both of them holding you so tightly you couldn’t breathe.

They didn’t pull out. They stayed locked inside, cocks twitching, their breaths harsh against your skin.

Jungwon’s hand squeezed your throat one last time, forcing your eyes to his. “Say it,” he demanded, voice hoarse. “Say you’re planted in me.”

Sunoo kissed your cheek, softer but no less cruel. “Say you’ll bloom for us both.”

And you, too full to think, too wrecked to fight, whispered the only truth left in you:

“I can’t belong to just one.”

They smiled—different smiles, but the same hunger.

And you knew you’d never escape again.

_______

woah this was so diffecult to write SO IM SORRY IF IT ISNT THE BEST

THANK YOU FOR READING!!

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© si3rren 2025. all rights reserved.

[lollovern]

- The Garden Left to Rot -

enhypen masterlist

wattpad

inspired by this post

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groundskeeper!yang jungwon x guest!femreader x cult counselor!kim sunoo | obsessive romance | cult horror | forced devotion | ritualistic sex | jealousy and rivalry | fucked-up love triangle | knife kink | corrupted comfort | you will belong to someone eventually | DARK CONTENT AHEAD!!

wc: 14k

summary: You’re sent to a grief recovery retreat hidden in the mountains. But this isn’t therapy — it’s a cult blooming in blood and rot. Jungwon wants to bury you where no one else can touch you. Sunoo wants to crack you open until you bloom for him. Both say it’s healing. But it’s obsession.

warnings: extreme gore, threesome, cult rituals, body horror (flowers under skin, insect scenes), blood play, forced confinement, psychological manipulation, emotional degradation, knife play, religious delusion, obsessive behavior, toxic romance, dubcon themes, ritualistic sex, hallucinations, violence

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The van climbs until the road forgets how to be a road. Pines crowd close; fog slicks the windshield like breath on glass. By the time the driver kills the engine, your phone has been surrendered, the waiver signed, and your name—your real one—folded into a sealed envelope with your belongings.

A hand-painted sign leans crooked against a stone pillar: THE GARDEN.

Beneath it, smaller script: Let go. Become.

Everyone here is an adult—paperwork made that clear. Still, the cluster of arrivals huddle like freshmen. A woman in a bone-white coat stands at the gate, serene as a photograph. “Welcome,” she says. “I’m Director Seo. You won’t need last names here. You won’t need yesterday.” Her smile doesn’t reach her eyes. “We begin with stillness.”

Stillness smells like damp soil and rosemary. The compound spreads in tiers: a glasshouse ribbed with iron; dormitories with shuttered windows; a refectory where steam fogs the panes; a low clinic painted the color of milk. The greenhouse breathes—a pulse of heavy, sweet air each time the door opens. Inside, rows of lilies lean toward heat lamps; vines net the rafters; something rustles in the loam.

“Orientation,” says the boy who appears at Director Seo’s shoulder. He’s young—early twenties—with paper-clean features and the kind of smile people don’t realize is a blade until it’s already inside them. Kim Sunoo. His name tag says Counselor; the ribbon beneath it says Ritual Lead. “Shoes off in the greenhouse,” he adds lightly. “We keep the floors soft.”

Your shoes leave the ground. Cool boards. Warm mist. A bell rings once. The arrivals form a circle on woven mats; a dozen white-robed staff ghost the edges. A few guests have the shaved look of hospital discharge; others wear expensive emptiness like cologne.

“Here,” Sunoo says gently, “we do not share pasts. Only needs.” His gaze slips over faces and lands on you. Not a leer. A selection. “You may speak or sit in silence. Both are honest.”

“I need to sleep,” says a woman with chewed nails. “Like, three days.”

“I need to stop remembering,” a man answers, voice flat.

The girl beside you—twenty-two, maybe—says nothing. Yejin is stitched on her wristband. Her hands are ink-stained. She draws while people talk: a quick, vicious graphite—faces with petal-mouths; ribs like trellises. When you shift, she tilts her sketchbook so you can see the newest figure: a person kneeling in dirt, throat blooming with something that isn’t a flower.

“Beautiful,” Sunoo murmurs, as if he’s praising a child’s first recital. “You have a keen eye for transformation, Yejin.”

From across the greenhouse, someone drags burlap sacks along iron grates. Soil dark as coffee spills from a split seam and oozes across the floor. The man hauling the bags moves like he’s apologized to gravity and refuses to do it again. Yang Jungwon. Groundskeeper on his tag. Grey work shirt. Forearms nicked white with old cuts. He doesn’t look at the circle—doesn’t look at you—until he does, and then he doesn’t stop. Not curiosity. Assessment, like weighing a seed between finger and thumb and deciding if it will live in his earth.

Director Seo outlines rules in the smooth tone of a stewardess reciting crash procedures:

No personal histories in group.

No contact with family for the first fourteen days.

No unsupervised access to the greenhouse after dusk.

Do not remove plant material from designated zones.

What is given to the soil remains in the soil.

“That includes grief,” Sunoo says, almost playful. “Especially grief.”

Your dorm is clean in the way of hospital corridors and mortuaries. Two metal beds. Two lockers. A copy of a softbound booklet on each pillow: STILLNESS GUIDE. Your roommate arrives with a jangle of bracelets and the brittle cheer of someone who learned to smile as self-defense. Mira, 26, volunteer-turned-resident-mentor.

“Welcome-welcome,” she chirps, then lowers her voice. “Pro tip: keep your head down the first three days. They watch how you watch.”

“Who?”

“Everyone.” She flicks her gaze toward the window, where the greenhouse skeletons against dusk. “Especially him.” She means Sunoo—you can hear it in the soft, reverent way. “And the groundskeeper when it’s dark.” That last part is almost a warning.

The bell rings again. Dinner is broth that tastes like the inside of a leaf and bread dense with seeds. You eat at long tables while staff move among you like shepherds. Across from you, a jittery young man, Taesun—24, scars like cat-scratches up his wrists—piles his crusts and crumbles them methodically. He pockets a handful when he thinks no one sees.

“For the worms,” he whispers to the crumbs. “They get hungry at night.”

Mira nudges your knee under the table. “He feeds them behind the east wall,” she murmurs. “Says they keep the nightmares down if they’re busy.”

In the clinic after dinner, a nurse swabs your fingers where the paper edges of the waiver bit skin. Nurse Min is beautiful in the harsh way of women who have decided their faces are weapons. When she says “this will sting,” the consonants soften strangely; a long surgical scar splits the underside of her tongue. She catches you looking and lifts a brow that says yes, I am aware of my mouth. Then—almost tender—she tapes your knuckle with gauze printed with tiny flowers.

Back in the greenhouse, the first night session is called Surrender. The lamps buzz. Mist beads your eyelashes. Sunoo stands barefoot on the damp boards, sleeves rolled, voice a low waterfall.

“Close your eyes,” he says. “Name the weight you want the earth to hold for you. Don’t say it out loud. Let your body say it.”

Around you, bodies sway. Some cry. Some freeze. When you keep your eyes open, Sunoo notices. Of course he does.

“New sprout,” he says softly, close to your ear, and the nickname feels chosen, not random. “You don’t have to force stillness. It happens when the soil recognizes you.”

“Does it?” Your voice is hoarse from disuse and altitude.

“Always.” He smiles. Not kind. Not unkind. Satisfied. “The Garden knows its own.”

Across the rows, Jungwon kneels in the dirt, wrist-deep in loam, planting something without a label. He doesn’t follow Sunoo’s cadence; he follows his own. When one lamp flickers, he rises and fixes it with the swift, competent movements of someone who builds instead of asks. When he sits back, the soil clings to his fingers like shadow.

You should sleep. Instead you help Mira remake your beds with the stiff white sheets that smell faintly of bleach and rosemary. She keeps talking, because silence makes her hands shake.

“I came as a volunteer,” she says, tucking corners square. “Stayed as a patient. It’s easier when they tell you what to be.”

“What do they tell you?”

She smiles without humor. “A flower.” Her eyes slide to your bandaged hand. “Try not to bleed in the greenhouse. They don’t like that.”

“Why?”

“Because the soil remembers.”

At night the compound changes. Lights dim. The wind strips the pines and combs the glass with needles. You lie awake and count breaths—yours, Mira’s, the building’s—until you can’t bear numbers anymore.

You go out.

The air is colder than the dorm suggests. The greenhouse glows from within, a pulse behind fogged panes. Beyond the east wall, something moves with slow persistence. You follow the ripple of disturbed leaves to a break in the hedgerow and find Taesun kneeling with his pockets turned inside out, sowing crumbs into the leaf litter like a penitent farmer.

“The worms,” he says. “They hate hunger.”

“And if they’re hungry?”

“They crawl into you,” he says simply, and his eyes are not crazy; they’re convinced. “They’re looking for warmth.”

A lantern kindles behind you. “Curfew,” a voice says.

You turn. Jungwon holds the light up so it paints his face in bones and gold. Up close, his features soften—stillness without Sunoo’s practiced grace; a patient animal’s attention. The lantern makes a thicket of his lashes. He looks from you to Taesun to your bare feet on the cold boards.

“You’ll catch a chill,” he says to you, like it’s a personal offense. “Shoes. Now.”

You should resent the command. Instead, you feel the unreasonable urge to obey. You start toward the dorms.

“Not that way,” he says. “West path. Easier. Less slope.” He tips the lantern so the light doesn’t blind you while you pass. It’s a small courtesy. It also marks you—every guard on the walkway can see who broke curfew and who brought them back.

“Do you plant at night?” you ask, because silence around him feels like standing at a cliff’s edge and leaning a little too far.

“Always,” he says. He doesn’t volunteer more. His eyes drag briefly to your bandaged hand. “You left blood in the greenhouse.”

“I didn’t—”

He lifts two fingers, the gesture efficient and final. “The soil remembers.” His mouth twitches—not a smile, exactly; the ghost of one. “Mira talks too much.”

“Is that against the rules?”

“It’s against survival.”

He walks you to the dorm porch and stops at the bottom step like there’s an invisible line he won’t cross. The night carries pine resin and wet metal. You want to ask him what he plants without labels, what grows under lamps that mimic suns, why the staff wear rosaries made of seeds.

He says, low, “Don’t follow sounds you don’t understand.”

“Why?”

“Because some things here answer to being watched.” He tilts the lantern, and for a heartbeat you see something like a tenderness he hides even from himself. “Sleep.”

You try. You fail. When you finally slide under, it’s the shallow kind of rest that hears every hinge complain.

Morning stains the glasshouse pale gold. Breakfast is porridge and a shot glass of bitter green. “Chlorophyll,” Mira grimaces. “For purity. Or the aesthetic.” She scans the refectory like she’s counting exits. “There’ll be a Placement Walk after breakfast. Don’t volunteer. They love volunteers.”

“What is it?”

She cuts her eyes toward the greenhouse. “They take someone to the grove and ‘help them choose a garden name.’ Sometimes they come back with a wreath. Sometimes without their voice for a while.”

Director Seo taps her cup. “Today’s Placement Walk is for… Yejin.”

The graphite girl looks up, startled as a deer. Her pencil stills. Sunoo’s smile brightens by half a watt. “I’ll take her,” he offers, hand already extended. “I’ve seen her drawings. She understands transformation.”

If you didn’t sleep, you are alert now. Jungwon appears in the doorway like the building made him. His gaze flicks over the room, and when it lands on Yejin’s shaking knuckles, something barely visible tightens in his jaw.

“I’ll go with you,” he says to Sunoo without looking away from the girl.

“Of course,” Sunoo replies. Silk over steel. “Two witnesses. Very proper.”

They lead her out between them: the counselor with a palm light on her shoulder; the groundskeeper holding the door open so it doesn’t bite her. The room exhales when the door closes. Mira’s bracelets clink as her hands start to shake again.

“They’ll bring her back,” you say, because logic is a habit.

“Usually,” Mira says.

Taesun folds bread crumbs into his napkin with ritual care. “If the worms are fed.”

“Stop with the worms—”

He looks up, suddenly fiercer than his tremor allows. “This place eats. I just like to decide what it eats.”

You leave your spoon in your bowl. The porridge lurches in your gut like a tide. Through the greenhouse glass, you can’t see the grove, only the suggestion of trunks and a slit of path. Time grows teeth.

When they return, Yejin walks in her body like someone has moved the furniture. A crown of woven reeds presses her hair flat. There’s a smear of green at the corner of her mouth, like she’s chewed a leaf until it bled. She carries her sketchbook close to her chest as if it’s the last piece of herself no one has touched.

“What did you choose?” Director Seo asks.

Yejin’s voice is soft but intact. “Night-blooming cereus.”

“A flower that opens in darkness,” Sunoo says, pleased. “Perfect.”

Jungwon stands behind them, sleeves rolled to the elbow, forearms dirt-streaked. A single thorn scratches the back of his hand, a bright new welt. You don’t know why your chest warms at the proof that something here can still hurt them too.

As the room settles, Nurse Min touches your shoulder. “Consult,” she says, consonants rounded. In the clinic, she peels your bandage, checks the small cut, nods. “Fine.”

“Was the walk… normal?” you ask, too casual. “For Yejin.”

Nurse Min dabs salve with a gentleness that doesn’t fit her knife-edged face. “Normal is a shape you learn,” she says. “Here, it is round.” She taps your knuckle. “Don’t open yourself on purpose. Things may grow inside.”

“Like what?”

Her eyes flick briefly toward the greenhouse. “Names.”

By afternoon the schedule has you shoveling, watering, scrubbing, writing lines. I am ready to be less. You write it a hundred times until the words separate from meaning and become a pattern of stems and loops. Outside, Jungwon clears a new bed along the south wall. His shovel bites; his shoulders move with the reliable rhythm of practiced labor. A boy twice your size steps into his path and mutters something you can’t hear. Jungwon doesn’t raise his voice. He simply looks at the boy until the boy forgets how to stand where he’s standing and moves.

“Don’t stare,” Mira warns from beside you, but she’s staring too. “He notices.”

“He noticed last night,” you say.

Mira goes still. “You went out?”

“For air.”

“Air is how they catch you,” she whispers, and for the first time her cheer fails. “Promise me you won’t go alone again.”

You don’t promise. You also don’t say I don’t know who I am without alone.

At dusk, group again. Sunoo has you sit closer to him than yesterday. When you resist, he laughs softly, as if you’re charming rather than disobedient. “We sit where the light needs us,” he says. You wonder if that’s a rule or a line he likes. While others speak, he doesn’t look at them; he watches their hands, their throats, the wet edge of eyes. When your breath hitches at someone’s story, he turns his head sharply like a wolf hearing snow crack.

“What would you let go of?” he asks you, voice pitched so the rest of the circle hears only the question, not the ownership threaded through it.

You could say: the fire, the last call you ignored, the smell of burning hair. Instead, you say nothing. He accepts your silence as if it were obedience he taught you.

Outside the glass, Jungwon is a darker shape among dark shapes, moving a hose along the rows. When his head turns toward the circle, it isn’t to the whole; it is to you. He holds you there for a breath you feel in your wrists. Then he tips the hose, and water falls like rain on metal bones.

You sleep after midnight because your body ambushes you. You wake to weight. Not on you; in the air, a heaviness like weather. The greenhouse lights are out. The compound holds its breath.

Something is under your pillow.

You slide your hand beneath it and touch paper—the rough tooth of a sketchbook page. You draw it out under the dim nightlight and see yourself. Not flattering. Not cruel. Exact. You kneel on dark soil, mouth open, and something vines out—delicate stems laced with thorns. Hands—two sets—hold your shoulders lightly, possessively: one set with ink stains, one with dirt ground into the half moons of the nails. At the bottom, Yejin’s cramped script: “Some flowers only open when watched.”

Mira stirs. “What is it?”

“Art,” you say, and your voice surprises you with how steady it is.

“What kind?”

“Prophetic,” you answer, because the truth is an animal pacing the edge of the bed and you’re not ready to let it into your ribs yet.

You slide the drawing back under your pillow and close your eyes. Across the compound, the night shifts. In your mind, Sunoo’s smile threads petals through your tongue. In reality, Jungwon’s lantern skates once across the fogged panes, a slow-moving star. Two orbits, caught in the same sky, tightening.

Slow burn, the booklet promised. Healing begins when you stop resisting.

You do not stop.

You breathe. You listen to the soil remembering you.

And you wait.

______

Morning arrives with a whistle under the door and the faint itch of grit in your teeth, as if you’ve been speaking to the ground in your sleep. Breakfast is the same: porridge, a bitter green shot, tea that tastes like boiled bark. Mira counts sips, bracelets clinking like quiet alarms. Taesun crushes his toast to dust and pockets it, eyes bright with purpose. Yejin sits very still, crown of reeds damp against her hair, sketchbook closed for once like a door she’s guarding with her body.

Director Seo taps her cup. “Today begins the Mouth Fast,” she says, voice smooth as tile. “Speech is the first addiction. For twenty-four hours, we practice voicelessness. Carry your stone”—a monk in linen sets a bowl of river stones on each table—“and let it hold your words. Anyone who breaks the fast will do a double shift in the greenhouse trenches. Sunoo will lead stillness. Jungwon will direct labor.”

A murmur rises and dies, mouths pressing shut to prove eagerness. Mira puts a flat, oval stone in your palm. “Don’t lose it,” she whispers, already breaking the rule. “They’ll say the soil took your voice because you were careless.”

You tuck the stone into your sleeve and meet Sunoo’s eyes across the hall. He’s already watching—of course he is. The smile he gives you would be harmless if you hadn’t seen how he moves when he’s pleased: slower, closer, like a candle drawn to oxygen. Jungwon lingers by the service door with a clipboard and a coil of hose on his shoulder, scanning tables the way a shepherd counts sheep by the sound of their breathing.

Chores first. Outside, the air needles your lungs; the mountain wears its cold like a second skin. Jungwon assigns tasks without looking at his list. “Mira, refectory herbs. Taesun, east wall compost. Yejin, with Nurse Min in the clinic.” His gaze slides to you and steadies. “You—paths and drains. Stay out of the grove.” Not a suggestion.

You carry a stiff-bristled broom down stone paths glazed with last night’s dew. The greenhouse ribs glow under weak sun; from inside, lamps hum, and something leafy slaps damply as if it’s learned the shape of applause. By the east wall, Taesun kneels with a small shovel and a reverence that would be holy if it didn’t smell like rot.

He tips crumbs in a neat line, then pauses to show you something cupped in his palm: a white, blind tangle coiling in damp soil. Worms, yes, but too many knotted together, a living thread. He beams, proud. You force your lips into gratitude and keep sweeping. If you stop, you will hear them, and if you hear them, you will dream them.

A shadow falls across your broom. Jungwon holds out a pair of soft-soled garden shoes with the temporary patience of a man who prefers doing to explaining. “Your feet,” he says. “You bruise easily.”

You glance at your bare socks, damp to the ankle. “Is that a rule?”

“It’s a reality,” he says; the word lands like weight. He crouches without asking, sets the shoes on the path, and steps back, gaze down so you can decide if you’ll take his help. You put them on. They’re warm from his hands. He notices the lift of your breath and looks away so the noticing won’t embarrass you. When he straightens, his eyes snag on the river stone tucked in your sleeve. “Don’t drop that,” he says. “The ravens like to steal them.”

You arch a brow—Are you joking?—but he’s already moving, a steady, unshowy force among the clatter of chores.

By mid-morning the Mouth Fast is a taut cord running through the compound. The quiet isn’t peace; it’s suppression, and suppression hums. Sunoo runs stillness from the center of the greenhouse like a maestro conducting silence. He has you sit within his radius; you don’t know how you know that, but you do. When a guest’s shoulders begin to shake, his hand appears at the nape of their neck—just weight, just heat, just enough to persuade the body that obedience feels like care.

He comes to you last, when the lamps have warmed the panes to sweating. He kneels, not quite touching, gaze on your throat. “Your pulse is stubborn,” he says in a voice pitched for you alone. “It hates rhythm. I like that.” He brushes the air near your jawline, not touching, so you feel it anyway. “The stone will teach it obedience. If you’re good at listening.”

You hold his eyes and refuse to nod. He smiles, pleased with your defiance like a trainer who prefers wild animals because they make better trophies. “We’ll work on it,” he whispers, and stands.

After lunch—a bowl of broth filtered until flavor gives up—you’re pulled into the clinic with half a dozen others for “check-ins.” Nurse Min sits you on a stool and unwraps your finger. The cut is a thin mouth now, pink with newness. She touches a gloved finger to the gauze and sniffs it as if the body has a scent that changes when it’s lying.

“Does it itch?” she asks.

You hesitate. The truth is embarrassing. “Everything does,” you admit. “Under the skin. Like… like something wants out.”

“Something wants in,” she corrects mildly. She takes tweezers to the pad of your finger and draws out a hair-fine splinter you didn’t know was there. It isn’t wood—it’s pale and sappy, flexing like a root in the air. She drops it in a jar and screws the lid tight. “Names need medium,” she says. “Don’t let anyone put theirs under your skin.”

“Is that medical advice?”

“It’s survival.” She tapes a fresh bandage printed with tiny leaves, then, softer, “If you start tasting flowers, spit.”

You leave the clinic with your mouth dry as chalk. On the steps, Yejin waits like a shadow that forgot to attach to a body. She presses a folded paper to your palm and flits off before you can unfold it. In the corner of the page, her fast, lethal graphite: you in profile, throat open, something like a stem ghosting up under the jaw. In the negative space behind you, two silhouettes—Sunoo’s soft edges; Jungwon’s blunt solidity—blur toward one another without touching. Underneath, her careful script: Not yet. But soon.

The Mouth Fast bends afternoon into a colder shape. Without words, people show who they are. Mira hums under her breath and taps her stone against her teeth like a bead. Taesun counts breath with his fingers on his ribs. A new arrival—Hana, thirty and jewel-hard—walks like a woman who refuses to ask permission from the air. An older man, Mr. Ko, rows his spoon through soup with the concentration of a man pretending there is a river and a boat that can take him off this mountain.

At dusk, Director Seo calls for the Seed Burial. “We surrender what we’ve hoarded,” she says, and volunteers step forward with small slips of paper seeded with something that will sprout if the soil wants it. They kneel, press the papers into a rectangle of fresh-turned earth, and cover them with a thin skin of loam. The lamps go low. Sunoo stands at their backs. Jungwon stands at their front, shovel grounded like a staff.

You don’t move. You have nothing to bury you can stand to name.

A woman you recognize from orientation—the one who needed three days of sleep—places both palms flat on the soil like it’s someone she loves. Her breath hitches once; she swallows whatever it shook loose. As the last handful of earth covers the names, something beneath the surface shifts. Not the modest swell of seeds drinking. A shove from below.

The crowd stills. You feel it again—a push. The soil flexes and sighs, grains settling. Someone’s hand jerks back as if bitten. Sunoo’s smile does not change, which means it changes. “The ground recognizes an offering,” he says pleasantly. “Stand, flowers. Let the dark do what it’s for.”

Jungwon’s eyes are on the dirt, not the people. His jaw flexes once, twice. You have the sharp, childish thought—He hears it too—and the relief that follows is so naked you almost miss the fear riding it.

Night stitches the compound tight. The Mouth Fast persists: tongues held, little pantomimes replacing argument. In bed, Mira sleeps with her open palm on her stone like it might roll away. You face the wall because the drawing under your pillow is a magnet and your skull is iron.

A scrape wakes you—a quick, purposeful sound under the window. You slide out of bed and ease the latch. Cold breath pours in. On the path below, a lantern moves slow as a planet. You follow, soft-soled shoes silent on the boards, the stone in your sleeve tapping your wrist like a heart that’s climbed too high.

The lantern stops. Jungwon steps into its circle. He doesn’t look surprised to see you. He looks like a man who has laid a trap and found what he baited it for. He lifts the lantern just enough to catch your face without flaying you with light.

He puts a finger to his mouth—quiet—and crooks that same finger: come.

You should run. You go.

He takes you along the west path to a low, fenced plot you haven’t noticed in daylight, because in daylight everything looks like something else. Up close, the boards are stained darker than weather. He stops you with a hand on your sleeve. His grip is gentle; his hand is strong. “Do not speak,” he says, and for the first time today the command lands like care, not control.

He tilts the lantern over the fence. The light stratifies a pit maybe two meters long, maybe one deep, lined with rough timbers and crawling with the industry of decay. You see peels, stems, pot scrapings—normal compost—then catch on something pale threaded through like lace: cartilage? You squint, heart hammering, and in among the skins and stems you see hair—just a clump, just enough to be undeniable. The sour-metal stink under the rot answers a question you didn’t know you were asking until now.

You stagger, mute because the rule still binds your mouth. Jungwon’s hand rises like he planned for your body to try to leave you. He catches your elbow with two fingers and steadies you without pulling you closer. “Breathe,” he says, voice so low the pit swallows it.

You breathe. He watches your lungs move under your shirt as if measuring if they’ll keep their job.

“What is this,” you manage, a whisper that bruises the fast.

“Everything that isn’t needed,” he says. It is both the most honest sentence you’ve heard since you arrived and the worst one. “Don’t come here alone.”

“Why show me?”

His mouth tightens. He weighs the truth and hands you a ration. “Because you will go looking. Better you see what is true than what you can’t live through.”

He lifts the lantern away; the pit dissolves back into darkness. When he looks at you again, the composure you’ve seen him wear like a uniform slips an inch. “Next time,” he says, “wake me.”

“How?” It comes out harder than you intend. “Do I knock on the earth?”

“On my door.” He says it like a correction and a promise. “I’d rather carry you than find you down there with your throat open to the sky.”

You swallow. The stone in your sleeve digs your wrist bone.

He walks you back along the west path, keeping the lantern low so you don’t blind yourself and tumble. At the bottom of the dorm steps, he stops as if a line of salt has been poured between you. “Sleep,” he says. Then, almost grudgingly—no, carefully, like he fears generosity might teach you to expect it—“You did well.”

“You mean quiet,” you say.

“I mean you didn’t lie to yourself while you were looking.” He turns the lantern, and for a heartbeat your faces share a circle of light. It is not intimate, and it is.

Inside, the warm dark smells like bodies and disinfection. Mira turns in her sleep, bracelets whickering. Your hands shake. Not with the adrenaline of the pit—though that remains like a taste at the back of your throat—but with the realization that both men see you. Sunoo sees the mechanism; Jungwon sees the fracture line. You can’t decide which is worse.

The Mouth Fast breaks at dawn with a bell so soft it feels like a secret. Voices resume like a creek finding an old bed; people speak too loudly, then blush, then laugh at their own relief. Director Seo praises “compliance” as if it were a sacrament. In the refectory, mugs clack, spoons scrape. Words return as barter.

You don’t trust yours yet.

Sunoo flows through tables like sunlight convincing itself it’s holy. He catches your empty mug, pours tea, and sets it in front of you with a flourish that makes a few heads turn. “How did the silence fit?” he asks, lazy, interested. It isn’t small talk. It’s a probe shaped like kindness.

“Like wire,” you say.

He smiles, delighted—as if you’ve told him a secret about yourself he can use. “It looks good on you,” he says, and taps your river stone where it sits on the table as if he gave it to you, as if it obeys him too. “We have Talkback today. You and me.”

“Is that optional?”

“In principle,” he says. “In practice, most people prefer to be seen.” He leans in, lower voice. “You certainly do.”

He leaves before you can snap that you preferred to be alive, actually. Across the room, Jungwon stops at the threshold, takes the refectory in at a glance, and chooses a seat with his back to the wall. He eats fast, plain, as if food is fuel and surveillance is dessert. When he lifts his mug, you notice the fresh welt across the back of his hand—a thorn, yesterday, dragging its punctuation.

Talkback is held in a small room off the clinic, windowless, lit by a lamp that chooses flattery over truth. Sunoo sits too close, but because he knows what too close does to bodies, he leaves exactly enough air that you can fool yourself into thinking you could stand if you wanted to. He doesn’t touch you. He rests his forearms on his knees, hands open, posture full of a patience he wears like silk.

“What is the shape of your fear?” he asks, as if fear is polite enough to have geometry.

“Wide,” you say.

“Flat?”

“Deep.”

He grins. “Good. Honesty makes my job easier.” He looks at your mouth, then your hands, then your throat. “Last night you broke curfew.”

It isn’t a question. “I walked.”

“To the west path,” he says, savoring the corridor of it.

“Is that forbidden?”

“Not if you were with someone.”

You hold his gaze. You don’t look away. You don’t nod. You don’t give him Jungwon.

Sunoo’s smile returns, but thinner. “We don’t punish curiosity,” he says silkily. “We shape it.” He nods to your sleeve. “Keep the stone. I like how you sound when you hold it.”

“I didn’t speak.”

“You breathed differently,” he says, and you hate that you believe him. “This afternoon I want you in the greenhouse. We’ll do matching breath. I’ll keep count so you don’t have to.”

Your stomach remembers the pit and rolls. “What if I say no?”

“Then we’ll go slower,” he says, as if you asked him to make it sweeter. “That’s the kind of consent you like, isn’t it? The kind that arrives after your body learns the lesson.”

You stand because sitting feels like agreeing. He doesn’t stop you. He nods as if you’ve completed a task he set in his head.

“Good,” he says. “The roots are listening.”

Outside, the day is too bright in the way of mountains pretending to be gentle. You find Mira tending pots of kitchen herbs—mint, rosemary, a vicious little basil. “You look like you saw a ghost,” she says without looking up.

“I saw the compost,” you say.

She flinches so hard the basil shudders. “You don’t say it out loud,” she hisses, then checks herself, forces her voice calm again. “Names wake things.”

“Whose hair is in it?”

“Everyone’s,” she says. “Eventually.”

By late afternoon your muscles revolt, and stillness becomes a thing you have to hold down with both hands. In the greenhouse, Sunoo runs breath like a metronome. When he kneels behind a girl whose hands won’t stop shaking, he doesn’t touch her skin; he places his palm two inches away from her spine and waits. The girl’s shoulders ease; her breath learns his count. You hate him for it. You hate her relief. You hate that your body pays attention.

Jungwon moves along the rows with a bucket and a dull pruning blade, nicking stems, turning soil, resetting stakes. When a lamp pops and goes dim, he crosses to replace it without being called. On his way back, he passes near your mat—near, not past. The air shifts with him: sweat, iron, soil, a clean note like water running under rock. He doesn’t look down. He scratches the back of his wrist where a thorn welt cross-hatches older scars and says, as if the comment belongs to the room, “Some things only grow when you pretend you can’t see them.”

You don’t know if he means the plants, the people, or you.

Evening comes with teeth. The bell pulls everyone to the refectory; the sky sits heavy, swollen with weather that refuses to begin. Over dinner, Hana spills her tea and swears loudly enough that half the room jumps; then she laughs, tips her chin like she meant to do it, and glares at anyone who looks sorry on her behalf. Mr. Ko tells Taesun to stop feeding the worms like they’re pets; Taesun bares his teeth, half-smile, half warning. Nurse Min pockets a spoon someone bent into a hook. Director Seo watches it all with the small, sated smile of a zookeeper whose animals are thriving.

Night brings the first scream.

Not a long one. Not a movie howl. A single, keening note cut off hard, like a rope being cut. The compound freezes; forks stop halfway to mouths; breath holds. Sunoo is already on his feet, smile sharpened into usefulness. Jungwon’s chair scrapes; he’s moving before you can find your shoes.

They go toward the grove at a measured pace that says they already know what they’ll find. Director Seo lifts her hand. “Stay seated,” she says, and the command lands like weight on your shoulders. Mira’s fingers take yours under the table and squeeze so hard your knuckles grind. You squeeze back. Your mouth tastes like rosemary and fear.

You wait. The greenhouse sweats. The clock you aren’t allowed to see walks itself around the hour by the sound of your blood in your ears. When the door opens again, Sunoo comes in first, serene, coat unwrinkled. Jungwon follows with a bundled shape in his arms—a blanket, a softness of color, too long where a body should bend.

A gasp skips the room. “She fainted,” Sunoo says, which is both intolerably insufficient and the only story you’ll be allowed. “A cleansing reaction. She will rest. We will keep vigil over the names she surrendered.”

He doesn’t say who. Your mind fills the blank with the sleeping woman from breakfast, because that is who you fear for, and fear is a magnet. Jungwon carries the bundle past. You know how much weight that is—your body recognizes the set of his jaw, the economy of his gait. He does not look at you. He doesn’t look anywhere but the door to the clinic, as if any glance could spill what he’s holding.

The dining hall exhales like it’s been underwater too long. Director Seo claps once, neat. “We will not gossip,” she says. “We will not catastrophize. We will practice serenity.”

You don’t sleep. Not because you’re brave—because you’re scared correctly now, and scared correctly people stay awake. When you doze, you wake to the sensation that someone has put a leaf on your tongue and asked you to pray with it in your mouth. You spit into your sheet and find nothing. When you sit up, a shadow peels off the wall near the window and becomes Jungwon.

You nearly fling yourself out of bed. He doesn’t move, as if sudden gestures would spook you. He should not be in the dorms after lights; rules are their own religion here. He breaks this one like he breaks branches: cleanly, without apology.

“You left your shoes,” he says, low. He sets them at the foot of your bed, lined up, laces tucked. His voice is stripped of everything but function. “Don’t go barefoot again.”

“What happened?” you ask, whispering because anything louder might wake the dark.

“Don’t ask me,” he says, and for a breath you think he’s refusing. Then he adds, “Because I’ll tell you.” His gaze drags over your face, cataloging fine tremors, the cracked edge of your mouth, the way one hand fists in the sheet like rope. “Sleep,” he says. “You’ll need it.”

He is out the way he came, the door kissing its jamb like a secret.

You try to obey. The mountain presses its cold face to the window and listens. Somewhere, a lantern moves. Somewhere else, a man like a hymn kneels by a bed that is too light.

You put the river stone back in your sleeve and hold it against your pulse until the beat stops arguing with your bones. You remember the jar in Nurse Min’s clinic with the threadlike root curled at the bottom like a question mark. You picture Yejin’s hand drawing you with something under your skin you didn’t agree to carry.

Stillness was the promise. Obedience was the price. You have paid neither. Now the Garden pays attention.

And you, finally, are afraid.

_________

You wake with the taste of copper and rosemary slicked over your tongue, as if someone pressed a leaf there while you slept and whispered hold it. A welt has risen along your bandaged finger—thin, pale, almost pretty. When you press it, it flexes under the skin like something answering from underneath.

Breakfast is a choreography of clatter and eyes. Mira smiles too hard; her bracelets rattle out a code you can’t read. Taesun tips crumbs into his pocket with priestly concentration. Yejin’s crown of reeds has dried to a brittle halo; she draws with her pencil held like a knife. Hana sits mean and diamond-bright, daring the room to dull her edges. Mr. Ko’s spoon cuts the same path through porridge like a boatman refusing any other shore. Director Seo watches the surface of her tea the way people watch the sea for bodies.

“The Naming Rite will be held at sundown,” she announces, as if she’s asking for the salt. “Those selected have been notified.”

Sunoo lifts his eyes, and that’s your notification.

Mira’s fingers find your knee under the table and clamp. She shakes her head once, small, fast—refuse. You don’t know what refusal looks like here besides a story they will tell about you afterward.

“Drink,” Nurse Min says when you pass through the clinic to turn in your night report—how many hours asleep, how many awake, whether you dreamed of heat, teeth, drowning. She hands you a glass the green of pond water. You smell it, and it smells like lawn and iron. “Chlorophyll with a little hem,” she says, seeing your face. “Calms the heart.”

“Calms or slows?” Your voice scratches.

She cants her head. “Same action, different motive.” She glances at your finger. “Still itching?”

“It… moves,” you say, and the honesty makes your stomach pitch. “Like a thread.”

“Everything alive wants a home,” she replies. She peels the bandage with sure fingers. Underneath, the welt has subdivided into delicate veins, a fine network. Not veins. Veining. It looks like leaf. She presses the back of her glove along it; the pattern darkens, limned green under the skin. “Names need medium,” she repeats. “Keep your mouth closed in the greenhouse today. Even when you want to answer.”

You want to ask answer what, but Sunoo is in the doorway, dusk caught in the lamplight of his hair. He doesn’t knock; he glides in like permission. “Our new sprout,” he says, pleased to find you in a chair. “I’ll take her.”

Nurse Min’s mouth goes a little flatter. “She eats first.”

“Of course.” Sunoo’s smile doesn’t move. “Then we breathe.”

The greenhouse sweats. Heat lamps hum like insects; the glass with its rain of condensation blurs the mountain into a myth. Staff move among the rows with trays of soil sheets—thin paper seeded with something that glitters faintly when the light hits it wrong. “Embedded affirmations,” Sunoo tells the group. “You write what you’ll surrender. The seeds will carry it.”

Hana snorts. “Is the surrender refundable?”

Sunoo’s eyes quicken. “There’s always a transaction,” he says. “We just prefer you know the price.” He looks back to you. “Mat,” he says, and it isn’t a request.

You sit. He kneels behind you, palms hovering two inches from your ribs. No touch—just the sense of touch waiting. “Open your mouth,” he murmurs. The admonition from Nurse Min echoes; you clamp your lips. Sunoo’s pleased noise lands against your neck like breath. “Good. Breathe through your nose. In on four, out on six. I’ll count.”

His voice is a rope you have to grab to keep from slipping. When your breath shudders, he matches it; when it calms, he pursues. On the sixth cycle, something sweet pushes the air—lily, wet earth—and you remember the pit and want to be sick. “Stay,” he says, reading your recoil. “Stay where your body is. Don’t run from it. That’s where people rot.”

Across the rows, Jungwon replaces a cracked lamp with quick, sure hands. He doesn’t look at you until he does, a glance like a hand closing on the back of your neck. The air between you tightens. His forearms are netted with healed cuts, white against brown; a fresh welt crosses them like a red thread. When Sunoo says “out on six,” Jungwon turns the dial and the light hums obedient, and you wonder whether the whole building breathes to his count.

Yejin brings you a tray of seed-paper without being asked. When you reach, her gaze drops to your bandage. She moves the pencil like a blade and sketches the back of your hand: the delicate leaf veining, the suggestion of something wanting to break surface. She writes Not yet over the knuckles and slides the paper into your lap. Her mouth is a thin line; her eyes are large and dry and furious.

The day’s chores are smaller and meaner than yesterday’s. Scrub the condensation gutters. Rake. Haul sacks labeled Bone Meal that smell like old molars. Taesun sings under his breath in a language not meant for mouths and leaves a damp trail of crumbs along the east wall. Mr. Ko fetches and carries with blank efficiency, his face empty as a cleaned plate.

By late afternoon, a woman you know only as Auntie Hye—fiftyish, hair cut short for neatness, eyes that scan like a mother bird’s—begins to cough. At first it is dry and prim; then she hunches, pushes a hand to her chest and coughs wet. A ribbon of something bright pops free onto her palm. Petals. White. Tissue-thin and slick with saliva. A few guests laugh—nerves, delight, cruelty. Nurse Min is there before the room decides what to feel, hand under Auntie Hye’s chin, tissues ready. Hye coughs again, harder, and a clot of petals spills: red-tipped now, streaked. She hacks out a final cluster and sags. The tissues are sodden. The petals look like tongues.

“Pollination,” Sunoo says calmly. “Sometimes the body rehearses letting go by practicing bloom.”

Auntie Hye shakes her head, breath hitching. “I didn’t—” she starts.

Sunoo presses two fingers lightly to her throat. “You did.”

She closes her mouth.

Jungwon comes with a bucket and a flat spade; he scoops the petals into the bucket without expression. Your stomach tilts; you grip the bench until the wood prints itself into your palm. He doesn’t look at anyone. He takes the bucket toward the compost. You see his jawclench once when he passes the pit door and files that, like a photographed crime scene.

After the petals, other small horrors follow as if emboldened. A boy pulls his sleeve up to scratch and reveals a faint green tracery along his inner arm; when he scrubs at it, the skin reddens and puffs and the pattern brightens like a pressed leaf held to light. Mira slices a basil stem and it bleeds thin, clean sap; she runs her thumb along the cut and licks it without thinking, then startles at the taste and laughs too loudly. Taesun tips a paper cup into a drain, and a pale, slick worm writhes against the grate and splits into two thinner threads that both crawl the wrong way, toward his fingers. He coos like they’re babies and tucks them back into mud.

“Don’t feed your nightmares,” Nurse Min says without looking up from the woman whose mouth she swabs. “They grow fine on their own.”

By evening, the heat in the greenhouse feels like a hand that won’t lift. The lamps go low. Director Seo stands by the iron ribs with her clipboard like a prayerbook. “For the Naming Rite,” she says, “we welcome Sunoo as Voice and Jungwon as Hands.”

Voice and Hands. A division of power simple enough to live inside.

You are led—gently, unmistakably—toward the central bed, a rectangle of fresh loam bordered by smooth stones. Yejin edges after you, sketchbook clutched to her chest; Nurse Min blocks her with just a glance. “Not this,” Min murmurs. “Later.”

Mira steps forward—too fast—“I can go instead,” she says, smile like a knife wrapped in tissue.

Sunoo’s smile is silk on a nail. “We don’t barter names,” he says. “We harvest them.”

Your knees give. Not dramatic; a small buckling, the body remembering the ground. Sunoo’s hand is there without touching you, a near-weight at your shoulder. “Kneel,” he says, as if reminding you what your body already decided. “Head up. We face what we bring.”

Jungwon stands at the foot of the bed, shovel grounded. Close, his expression is the same flat steel as his blade. He looks at your throat the way carpenters look at walls: not hunger—assessment. When he speaks, his voice is small enough to belong only to the three of you. “Do you know what you’re giving?” he asks.

You try to say No. What comes out is “Something I can’t carry.”

“Good,” he says, and the word is not kindness. It’s calibration.

Sunoo’s fingers hover at your jaw, turning your face by the gravity of proximity. “Open,” he tells you, and your mouth obeys because your body recognizes a doctor’s tone even when it comes from someone who would rather be a priest. He places a petal on your tongue. It tastes like cold tea and a coin. “Hold,” he says. He waits. When you swallow despite yourself, his smile flares. “You see? The body knows ceremony even when the mind resists.”

He steps behind you. You feel his presence like a heat lamp. Jungwon moves to your side and holds out his hand. On his palm: a knife. Not sharp—its edge has been blunted until it’s a tongue of metal—but its point is honest. He waits until you meet his eyes; only then does he set the flat of the blade against your sternum. The steel is cool. Your skin fists under it.

“This is how we write it,” Sunoo says, and his breath touches the shell of your ear like a whispering moth. “Not deep. Not cruel. Not yet.”

The blade slides up without breaking skin, tracing between ribs, across the slow bell of breath—sternum, clavicle, the notch at your throat. The metal leaves a trail of gooseflesh; your pulse hammers against it like an animal trapped under the lid of a box. Jungwon’s other hand is steady at your shoulder, not pushing, not holding, just there, a second horizon the body can measure itself against.

“Name what cannot follow you,” Sunoo murmurs. It could be a real question. It could be a spell. Your mouth fills with the taste of flower and iron; words gather behind it like flies at meat.

You can’t say the fire; to say it would open something that the soil will keep. You say, “The last night.”

“Again,” Sunoo purrs.

“The last night,” you repeat, and the room tilts like a field under wind.

The congregation—guests in white, staff in linen—sways. Mira has both hands pressed to her lips. Taesun rocks in small, violent arcs. Yejin’s pencil moves; she draws you kneeling, two sets of hands marking you; she smudges the graphite so the air around you looks like breath or smoke.

The blade dips, lifts, comes to rest against your throat’s right side. You feel the exact spot where it would enter if it wanted to. Jungwon’s pulse is visible in his wrist; steady, heavier than yours. He moves the flat in a small crescent along the tendon, and your voice leaves you for a moment—pure reflex. A small, unpretty sound. Sunoo shivers behind you, pleased as if you performed a note he’d been coaching you toward.

“Do you understand the price?” Sunoo asks softly.

“No,” you say honestly.

“Beautiful,” he says, delighted. “No one ever does until after.”

He lifts the petal from your mouth with two fingers and lays it on your tongue again like communion. You hold it. Jungwon takes your left hand. His palm is rough and warm; soil lives in the whorls of his fingerprints. He pricks the pad of your finger with the very tip of the blunted knife, as if he wants to remind the blade of its older religion. A bead of blood swells, bright, neat. He turns your hand and presses that red to the seed-paper waiting in a shallow trench at the bed’s edge. Your blood bleeds into the paper like water into thirst.

“Now,” Sunoo says, voice dropped low enough to live in your bones, “we plant what you are not. So what you are can grow.”

Jungwon folds loam over the paper. The soil is cool even in this hothouse weather. It sucks at your finger when he presses your hand flat to it. Something moves underneath—something too quick for roots. Your stomach rocks. You try to pull back. Jungwon’s hand covers yours, firm as a yoke; Sunoo’s hand wraps your throat—not squeezing, just holding the column steady. You are pinned in two places that translate directly to obedience.

“Breathe,” Sunoo says.

You do. The soil under your hand warms like a mouth.

The congregation murmurs. Not words; the sound bodies make when they agree to a script. Director Seo watches like a reader flipping to the end to be sure it comes out as written. Nurse Min’s face has the set of a woman who’s decided to count a vein until morning.

The thing under the soil stills.

Jungwon lifts your hand and wipes the loam away with his thumb. The smear looks like war paint. Sunoo releases your throat and smooths his palm down the line his fingers left, a correction, an apology, a brand. He bends and whispers against your ear, “You belong to the ground,” and then, after a heartbeat, “and to us while you’re learning.”

His mouth never touches skin. The idea of it does.

The Rite closes with a bell that tastes like copper in your teeth. People file out as if stepping around a sleeping animal. Mira gets to you first, palms hot where she holds your face. “Drink water,” she hisses. “Don’t go to sleep. If you dream the name, it sticks.”

“I didn’t give it,” you say.

She laughs, a small animal sound. “You bled. That’s enough.”

Mr. Ko offers a clean handkerchief without meeting your eyes. Hana watches from a distance like a hawk deciding if a rabbit is worth stooping for when the field is full of easier meat. Taesun beams, mud on his lip, as if he’s just watched a very good wedding.

Yejin presses a drawing into your hand and vanishes. It’s you kneeling, hands marked, a line along your throat that is not a cut but knows where one would go. Over your shoulder, two shadows bend—one a heat-halo, one a blunt storm. Soon, she’s written. Don’t say yes with your mouth.

Night. The mountain holds its breath. The lamps in the greenhouse go black one by one until the glass is only a shape. You sit on your dorm bed and watch your hands not shake. Mira sleeps curled like a comma with her stone under her cheek. The drawing under your pillow warms to your scalp as if it wants to crawl into you.

A knock—not on the door. On the window, one knuckle, once. When you slide the frame, cold air pours in, and you think of Nurse Min’s keep your mouth closed in the greenhouse and keep it shut.

Jungwon stands below, lantern hooded, face lit just enough to make eyes and jaw. He tilts his head—come—and you go because your legs have learned this path. Out the back, down the steps, across the boards to the west path. He waits in the shadow of the shed where spades hang like a rack of tongues.

“Any dizziness? Nausea?” he asks, clinic-plain.

“Just… aware.” The word feels too small for your body’s rattled hum.

He grunts—approval. He reaches for your hand and turns the palm up. The loam under your nails has dried to fine grit. He rubs it away with his thumb, slow, methodical. It’s almost tender until you realize he is checking for changes—for the leaf-vein under your skin brightening, for anything moving that shouldn’t. When his thumb passes over the edge of your pulse, it jumps. He looks up sharply. You look away.

“You shouldn’t stay in the dorm tonight.” Matter-of-fact. “You’ll hear things like your name, and some of them will be for you and some won’t. You’re still soft. Soft things take impressions.”

“Where do I go?”

“My room.” Flat. Then, as if he heard how it sounds: “It’s safer. There are no plants there.”

“Is that true?”

“It’s true enough.” He waits. “Or go to the clinic and sit under Min’s lamp and let her count your breaths until morning.”

“Which would you pick,” you ask, because some part of you refuses to let him stand there and decide your body in his head without you in the room.

He takes too long to answer, then says, “The clinic is gentle.” A beat. “I am not.”

Wind combs the pines; the greenhouse ticks as it cools. Somewhere a raven laughs like a woman who knows your secrets and isn’t impressed.

“Choose,” he says quietly.

Sunoo’s shadow falls across the path before you can. He steps into the lantern’s circle like a storybook: pale wrists, clean hands, a smile that tells you exactly how he will use it. “Ah,” he says, soft delight. “My flower and my hands. I wondered where the night would put you.”

Jungwon does not step back. He also does not step forward. The lantern holds the three of you in a tight Venn where your breaths overlap. Sunoo tips his head, curious. “You can take her,” he says to Jungwon, which is to say I will let you. “But she’ll come back to me tasting like soil and fear, and we’ll start again from below.” He turns to you, voice honeyed and mean. “Or you can come with me and I’ll teach your body what calm feels like so you know when you’ve lost it.”

The polite violence of the options makes your stomach liquefy.

“Stop,” Jungwon says, and the word is a tool, not a plea.

Sunoo laughs softly. “The earth doesn’t stop growing just because you ask it gently.” He reaches, very slowly, and lifts your jaw with two fingers—not touching skin; his hand floats a whisper below it and your head lifts anyway, obedient to suggestion. “Show me your throat,” he says, and your body almost does it because it learned tonight and bodies like to repeat lessons. You hold yourself still out of spite. His smile warms. “Good girl.”

The words hit like a hand under your ribs. Jungwon’s breath changes. It darkens the air.

“Enough,” Jungwon says again, and hooks a finger in the lantern hood. He pulls it open. Light flares, pot-bright, brutal. The three of you blink; the world loses its beautiful edges and shows its seams. “Clinic,” he tells you.

Sunoo’s smile fades pixel by pixel until only his eyes shine. “For now,” he agrees. He steps in closer so there is no air between the three bodies but what breath can claim. He looks at Jungwon and speaks to you. “You’ll end up between us anyway,” he says, the prophecy flat, not cruel. “Why not learn the shape early.”

You should move. You should walk yourself to the nurse and let her count your lungs like prayer beads. Instead you stand very still while two men who have learned your pulse by different languages consider the currency of your fear.

Sunoo lifts his hand and stops a breath from your mouth. You feel the heat of him without the permission of touch. “I won’t kiss you,” he says, velvet and wicked. “Not yet.” He turns his palm and hovers over your throat, reading the rush there like a favorite book. “See what your body does with almost.”

Jungwon moves behind you so quietly the night forgets to mark his steps. He doesn’t touch you. His presence is so large it reads like contact anyway—the shape of him corralling air. You have the dizzy thought that if you leaned back, he would catch you, and if you leaned forward, Sunoo would open like a mouth.

“Breathe,” Sunoo whispers, and it isn’t instruction now; it’s a dare.

You do. The air leans with you. The world tightens to a triangle: lantern glare, the line of a blunted blade tucked into Jungwon’s belt, the faint copper on Sunoo’s knuckle where he touched your lip earlier with the petal.

“I said clinic,” Jungwon repeats, low enough to live at your spine.

“Make her say please,” Sunoo counters, amusement sweet as rot. “Our girl loves a ritual.”

“Don’t—” you start, and then stop, because the word tastes like surrender and you haven’t decided whose hands deserve it.

“Not tonight,” Jungwon says, and you understand: it isn’t mercy. It’s control deferred. He steps to your side, inserts a palm—warm, heavy—at your waist, not pulling, not pushing, just a point you can move along. Sunoo mirrors the motion on your other side without touching, an echo your nerves misread as contact. Together they guide you three steps, five, toward the clinic’s dim window—two gravities that agree for once.

At the threshold, Sunoo bends so close your ear warms. “Sleep,” he murmurs, the same command Jungwon uses like a blessing. “Dream of hands.” He smiles against the air where your skin ends. “Next time I’ll count for you while he holds you still.”

Jungwon’s hand tightens one notch at your waist, a warning, a promise, a brand pressed through clothes. “Next time,” he says, to Sunoo, to you, to the night that will keep at this until you’re rewritten, “I’ll decide who goes first.”

Nurse Min opens the clinic door before anyone knocks, lamp bright behind her like a little square sun. She takes in the triangle of bodies, the glint of the knife, the feral set of Sunoo’s mouth, the obedient steadiness of Jungwon’s hand at your side.

“Inside,” she says, and steps aside.

You pass between them—Sunoo’s almost-touch a heat across your throat; Jungwon’s real touch a line at your hip you could follow with your eyes closed—and cross into the light.

You do not kiss anyone. No one kisses you.

But as the door shuts and the mountain presses its ear to the glass to listen, you know it: your body already understands the shape they promised. It will remember. It will hunger.

And when it happens—when it really happens—it will not be an accident.

________

The clinic smelled of metal and mint. Nurse Min left you in a chair under her lamp until the feverish hum in your body dulled to a bearable pitch. She made you drink water, bitter and green as ditch weed, and held your wrist while your pulse rattled beneath her thumb. When you asked her if you were safe, she only said, “Nothing in a place like this is safe. At best, some things are safer than others.”

By the time she dismissed you, the compound had already gone to sleep. Mira was curled on her side in the dorm, bracelets stilled. You should have slept too. Instead you lay awake, tasting the memory of a petal pressed against your tongue, feeling the phantom weight of Jungwon’s hand steady at your waist, the ghost of Sunoo’s fingers just shy of your throat.

Your body remembered. It remembered too well.

When you finally slipped into the corridor, your bare feet soundless on the boards, it wasn’t to find air. It was because something in you had already decided that the ache would not stop on its own.

The greenhouse loomed against the night, ribs of iron and glass sweating mist. The lock had never been for people who wanted to stay out. You pushed the door and it sighed open, warm air rushing at you like a mouth.

He was waiting. Of course he was.

Sunoo leaned against a bench, sleeves rolled, pale wrists glowing under the lamps. His expression was the same one he’d worn when he laid the petal on your tongue earlier—delighted, expectant, like he had always known your body would come back to him.

“You breathe too loud when you lie down,” he murmured. “I could hear you from the other side of the hall.”

You should have left. You stepped closer instead.

Sunoo reached for you without touching, fingers tracing the air beside your cheek. That almost-contact burned hotter than heat itself. Your breath caught, and his smile sharpened. “See? Your body tells the truth. It remembers me already.”

His hand hovered down, stopping at the hollow of your throat. “Here,” he whispered. “Where the pulse lives.” He bent, mouth a whisper away from your skin, never quite sealing it. Your nerves screamed as if he’d kissed you. “You want me to touch you. That’s why you came.”

Your denial scraped your teeth but never left your tongue.

“Good girl,” he said, pleased at your silence. He turned you, pressing between your shoulder blades until your knees bent and you landed on the warm boards of the floor. “Stay open. Stay soft.”

His hands came at last—sliding along your thighs, parting them without rush, without doubt. He dragged his thumb along the cotton of your thin shorts, pressing until the damp there gave you away. “Blooming,” he said reverently, as if the word itself could coax you wider.

You gasped when he pressed harder, the friction maddening. He laughed low in his throat, pleased. “You’ve been waiting since the Rite, haven’t you? You swallowed the petal and your body begged for more.”

He tugged fabric aside with clinical precision, exposing you to the humid air. His fingers slicked easily through the wetness already gathered, and he made a sound of satisfaction that went straight to your gut. “So ready,” he crooned. “So obedient.”

Two fingers circled, teased, pressed—but never where you needed. He watched your hips shift, your breath stutter. “Say please,” he murmured.

“I—”

“Shh.” His free hand covered your mouth lightly, thumb grazing your lower lip. “Not with words. With your body.”

Your thighs trembled. You pushed into his hand, desperate. His smile widened. “There it is. Begging without speech.”

He slipped two fingers inside, slow, deliberate. Your back arched, a strangled sound caught behind his palm. He curled them just right, hitting the place that made you shiver, made your eyes roll back. “Yes,” he whispered against your ear. “That’s it. That’s how you bloom.”

His palm pressed harder over your mouth as your moans broke free. His rhythm quickened, fingers thrusting, scissoring, spreading you open as if he meant to plant something inside. Every push forced slick sounds into the greenhouse air. He bent low, lips brushing your temple, murmuring praises between each thrust: “Perfect. My good flower. Opening just for me. No one else will see you like this.”

Your orgasm came sudden, brutal—your whole body snapping tight around his hand, shuddering against him. He kept moving, dragging it out until you were gasping into his palm, thighs twitching.

When at last he withdrew, his fingers glistened. He lifted them to your lips, smearing wetness across them before pushing between. “Taste yourself,” he ordered softly. “Know what you are to me.”

Shame and hunger tangled in your chest. You sucked his fingers clean, and his eyes darkened, mouth parting as if he might finally kiss you. He didn’t. He pulled back just enough to leave you desperate, to make absence itself a cruelty.

“Blooming,” he whispered again, satisfied. “And tomorrow, you’ll be ready for the soil.”

The greenhouse door creaked. You jerked, Sunoo still crouched over you, his slick fingers withdrawing with deliberate slowness.

Jungwon stood in the doorway, lantern spilling gold over his dirt-streaked arms. His jaw tightened as his eyes tracked the wet shine on your lips, the way your legs trembled, the smug curve of Sunoo’s smile.

For a long, brutal moment, no one spoke. Then Jungwon stepped forward, shovel still in one hand, and his voice came out rough, dangerous.

“She’s mine next.”

The lamps hummed. The soil smelled of iron. Your heart beat against your throat like a trapped bird as the two men stared across you, and you realized the next time you were touched, it would be by both.

And you would not escape it.

______

The night you tried to run, the mountain gave you away.

The boards beneath your feet creaked, wet leaves clung to your calves, and the fog was a hand on your throat. You ran anyway. Past the dorms, past the glasshouse ribs glowing faintly from their lamps, down the west path where the ravens laughed like women who knew your secrets.

You thought the dark would cover you.

But the dark belonged to him.

A hand caught your wrist so hard you nearly went down. The lantern flared, and Jungwon’s face came out of the mist—eyes black, jaw locked, the muscle jumping with rage he didn’t bother to soften. He dragged you against him, chest heaving like you’d run into a wall that had learned how to breathe.

“Running,” he said, voice low and sharp as a spade. “After I told you not to.”

“I—”

“Quiet.” His grip on your wrist tightened until your bones ached. “Do you know what he did to you in there? Do you know what you smell like? Soil and him.” His other hand closed hard around your chin, forcing you to meet his eyes. His breath came hot, furious. “I told you not to let him touch you.”

Your protest was thin. “I didn’t—”

“You did.” He shoved you back against the rough bark of a pine. The trunk dug into your spine; his body crowded yours, heat and dirt and something mean. “You opened your mouth. You let him put his fingers in you.” His hand slid down your throat, pressing just enough to make your pulse throb under his palm. “Do you think that makes you his?”

“No—”

“No,” he repeated, mocking and brutal, pressing harder until your words broke into breath. His eyes raked you up and down like he was reading your body for lies. “You’re mine. If you’re soil, then I’m the one who plants.”

The knife appeared from his belt—not sharp, its edge long since blunted, but the point still honest. He held it flat against your belly, dragging it up under your shirt until the cold metal kissed the underside of your breast. You shivered, body jerking against the bark. His mouth twisted, equal parts fury and hunger.

“Scared?” he murmured. “Good. Fear makes roots dig deeper.”

He hooked the blade under the band of your shorts, pulling until the fabric stretched and then snapped. His hand shoved inside without pause, fingers rough, pushing into you like he meant to stake a claim. You gasped, the sound choking against the hand still at your throat.

“Wet,” he said, voice a growl, face close enough you could feel every word on your skin. “You’re soaked for me already. Even after him. Especially after him.” His fingers thrust harder, curling, relentless, forcing your body to answer him. “Say it. Say whose you are.”

You shook your head, too proud, too broken to give it.

His mouth curved cruel. “Then I’ll fuck it into you.”

He yanked your shorts down to your thighs, lifted you bodily against the tree, and shoved his hips between your legs. You clawed at his shoulders, half to push, half to hold on, but he pinned you easy, the knife’s flat pressed to your throat now like a brand. His cock pressed hot and thick against your entrance, grinding through the slick he’d found there, rubbing until you whined.

“You hear that?” he hissed, rolling his hips, dragging the head over your folds until obscene wet sounds filled the air. “Your body begging me in front of the whole fucking mountain.” He pushed in one brutal stroke, burying himself deep, forcing a cry from your throat. His teeth bared at the sound, savage triumph. “That’s it. Open up. Take me.”

He fucked you hard against the tree, every thrust jarring bark into your spine, every shove brutal and unrelenting. The knife never left your throat—flat, cold, reminding you what he could do if he wanted. His free hand gripped your hip so hard you knew you’d bruise, dragging you down onto him, using your body like it was already his.

“Mine,” he snarled against your ear, hips slamming. “Not his. Not anyone’s. Mine to fuck. Mine to plant. Mine to keep.” His pace grew rougher, desperate, jealousy bleeding into possession. “You’ll carry me. You’ll take my seed. You’ll remember whose cock fucked you open like this.”

Your moans tore free, high and broken, every thrust forcing them out. He laughed, breathless, mean. “Good little soil. Look at you—taking it. Clenching so tight you’ll never forget.”

When you came, it was with your whole body jerking, nails raking his back, his name spilling without permission. He fucked you through it, ruthless, using your climax to milk himself. With a final, brutal thrust, he came inside you, grinding deep, growling your name like a curse and a prayer.

He stayed pressed to you, chest heaving, the knife slipping down to rest against your collarbone. He didn’t soften. He didn’t let go. His mouth found your jaw, biting hard enough to leave a mark.

When he finally pulled out, slick running down your thighs, he yanked your shorts back up roughly, like covering you was a punishment. He grabbed your wrist again, dragging you toward the compound.

“You’re not sleeping in the dorms,” he said, voice iron. “You’re mine now. My room. My bed. No one else touches you.”

The lantern swung, throwing gold across the path. His grip never loosened. You stumbled after him, body raw, used, filled, the echo of his thrusts still beating through you.

And you knew he wasn’t bluffing.

______

Jungwon’s grip on your wrist was iron, dragging you through the silent hallways until the greenhouse lamps and dorm windows disappeared. His door slammed behind you, the bolt driven home with the finality of a lock on a coffin. His room was small, spare, stripped bare of comfort—just a bed, a chair, his tools. No flowers, no soil. Only him.

He shoved you onto the mattress like you weighed nothing. Your body jolted, still slick, still aching from what he’d already done. He stood over you, chest rising and falling hard, sweat at his temples, jaw clenched like a vice.

“You don’t go back to them,” he growled. “Not Mira, not Seo, and never him.” His eyes burned. “You’re mine.”

Your breath hitched; the word stuck in your throat.

A voice cut through the dark. “You’re wrong.”

The lantern on the desk flared, spilling its glow across pale wrists, white robes loosened at the chest, a mouth curved in that familiar, cruel delight. Sunoo. Already inside. Already waiting.

Jungwon stiffened, shoulders tensing like a predator finding another in his territory. “Get out.”

Sunoo ignored him. He stepped closer, his smile syrup-sweet but eyes sharp. “She doesn’t belong to you alone. Look at her.” His gaze slid over you where you trembled on the bed, your thighs pressed together, your lips parted from shallow breaths. “She’s terrified. She’s confused. She needs gentleness.” His tone softened, dripping like honey. “And you can’t give her that.”

“Gentle doesn’t keep her alive,” Jungwon snapped, stepping between you and him, shovel-callused fists at his sides. “Gentle lets her rot.”

“Alive?” Sunoo laughed, low and dangerous. “She’s not alive. She’s blooming. That’s what I make her.”

“Blooming,” Jungwon spat, “is just another word for open. And I’m the one inside her.”

The words made your stomach twist; heat and fear tangled until you couldn’t tell the difference. You tried to speak—stop, please stop—but your throat locked.

Sunoo’s gaze darted back to you, softening. He crouched, ignoring the way Jungwon loomed above him. His hand hovered just shy of your ankle, not touching—never touching—but the heat of him crawled up your skin. “Petal,” he whispered, “don’t be afraid. I’ll take care of you. I’ll show you how it feels to be cherished.” His lips parted, almost grazing your skin as he breathed you in. “Let me taste you.”

Jungwon’s growl shook the air. He seized your arm, yanking you back against his chest, his hand spread possessive across your stomach. His cock, still half-hard, pressed against your spine. “She’s mine. Mine to fuck. Mine to plant. Mine to keep.”

Your body shuddered. Fear, yes—but deeper, darker: want, shame, hunger you couldn’t smother.

Sunoo’s smile only widened. “Then let’s see who she opens for first.” He slid closer, slipping between your knees before Jungwon could stop him. His breath fanned over your thighs, hot and wet, and you gasped when he finally touched you—soft, reverent, his hands parting you like something fragile.

The contrast made you dizzy. Jungwon’s grip bruised; Sunoo’s mouth pressed feather-light kisses along the inside of your thigh, slow, teasing, as if every touch was worship. “Sweet,” he murmured, nose brushing close to the heat of you. “So sweet. I’ll make her sing.”

“Don’t you dare—” Jungwon started, but your body betrayed you, hips twitching toward Sunoo’s mouth, a whimper breaking past your lips.

That sound changed everything.

Jungwon froze, then snarled, shoving you down into the mattress, caging you with his body. One hand pinned your wrists above your head; the other tore your shirt open down the middle, fabric splitting under his strength. His mouth crashed to your throat, biting, marking, sucking bruises into your skin with furious precision.

Sunoo groaned at the sight, as if Jungwon’s violence only made you more beautiful. He leaned in, finally sealing his lips over your cunt, sucking hard, tongue lapping deep through your folds. The wet sounds filled the room, obscene, echoing against the bare walls.

You cried out, the noise muffled against Jungwon’s hand when he clapped it over your mouth. “Quiet,” he hissed, teeth at your jaw. “Don’t give him the satisfaction of hearing how much you love it.”

But Sunoo knew anyway. He moaned against you, tongue flicking your clit, fingers sliding inside with practiced ease, curling just right. He fed off every twitch, every muffled scream, every desperate roll of your hips. “See?” he said between licks, voice thick with arousal. “She opens for me. She’s blooming already.”

Jungwon pressed harder, grinding his cock against your hip through his pants, furious at your body’s betrayal, at the way your thighs trembled around Sunoo’s head. “She’s dripping because I fucked her raw,” he snarled. “All you’re doing is licking up what I left in her.”

The words made your body jerk, shame and desire hitting like lightning.

Sunoo pulled back just enough to look up at you, his mouth shining with your wetness, his eyes dark and soft. “You taste like need,” he whispered. He dragged his tongue slowly over your clit, savoring the way you cried out under Jungwon’s palm. “And you’ll remember I was the first one who made you come with his mouth.”

“Shut up,” Jungwon snapped. But his own hips rolled against you, his cock throbbing, desperate. His jealousy only sharpened his need.

You couldn’t fight it. You came hard, body arching, Sunoo’s mouth sucking your clit, Jungwon’s hand holding you down, his teeth biting at your throat. Your orgasm tore through you like the roots of something invasive, clawing deep, unstoppable.

They didn’t stop.

Sunoo licked you clean, gentle as a lover, humming like he was savoring wine. Jungwon bit harder, grinded rougher, his hand forcing your wrists deeper into the mattress. Both of them on you—one soft, one brutal—until you didn’t know whose name to scream.

And you understood, with raw clarity, that they weren’t fighting for you.

They were fighting through you.

When the shudders finally broke, you collapsed back, gasping, throat raw. Jungwon leaned down, lips brushing your ear, his voice a growl. “This is just the beginning. Next time I’m inside you while he’s in your mouth. We’ll see who you really belong to.”

Sunoo laughed softly, licking his lips clean of you. “She’ll belong to both.”

And for the first time, you realized he was right.

_____

Your body was still shaking when Jungwon yanked you upright, dragging you into his lap as if the bed belonged only to him. His thighs were iron beneath you, his chest hard against your spine. One arm locked around your waist, the other snared your throat, thick fingers spreading wide until his grip owned the column of your neck. He forced your head back, baring your mouth to him.

“You’ll taste me now,” he snarled, lips crashing into yours.

The kiss was brutal—teeth knocking, spit spilling. He shoved his tongue deep, choking you with it, swallowing every noise you tried to make. His palm pressed tighter at your throat until your pulse roared in your ears, until breath itself became something you had to beg him for. Drool slicked your chin, his tongue forcing yours down, his grip refusing to let you turn away. It was less a kiss than a violent claiming, his mouth fucking yours the way his cock had already fucked your body raw.

You gasped when he pulled back just enough to let air in, a string of spit hanging obscenely between your mouths. He licked it off your bottom lip, then spat into your mouth deliberately, cruelly, watching you swallow because you had no choice.

“Open,” he growled, forcing your jaw wider with his hand at your throat. “Good. That’s mine too. Every sound. Every swallow.”

Your vision blurred; your thighs squeezed together involuntarily. Terror and heat tangled until you couldn’t breathe for either.

And then Sunoo was there.

He crouched in front of you, hands sliding up your knees to part them wider, his smile infuriatingly calm even in violence. “My turn.”

“No,” Jungwon bit out, but Sunoo was already moving. He grabbed your chin, fingers digging in hard enough to bruise, and wrenched your head away from Jungwon’s mouth. Your neck snapped to the side, and before you could gasp, Sunoo’s lips were on yours.

It wasn’t tender. It was vicious. He sucked your bottom lip until it split, teeth biting down until pain shot bright, then licked the blood from your mouth as if it belonged to him. His tongue drove past your teeth, tasting everything Jungwon had left there, devouring it with obscene relish.

You moaned helplessly, the sound muffled between them.

Jungwon’s grip on your throat tightened, forcing your head back further, rage pouring off him like heat. “She’s mine.”

Sunoo broke the kiss just long enough to sneer against your wet mouth. “Then why is she kissing me back?” He pressed his tongue to yours again, slow and filthy, sucking until spit ran down your chin. Then he pulled back, wiped it with his thumb, and shoved the slick digit back between your lips. “Lick it clean. That’s mine now.”

Your mouth obeyed before your brain caught up.

Jungwon’s chest vibrated with a growl. He bent and bit your jaw, then your throat, leaving purple marks against Sunoo’s fingerprints. His hand clamped your neck harder, forcing you to gasp around Sunoo’s thumb.

“She’s choking on me,” Jungwon snarled. “Not you.”

Sunoo laughed low, mean. He leaned closer, his forehead pressing to yours, his other hand grabbing Jungwon’s wrist on your throat, not to stop it, but to squeeze it tighter. “Then let’s choke her together.”

The pressure doubled. Your eyes watered, spit pooling at the corner of your mouth, drooling down your chin as both of them held you, forced you open, forced you to take them. One mouth kissed you, sucked you, spat into you; the other bit, bruised, pressed your throat until stars danced.

You weren’t kissing anymore. You were being consumed.

And God help you—your body wanted more.

_______

They had you caged between them—Jungwon at your back, Sunoo at your front—two sets of hands closing every door your body might have tried to escape through.

Your pulse beat frantically against Jungwon’s palm at your throat. Sunoo’s fingers dug into your chin, keeping your face tipped up so you couldn’t hide. Their mouths had already ruined you, spit running down your jaw, bruises blooming on your throat and collarbone like dark flowers. Your chest rose too fast, every breath their permission, every sound something they stole from you.

“You see?” Sunoo whispered, voice as sweet as it was cruel. “She’s ready. She’s shaking for us.” His hand slid down, brushing your stomach, spreading lower. “The soil is wet.”

“She’s wet because I fucked her open,” Jungwon snapped against your ear, his breath harsh. “She’s mine to fill.” He ground his cock against your ass through his pants, thick and hard, a promise of what was coming. His teeth found your neck again, biting until your body arched despite yourself.

The two of them moved you as if you were theirs to arrange. Your thighs were forced wide over Sunoo’s lap, your back crushed to Jungwon’s chest. Rough hands tugged your ruined shorts away; cool air hit the slick heat between your legs. Sunoo hummed like a priest receiving an offering.

“Let me taste again.” He didn’t wait for permission. His mouth descended, sucking your clit into his mouth, tongue lapping at you until your eyes rolled back. His hands locked on your thighs, holding you open for him, his moans vibrating into your cunt.

Jungwon shoved your wrists down into the mattress, his cock rutting against you through fabric, his fury pressed into every grind. “Listen to her,” he growled. “Dripping for us. Begging without words.” He yanked his pants open, the blunt head of his cock dragging along your ass, smearing precum. “She’s going to take both. Right now.”

You sobbed, terror and need colliding until you couldn’t tell them apart. “I can’t—”

“You can,” Sunoo cut in smoothly, lifting his head, chin wet with your slick. He stroked your trembling thighs with a mockery of gentleness. “Your body’s already opening. We’ll guide you.” His eyes glimmered, half-devotion, half-madness. “You’ll bloom for us together.”

Jungwon spat into his palm, gripped his cock, and shoved it between your cheeks, rubbing the head against your tight hole until you whined. “Scared?” he hissed, his hand tightening at your throat. “Good. Fear makes you clench tighter.”

Sunoo’s fingers slid inside your cunt again, curling, coaxing, slicking you up for him. He looked up at you, his smile soft even as he stretched you ruthlessly. “Breathe, petal. I’ll be inside you soon. You’ll be so full you won’t remember how to be empty.”

When Sunoo lined himself up, pressing the head of his cock against your soaked entrance, Jungwon shoved his tip harder at your ass, both of them pushing at once. Your cry ripped the air as your body was forced to split, one cock stretching your cunt, the other pressing past the tight ring of muscle until you thought you’d break.

“Fuck,” Jungwon groaned, voice raw. “So tight. Gripping me like a fist.”

“She’s perfect,” Sunoo sighed, already sinking deeper, your walls convulsing around him. “Taking both of us. Our flower.”

It was too much. The stretch burned, overwhelming, obscene. You clawed at the sheets, eyes rolling back as both of them bottomed out, your body trembling violently with the force of being split in two. They didn’t give you time. Jungwon’s hips snapped forward first, brutal, pounding into your ass with the fury of jealousy. Sunoo met him stroke for stroke, slower, deeper, angling until every thrust speared your cunt exactly where it made you scream.

Pinned, stuffed, broken open—you were nothing but their vessel.

“Say it,” Jungwon snarled, hand squeezing your throat until your vision blurred. “Say you’re mine.”

“She’s ours,” Sunoo countered, kissing you, sucking the spit from your mouth, swallowing your gasps. “Tell us, petal. Tell us who you bloom for.”

Your answer was a sob, a whimper, a strangled cry as their cocks moved inside you, filling every inch, grinding against each other through the thin wall of your body until the sensation drove you half-mad.

“Fuck, I can feel him through you,” Jungwon groaned, rutting harder, holding you down as if you might try to run again. “But you’re squeezing me tighter. That’s how I know you’re mine.”

Sunoo’s tongue licked the tears from your cheeks. “She’s crying for me. Look at her. Look how she wants to be saved even while we ruin her.”

Your body convulsed around them, slick gushing down your thighs, every nerve alight. The pain blurred into pleasure until you were begging without words, your nails tearing the sheets, your cries spilling into their mouths as they fought to own your climax.

When you came, it was devastating—your cunt and ass clenching around them both, milking them, dragging them deeper. Jungwon groaned, teeth sinking into your shoulder as he spilled inside you, hot and overwhelming. Sunoo followed seconds later, filling your cunt until you were overflowing, cum dripping down your thighs, both of them holding you so tightly you couldn’t breathe.

They didn’t pull out. They stayed locked inside, cocks twitching, their breaths harsh against your skin.

Jungwon’s hand squeezed your throat one last time, forcing your eyes to his. “Say it,” he demanded, voice hoarse. “Say you’re planted in me.”

Sunoo kissed your cheek, softer but no less cruel. “Say you’ll bloom for us both.”

And you, too full to think, too wrecked to fight, whispered the only truth left in you:

“I can’t belong to just one.”

They smiled—different smiles, but the same hunger.

And you knew you’d never escape again.

_______

woah this was so diffecult to write SO IM SORRY IF IT ISNT THE BEST

THANK YOU FOR READING!!

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[lollovern]

- The Garden Left to Rot -

enhypen masterlist

wattpad

inspired by this post

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groundskeeper!yang jungwon x guest!femreader x cult counselor!kim sunoo | obsessive romance | cult horror | forced devotion | ritualistic sex | jealousy and rivalry | fucked-up love triangle | knife kink | corrupted comfort | you will belong to someone eventually | DARK CONTENT AHEAD!!

wc: 14k

summary: You’re sent to a grief recovery retreat hidden in the mountains. But this isn’t therapy — it’s a cult blooming in blood and rot. Jungwon wants to bury you where no one else can touch you. Sunoo wants to crack you open until you bloom for him. Both say it’s healing. But it’s obsession.

warnings: extreme gore, threesome, cult rituals, body horror (flowers under skin, insect scenes), blood play, forced confinement, psychological manipulation, emotional degradation, knife play, religious delusion, obsessive behavior, toxic romance, dubcon themes, ritualistic sex, hallucinations, violence

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The van climbs until the road forgets how to be a road. Pines crowd close; fog slicks the windshield like breath on glass. By the time the driver kills the engine, your phone has been surrendered, the waiver signed, and your name—your real one—folded into a sealed envelope with your belongings.

A hand-painted sign leans crooked against a stone pillar: THE GARDEN.

Beneath it, smaller script: Let go. Become.

Everyone here is an adult—paperwork made that clear. Still, the cluster of arrivals huddle like freshmen. A woman in a bone-white coat stands at the gate, serene as a photograph. “Welcome,” she says. “I’m Director Seo. You won’t need last names here. You won’t need yesterday.” Her smile doesn’t reach her eyes. “We begin with stillness.”

Stillness smells like damp soil and rosemary. The compound spreads in tiers: a glasshouse ribbed with iron; dormitories with shuttered windows; a refectory where steam fogs the panes; a low clinic painted the color of milk. The greenhouse breathes—a pulse of heavy, sweet air each time the door opens. Inside, rows of lilies lean toward heat lamps; vines net the rafters; something rustles in the loam.

“Orientation,” says the boy who appears at Director Seo’s shoulder. He’s young—early twenties—with paper-clean features and the kind of smile people don’t realize is a blade until it’s already inside them. Kim Sunoo. His name tag says Counselor; the ribbon beneath it says Ritual Lead. “Shoes off in the greenhouse,” he adds lightly. “We keep the floors soft.”

Your shoes leave the ground. Cool boards. Warm mist. A bell rings once. The arrivals form a circle on woven mats; a dozen white-robed staff ghost the edges. A few guests have the shaved look of hospital discharge; others wear expensive emptiness like cologne.

“Here,” Sunoo says gently, “we do not share pasts. Only needs.” His gaze slips over faces and lands on you. Not a leer. A selection. “You may speak or sit in silence. Both are honest.”

“I need to sleep,” says a woman with chewed nails. “Like, three days.”

“I need to stop remembering,” a man answers, voice flat.

The girl beside you—twenty-two, maybe—says nothing. Yejin is stitched on her wristband. Her hands are ink-stained. She draws while people talk: a quick, vicious graphite—faces with petal-mouths; ribs like trellises. When you shift, she tilts her sketchbook so you can see the newest figure: a person kneeling in dirt, throat blooming with something that isn’t a flower.

“Beautiful,” Sunoo murmurs, as if he’s praising a child’s first recital. “You have a keen eye for transformation, Yejin.”

From across the greenhouse, someone drags burlap sacks along iron grates. Soil dark as coffee spills from a split seam and oozes across the floor. The man hauling the bags moves like he’s apologized to gravity and refuses to do it again. Yang Jungwon. Groundskeeper on his tag. Grey work shirt. Forearms nicked white with old cuts. He doesn’t look at the circle—doesn’t look at you—until he does, and then he doesn’t stop. Not curiosity. Assessment, like weighing a seed between finger and thumb and deciding if it will live in his earth.

Director Seo outlines rules in the smooth tone of a stewardess reciting crash procedures:

No personal histories in group.

No contact with family for the first fourteen days.

No unsupervised access to the greenhouse after dusk.

Do not remove plant material from designated zones.

What is given to the soil remains in the soil.

“That includes grief,” Sunoo says, almost playful. “Especially grief.”

Your dorm is clean in the way of hospital corridors and mortuaries. Two metal beds. Two lockers. A copy of a softbound booklet on each pillow: STILLNESS GUIDE. Your roommate arrives with a jangle of bracelets and the brittle cheer of someone who learned to smile as self-defense. Mira, 26, volunteer-turned-resident-mentor.

“Welcome-welcome,” she chirps, then lowers her voice. “Pro tip: keep your head down the first three days. They watch how you watch.”

“Who?”

“Everyone.” She flicks her gaze toward the window, where the greenhouse skeletons against dusk. “Especially him.” She means Sunoo—you can hear it in the soft, reverent way. “And the groundskeeper when it’s dark.” That last part is almost a warning.

The bell rings again. Dinner is broth that tastes like the inside of a leaf and bread dense with seeds. You eat at long tables while staff move among you like shepherds. Across from you, a jittery young man, Taesun—24, scars like cat-scratches up his wrists—piles his crusts and crumbles them methodically. He pockets a handful when he thinks no one sees.

“For the worms,” he whispers to the crumbs. “They get hungry at night.”

Mira nudges your knee under the table. “He feeds them behind the east wall,” she murmurs. “Says they keep the nightmares down if they’re busy.”

In the clinic after dinner, a nurse swabs your fingers where the paper edges of the waiver bit skin. Nurse Min is beautiful in the harsh way of women who have decided their faces are weapons. When she says “this will sting,” the consonants soften strangely; a long surgical scar splits the underside of her tongue. She catches you looking and lifts a brow that says yes, I am aware of my mouth. Then—almost tender—she tapes your knuckle with gauze printed with tiny flowers.

Back in the greenhouse, the first night session is called Surrender. The lamps buzz. Mist beads your eyelashes. Sunoo stands barefoot on the damp boards, sleeves rolled, voice a low waterfall.

“Close your eyes,” he says. “Name the weight you want the earth to hold for you. Don’t say it out loud. Let your body say it.”

Around you, bodies sway. Some cry. Some freeze. When you keep your eyes open, Sunoo notices. Of course he does.

“New sprout,” he says softly, close to your ear, and the nickname feels chosen, not random. “You don’t have to force stillness. It happens when the soil recognizes you.”

“Does it?” Your voice is hoarse from disuse and altitude.

“Always.” He smiles. Not kind. Not unkind. Satisfied. “The Garden knows its own.”

Across the rows, Jungwon kneels in the dirt, wrist-deep in loam, planting something without a label. He doesn’t follow Sunoo’s cadence; he follows his own. When one lamp flickers, he rises and fixes it with the swift, competent movements of someone who builds instead of asks. When he sits back, the soil clings to his fingers like shadow.

You should sleep. Instead you help Mira remake your beds with the stiff white sheets that smell faintly of bleach and rosemary. She keeps talking, because silence makes her hands shake.

“I came as a volunteer,” she says, tucking corners square. “Stayed as a patient. It’s easier when they tell you what to be.”

“What do they tell you?”

She smiles without humor. “A flower.” Her eyes slide to your bandaged hand. “Try not to bleed in the greenhouse. They don’t like that.”

“Why?”

“Because the soil remembers.”

At night the compound changes. Lights dim. The wind strips the pines and combs the glass with needles. You lie awake and count breaths—yours, Mira’s, the building’s—until you can’t bear numbers anymore.

You go out.

The air is colder than the dorm suggests. The greenhouse glows from within, a pulse behind fogged panes. Beyond the east wall, something moves with slow persistence. You follow the ripple of disturbed leaves to a break in the hedgerow and find Taesun kneeling with his pockets turned inside out, sowing crumbs into the leaf litter like a penitent farmer.

“The worms,” he says. “They hate hunger.”

“And if they’re hungry?”

“They crawl into you,” he says simply, and his eyes are not crazy; they’re convinced. “They’re looking for warmth.”

A lantern kindles behind you. “Curfew,” a voice says.

You turn. Jungwon holds the light up so it paints his face in bones and gold. Up close, his features soften—stillness without Sunoo’s practiced grace; a patient animal’s attention. The lantern makes a thicket of his lashes. He looks from you to Taesun to your bare feet on the cold boards.

“You’ll catch a chill,” he says to you, like it’s a personal offense. “Shoes. Now.”

You should resent the command. Instead, you feel the unreasonable urge to obey. You start toward the dorms.

“Not that way,” he says. “West path. Easier. Less slope.” He tips the lantern so the light doesn’t blind you while you pass. It’s a small courtesy. It also marks you—every guard on the walkway can see who broke curfew and who brought them back.

“Do you plant at night?” you ask, because silence around him feels like standing at a cliff’s edge and leaning a little too far.

“Always,” he says. He doesn’t volunteer more. His eyes drag briefly to your bandaged hand. “You left blood in the greenhouse.”

“I didn’t—”

He lifts two fingers, the gesture efficient and final. “The soil remembers.” His mouth twitches—not a smile, exactly; the ghost of one. “Mira talks too much.”

“Is that against the rules?”

“It’s against survival.”

He walks you to the dorm porch and stops at the bottom step like there’s an invisible line he won’t cross. The night carries pine resin and wet metal. You want to ask him what he plants without labels, what grows under lamps that mimic suns, why the staff wear rosaries made of seeds.

He says, low, “Don’t follow sounds you don’t understand.”

“Why?”

“Because some things here answer to being watched.” He tilts the lantern, and for a heartbeat you see something like a tenderness he hides even from himself. “Sleep.”

You try. You fail. When you finally slide under, it’s the shallow kind of rest that hears every hinge complain.

Morning stains the glasshouse pale gold. Breakfast is porridge and a shot glass of bitter green. “Chlorophyll,” Mira grimaces. “For purity. Or the aesthetic.” She scans the refectory like she’s counting exits. “There’ll be a Placement Walk after breakfast. Don’t volunteer. They love volunteers.”

“What is it?”

She cuts her eyes toward the greenhouse. “They take someone to the grove and ‘help them choose a garden name.’ Sometimes they come back with a wreath. Sometimes without their voice for a while.”

Director Seo taps her cup. “Today’s Placement Walk is for… Yejin.”

The graphite girl looks up, startled as a deer. Her pencil stills. Sunoo’s smile brightens by half a watt. “I’ll take her,” he offers, hand already extended. “I’ve seen her drawings. She understands transformation.”

If you didn’t sleep, you are alert now. Jungwon appears in the doorway like the building made him. His gaze flicks over the room, and when it lands on Yejin’s shaking knuckles, something barely visible tightens in his jaw.

“I’ll go with you,” he says to Sunoo without looking away from the girl.

“Of course,” Sunoo replies. Silk over steel. “Two witnesses. Very proper.”

They lead her out between them: the counselor with a palm light on her shoulder; the groundskeeper holding the door open so it doesn’t bite her. The room exhales when the door closes. Mira’s bracelets clink as her hands start to shake again.

“They’ll bring her back,” you say, because logic is a habit.

“Usually,” Mira says.

Taesun folds bread crumbs into his napkin with ritual care. “If the worms are fed.”

“Stop with the worms—”

He looks up, suddenly fiercer than his tremor allows. “This place eats. I just like to decide what it eats.”

You leave your spoon in your bowl. The porridge lurches in your gut like a tide. Through the greenhouse glass, you can’t see the grove, only the suggestion of trunks and a slit of path. Time grows teeth.

When they return, Yejin walks in her body like someone has moved the furniture. A crown of woven reeds presses her hair flat. There’s a smear of green at the corner of her mouth, like she’s chewed a leaf until it bled. She carries her sketchbook close to her chest as if it’s the last piece of herself no one has touched.

“What did you choose?” Director Seo asks.

Yejin’s voice is soft but intact. “Night-blooming cereus.”

“A flower that opens in darkness,” Sunoo says, pleased. “Perfect.”

Jungwon stands behind them, sleeves rolled to the elbow, forearms dirt-streaked. A single thorn scratches the back of his hand, a bright new welt. You don’t know why your chest warms at the proof that something here can still hurt them too.

As the room settles, Nurse Min touches your shoulder. “Consult,” she says, consonants rounded. In the clinic, she peels your bandage, checks the small cut, nods. “Fine.”

“Was the walk… normal?” you ask, too casual. “For Yejin.”

Nurse Min dabs salve with a gentleness that doesn’t fit her knife-edged face. “Normal is a shape you learn,” she says. “Here, it is round.” She taps your knuckle. “Don’t open yourself on purpose. Things may grow inside.”

“Like what?”

Her eyes flick briefly toward the greenhouse. “Names.”

By afternoon the schedule has you shoveling, watering, scrubbing, writing lines. I am ready to be less. You write it a hundred times until the words separate from meaning and become a pattern of stems and loops. Outside, Jungwon clears a new bed along the south wall. His shovel bites; his shoulders move with the reliable rhythm of practiced labor. A boy twice your size steps into his path and mutters something you can’t hear. Jungwon doesn’t raise his voice. He simply looks at the boy until the boy forgets how to stand where he’s standing and moves.

“Don’t stare,” Mira warns from beside you, but she’s staring too. “He notices.”

“He noticed last night,” you say.

Mira goes still. “You went out?”

“For air.”

“Air is how they catch you,” she whispers, and for the first time her cheer fails. “Promise me you won’t go alone again.”

You don’t promise. You also don’t say I don’t know who I am without alone.

At dusk, group again. Sunoo has you sit closer to him than yesterday. When you resist, he laughs softly, as if you’re charming rather than disobedient. “We sit where the light needs us,” he says. You wonder if that’s a rule or a line he likes. While others speak, he doesn’t look at them; he watches their hands, their throats, the wet edge of eyes. When your breath hitches at someone’s story, he turns his head sharply like a wolf hearing snow crack.

“What would you let go of?” he asks you, voice pitched so the rest of the circle hears only the question, not the ownership threaded through it.

You could say: the fire, the last call you ignored, the smell of burning hair. Instead, you say nothing. He accepts your silence as if it were obedience he taught you.

Outside the glass, Jungwon is a darker shape among dark shapes, moving a hose along the rows. When his head turns toward the circle, it isn’t to the whole; it is to you. He holds you there for a breath you feel in your wrists. Then he tips the hose, and water falls like rain on metal bones.

You sleep after midnight because your body ambushes you. You wake to weight. Not on you; in the air, a heaviness like weather. The greenhouse lights are out. The compound holds its breath.

Something is under your pillow.

You slide your hand beneath it and touch paper—the rough tooth of a sketchbook page. You draw it out under the dim nightlight and see yourself. Not flattering. Not cruel. Exact. You kneel on dark soil, mouth open, and something vines out—delicate stems laced with thorns. Hands—two sets—hold your shoulders lightly, possessively: one set with ink stains, one with dirt ground into the half moons of the nails. At the bottom, Yejin’s cramped script: “Some flowers only open when watched.”

Mira stirs. “What is it?”

“Art,” you say, and your voice surprises you with how steady it is.

“What kind?”

“Prophetic,” you answer, because the truth is an animal pacing the edge of the bed and you’re not ready to let it into your ribs yet.

You slide the drawing back under your pillow and close your eyes. Across the compound, the night shifts. In your mind, Sunoo’s smile threads petals through your tongue. In reality, Jungwon’s lantern skates once across the fogged panes, a slow-moving star. Two orbits, caught in the same sky, tightening.

Slow burn, the booklet promised. Healing begins when you stop resisting.

You do not stop.

You breathe. You listen to the soil remembering you.

And you wait.

______

Morning arrives with a whistle under the door and the faint itch of grit in your teeth, as if you’ve been speaking to the ground in your sleep. Breakfast is the same: porridge, a bitter green shot, tea that tastes like boiled bark. Mira counts sips, bracelets clinking like quiet alarms. Taesun crushes his toast to dust and pockets it, eyes bright with purpose. Yejin sits very still, crown of reeds damp against her hair, sketchbook closed for once like a door she’s guarding with her body.

Director Seo taps her cup. “Today begins the Mouth Fast,” she says, voice smooth as tile. “Speech is the first addiction. For twenty-four hours, we practice voicelessness. Carry your stone”—a monk in linen sets a bowl of river stones on each table—“and let it hold your words. Anyone who breaks the fast will do a double shift in the greenhouse trenches. Sunoo will lead stillness. Jungwon will direct labor.”

A murmur rises and dies, mouths pressing shut to prove eagerness. Mira puts a flat, oval stone in your palm. “Don’t lose it,” she whispers, already breaking the rule. “They’ll say the soil took your voice because you were careless.”

You tuck the stone into your sleeve and meet Sunoo’s eyes across the hall. He’s already watching—of course he is. The smile he gives you would be harmless if you hadn’t seen how he moves when he’s pleased: slower, closer, like a candle drawn to oxygen. Jungwon lingers by the service door with a clipboard and a coil of hose on his shoulder, scanning tables the way a shepherd counts sheep by the sound of their breathing.

Chores first. Outside, the air needles your lungs; the mountain wears its cold like a second skin. Jungwon assigns tasks without looking at his list. “Mira, refectory herbs. Taesun, east wall compost. Yejin, with Nurse Min in the clinic.” His gaze slides to you and steadies. “You—paths and drains. Stay out of the grove.” Not a suggestion.

You carry a stiff-bristled broom down stone paths glazed with last night’s dew. The greenhouse ribs glow under weak sun; from inside, lamps hum, and something leafy slaps damply as if it’s learned the shape of applause. By the east wall, Taesun kneels with a small shovel and a reverence that would be holy if it didn’t smell like rot.

He tips crumbs in a neat line, then pauses to show you something cupped in his palm: a white, blind tangle coiling in damp soil. Worms, yes, but too many knotted together, a living thread. He beams, proud. You force your lips into gratitude and keep sweeping. If you stop, you will hear them, and if you hear them, you will dream them.

A shadow falls across your broom. Jungwon holds out a pair of soft-soled garden shoes with the temporary patience of a man who prefers doing to explaining. “Your feet,” he says. “You bruise easily.”

You glance at your bare socks, damp to the ankle. “Is that a rule?”

“It’s a reality,” he says; the word lands like weight. He crouches without asking, sets the shoes on the path, and steps back, gaze down so you can decide if you’ll take his help. You put them on. They’re warm from his hands. He notices the lift of your breath and looks away so the noticing won’t embarrass you. When he straightens, his eyes snag on the river stone tucked in your sleeve. “Don’t drop that,” he says. “The ravens like to steal them.”

You arch a brow—Are you joking?—but he’s already moving, a steady, unshowy force among the clatter of chores.

By mid-morning the Mouth Fast is a taut cord running through the compound. The quiet isn’t peace; it’s suppression, and suppression hums. Sunoo runs stillness from the center of the greenhouse like a maestro conducting silence. He has you sit within his radius; you don’t know how you know that, but you do. When a guest’s shoulders begin to shake, his hand appears at the nape of their neck—just weight, just heat, just enough to persuade the body that obedience feels like care.

He comes to you last, when the lamps have warmed the panes to sweating. He kneels, not quite touching, gaze on your throat. “Your pulse is stubborn,” he says in a voice pitched for you alone. “It hates rhythm. I like that.” He brushes the air near your jawline, not touching, so you feel it anyway. “The stone will teach it obedience. If you’re good at listening.”

You hold his eyes and refuse to nod. He smiles, pleased with your defiance like a trainer who prefers wild animals because they make better trophies. “We’ll work on it,” he whispers, and stands.

After lunch—a bowl of broth filtered until flavor gives up—you’re pulled into the clinic with half a dozen others for “check-ins.” Nurse Min sits you on a stool and unwraps your finger. The cut is a thin mouth now, pink with newness. She touches a gloved finger to the gauze and sniffs it as if the body has a scent that changes when it’s lying.

“Does it itch?” she asks.

You hesitate. The truth is embarrassing. “Everything does,” you admit. “Under the skin. Like… like something wants out.”

“Something wants in,” she corrects mildly. She takes tweezers to the pad of your finger and draws out a hair-fine splinter you didn’t know was there. It isn’t wood—it’s pale and sappy, flexing like a root in the air. She drops it in a jar and screws the lid tight. “Names need medium,” she says. “Don’t let anyone put theirs under your skin.”

“Is that medical advice?”

“It’s survival.” She tapes a fresh bandage printed with tiny leaves, then, softer, “If you start tasting flowers, spit.”

You leave the clinic with your mouth dry as chalk. On the steps, Yejin waits like a shadow that forgot to attach to a body. She presses a folded paper to your palm and flits off before you can unfold it. In the corner of the page, her fast, lethal graphite: you in profile, throat open, something like a stem ghosting up under the jaw. In the negative space behind you, two silhouettes—Sunoo’s soft edges; Jungwon’s blunt solidity—blur toward one another without touching. Underneath, her careful script: Not yet. But soon.

The Mouth Fast bends afternoon into a colder shape. Without words, people show who they are. Mira hums under her breath and taps her stone against her teeth like a bead. Taesun counts breath with his fingers on his ribs. A new arrival—Hana, thirty and jewel-hard—walks like a woman who refuses to ask permission from the air. An older man, Mr. Ko, rows his spoon through soup with the concentration of a man pretending there is a river and a boat that can take him off this mountain.

At dusk, Director Seo calls for the Seed Burial. “We surrender what we’ve hoarded,” she says, and volunteers step forward with small slips of paper seeded with something that will sprout if the soil wants it. They kneel, press the papers into a rectangle of fresh-turned earth, and cover them with a thin skin of loam. The lamps go low. Sunoo stands at their backs. Jungwon stands at their front, shovel grounded like a staff.

You don’t move. You have nothing to bury you can stand to name.

A woman you recognize from orientation—the one who needed three days of sleep—places both palms flat on the soil like it’s someone she loves. Her breath hitches once; she swallows whatever it shook loose. As the last handful of earth covers the names, something beneath the surface shifts. Not the modest swell of seeds drinking. A shove from below.

The crowd stills. You feel it again—a push. The soil flexes and sighs, grains settling. Someone’s hand jerks back as if bitten. Sunoo’s smile does not change, which means it changes. “The ground recognizes an offering,” he says pleasantly. “Stand, flowers. Let the dark do what it’s for.”

Jungwon’s eyes are on the dirt, not the people. His jaw flexes once, twice. You have the sharp, childish thought—He hears it too—and the relief that follows is so naked you almost miss the fear riding it.

Night stitches the compound tight. The Mouth Fast persists: tongues held, little pantomimes replacing argument. In bed, Mira sleeps with her open palm on her stone like it might roll away. You face the wall because the drawing under your pillow is a magnet and your skull is iron.

A scrape wakes you—a quick, purposeful sound under the window. You slide out of bed and ease the latch. Cold breath pours in. On the path below, a lantern moves slow as a planet. You follow, soft-soled shoes silent on the boards, the stone in your sleeve tapping your wrist like a heart that’s climbed too high.

The lantern stops. Jungwon steps into its circle. He doesn’t look surprised to see you. He looks like a man who has laid a trap and found what he baited it for. He lifts the lantern just enough to catch your face without flaying you with light.

He puts a finger to his mouth—quiet—and crooks that same finger: come.

You should run. You go.

He takes you along the west path to a low, fenced plot you haven’t noticed in daylight, because in daylight everything looks like something else. Up close, the boards are stained darker than weather. He stops you with a hand on your sleeve. His grip is gentle; his hand is strong. “Do not speak,” he says, and for the first time today the command lands like care, not control.

He tilts the lantern over the fence. The light stratifies a pit maybe two meters long, maybe one deep, lined with rough timbers and crawling with the industry of decay. You see peels, stems, pot scrapings—normal compost—then catch on something pale threaded through like lace: cartilage? You squint, heart hammering, and in among the skins and stems you see hair—just a clump, just enough to be undeniable. The sour-metal stink under the rot answers a question you didn’t know you were asking until now.

You stagger, mute because the rule still binds your mouth. Jungwon’s hand rises like he planned for your body to try to leave you. He catches your elbow with two fingers and steadies you without pulling you closer. “Breathe,” he says, voice so low the pit swallows it.

You breathe. He watches your lungs move under your shirt as if measuring if they’ll keep their job.

“What is this,” you manage, a whisper that bruises the fast.

“Everything that isn’t needed,” he says. It is both the most honest sentence you’ve heard since you arrived and the worst one. “Don’t come here alone.”

“Why show me?”

His mouth tightens. He weighs the truth and hands you a ration. “Because you will go looking. Better you see what is true than what you can’t live through.”

He lifts the lantern away; the pit dissolves back into darkness. When he looks at you again, the composure you’ve seen him wear like a uniform slips an inch. “Next time,” he says, “wake me.”

“How?” It comes out harder than you intend. “Do I knock on the earth?”

“On my door.” He says it like a correction and a promise. “I’d rather carry you than find you down there with your throat open to the sky.”

You swallow. The stone in your sleeve digs your wrist bone.

He walks you back along the west path, keeping the lantern low so you don’t blind yourself and tumble. At the bottom of the dorm steps, he stops as if a line of salt has been poured between you. “Sleep,” he says. Then, almost grudgingly—no, carefully, like he fears generosity might teach you to expect it—“You did well.”

“You mean quiet,” you say.

“I mean you didn’t lie to yourself while you were looking.” He turns the lantern, and for a heartbeat your faces share a circle of light. It is not intimate, and it is.

Inside, the warm dark smells like bodies and disinfection. Mira turns in her sleep, bracelets whickering. Your hands shake. Not with the adrenaline of the pit—though that remains like a taste at the back of your throat—but with the realization that both men see you. Sunoo sees the mechanism; Jungwon sees the fracture line. You can’t decide which is worse.

The Mouth Fast breaks at dawn with a bell so soft it feels like a secret. Voices resume like a creek finding an old bed; people speak too loudly, then blush, then laugh at their own relief. Director Seo praises “compliance” as if it were a sacrament. In the refectory, mugs clack, spoons scrape. Words return as barter.

You don’t trust yours yet.

Sunoo flows through tables like sunlight convincing itself it’s holy. He catches your empty mug, pours tea, and sets it in front of you with a flourish that makes a few heads turn. “How did the silence fit?” he asks, lazy, interested. It isn’t small talk. It’s a probe shaped like kindness.

“Like wire,” you say.

He smiles, delighted—as if you’ve told him a secret about yourself he can use. “It looks good on you,” he says, and taps your river stone where it sits on the table as if he gave it to you, as if it obeys him too. “We have Talkback today. You and me.”

“Is that optional?”

“In principle,” he says. “In practice, most people prefer to be seen.” He leans in, lower voice. “You certainly do.”

He leaves before you can snap that you preferred to be alive, actually. Across the room, Jungwon stops at the threshold, takes the refectory in at a glance, and chooses a seat with his back to the wall. He eats fast, plain, as if food is fuel and surveillance is dessert. When he lifts his mug, you notice the fresh welt across the back of his hand—a thorn, yesterday, dragging its punctuation.

Talkback is held in a small room off the clinic, windowless, lit by a lamp that chooses flattery over truth. Sunoo sits too close, but because he knows what too close does to bodies, he leaves exactly enough air that you can fool yourself into thinking you could stand if you wanted to. He doesn’t touch you. He rests his forearms on his knees, hands open, posture full of a patience he wears like silk.

“What is the shape of your fear?” he asks, as if fear is polite enough to have geometry.

“Wide,” you say.

“Flat?”

“Deep.”

He grins. “Good. Honesty makes my job easier.” He looks at your mouth, then your hands, then your throat. “Last night you broke curfew.”

It isn’t a question. “I walked.”

“To the west path,” he says, savoring the corridor of it.

“Is that forbidden?”

“Not if you were with someone.”

You hold his gaze. You don’t look away. You don’t nod. You don’t give him Jungwon.

Sunoo’s smile returns, but thinner. “We don’t punish curiosity,” he says silkily. “We shape it.” He nods to your sleeve. “Keep the stone. I like how you sound when you hold it.”

“I didn’t speak.”

“You breathed differently,” he says, and you hate that you believe him. “This afternoon I want you in the greenhouse. We’ll do matching breath. I’ll keep count so you don’t have to.”

Your stomach remembers the pit and rolls. “What if I say no?”

“Then we’ll go slower,” he says, as if you asked him to make it sweeter. “That’s the kind of consent you like, isn’t it? The kind that arrives after your body learns the lesson.”

You stand because sitting feels like agreeing. He doesn’t stop you. He nods as if you’ve completed a task he set in his head.

“Good,” he says. “The roots are listening.”

Outside, the day is too bright in the way of mountains pretending to be gentle. You find Mira tending pots of kitchen herbs—mint, rosemary, a vicious little basil. “You look like you saw a ghost,” she says without looking up.

“I saw the compost,” you say.

She flinches so hard the basil shudders. “You don’t say it out loud,” she hisses, then checks herself, forces her voice calm again. “Names wake things.”

“Whose hair is in it?”

“Everyone’s,” she says. “Eventually.”

By late afternoon your muscles revolt, and stillness becomes a thing you have to hold down with both hands. In the greenhouse, Sunoo runs breath like a metronome. When he kneels behind a girl whose hands won’t stop shaking, he doesn’t touch her skin; he places his palm two inches away from her spine and waits. The girl’s shoulders ease; her breath learns his count. You hate him for it. You hate her relief. You hate that your body pays attention.

Jungwon moves along the rows with a bucket and a dull pruning blade, nicking stems, turning soil, resetting stakes. When a lamp pops and goes dim, he crosses to replace it without being called. On his way back, he passes near your mat—near, not past. The air shifts with him: sweat, iron, soil, a clean note like water running under rock. He doesn’t look down. He scratches the back of his wrist where a thorn welt cross-hatches older scars and says, as if the comment belongs to the room, “Some things only grow when you pretend you can’t see them.”

You don’t know if he means the plants, the people, or you.

Evening comes with teeth. The bell pulls everyone to the refectory; the sky sits heavy, swollen with weather that refuses to begin. Over dinner, Hana spills her tea and swears loudly enough that half the room jumps; then she laughs, tips her chin like she meant to do it, and glares at anyone who looks sorry on her behalf. Mr. Ko tells Taesun to stop feeding the worms like they’re pets; Taesun bares his teeth, half-smile, half warning. Nurse Min pockets a spoon someone bent into a hook. Director Seo watches it all with the small, sated smile of a zookeeper whose animals are thriving.

Night brings the first scream.

Not a long one. Not a movie howl. A single, keening note cut off hard, like a rope being cut. The compound freezes; forks stop halfway to mouths; breath holds. Sunoo is already on his feet, smile sharpened into usefulness. Jungwon’s chair scrapes; he’s moving before you can find your shoes.

They go toward the grove at a measured pace that says they already know what they’ll find. Director Seo lifts her hand. “Stay seated,” she says, and the command lands like weight on your shoulders. Mira’s fingers take yours under the table and squeeze so hard your knuckles grind. You squeeze back. Your mouth tastes like rosemary and fear.

You wait. The greenhouse sweats. The clock you aren’t allowed to see walks itself around the hour by the sound of your blood in your ears. When the door opens again, Sunoo comes in first, serene, coat unwrinkled. Jungwon follows with a bundled shape in his arms—a blanket, a softness of color, too long where a body should bend.

A gasp skips the room. “She fainted,” Sunoo says, which is both intolerably insufficient and the only story you’ll be allowed. “A cleansing reaction. She will rest. We will keep vigil over the names she surrendered.”

He doesn’t say who. Your mind fills the blank with the sleeping woman from breakfast, because that is who you fear for, and fear is a magnet. Jungwon carries the bundle past. You know how much weight that is—your body recognizes the set of his jaw, the economy of his gait. He does not look at you. He doesn’t look anywhere but the door to the clinic, as if any glance could spill what he’s holding.

The dining hall exhales like it’s been underwater too long. Director Seo claps once, neat. “We will not gossip,” she says. “We will not catastrophize. We will practice serenity.”

You don’t sleep. Not because you’re brave—because you’re scared correctly now, and scared correctly people stay awake. When you doze, you wake to the sensation that someone has put a leaf on your tongue and asked you to pray with it in your mouth. You spit into your sheet and find nothing. When you sit up, a shadow peels off the wall near the window and becomes Jungwon.

You nearly fling yourself out of bed. He doesn’t move, as if sudden gestures would spook you. He should not be in the dorms after lights; rules are their own religion here. He breaks this one like he breaks branches: cleanly, without apology.

“You left your shoes,” he says, low. He sets them at the foot of your bed, lined up, laces tucked. His voice is stripped of everything but function. “Don’t go barefoot again.”

“What happened?” you ask, whispering because anything louder might wake the dark.

“Don’t ask me,” he says, and for a breath you think he’s refusing. Then he adds, “Because I’ll tell you.” His gaze drags over your face, cataloging fine tremors, the cracked edge of your mouth, the way one hand fists in the sheet like rope. “Sleep,” he says. “You’ll need it.”

He is out the way he came, the door kissing its jamb like a secret.

You try to obey. The mountain presses its cold face to the window and listens. Somewhere, a lantern moves. Somewhere else, a man like a hymn kneels by a bed that is too light.

You put the river stone back in your sleeve and hold it against your pulse until the beat stops arguing with your bones. You remember the jar in Nurse Min’s clinic with the threadlike root curled at the bottom like a question mark. You picture Yejin’s hand drawing you with something under your skin you didn’t agree to carry.

Stillness was the promise. Obedience was the price. You have paid neither. Now the Garden pays attention.

And you, finally, are afraid.

_________

You wake with the taste of copper and rosemary slicked over your tongue, as if someone pressed a leaf there while you slept and whispered hold it. A welt has risen along your bandaged finger—thin, pale, almost pretty. When you press it, it flexes under the skin like something answering from underneath.

Breakfast is a choreography of clatter and eyes. Mira smiles too hard; her bracelets rattle out a code you can’t read. Taesun tips crumbs into his pocket with priestly concentration. Yejin’s crown of reeds has dried to a brittle halo; she draws with her pencil held like a knife. Hana sits mean and diamond-bright, daring the room to dull her edges. Mr. Ko’s spoon cuts the same path through porridge like a boatman refusing any other shore. Director Seo watches the surface of her tea the way people watch the sea for bodies.

“The Naming Rite will be held at sundown,” she announces, as if she’s asking for the salt. “Those selected have been notified.”

Sunoo lifts his eyes, and that’s your notification.

Mira’s fingers find your knee under the table and clamp. She shakes her head once, small, fast—refuse. You don’t know what refusal looks like here besides a story they will tell about you afterward.

“Drink,” Nurse Min says when you pass through the clinic to turn in your night report—how many hours asleep, how many awake, whether you dreamed of heat, teeth, drowning. She hands you a glass the green of pond water. You smell it, and it smells like lawn and iron. “Chlorophyll with a little hem,” she says, seeing your face. “Calms the heart.”

“Calms or slows?” Your voice scratches.

She cants her head. “Same action, different motive.” She glances at your finger. “Still itching?”

“It… moves,” you say, and the honesty makes your stomach pitch. “Like a thread.”

“Everything alive wants a home,” she replies. She peels the bandage with sure fingers. Underneath, the welt has subdivided into delicate veins, a fine network. Not veins. Veining. It looks like leaf. She presses the back of her glove along it; the pattern darkens, limned green under the skin. “Names need medium,” she repeats. “Keep your mouth closed in the greenhouse today. Even when you want to answer.”

You want to ask answer what, but Sunoo is in the doorway, dusk caught in the lamplight of his hair. He doesn’t knock; he glides in like permission. “Our new sprout,” he says, pleased to find you in a chair. “I’ll take her.”

Nurse Min’s mouth goes a little flatter. “She eats first.”

“Of course.” Sunoo’s smile doesn’t move. “Then we breathe.”

The greenhouse sweats. Heat lamps hum like insects; the glass with its rain of condensation blurs the mountain into a myth. Staff move among the rows with trays of soil sheets—thin paper seeded with something that glitters faintly when the light hits it wrong. “Embedded affirmations,” Sunoo tells the group. “You write what you’ll surrender. The seeds will carry it.”

Hana snorts. “Is the surrender refundable?”

Sunoo’s eyes quicken. “There’s always a transaction,” he says. “We just prefer you know the price.” He looks back to you. “Mat,” he says, and it isn’t a request.

You sit. He kneels behind you, palms hovering two inches from your ribs. No touch—just the sense of touch waiting. “Open your mouth,” he murmurs. The admonition from Nurse Min echoes; you clamp your lips. Sunoo’s pleased noise lands against your neck like breath. “Good. Breathe through your nose. In on four, out on six. I’ll count.”

His voice is a rope you have to grab to keep from slipping. When your breath shudders, he matches it; when it calms, he pursues. On the sixth cycle, something sweet pushes the air—lily, wet earth—and you remember the pit and want to be sick. “Stay,” he says, reading your recoil. “Stay where your body is. Don’t run from it. That’s where people rot.”

Across the rows, Jungwon replaces a cracked lamp with quick, sure hands. He doesn’t look at you until he does, a glance like a hand closing on the back of your neck. The air between you tightens. His forearms are netted with healed cuts, white against brown; a fresh welt crosses them like a red thread. When Sunoo says “out on six,” Jungwon turns the dial and the light hums obedient, and you wonder whether the whole building breathes to his count.

Yejin brings you a tray of seed-paper without being asked. When you reach, her gaze drops to your bandage. She moves the pencil like a blade and sketches the back of your hand: the delicate leaf veining, the suggestion of something wanting to break surface. She writes Not yet over the knuckles and slides the paper into your lap. Her mouth is a thin line; her eyes are large and dry and furious.

The day’s chores are smaller and meaner than yesterday’s. Scrub the condensation gutters. Rake. Haul sacks labeled Bone Meal that smell like old molars. Taesun sings under his breath in a language not meant for mouths and leaves a damp trail of crumbs along the east wall. Mr. Ko fetches and carries with blank efficiency, his face empty as a cleaned plate.

By late afternoon, a woman you know only as Auntie Hye—fiftyish, hair cut short for neatness, eyes that scan like a mother bird’s—begins to cough. At first it is dry and prim; then she hunches, pushes a hand to her chest and coughs wet. A ribbon of something bright pops free onto her palm. Petals. White. Tissue-thin and slick with saliva. A few guests laugh—nerves, delight, cruelty. Nurse Min is there before the room decides what to feel, hand under Auntie Hye’s chin, tissues ready. Hye coughs again, harder, and a clot of petals spills: red-tipped now, streaked. She hacks out a final cluster and sags. The tissues are sodden. The petals look like tongues.

“Pollination,” Sunoo says calmly. “Sometimes the body rehearses letting go by practicing bloom.”

Auntie Hye shakes her head, breath hitching. “I didn’t—” she starts.

Sunoo presses two fingers lightly to her throat. “You did.”

She closes her mouth.

Jungwon comes with a bucket and a flat spade; he scoops the petals into the bucket without expression. Your stomach tilts; you grip the bench until the wood prints itself into your palm. He doesn’t look at anyone. He takes the bucket toward the compost. You see his jawclench once when he passes the pit door and files that, like a photographed crime scene.

After the petals, other small horrors follow as if emboldened. A boy pulls his sleeve up to scratch and reveals a faint green tracery along his inner arm; when he scrubs at it, the skin reddens and puffs and the pattern brightens like a pressed leaf held to light. Mira slices a basil stem and it bleeds thin, clean sap; she runs her thumb along the cut and licks it without thinking, then startles at the taste and laughs too loudly. Taesun tips a paper cup into a drain, and a pale, slick worm writhes against the grate and splits into two thinner threads that both crawl the wrong way, toward his fingers. He coos like they’re babies and tucks them back into mud.

“Don’t feed your nightmares,” Nurse Min says without looking up from the woman whose mouth she swabs. “They grow fine on their own.”

By evening, the heat in the greenhouse feels like a hand that won’t lift. The lamps go low. Director Seo stands by the iron ribs with her clipboard like a prayerbook. “For the Naming Rite,” she says, “we welcome Sunoo as Voice and Jungwon as Hands.”

Voice and Hands. A division of power simple enough to live inside.

You are led—gently, unmistakably—toward the central bed, a rectangle of fresh loam bordered by smooth stones. Yejin edges after you, sketchbook clutched to her chest; Nurse Min blocks her with just a glance. “Not this,” Min murmurs. “Later.”

Mira steps forward—too fast—“I can go instead,” she says, smile like a knife wrapped in tissue.

Sunoo’s smile is silk on a nail. “We don’t barter names,” he says. “We harvest them.”

Your knees give. Not dramatic; a small buckling, the body remembering the ground. Sunoo’s hand is there without touching you, a near-weight at your shoulder. “Kneel,” he says, as if reminding you what your body already decided. “Head up. We face what we bring.”

Jungwon stands at the foot of the bed, shovel grounded. Close, his expression is the same flat steel as his blade. He looks at your throat the way carpenters look at walls: not hunger—assessment. When he speaks, his voice is small enough to belong only to the three of you. “Do you know what you’re giving?” he asks.

You try to say No. What comes out is “Something I can’t carry.”

“Good,” he says, and the word is not kindness. It’s calibration.

Sunoo’s fingers hover at your jaw, turning your face by the gravity of proximity. “Open,” he tells you, and your mouth obeys because your body recognizes a doctor’s tone even when it comes from someone who would rather be a priest. He places a petal on your tongue. It tastes like cold tea and a coin. “Hold,” he says. He waits. When you swallow despite yourself, his smile flares. “You see? The body knows ceremony even when the mind resists.”

He steps behind you. You feel his presence like a heat lamp. Jungwon moves to your side and holds out his hand. On his palm: a knife. Not sharp—its edge has been blunted until it’s a tongue of metal—but its point is honest. He waits until you meet his eyes; only then does he set the flat of the blade against your sternum. The steel is cool. Your skin fists under it.

“This is how we write it,” Sunoo says, and his breath touches the shell of your ear like a whispering moth. “Not deep. Not cruel. Not yet.”

The blade slides up without breaking skin, tracing between ribs, across the slow bell of breath—sternum, clavicle, the notch at your throat. The metal leaves a trail of gooseflesh; your pulse hammers against it like an animal trapped under the lid of a box. Jungwon’s other hand is steady at your shoulder, not pushing, not holding, just there, a second horizon the body can measure itself against.

“Name what cannot follow you,” Sunoo murmurs. It could be a real question. It could be a spell. Your mouth fills with the taste of flower and iron; words gather behind it like flies at meat.

You can’t say the fire; to say it would open something that the soil will keep. You say, “The last night.”

“Again,” Sunoo purrs.

“The last night,” you repeat, and the room tilts like a field under wind.

The congregation—guests in white, staff in linen—sways. Mira has both hands pressed to her lips. Taesun rocks in small, violent arcs. Yejin’s pencil moves; she draws you kneeling, two sets of hands marking you; she smudges the graphite so the air around you looks like breath or smoke.

The blade dips, lifts, comes to rest against your throat’s right side. You feel the exact spot where it would enter if it wanted to. Jungwon’s pulse is visible in his wrist; steady, heavier than yours. He moves the flat in a small crescent along the tendon, and your voice leaves you for a moment—pure reflex. A small, unpretty sound. Sunoo shivers behind you, pleased as if you performed a note he’d been coaching you toward.

“Do you understand the price?” Sunoo asks softly.

“No,” you say honestly.

“Beautiful,” he says, delighted. “No one ever does until after.”

He lifts the petal from your mouth with two fingers and lays it on your tongue again like communion. You hold it. Jungwon takes your left hand. His palm is rough and warm; soil lives in the whorls of his fingerprints. He pricks the pad of your finger with the very tip of the blunted knife, as if he wants to remind the blade of its older religion. A bead of blood swells, bright, neat. He turns your hand and presses that red to the seed-paper waiting in a shallow trench at the bed’s edge. Your blood bleeds into the paper like water into thirst.

“Now,” Sunoo says, voice dropped low enough to live in your bones, “we plant what you are not. So what you are can grow.”

Jungwon folds loam over the paper. The soil is cool even in this hothouse weather. It sucks at your finger when he presses your hand flat to it. Something moves underneath—something too quick for roots. Your stomach rocks. You try to pull back. Jungwon’s hand covers yours, firm as a yoke; Sunoo’s hand wraps your throat—not squeezing, just holding the column steady. You are pinned in two places that translate directly to obedience.

“Breathe,” Sunoo says.

You do. The soil under your hand warms like a mouth.

The congregation murmurs. Not words; the sound bodies make when they agree to a script. Director Seo watches like a reader flipping to the end to be sure it comes out as written. Nurse Min’s face has the set of a woman who’s decided to count a vein until morning.

The thing under the soil stills.

Jungwon lifts your hand and wipes the loam away with his thumb. The smear looks like war paint. Sunoo releases your throat and smooths his palm down the line his fingers left, a correction, an apology, a brand. He bends and whispers against your ear, “You belong to the ground,” and then, after a heartbeat, “and to us while you’re learning.”

His mouth never touches skin. The idea of it does.

The Rite closes with a bell that tastes like copper in your teeth. People file out as if stepping around a sleeping animal. Mira gets to you first, palms hot where she holds your face. “Drink water,” she hisses. “Don’t go to sleep. If you dream the name, it sticks.”

“I didn’t give it,” you say.

She laughs, a small animal sound. “You bled. That’s enough.”

Mr. Ko offers a clean handkerchief without meeting your eyes. Hana watches from a distance like a hawk deciding if a rabbit is worth stooping for when the field is full of easier meat. Taesun beams, mud on his lip, as if he’s just watched a very good wedding.

Yejin presses a drawing into your hand and vanishes. It’s you kneeling, hands marked, a line along your throat that is not a cut but knows where one would go. Over your shoulder, two shadows bend—one a heat-halo, one a blunt storm. Soon, she’s written. Don’t say yes with your mouth.

Night. The mountain holds its breath. The lamps in the greenhouse go black one by one until the glass is only a shape. You sit on your dorm bed and watch your hands not shake. Mira sleeps curled like a comma with her stone under her cheek. The drawing under your pillow warms to your scalp as if it wants to crawl into you.

A knock—not on the door. On the window, one knuckle, once. When you slide the frame, cold air pours in, and you think of Nurse Min’s keep your mouth closed in the greenhouse and keep it shut.

Jungwon stands below, lantern hooded, face lit just enough to make eyes and jaw. He tilts his head—come—and you go because your legs have learned this path. Out the back, down the steps, across the boards to the west path. He waits in the shadow of the shed where spades hang like a rack of tongues.

“Any dizziness? Nausea?” he asks, clinic-plain.

“Just… aware.” The word feels too small for your body’s rattled hum.

He grunts—approval. He reaches for your hand and turns the palm up. The loam under your nails has dried to fine grit. He rubs it away with his thumb, slow, methodical. It’s almost tender until you realize he is checking for changes—for the leaf-vein under your skin brightening, for anything moving that shouldn’t. When his thumb passes over the edge of your pulse, it jumps. He looks up sharply. You look away.

“You shouldn’t stay in the dorm tonight.” Matter-of-fact. “You’ll hear things like your name, and some of them will be for you and some won’t. You’re still soft. Soft things take impressions.”

“Where do I go?”

“My room.” Flat. Then, as if he heard how it sounds: “It’s safer. There are no plants there.”

“Is that true?”

“It’s true enough.” He waits. “Or go to the clinic and sit under Min’s lamp and let her count your breaths until morning.”

“Which would you pick,” you ask, because some part of you refuses to let him stand there and decide your body in his head without you in the room.

He takes too long to answer, then says, “The clinic is gentle.” A beat. “I am not.”

Wind combs the pines; the greenhouse ticks as it cools. Somewhere a raven laughs like a woman who knows your secrets and isn’t impressed.

“Choose,” he says quietly.

Sunoo’s shadow falls across the path before you can. He steps into the lantern’s circle like a storybook: pale wrists, clean hands, a smile that tells you exactly how he will use it. “Ah,” he says, soft delight. “My flower and my hands. I wondered where the night would put you.”

Jungwon does not step back. He also does not step forward. The lantern holds the three of you in a tight Venn where your breaths overlap. Sunoo tips his head, curious. “You can take her,” he says to Jungwon, which is to say I will let you. “But she’ll come back to me tasting like soil and fear, and we’ll start again from below.” He turns to you, voice honeyed and mean. “Or you can come with me and I’ll teach your body what calm feels like so you know when you’ve lost it.”

The polite violence of the options makes your stomach liquefy.

“Stop,” Jungwon says, and the word is a tool, not a plea.

Sunoo laughs softly. “The earth doesn’t stop growing just because you ask it gently.” He reaches, very slowly, and lifts your jaw with two fingers—not touching skin; his hand floats a whisper below it and your head lifts anyway, obedient to suggestion. “Show me your throat,” he says, and your body almost does it because it learned tonight and bodies like to repeat lessons. You hold yourself still out of spite. His smile warms. “Good girl.”

The words hit like a hand under your ribs. Jungwon’s breath changes. It darkens the air.

“Enough,” Jungwon says again, and hooks a finger in the lantern hood. He pulls it open. Light flares, pot-bright, brutal. The three of you blink; the world loses its beautiful edges and shows its seams. “Clinic,” he tells you.

Sunoo’s smile fades pixel by pixel until only his eyes shine. “For now,” he agrees. He steps in closer so there is no air between the three bodies but what breath can claim. He looks at Jungwon and speaks to you. “You’ll end up between us anyway,” he says, the prophecy flat, not cruel. “Why not learn the shape early.”

You should move. You should walk yourself to the nurse and let her count your lungs like prayer beads. Instead you stand very still while two men who have learned your pulse by different languages consider the currency of your fear.

Sunoo lifts his hand and stops a breath from your mouth. You feel the heat of him without the permission of touch. “I won’t kiss you,” he says, velvet and wicked. “Not yet.” He turns his palm and hovers over your throat, reading the rush there like a favorite book. “See what your body does with almost.”

Jungwon moves behind you so quietly the night forgets to mark his steps. He doesn’t touch you. His presence is so large it reads like contact anyway—the shape of him corralling air. You have the dizzy thought that if you leaned back, he would catch you, and if you leaned forward, Sunoo would open like a mouth.

“Breathe,” Sunoo whispers, and it isn’t instruction now; it’s a dare.

You do. The air leans with you. The world tightens to a triangle: lantern glare, the line of a blunted blade tucked into Jungwon’s belt, the faint copper on Sunoo’s knuckle where he touched your lip earlier with the petal.

“I said clinic,” Jungwon repeats, low enough to live at your spine.

“Make her say please,” Sunoo counters, amusement sweet as rot. “Our girl loves a ritual.”

“Don’t—” you start, and then stop, because the word tastes like surrender and you haven’t decided whose hands deserve it.

“Not tonight,” Jungwon says, and you understand: it isn’t mercy. It’s control deferred. He steps to your side, inserts a palm—warm, heavy—at your waist, not pulling, not pushing, just a point you can move along. Sunoo mirrors the motion on your other side without touching, an echo your nerves misread as contact. Together they guide you three steps, five, toward the clinic’s dim window—two gravities that agree for once.

At the threshold, Sunoo bends so close your ear warms. “Sleep,” he murmurs, the same command Jungwon uses like a blessing. “Dream of hands.” He smiles against the air where your skin ends. “Next time I’ll count for you while he holds you still.”

Jungwon’s hand tightens one notch at your waist, a warning, a promise, a brand pressed through clothes. “Next time,” he says, to Sunoo, to you, to the night that will keep at this until you’re rewritten, “I’ll decide who goes first.”

Nurse Min opens the clinic door before anyone knocks, lamp bright behind her like a little square sun. She takes in the triangle of bodies, the glint of the knife, the feral set of Sunoo’s mouth, the obedient steadiness of Jungwon’s hand at your side.

“Inside,” she says, and steps aside.

You pass between them—Sunoo’s almost-touch a heat across your throat; Jungwon’s real touch a line at your hip you could follow with your eyes closed—and cross into the light.

You do not kiss anyone. No one kisses you.

But as the door shuts and the mountain presses its ear to the glass to listen, you know it: your body already understands the shape they promised. It will remember. It will hunger.

And when it happens—when it really happens—it will not be an accident.

________

The clinic smelled of metal and mint. Nurse Min left you in a chair under her lamp until the feverish hum in your body dulled to a bearable pitch. She made you drink water, bitter and green as ditch weed, and held your wrist while your pulse rattled beneath her thumb. When you asked her if you were safe, she only said, “Nothing in a place like this is safe. At best, some things are safer than others.”

By the time she dismissed you, the compound had already gone to sleep. Mira was curled on her side in the dorm, bracelets stilled. You should have slept too. Instead you lay awake, tasting the memory of a petal pressed against your tongue, feeling the phantom weight of Jungwon’s hand steady at your waist, the ghost of Sunoo’s fingers just shy of your throat.

Your body remembered. It remembered too well.

When you finally slipped into the corridor, your bare feet soundless on the boards, it wasn’t to find air. It was because something in you had already decided that the ache would not stop on its own.

The greenhouse loomed against the night, ribs of iron and glass sweating mist. The lock had never been for people who wanted to stay out. You pushed the door and it sighed open, warm air rushing at you like a mouth.

He was waiting. Of course he was.

Sunoo leaned against a bench, sleeves rolled, pale wrists glowing under the lamps. His expression was the same one he’d worn when he laid the petal on your tongue earlier—delighted, expectant, like he had always known your body would come back to him.

“You breathe too loud when you lie down,” he murmured. “I could hear you from the other side of the hall.”

You should have left. You stepped closer instead.

Sunoo reached for you without touching, fingers tracing the air beside your cheek. That almost-contact burned hotter than heat itself. Your breath caught, and his smile sharpened. “See? Your body tells the truth. It remembers me already.”

His hand hovered down, stopping at the hollow of your throat. “Here,” he whispered. “Where the pulse lives.” He bent, mouth a whisper away from your skin, never quite sealing it. Your nerves screamed as if he’d kissed you. “You want me to touch you. That’s why you came.”

Your denial scraped your teeth but never left your tongue.

“Good girl,” he said, pleased at your silence. He turned you, pressing between your shoulder blades until your knees bent and you landed on the warm boards of the floor. “Stay open. Stay soft.”

His hands came at last—sliding along your thighs, parting them without rush, without doubt. He dragged his thumb along the cotton of your thin shorts, pressing until the damp there gave you away. “Blooming,” he said reverently, as if the word itself could coax you wider.

You gasped when he pressed harder, the friction maddening. He laughed low in his throat, pleased. “You’ve been waiting since the Rite, haven’t you? You swallowed the petal and your body begged for more.”

He tugged fabric aside with clinical precision, exposing you to the humid air. His fingers slicked easily through the wetness already gathered, and he made a sound of satisfaction that went straight to your gut. “So ready,” he crooned. “So obedient.”

Two fingers circled, teased, pressed—but never where you needed. He watched your hips shift, your breath stutter. “Say please,” he murmured.

“I—”

“Shh.” His free hand covered your mouth lightly, thumb grazing your lower lip. “Not with words. With your body.”

Your thighs trembled. You pushed into his hand, desperate. His smile widened. “There it is. Begging without speech.”

He slipped two fingers inside, slow, deliberate. Your back arched, a strangled sound caught behind his palm. He curled them just right, hitting the place that made you shiver, made your eyes roll back. “Yes,” he whispered against your ear. “That’s it. That’s how you bloom.”

His palm pressed harder over your mouth as your moans broke free. His rhythm quickened, fingers thrusting, scissoring, spreading you open as if he meant to plant something inside. Every push forced slick sounds into the greenhouse air. He bent low, lips brushing your temple, murmuring praises between each thrust: “Perfect. My good flower. Opening just for me. No one else will see you like this.”

Your orgasm came sudden, brutal—your whole body snapping tight around his hand, shuddering against him. He kept moving, dragging it out until you were gasping into his palm, thighs twitching.

When at last he withdrew, his fingers glistened. He lifted them to your lips, smearing wetness across them before pushing between. “Taste yourself,” he ordered softly. “Know what you are to me.”

Shame and hunger tangled in your chest. You sucked his fingers clean, and his eyes darkened, mouth parting as if he might finally kiss you. He didn’t. He pulled back just enough to leave you desperate, to make absence itself a cruelty.

“Blooming,” he whispered again, satisfied. “And tomorrow, you’ll be ready for the soil.”

The greenhouse door creaked. You jerked, Sunoo still crouched over you, his slick fingers withdrawing with deliberate slowness.

Jungwon stood in the doorway, lantern spilling gold over his dirt-streaked arms. His jaw tightened as his eyes tracked the wet shine on your lips, the way your legs trembled, the smug curve of Sunoo’s smile.

For a long, brutal moment, no one spoke. Then Jungwon stepped forward, shovel still in one hand, and his voice came out rough, dangerous.

“She’s mine next.”

The lamps hummed. The soil smelled of iron. Your heart beat against your throat like a trapped bird as the two men stared across you, and you realized the next time you were touched, it would be by both.

And you would not escape it.

______

The night you tried to run, the mountain gave you away.

The boards beneath your feet creaked, wet leaves clung to your calves, and the fog was a hand on your throat. You ran anyway. Past the dorms, past the glasshouse ribs glowing faintly from their lamps, down the west path where the ravens laughed like women who knew your secrets.

You thought the dark would cover you.

But the dark belonged to him.

A hand caught your wrist so hard you nearly went down. The lantern flared, and Jungwon’s face came out of the mist—eyes black, jaw locked, the muscle jumping with rage he didn’t bother to soften. He dragged you against him, chest heaving like you’d run into a wall that had learned how to breathe.

“Running,” he said, voice low and sharp as a spade. “After I told you not to.”

“I—”

“Quiet.” His grip on your wrist tightened until your bones ached. “Do you know what he did to you in there? Do you know what you smell like? Soil and him.” His other hand closed hard around your chin, forcing you to meet his eyes. His breath came hot, furious. “I told you not to let him touch you.”

Your protest was thin. “I didn’t—”

“You did.” He shoved you back against the rough bark of a pine. The trunk dug into your spine; his body crowded yours, heat and dirt and something mean. “You opened your mouth. You let him put his fingers in you.” His hand slid down your throat, pressing just enough to make your pulse throb under his palm. “Do you think that makes you his?”

“No—”

“No,” he repeated, mocking and brutal, pressing harder until your words broke into breath. His eyes raked you up and down like he was reading your body for lies. “You’re mine. If you’re soil, then I’m the one who plants.”

The knife appeared from his belt—not sharp, its edge long since blunted, but the point still honest. He held it flat against your belly, dragging it up under your shirt until the cold metal kissed the underside of your breast. You shivered, body jerking against the bark. His mouth twisted, equal parts fury and hunger.

“Scared?” he murmured. “Good. Fear makes roots dig deeper.”

He hooked the blade under the band of your shorts, pulling until the fabric stretched and then snapped. His hand shoved inside without pause, fingers rough, pushing into you like he meant to stake a claim. You gasped, the sound choking against the hand still at your throat.

“Wet,” he said, voice a growl, face close enough you could feel every word on your skin. “You’re soaked for me already. Even after him. Especially after him.” His fingers thrust harder, curling, relentless, forcing your body to answer him. “Say it. Say whose you are.”

You shook your head, too proud, too broken to give it.

His mouth curved cruel. “Then I’ll fuck it into you.”

He yanked your shorts down to your thighs, lifted you bodily against the tree, and shoved his hips between your legs. You clawed at his shoulders, half to push, half to hold on, but he pinned you easy, the knife’s flat pressed to your throat now like a brand. His cock pressed hot and thick against your entrance, grinding through the slick he’d found there, rubbing until you whined.

“You hear that?” he hissed, rolling his hips, dragging the head over your folds until obscene wet sounds filled the air. “Your body begging me in front of the whole fucking mountain.” He pushed in one brutal stroke, burying himself deep, forcing a cry from your throat. His teeth bared at the sound, savage triumph. “That’s it. Open up. Take me.”

He fucked you hard against the tree, every thrust jarring bark into your spine, every shove brutal and unrelenting. The knife never left your throat—flat, cold, reminding you what he could do if he wanted. His free hand gripped your hip so hard you knew you’d bruise, dragging you down onto him, using your body like it was already his.

“Mine,” he snarled against your ear, hips slamming. “Not his. Not anyone’s. Mine to fuck. Mine to plant. Mine to keep.” His pace grew rougher, desperate, jealousy bleeding into possession. “You’ll carry me. You’ll take my seed. You’ll remember whose cock fucked you open like this.”

Your moans tore free, high and broken, every thrust forcing them out. He laughed, breathless, mean. “Good little soil. Look at you—taking it. Clenching so tight you’ll never forget.”

When you came, it was with your whole body jerking, nails raking his back, his name spilling without permission. He fucked you through it, ruthless, using your climax to milk himself. With a final, brutal thrust, he came inside you, grinding deep, growling your name like a curse and a prayer.

He stayed pressed to you, chest heaving, the knife slipping down to rest against your collarbone. He didn’t soften. He didn’t let go. His mouth found your jaw, biting hard enough to leave a mark.

When he finally pulled out, slick running down your thighs, he yanked your shorts back up roughly, like covering you was a punishment. He grabbed your wrist again, dragging you toward the compound.

“You’re not sleeping in the dorms,” he said, voice iron. “You’re mine now. My room. My bed. No one else touches you.”

The lantern swung, throwing gold across the path. His grip never loosened. You stumbled after him, body raw, used, filled, the echo of his thrusts still beating through you.

And you knew he wasn’t bluffing.

______

Jungwon’s grip on your wrist was iron, dragging you through the silent hallways until the greenhouse lamps and dorm windows disappeared. His door slammed behind you, the bolt driven home with the finality of a lock on a coffin. His room was small, spare, stripped bare of comfort—just a bed, a chair, his tools. No flowers, no soil. Only him.

He shoved you onto the mattress like you weighed nothing. Your body jolted, still slick, still aching from what he’d already done. He stood over you, chest rising and falling hard, sweat at his temples, jaw clenched like a vice.

“You don’t go back to them,” he growled. “Not Mira, not Seo, and never him.” His eyes burned. “You’re mine.”

Your breath hitched; the word stuck in your throat.

A voice cut through the dark. “You’re wrong.”

The lantern on the desk flared, spilling its glow across pale wrists, white robes loosened at the chest, a mouth curved in that familiar, cruel delight. Sunoo. Already inside. Already waiting.

Jungwon stiffened, shoulders tensing like a predator finding another in his territory. “Get out.”

Sunoo ignored him. He stepped closer, his smile syrup-sweet but eyes sharp. “She doesn’t belong to you alone. Look at her.” His gaze slid over you where you trembled on the bed, your thighs pressed together, your lips parted from shallow breaths. “She’s terrified. She’s confused. She needs gentleness.” His tone softened, dripping like honey. “And you can’t give her that.”

“Gentle doesn’t keep her alive,” Jungwon snapped, stepping between you and him, shovel-callused fists at his sides. “Gentle lets her rot.”

“Alive?” Sunoo laughed, low and dangerous. “She’s not alive. She’s blooming. That’s what I make her.”

“Blooming,” Jungwon spat, “is just another word for open. And I’m the one inside her.”

The words made your stomach twist; heat and fear tangled until you couldn’t tell the difference. You tried to speak—stop, please stop—but your throat locked.

Sunoo’s gaze darted back to you, softening. He crouched, ignoring the way Jungwon loomed above him. His hand hovered just shy of your ankle, not touching—never touching—but the heat of him crawled up your skin. “Petal,” he whispered, “don’t be afraid. I’ll take care of you. I’ll show you how it feels to be cherished.” His lips parted, almost grazing your skin as he breathed you in. “Let me taste you.”

Jungwon’s growl shook the air. He seized your arm, yanking you back against his chest, his hand spread possessive across your stomach. His cock, still half-hard, pressed against your spine. “She’s mine. Mine to fuck. Mine to plant. Mine to keep.”

Your body shuddered. Fear, yes—but deeper, darker: want, shame, hunger you couldn’t smother.

Sunoo’s smile only widened. “Then let’s see who she opens for first.” He slid closer, slipping between your knees before Jungwon could stop him. His breath fanned over your thighs, hot and wet, and you gasped when he finally touched you—soft, reverent, his hands parting you like something fragile.

The contrast made you dizzy. Jungwon’s grip bruised; Sunoo’s mouth pressed feather-light kisses along the inside of your thigh, slow, teasing, as if every touch was worship. “Sweet,” he murmured, nose brushing close to the heat of you. “So sweet. I’ll make her sing.”

“Don’t you dare—” Jungwon started, but your body betrayed you, hips twitching toward Sunoo’s mouth, a whimper breaking past your lips.

That sound changed everything.

Jungwon froze, then snarled, shoving you down into the mattress, caging you with his body. One hand pinned your wrists above your head; the other tore your shirt open down the middle, fabric splitting under his strength. His mouth crashed to your throat, biting, marking, sucking bruises into your skin with furious precision.

Sunoo groaned at the sight, as if Jungwon’s violence only made you more beautiful. He leaned in, finally sealing his lips over your cunt, sucking hard, tongue lapping deep through your folds. The wet sounds filled the room, obscene, echoing against the bare walls.

You cried out, the noise muffled against Jungwon’s hand when he clapped it over your mouth. “Quiet,” he hissed, teeth at your jaw. “Don’t give him the satisfaction of hearing how much you love it.”

But Sunoo knew anyway. He moaned against you, tongue flicking your clit, fingers sliding inside with practiced ease, curling just right. He fed off every twitch, every muffled scream, every desperate roll of your hips. “See?” he said between licks, voice thick with arousal. “She opens for me. She’s blooming already.”

Jungwon pressed harder, grinding his cock against your hip through his pants, furious at your body’s betrayal, at the way your thighs trembled around Sunoo’s head. “She’s dripping because I fucked her raw,” he snarled. “All you’re doing is licking up what I left in her.”

The words made your body jerk, shame and desire hitting like lightning.

Sunoo pulled back just enough to look up at you, his mouth shining with your wetness, his eyes dark and soft. “You taste like need,” he whispered. He dragged his tongue slowly over your clit, savoring the way you cried out under Jungwon’s palm. “And you’ll remember I was the first one who made you come with his mouth.”

“Shut up,” Jungwon snapped. But his own hips rolled against you, his cock throbbing, desperate. His jealousy only sharpened his need.

You couldn’t fight it. You came hard, body arching, Sunoo’s mouth sucking your clit, Jungwon’s hand holding you down, his teeth biting at your throat. Your orgasm tore through you like the roots of something invasive, clawing deep, unstoppable.

They didn’t stop.

Sunoo licked you clean, gentle as a lover, humming like he was savoring wine. Jungwon bit harder, grinded rougher, his hand forcing your wrists deeper into the mattress. Both of them on you—one soft, one brutal—until you didn’t know whose name to scream.

And you understood, with raw clarity, that they weren’t fighting for you.

They were fighting through you.

When the shudders finally broke, you collapsed back, gasping, throat raw. Jungwon leaned down, lips brushing your ear, his voice a growl. “This is just the beginning. Next time I’m inside you while he��s in your mouth. We’ll see who you really belong to.”

Sunoo laughed softly, licking his lips clean of you. “She’ll belong to both.”

And for the first time, you realized he was right.

_____

Your body was still shaking when Jungwon yanked you upright, dragging you into his lap as if the bed belonged only to him. His thighs were iron beneath you, his chest hard against your spine. One arm locked around your waist, the other snared your throat, thick fingers spreading wide until his grip owned the column of your neck. He forced your head back, baring your mouth to him.

“You’ll taste me now,” he snarled, lips crashing into yours.

The kiss was brutal—teeth knocking, spit spilling. He shoved his tongue deep, choking you with it, swallowing every noise you tried to make. His palm pressed tighter at your throat until your pulse roared in your ears, until breath itself became something you had to beg him for. Drool slicked your chin, his tongue forcing yours down, his grip refusing to let you turn away. It was less a kiss than a violent claiming, his mouth fucking yours the way his cock had already fucked your body raw.

You gasped when he pulled back just enough to let air in, a string of spit hanging obscenely between your mouths. He licked it off your bottom lip, then spat into your mouth deliberately, cruelly, watching you swallow because you had no choice.

“Open,” he growled, forcing your jaw wider with his hand at your throat. “Good. That’s mine too. Every sound. Every swallow.”

Your vision blurred; your thighs squeezed together involuntarily. Terror and heat tangled until you couldn’t breathe for either.

And then Sunoo was there.

He crouched in front of you, hands sliding up your knees to part them wider, his smile infuriatingly calm even in violence. “My turn.”

“No,” Jungwon bit out, but Sunoo was already moving. He grabbed your chin, fingers digging in hard enough to bruise, and wrenched your head away from Jungwon’s mouth. Your neck snapped to the side, and before you could gasp, Sunoo’s lips were on yours.

It wasn’t tender. It was vicious. He sucked your bottom lip until it split, teeth biting down until pain shot bright, then licked the blood from your mouth as if it belonged to him. His tongue drove past your teeth, tasting everything Jungwon had left there, devouring it with obscene relish.

You moaned helplessly, the sound muffled between them.

Jungwon’s grip on your throat tightened, forcing your head back further, rage pouring off him like heat. “She’s mine.”

Sunoo broke the kiss just long enough to sneer against your wet mouth. “Then why is she kissing me back?” He pressed his tongue to yours again, slow and filthy, sucking until spit ran down your chin. Then he pulled back, wiped it with his thumb, and shoved the slick digit back between your lips. “Lick it clean. That’s mine now.”

Your mouth obeyed before your brain caught up.

Jungwon’s chest vibrated with a growl. He bent and bit your jaw, then your throat, leaving purple marks against Sunoo’s fingerprints. His hand clamped your neck harder, forcing you to gasp around Sunoo’s thumb.

“She’s choking on me,” Jungwon snarled. “Not you.”

Sunoo laughed low, mean. He leaned closer, his forehead pressing to yours, his other hand grabbing Jungwon’s wrist on your throat, not to stop it, but to squeeze it tighter. “Then let’s choke her together.”

The pressure doubled. Your eyes watered, spit pooling at the corner of your mouth, drooling down your chin as both of them held you, forced you open, forced you to take them. One mouth kissed you, sucked you, spat into you; the other bit, bruised, pressed your throat until stars danced.

You weren’t kissing anymore. You were being consumed.

And God help you—your body wanted more.

_______

They had you caged between them—Jungwon at your back, Sunoo at your front—two sets of hands closing every door your body might have tried to escape through.

Your pulse beat frantically against Jungwon’s palm at your throat. Sunoo’s fingers dug into your chin, keeping your face tipped up so you couldn’t hide. Their mouths had already ruined you, spit running down your jaw, bruises blooming on your throat and collarbone like dark flowers. Your chest rose too fast, every breath their permission, every sound something they stole from you.

“You see?” Sunoo whispered, voice as sweet as it was cruel. “She’s ready. She’s shaking for us.” His hand slid down, brushing your stomach, spreading lower. “The soil is wet.”

“She’s wet because I fucked her open,” Jungwon snapped against your ear, his breath harsh. “She’s mine to fill.” He ground his cock against your ass through his pants, thick and hard, a promise of what was coming. His teeth found your neck again, biting until your body arched despite yourself.

The two of them moved you as if you were theirs to arrange. Your thighs were forced wide over Sunoo’s lap, your back crushed to Jungwon’s chest. Rough hands tugged your ruined shorts away; cool air hit the slick heat between your legs. Sunoo hummed like a priest receiving an offering.

“Let me taste again.” He didn’t wait for permission. His mouth descended, sucking your clit into his mouth, tongue lapping at you until your eyes rolled back. His hands locked on your thighs, holding you open for him, his moans vibrating into your cunt.

Jungwon shoved your wrists down into the mattress, his cock rutting against you through fabric, his fury pressed into every grind. “Listen to her,” he growled. “Dripping for us. Begging without words.” He yanked his pants open, the blunt head of his cock dragging along your ass, smearing precum. “She’s going to take both. Right now.”

You sobbed, terror and need colliding until you couldn’t tell them apart. “I can’t—”

“You can,” Sunoo cut in smoothly, lifting his head, chin wet with your slick. He stroked your trembling thighs with a mockery of gentleness. “Your body’s already opening. We’ll guide you.” His eyes glimmered, half-devotion, half-madness. “You’ll bloom for us together.”

Jungwon spat into his palm, gripped his cock, and shoved it between your cheeks, rubbing the head against your tight hole until you whined. “Scared?” he hissed, his hand tightening at your throat. “Good. Fear makes you clench tighter.”

Sunoo’s fingers slid inside your cunt again, curling, coaxing, slicking you up for him. He looked up at you, his smile soft even as he stretched you ruthlessly. “Breathe, petal. I’ll be inside you soon. You’ll be so full you won’t remember how to be empty.”

When Sunoo lined himself up, pressing the head of his cock against your soaked entrance, Jungwon shoved his tip harder at your ass, both of them pushing at once. Your cry ripped the air as your body was forced to split, one cock stretching your cunt, the other pressing past the tight ring of muscle until you thought you’d break.

“Fuck,” Jungwon groaned, voice raw. “So tight. Gripping me like a fist.”

“She’s perfect,” Sunoo sighed, already sinking deeper, your walls convulsing around him. “Taking both of us. Our flower.”

It was too much. The stretch burned, overwhelming, obscene. You clawed at the sheets, eyes rolling back as both of them bottomed out, your body trembling violently with the force of being split in two. They didn’t give you time. Jungwon’s hips snapped forward first, brutal, pounding into your ass with the fury of jealousy. Sunoo met him stroke for stroke, slower, deeper, angling until every thrust speared your cunt exactly where it made you scream.

Pinned, stuffed, broken open—you were nothing but their vessel.

“Say it,” Jungwon snarled, hand squeezing your throat until your vision blurred. “Say you’re mine.”

“She’s ours,” Sunoo countered, kissing you, sucking the spit from your mouth, swallowing your gasps. “Tell us, petal. Tell us who you bloom for.”

Your answer was a sob, a whimper, a strangled cry as their cocks moved inside you, filling every inch, grinding against each other through the thin wall of your body until the sensation drove you half-mad.

“Fuck, I can feel him through you,” Jungwon groaned, rutting harder, holding you down as if you might try to run again. “But you’re squeezing me tighter. That’s how I know you’re mine.”

Sunoo’s tongue licked the tears from your cheeks. “She’s crying for me. Look at her. Look how she wants to be saved even while we ruin her.”

Your body convulsed around them, slick gushing down your thighs, every nerve alight. The pain blurred into pleasure until you were begging without words, your nails tearing the sheets, your cries spilling into their mouths as they fought to own your climax.

When you came, it was devastating—your cunt and ass clenching around them both, milking them, dragging them deeper. Jungwon groaned, teeth sinking into your shoulder as he spilled inside you, hot and overwhelming. Sunoo followed seconds later, filling your cunt until you were overflowing, cum dripping down your thighs, both of them holding you so tightly you couldn’t breathe.

They didn’t pull out. They stayed locked inside, cocks twitching, their breaths harsh against your skin.

Jungwon’s hand squeezed your throat one last time, forcing your eyes to his. “Say it,” he demanded, voice hoarse. “Say you’re planted in me.”

Sunoo kissed your cheek, softer but no less cruel. “Say you’ll bloom for us both.”

And you, too full to think, too wrecked to fight, whispered the only truth left in you:

“I can’t belong to just one.”

They smiled—different smiles, but the same hunger.

And you knew you’d never escape again.

_______

woah this was so diffecult to write SO IM SORRY IF IT ISNT THE BEST

THANK YOU FOR READING!!

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