#trying my best to bend this metal without breaking it ….. | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

leejenowrld · 29 days ago

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back to you — ten (one)

pairing - lee jeno x reader

word count - 93k words… (split into two posts) 40k in this post, 53k in the next post. goes without saying don’t read the next post until you finish this.

genre - smut, fluff, angst, enemies to lovers

synopsis — after taeyong’s death, jeno and those closest to him are each haunted by memories and ghosts, real and imagined, that refuse to let them move on. grief shadows every moment, but when an unexpected night brings everyone all together, the lines between past and present blur, and everything changes in ways no one could have foreseen. in the midst of it, you and jeno find yourselves pulled back into each other’s orbit, unable to escape the unfinished story between you.

chapter warnings — post college au, small town vibes, explicit language, explicit sexual content(18+), explicit themes, one tree hill inspired, early 2000s vibe, power play, dom reader/sub jeno dynamics (both switches tbh), rough sex, explicit language, this chapter contains scenes of emotional abuse, bullying, and targeted harassment that may be distressing to some readers. this chapter is the largest yet, it’s incredibly heavy and loaded, take your time, i’ve uploaded it into two seperate posts, think of it a special two part(er), read the next part here, i can’t add much here as everything in this chapter will be unexpected and a spoiler, but you’ll see the new york gang having slay moments, you’ll meet baby haeun, many jeno and nahyun moments, you’ll see familiar places :), i wanna preface by saying i haven’t proofread anything and there’s a high likelihood that there’s some small mistakes (i hope not a lot), if it’s something where i’ve accidentally copied and pasted the same section twice then tell me, if it’s correcting anything or being annoying then don’t tell me. the pacing may feel unsteady at times, characters may seem unlike themselves, i tried my best with this chapter lol.

listen to 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐏𝐋𝐀𝐘𝐋𝐈𝐒𝐓 whilst reading <3

𝐅𝐈𝐂 𝐌𝐋

𝐍𝐄𝐖 𝐘𝐎𝐑𝐊. 𝟒𝟎.𝟕𝟏𝟒𝟓° 𝐍, 𝟕𝟒.𝟎𝟎𝟔𝟎° 𝐖

The city exhales like it’s tired of lying. Steam rises from beneath the pavement in slow spirals, curling around the ankles of people who don’t look up anymore. Taxis idle along the curb like yellowed teeth in a mouth too bruised to bite, windows fogged from the inside, engines humming with all the things their passengers won’t say out loud. Somewhere blocks away, a siren wails half-hearted through traffic like it’s lost its urgency, like even emergencies are running late now. Above it all, scaffolding clings to buildings like regret—thin metal bones holding up glass spines that were never supposed to bend this far. The whole skyline looks like it’s bracing for something it already missed.

Outside the window, everything rushes forward—horns, heels, rain-soaked cardboard curling at the edges—but the apartment traps its own time. The air moves wrong in here, too thick in the lungs, too still around the wrists. The windowpane’s sweat-blurred, muting the outlines of towers that used to promise arrival. You can’t see the Chrysler spire anymore, just a smudge of silver where glory used to sit. The radiator hisses like it’s biting back a warning. The faucet drips unevenly, tapping out a rhythm like a code you’ve forgotten how to break. And across the street, someone shouts in a language that once belonged to you, the vowels clashing against fire escapes like a memory trying to climb back in. This city was supposed to mean progress, reinvention and survival. It was supposed to swallow everything you were and spit back someone cleaner, smarter, better but all it’s doing now is mirroring you at your most undone, cracking in the places you pretend no one will see, reflecting a face shaped by choices you didn’t make fast enough. The city hasn’t moved on. It’s just mastered the art of pretending broken things are still beautiful if you light them from the right angle.

The ice roller drags slowly beneath your cheekbone, clinking against the edge of your jaw as condensation pools in the curve of your wrist, your body still heavy with heat that sleep didn’t wash off and the kind of restless stillness that sticks when the sky turns too pale to ignore. You’re standing barefoot in the kitchen where nothing breathes properly—air too dry, the windows fogged just enough to blur the skyline into a dull smudge of gold and static. The sun slants through the blinds like punishment, slicing across the metal sink, brushing the handle of the mug Donghyuck used three days ago and never rinsed, casting long thin shadows across the envelope on the counter marked ‘APEX Global.’ You already know what it says. Six months, rotation, international leadership placement. The version of you from three years ago would’ve screamed, the version of you from six months ago would’ve cried. The version standing here now just watches a drop of water roll from the roller’s edge down the side of your wrist and fall, silent, into the hem of your sleeve.

Yangyang’s hoodie is soft, too warm at the neck, heavy around the shoulders like it’s trying to pin you to this moment, like maybe if you stand still enough time will crawl backwards instead of on. The apartment is quiet but the quiet has weight to it, not peace but pressure, not calm but that strange echoing stillness that creeps in after a party ends and nobody’s swept up the glitter. Tote bags are slumped beside the kitchen stool with zippers half-open like mouths caught mid-sigh, a crushed granola bar wrapper peeking out beneath Karina’s travel charger, Donghyuck’s slides tucked just far enough under the couch to suggest he kicked them off while falling asleep instead of taking them off like someone who meant to stay. Her overnight bag is still lying by the bar, unzipped, one strap twisted like it’s been dropped in the middle of something and left bleeding out across the hardwood, mascara rolling under the chair leg beside a sweater you don’t remember her packing, and all of it is wrong in a way you don’t have the energy to correct.

The only thing making noise is the fridge, humming low and inconsistent like even it’s debating whether to keep going, the oat milk on the top shelf probably spoiled, the open cap beside the half-eaten strawberries daring you to pretend it matters. You roll the ice up across your temple and back again, the cold catching at your hairline, and you let your eyes flick toward the envelope once more before looking away. You’d known it was coming. The promotion. The rotation. The invitation. All those things people dream about when they imagine themselves far away from where they started, all those words they say when they try to make ambition sound like grace—opportunity, mobility, voice—but none of them feel like they belong in your mouth right now, not when the floor is still sticky from last night’s wine spill and your throat tastes like regret instead of coffee.

Karina shifts on the couch, her breath catching in that way it does when she’s trying not to cry in her sleep again. The throw blanket slips further down her legs and she doesn’t move to pull it up, and for a second you think about walking over and fixing it but your legs don’t move, your feet won’t leave the tile. Somewhere down the hall, Donghyuck mumbles something you don’t catch, followed by the whine of the tap, the clink of a toothbrush against ceramic. The apartment is full but it feels like a ruin. Everything built too fast, stretched too thin, held together by group chats, leftovers and shared Spotify accounts, none of it permanent, all of it waiting to be cleared away like stage lighting after a dress rehearsal. This was never supposed to last. None of it was but that doesn’t make the stillness any less suffocating.

You turn the faucet on just to hear something change. The water hits the basin sharp and fast and cold. You stare into the stream like it might give you an answer, like if you wait long enough someone will walk in and say it—say he’s fine, say they found him, say it was all a misunderstanding, that Jaemin never meant to vanish, that people don’t just slip through the cracks when they’re that close to you, that you didn’t miss a sign that should’ve screamed. But no one says anything. Karina shifts again. The water keeps running. The envelope doesn’t move.

The roller slips from your fingers and lands in the sink with a dull, hollow clack, the sound too small for how loud everything feels in your chest. Your hand stays suspended in the air for a second too long before you lower it, palm pressing flat to the marble like you’re trying to listen for something underneath—like if you lean in close enough, the counter might confess what the rest of the room won’t. The stone is cold, indifferent, the way most truths are when they finally settle. Water beads against your wrist, trails down the lifeline of your palm, and your breath stutters but doesn’t come. You don’t blink. You don’t shift. You just hold yourself there, steady in a way that feels more like bracing than balance, heartbeat caught between seconds that won’t pass. The sun hasn’t cleared the buildings yet, the apartment’s still thick with last night’s air, and somehow the day already feels like it outran you hours ago.

You towel off with slow, autopilot movements, the steam from the shower still clinging to your skin like something unfinished, something not fully washed away. Your hair’s damp against your collarbone, water pooling at the hollow of your throat, and the hallway feels colder than it should as you move barefoot toward the living room. Karina’s curled into the couch, blanket up to her chin, the TV flickering low with some runway replay she’s not really watching. You don’t say anything at first—you just sit down beside her, shoulder to shoulder, the air between you warmer than either of you feels. Your hand finds hers without thinking, a small squeeze, just enough to say I’m here, even if he’s not. “I’m sure he’s fine,” you say quietly, like if you say it low enough the truth won’t snap in half. “I’m sure—”

She doesn’t even look at you. Just snorts, sharp and sudden, eyes glued to the screen as her hand jerks out from under yours like she’s swatting a fly. “Save it,” she says flatly, voice like chipped glass, “I don’t give a fuck about the man who pulled a full Houdini and vanished for nine months like he’s journaling in the Himalayas and finding his third eye under a waterfall.” Her blanket rustles as she shifts, arms crossed now, remote clenched in her fist like it’s the only thing tethering her to Earth. “He can stay wherever the hell he is and reach enlightenment without dragging me into it. I'm busy doing breathing exercises so I don’t punch a Dior intern in the throat.”

You blink. She finally turns her head, blanket still wrapped around her ears like a burrito of bitterness, only her face visible and fully fed up. “Busy being emotionally terrorised by a designer who thinks ‘accessible fashion’ means making a five-foot-eleven model wear socks as a top and calling it a silhouette study. I’ve been up since six being gaslighted by a man named Bastien who told me zippers are too ‘heteronormative’ and suggested replacing them with magnetic poetry.” She blinks, slow and deadpan, rage simmering just beneath. “He spelled my name with a ‘C’ in the group email. We’ve been working together for two years. I hope his collection catches fire.”

You bite down a laugh and sink further into the couch, her hand still under yours, her voice rising like it’s the only stable thing in the room, sharp with purpose, hilariously righteous. “Jaemin might’ve vanished off the face of the earth but at least he never tried to call muslin an emotional thesis or accuse a zipper of upholding the patriarchy.”

Karina exhales slow through her nose and presses the remote tighter in her hand like she’s resisting the urge to hurl it through something, her voice stays level but you catch the flicker of something behind her eyes when she says, “Please,” she mutters, dead flat, “the only thing Jaemin’s ever designed is his own fucking exit. I hope he’s happy in whatever remote Scandinavian IKEA showroom he’s decided to spiritually rot in. “If he ever shows up again, I’m slapping him with a cease and desist and a list of every yeast infection I’ve named after him in his absence,” then she shifts the blanket like she’s getting comfortable in her own rage, like spite is the only fabric that fits right anymore, her tone doesn’t waver, not once, it’s smooth in that way she saves for publicists and breakups and the second before she falls apart

You don’t answer because you know that voice too well, you know the chill behind it, the way her sentences stretch too far when she’s hiding something that wants out, you recognise the way she doesn’t say his name like it’s a spell she’s pretending she never knew how to cast, her mouth is all defense and her shoulders have been tight for days, the Jaemin-shaped space in her chest not closed off but boarded up, weathered like a house that still breathes through the floorboards, and somewhere beneath her practiced indifference you feel it, that pulse of something waiting, the way a room starts to swell before the wallpaper shifts or the windows breathe in too deep, like she’s not haunted but hosting something she hasn’t let herself name yet.

After the wedding, something followed Jaemin home, not the kind of thing that slammed doors or flickered lights but something colder, something with patience, something that knew how to wait in the quiet parts of a person until the body forgot it was ever meant to feel full. He didn’t vanish, not all at once, he just slowed—his answers took longer, his eyes stayed still longer, his presence stopped pressing into the room like it used to, and the warmth that once came with him turned clinical, the kind of quiet that fills a waiting room after bad news. His footsteps stopped sounding like they belonged to him and started echoing like something borrowed, as if the floor didn’t recognise him anymore and was learning to flinch beneath his weight.

He became still in a way that didn’t look like rest but like surrender, like whatever grief had been left unspoken had finally laid down roots inside his chest and started blooming upside-down, and he carried it not like a wound but like a replacement, like his pulse had been swapped for something steadier and less human. People said he seemed tired, distracted, overworked, and he nodded at all the right times, smiled when he was supposed to, but his voice lost its gravity, his laugh came too late, and his hands, once so certain, stopped reaching for anyone who said his name like it meant something. He just turned into a version of himself that was unrecognisable — a ghost wearing scrubs, a heartbeat with no map, a name people whispered around instead of toward.

Right after the wedding Jaemin and Karina blew up, iin the way champagne hisses after being left open too long, in the way tension snaps when stretched too thin without anyone realising it’s about to split, and it started with a question, about exclusivity, about whether this was real, she had asked it too clearly and it followed with a silence he let sit for too long, the kind of silence that turns corners sharp and makes the air feel watched, and by the time she’d said ‘you can’t keep giving me half of you and calling it real’ the door was already closing behind her.

The last photo of them together was still warm in the group chat when the quiet started—sharp silences in the middle of shared dinners, late arrivals, early exits, the way Karina would answer his messages like she was filing paperwork and Jaemin would reply hours later with nothing but read receipts.

Month two dragged its heels, thick with heat and something meaner, and even when the city swelled into summer, the apartment stayed cold in that way heartbreak makes the walls too wide, Karina barely left the living room except to shuffle from charger to charger with her laptop open but untouched, emails rewritten to the point of erasure and playlists playing the same eight songs like she was trying to hypnotise herself into forgetting how often she blinked and realised she hadn’t eaten since yesterday. She stopped going to fittings, started sleeping on the couch, claimed it was better for her back but you’d catch her awake at 4AM watching nothing on mute and fidgeting with the hem of her shirt like the thread might unravel if she pulled hard enough.

Jaemin slipped sideways in a way only the ones paying too much attention noticed, his hours at the hospital stretched long and strange, his name in the group chat trailing further and further up the scroll, and someone whispered they’d seen him leaving a bar downtown with a girl whose coat looked just like Karina’s, same shoes, same swing of the hair, like muscle memory dressed in someone else’s skin. Donghyuck started showing up more often with bags of lukewarm takeout and half-hearted jokes, sat on the arm of the couch pretending to be casual while he checked on how many mugs Karina had abandoned under the table, and even he couldn’t plug the hole Jaemin used to fill just by walking into a room and existing like he belonged there.

One night, Hyuck found Karina in the shower, the water on too hot, her body turned away but her shoulders shaking like she was laughing through glass, and he didn’t say anything, just sat down on the floor outside the door and waited until it stopped. The next morning, Karina burned the toast and didn’t flinch until the smoke alarm shrieked through the ceiling like something dying, and while Donghyuck scrambled for a towel, she stayed perfectly still in front of the stove, eyes glazed, fingers twitching at her side like she’d forgotten how to move, then without a word she crossed the kitchen, uncapped a black marker, and dragged a thick line through one of the dates on the calendar pinned beside the fridge, pressing so hard the ink bled through to the wall behind it, no explanation, no context, just a day she refused to let exist anymore.

By month five, something begins tracing itself into the fabric of your days, a pattern forming where Jaemin’s name used to land, half-typed messages left hanging in text bars, his contact sinking lower in your recents list like a stone dragged by weight, and the air shifts slightly whenever his name almost comes up, conversations twitching sideways, glances exchanged without anchoring, like everyone feels it forming but no one agrees on the shape. His shadow moves in suggestion—an untouched corner at the dinner table, a ringtone that rings once then disappears, a reply box blinking with no answer. You cross paths with his absence in strange places now, in static, in schedule gaps, in the pause before Karina says she hasn’t heard from him in a while.

It starts with Shotaro pacing, phone gripped too tight, saying he’s called three times this week and every time it’s gone straight to voicemail. Karina’s already sitting, arms crossed, eyes hollowed out from nights spent staring at her inbox like it might blink first. You’re on the floor, knees pulled to your chest, phone buzzing in your palm with updates that mean nothing. Donghyuck walks in late, holding a paper bag he forgets to put down. A parcel addressed to Jaemin arrived at the hospital, but the nurse said it came back marked ‘no forwarding address.’ Shotaro tried FaceTiming twice, then once more at three in the morning, stared at the grey screen until the call disappeared like it had never been there at all.

In Seoul, the tension hums through the group like static. Mark’s voice memo sits unopened in the chat—‘you alive, bro?’—timestamped eight days ago. No response. Not even a read. Doyoung mentions offhand at a meeting that Jaemin’s name hasn’t been on the monthly reports. Yangyang says he still owes him dinner and doesn’t follow it with a joke. Irene starts typing in the group chat, stops, starts again—her messages clipped, all full stops, like she’s hacking at the dark with punctuation. Areum scrolls through old photos and mutters that some people just change after breakups, but no one nods, no one agrees. The silence after carries weight, settles sharp behind your ribs, and Shotaro finally says it—‘when’s the last time anyone actually saw him?’ and nobody answers, because somehow, no one knows.

The first real shift comes on the night you’re supposed to meet for dinner, Shotaro booked the table, Donghyuck sent too many reminders, Karina even puts on makeup and then wipes it off before leaving her room, but Jaemin doesn’t show, no call, no excuse, just a chair that stays empty long enough to start feeling like a placeholder for something worse, Hyuck jokes about filing a missing persons report and no one laughs, then Karina’s voice breaks the silence, brittle and stunned, “I haven’t heard from him in a month,” and the words land heavy, like the floorboards underneath all of you have started to shift, like something underneath is preparing to give way

It’s no longer breakup fallout, no longer romantic failure or emotional mess—now it’s something colder, thinner, stretched across too much space, and when Donghyuck calls the hospital and asks for Dr. Na, the receptionist says he quit two weeks ago with no written notice, left his badge at the front desk with a single folded post-it that just said ‘thank you,’ and when Karina visits his apartment the next morning, the blinds are closed, the plants are dead, the bed is stripped, and there’s no sign he ever lived there except for one voicemail on her phone that she plays every night but never lets anyone else hear. You remember the last time you saw him—just a blur of movement in the hospital corridor, fluorescent light flickering overhead, his scrubs creased like he hadn’t gone home in days. He didn’t say anything. Just paused when he passed you, eyes dipping down, not lingering, not obvious, just a glance too slow to mean nothing. His gaze caught at your stomach like a thread snagging on fabric, something registering behind his eyes that never made it to his mouth, and for a second you thought he might speak, might ask, might know, but he only blinked once, like whatever passed through him didn’t have a name yet, just shape, just weight, just a question too fragile to form aloud.

The door clicks open with the ease of someone who’s done it a thousand times, no knock, no warning, just the softened rhythm of keys turning, muscle memory wrapped in familiarity. Shotaro steps inside already tugging his hoodie over his head, curls damp at the edges, shirt clinging faintly to his back where the sweat hasn’t dried from class, and the faint smell of floor polish and sweetness clings to him, the kind of artificial fruit scent that comes from too many bodies moving through one room, pressed shoulder to shoulder beneath dim lights and loud music. His shoes miss the rack entirely, land sideways against the wall, and he doesn’t bother fixing them.

He’s muttering before he even makes it to the living room, something about a new student who danced like his limbs weren’t on speaking terms, hands doing contemporary while his knees waged war with gravity. There’s a half-eaten protein bar in one hand and a single bubble tea in the other, sweat cooling at his collarbone, and when he sees the three of you spread across the couch and floor, he pauses like he just realised how short the offering falls. Still, he drops the drink on the table like it might multiply under pressure, flops down beside you without a word, part of his thigh knocking against yours, breath still a little uneven from the studio, his presence settling into the room like he’s always belonged to the silence that follows a storm.

He pushes off the couch with a groan, shirt tugged over his head in one rough pull, and your eyes widen before you can hide it—dark marks scattered down his throat and across his chest, a trail of possession that’s unmistakably Ryujin’s handiwork, delicate only in placement. Karina lets out a low whistle. “Damn. Someone’s getting the good kind of cardio.” He rolls his eyes, flipping you all off over his shoulder as he disappears into the shower, towel slung loose around his neck. Fifteen minutes later, he’s back in soft navy pajamas, hair damp, skin pink at the edges, and he sinks down beside you again like the hickies weren’t ever there.

The apartment smells like popcorn and old candle wax, one of those half-burned wicks Karina refuses to throw away sitting crooked on the windowsill, and a movie plays on low—something none of you are really watching, too many sequels deep and too many scenes away from making sense. The only light comes from the screen, flickering blue over Donghyuck’s cheek as he reaches aimlessly for another handful, misses the bowl, and curses under his breath. When Shotaro lifts his bubble tea to take a long, dramatic sip, all three of you turn toward him like vultures.

“Really?” Karina says, flat. “No one thought to bring extras?”

Shotaro grins around the straw, shrugs like he’s the villain. “Guess I love myself more.”

But then he laughs, soft and breathy, and ducks into the kitchen without another word, returning a moment later with three drinks balanced in his arms. “Relax,” he says. “I remembered.” He hands Karina her usual—lychee jasmine with aloe and light ice, exactly how she likes it, muttering, “don’t roll your eyes, I even told them no seal sticker so you wouldn’t smudge your nails.” Then he tosses Donghyuck his matcha crème brûlée with extra pearls, the cup practically vibrating with sugar, and finally places yours into your hands like it’s something delicate—taro oat milk, less sweet, no toppings, the way you’ve ordered it since college.

“This is how I know I’m too loyal,” he sighs, flopping down beside you with a sigh. “You guys don’t deserve me.”

“Shut up,” Hyuck mutters. “You’re drinking brown sugar like a basic bitch.” Shotaro snorts, kicks him lightly in the shin, and for a few minutes the room is easy, fizzy with sugar and comfort, the kind of soft that feels borrowed.

It’s halfway through the movie when he says it, quiet, casual, voice catching somewhere between the last line of dialogue and the background score. “I think I saw him.” The screen keeps flashing, someone yelling about time travel or betrayal, but your spine goes still against the cushion.

“Saw who?” Karina asks, already frowning.

Shotaro doesn’t look up. “Jaemin, last night, right outside the studio.”

You tilt your head, bubble tea half-raised. “Seriously?”

He shrugs once, slow, like the words are still settling on his tongue. “Could’ve been someone else, I guess, but he moved like him,” he says, eyes flicking toward the window even though he’s not really looking. “Same build—kinda bulky now, more muscle than I remember. His hair was different too, different color, longer and messier. I don’t know but it looked like him. It looked like the way he carries himself—like he knew the street but didn’t want the street to know him.” He pauses. “Hood up. Head down. He walked fast but not like he was scared, like he couldn’t afford to be seen.”

Shotaro exhales through his nose, brows pulling together like the memory’s sticking harder now that he’s saying it aloud. “And I noticed something weird,” he adds, voice quieter, like it might break if he says it too fast. “He was carrying this yellow blanket. It wasn’t folded or stuffed into a bag—just draped over his shoulder like it belonged there.” He rubs the back of his neck. “It had little stars on it, I think, faded ones, pale blue. Maybe clouds too? It looked soft, like the kind of thing you’d wrap around a baby after a bath. It just didn’t fit him at all, that’s what caught my eye.” His mouth twitches, not quite a smile. “Big guy in dark clothes, built like he could throw someone across a room, but carrying that thing like it was made of gold.”

The room stills, like the air itself tightens. Karina lowers her drink without meaning to, eyes pinned on the coffee table, the condensation from her cup leaving a print that spreads slowly into the wood. “That doesn’t sound like something he’d just… pick up,” she says, quiet, almost to herself. “Not unless it meant something.”

Donghyuck shifts where he’s sitting, the playful slouch gone, his fingers tapping absently against his knee. “That’s not even weird anymore,” he mutters. “That’s straight-up eerie. Like, why the fuck would he be carrying around something like that? In the heat? In public?”

You don’t say anything at first, just watch the bubble in your drink rise to the top and burst. The words crawl up your throat too thick. Jaemin with a baby blanket. Jaemin looking bulkier. Jaemin walking like he had somewhere to be that didn’t belong to anyone else. You finally breathe, “You’re sure it was yellow?”

Shotaro nods, slowly, a crease forming between his brows. “Yellow with stars. I know what I saw.” He glances between you all, something unreadable in his face. “I didn’t think it meant anything until now.”

It’s past midnight by the time the movie finishes, screen fading to black while the room stays lit in that ghostly way only credits can manage, white names scrolling endlessly over silence that feels louder now that none of you are talking. Karina’s curled up in one corner of the couch with a throw blanket tucked under her chin, Donghyuck’s flicking at the empty pearl cups like they’ll refill themselves if he stares hard enough, and Shotaro’s legs are stretched out, head tilted back like he’s trying to cool the last of the sweat behind his ears. You’re closest to him, cross-legged with your phone face down beside your knee, your spine starting to ache, your pulse still stuck on that one thing he said hours ago that none of you have touched since—he moved like him.

Shotaro shifts, reaching lazily for his laptop bag and dragging it toward him with his heel. “Hold on,” he murmurs, almost to himself. “There’s something I wanna check.” He props the laptop against his thigh and opens it with a quiet snap, fingers tapping muscle memory into the keyboard, clicks fast and silent like he’s done this a hundred times.

Karina looks over. “You’re working?” she asks, dry, but he just shakes his head.

“No, just—there was this thing Jaemin and I used to do.”

Donghyuck snorts. “Romantic.”

Shotaro kicks him without looking. “Shut up. No. I’m talking about playlists. We used to trade edits back and forth. Lullabies, mostly. He said he liked sounds that made the air feel soft.” You say nothing, but your eyes don’t leave the screen.

He scrolls through folders like he knows exactly where to go, digging four levels deep until he finds one with a name barely readable in lowercase—jae//midnights—and clicks. The interface flickers, revealing a list longer than you expect, a dozen sound files lined in quiet succession, half of them titled only by timestamps that feel like memories. “This one,” he murmurs, hovering over 03:47AM, “was the first thing we ever built together.” His voice softens like the memory still lives inside his mouth. “He recorded the hum from the heater in his room, looping it under a child’s melody in C minor. Said it reminded him of falling asleep on car rides.” The way Shotaro says it makes something in your chest twist. “We never made it public,” he adds, quieter now, thumb brushing the trackpad. “It’s only on this laptop. Nowhere else.” Then he clicks, and the page begins to load.

There’s a user logged in, you all lean in at once, breath caught, eyes locked to the glowing display where there’s an anonymous figure listening. Donghyuck whispers, “what the fuck?”

Karina jerks upright so fast her blanket slips to the floor, muttering “wait, wait—how?” Shotaro’s already clicking through the metadata with his jaw tight and his brows drawn, voice low and focused as he says “the stream is live, someone’s listening to this exact track right now” and when he pulls up the playback map, a single blue location pin flares to life, hovering steady less than a mile from his studio.

“This file was last edited six years ago, no one’s touched it since” and his voice drops, tighter now, “and now someone’s… he’s listening, he has to be.”

You swallow, throat dry, heart thudding uneven against your ribs. “Check the IP,” you say.

Shotaro’s already there, shaking his head. “Anonymous server, masked and rerouted through something local—there’s no trace, but the ping’s real.” He zooms in until the edges of the map blur. “It’s been playing for seven minutes straight.”

The track loops, slow and eerie, soft hums layered under a child’s voice too pure to be sampled, and faint static pulses underneath like a monitor trying to sync with something—rhythm, breath, maybe grief—and it’s too exact, too shaped, too him to be anyone else, and none of you speak because there’s nothing to say, not yet, just the weight of it pressing into the walls and the silence between your bodies, and in your chest something cold locks into place with a soft internal snap, like recognition arriving before reason.

It’s the next morning when Donghyuck finds the receipt. You’re all moving slowly, the apartment is too quiet for how much caffeine has been passed around, and the air tastes like leftover sesame noodles and unspoken questions. He’s digging through one of Jaemin’s old books—The Lives of Others, spine cracked, corners bent from being read too many times and something flutters out from between the pages, slips down onto the floor like it was waiting. “What the—” he mutters, leaning down, and the moment he picks it up you already know from the shift in his voice. “Guys,” he says, louder now. “This isn’t old. This is last week.” You’re already moving toward him as he holds up the receipt, timestamp clear as day, 9:42PM, St. Aurelian Hospital Café. Karina blinks, brow furrowing.

Karina tilts her head, brows pinching. “Isn’t that the new private one? The one with the glass atrium and concierge midwives?”

You take the paper from Donghyuck slowly, fingertips grazing the faint thermal ink, your eyes narrowing as you read. “Yeah,” you murmur, pulse steadying into something cold. “‘APEX’ did some work with them, they’re a new boutique hospital with no public staff page, no published rotations, and a front desk that won’t give you a name unless your surname is on the board of donors.”

He stays hunched over his laptop after that, headphones in but not playing music, screen brightness turned low like he’s trying not to spook the internet into hiding. “Give me a few hours,” he says. “I’m going full dark web mom mode.” And he does—scrolling through anonymous parenting forums, Facebook groups with names like ‘Mommy & Me Upper Manhattan,’ private nannying directories, anything that smells like recent birth and low-profile doctors. You don’t bother interrupting. He’s in the zone, muttering search strings under his breath like prayers—“single dad,” “pediatric rotation,” “yellow blanket,” “newborn father” and by late afternoon he goes completely still, one hand paused above the keyboard, breath held like he’s seen a ghost. “Holy shit,” he whispers. “I found something.”

You rush over and see it, a thread buried deep in a private parenting group, already marked removed by the admin but it’s still cached on the page: ‘Saw the hot pediatrician again today—scrubs and all, with the softest baby girl and eyes like he hasn’t slept in years.’ He screenshots it instantly. “Post got deleted,” he says. “But it was posted this morning, from a hospital five blocks from the café receipt.” The room goes still again, that same frozen hum of something real settling in.

Karina’s the one who brings it up, calm like it isn’t the most desperate thing any of you have said all day, scrolling her phone without looking up as she says, “New parents shop near home, near the hospital—no one orders everything online,” and she glances over at Shotaro like she’s already made the decision for both of them. They leave just before noon, drizzle dusting across the skyline, street corners washed in silver light as they move from one baby boutique to the next with vague descriptions and clipped smiles, asking cashiers if they’ve seen someone tall, soft-spoken, carrying a pale yellow blanket and maybe a newborn wrapped close to his chest. Most say no or shake their heads before the question even lands, but one woman behind a pale pink counter with a chipped credit card machine pauses, mouth slightly open, and says she thinks someone like that came in last week—she can’t remember his face exactly, only that he paid in cash and held the gift bag like it was the most breakable thing in the world.

You and Donghyuck take the next part, heading downtown toward the address stamped in faded ink on the receipt, the hospital café tucked into the lobby of a brand new private wing where everything smells too clean and the overhead lights feel too bright for the hour. You pick the table in the back corner, close to the elevators but angled just enough to watch the front entrance, and the two of you sit there for almost two hours with one shared croissant and a pair of iced teas growing warm on the table, pretending not to scan every person that walks by while your heart flicks between hope and hollow. Most of the staff look the same, hurried, tired, blank-faced but then someone brushes past in soft blue scrubs with the collar slightly turned, and stitched just above the left shoulder in pale thread are the initials N.J., the stitching small enough that you almost miss it, and your body reacts before your brain catches up. You’re on your feet, Donghyuck half a step behind you as you follow fast toward the elevator bank, but just as you reach the edge, the doors glide shut and he disappears inside without ever turning around.

You’re the first to speak when you all pile back into the apartment, shoes half-kicked into the hallway, bags dropped wherever they fall, the leftover croissant from the café still clutched in Donghyuck’s hand like he forgot to eat it out of spite. “I’m just saying,” you start, flopping down onto the couch with enough drama to rattle the cushions, “I’ve never worked this hard for someone who so clearly doesn’t want to be found. We’re out here doing field research, stakeouts, combing through online breadcrumbs like we’re in Prison Break, and for what?” Karina raises a brow, toeing off her boots. “For the man who ghosted his own life?” You nod, mouth already twisting. “I swear to God, if I got my people at Apex involved, this wouldn’t be a manhunt, it’d be a two-minute LinkedIn scrape and a casual sweep of facial recognition software. He’d be found before the kettle boils.”

Donghyuck groans, face down in the armchair. “You could’ve done that from the beginning, you evil witch.”

You glare. “Do you want Jaemin dragged out of a paediatric ward in cuffs by Apex interns named Hoshi and Woozi?”

Shotaro, sprawled on the floor with a protein bar he refuses to open, raises a hand lazily. “I kinda do, just for fun.”

You exhale hard through your nose, pinching the bridge. “No, but seriously, why didn’t we file a missing persons report? Are we allergic to normal solutions now?”

Karina lets out a sharp breath, turning toward the window. “I tried,” she says, voice clipped. “Twice, maybe three times.”

“And?” you ask, leaning forward, elbows on knees, voice softer now, though you’re not sure why—something in Karina’s stillness unsettles you, her posture too rigid, like she’s bracing for a wave she’s already drowned in.

She shrugs, but the movement doesn’t land, barely reaches her shoulders. “Every single time that I’d start filling out the form, opening the missing persons portal my phone would ring. Sometimes it was a call, sometimes a message.” She swallows. “Always the same thing, ‘don’t file anything, he’s safe, leave it, trust me.’” Her voice twists sharp around the last word like it still cuts her. Then she turns her head toward you, slow and deliberate. “Guess who sent those messages.”

Your body reacts before your mind even forms the shape of a thought, before language returns to you, before the room steadies enough to hold what’s just been said. Something clutches in your chest, tight, immovable, like breath trying to claw its way out from beneath concrete, and your limbs go still from the unmistakable sensation of being seen, like someone’s breath is resting against the nape of your neck without sound or warning. Your wrists feel cold first, then your throat, then the space behind your knees, your pulse dropping into the hollows of you like it’s trying to retreat into bone. Your mouth is parted just enough for the air to sit heavy on your tongue but your name—your voice—doesn’t move, just hovers there like a ghost of a question you already know the answer to.

Your spine straightens on instinct, vertebrae aligning with eerie precision, like strings have been pulled from the ceiling and your body obeys without protest, like you’ve become a marionette under someone else’s hand. It’s too quiet. Even the sound of your own breath feels distant, filtered, like it’s passing through cloth. All you can hear is the echo of Karina’s voice folding into that name, the one you’d buried in some distant chamber of thought—Jeno—and it slams through your mind like a door unlatched in a windless room, opening without touch. You don’t remember standing. You don’t remember looking at her. You just know. You knew before she said it. Knew in the way animals know an earthquake is coming, in the way silence sharpens right before something shatters.

“Jeno,” you say.

Karina nods once, almost too slow to track. “Always him. Always calm. Always exactly on time.” She blinks. “Like he was watching my screen. Like he wasn’t guessing—he knew.” The light in the apartment suddenly feels too sharp, too white, like a surgical theatre instead of a home, like something is being exposed and you’re not ready for the incision. You feel it down your spine, an invisible pressure folding over your shoulders like a cold breath. He hadn’t vanished, he’d intervened and somehow, that’s worse because it means he never stopped holding the strings.

Karina leans back into the couch like the tension just caught up with her spine, her voice low and bitten off at the edges as she mutters, “You’d think he’d have better shit to be doing.” Her thumb skims the condensation down her cup, the words coming slower now, one after the other. “Like breaking whatever new scoring milestone the NBA cooks up for him. That three-point shot from half court last week? They aired it on five different sports networks in under an hour. Someone tweeted that it defied physics. Someone else said he’s the first player in franchise history to hit thirty points in twelve consecutive games with a fractured wrist, like flying to meet with whatever hyper-athletic nutrition brand he’s the new face of—signing a deal with a private equity firm that makes more in a quarter than any of us will in a lifetime.” Her eyes flick past the wall, somewhere far off. “Like that rooftop gala he went to last month in Miami with the twenty-foot ice sculpture and three different drone camera crews. Or the off-season Adidas campaign they shot in Tokyo.” She shakes her head once. “I still see his face on a bus ad near my boutique—digital, full wrap, takes up the whole intersection.” Her mouth curves, but it doesn’t reach her eyes. “He’s got millions of followers watching his highlights, watching his life, waiting for whatever designer coat he’s told to wear next and he’s out here intercepting missing person reports.”

She exhales once, sharper now. “And then there’s Nahyun. The fiancée, matching watches. Her face in Vogue Korea before the engagement was even confirmed. She sat courtside last month in archival Mugler like it was a press conference and held his hand with both of hers like she was praying over it.”

She cuts off before the word can land because she sees it—the way your jaw clenches sharp like a trap that’s already snapped shut, the way your fingers shift just slightly against the cushion like you’re holding onto the edge of something that might give. Her face softens instantly, everything dropping, the bravado, the timing, the sharp edge in her voice that never quite meant to slice. “Shit,” she says, barely above a whisper. “I didn’t mean—fuck, I got carried away.” She leans in without asking, arms slipping around your shoulders like muscle memory, chin tucked lightly against your temple, breath warm at the side of your face. “I’m sorry. You didn’t deserve to hear that. You’ve already had to carry too much of him.” She presses a quick kiss to your hair, voice catching. “You’re better than him anyway. Prettier. Smarter. You could outrun his entire bloodline in three-inch heels and a hangover.”

You snort, but it doesn’t quite reach your chest, your hands caught mid-air like you’re not sure what to do with them, like affection is something you forgot how to receive properly. “Karina,” you mumble, trying to roll your eyes, but it’s too soft around the edges. “I don’t need the pep talk.” She pulls back just enough to look at you, her brows raised, her mouth curving like she’s about to go full drama. “Okay, cool, so can I go back to slandering your war criminal ex or do you wanna cry and braid each other’s hair?”

You shake your head, but your lips twitch. “You’re the worst.”

She grins, forehead resting briefly against yours. “Takes one to love one.”

You’re still half-smiling into Karina’s shoulder when a shadow moves past the kitchen counter and Shotaro clears his throat in that very obvious way that means he’s been watching long enough to form an opinion. “Okay,” he says, voice dry as bone, “if you two are about to start scissoring on the couch I’m gonna need you to either pause or pivot because we still have a missing Na Jaemin to locate.”

Karina groans without looking up, flipping him off lazily with the hand that’s still resting on your arm. “Oh my God, can’t two traumatised women share an intimate moment of solidarity in peace?”

Shotaro raises both brows and grabs a snack bar from the counter like it’s evidence. “It stopped being solidarity the second she kissed your head like a Regency housewife mourning her forbidden lover.”

You nudge Karina off you gently, trying to compose yourself while still wiping at the corner of your eye, and glance at Shotaro with a crooked smile. “Jesus. Ryujin’s really rubbing off on you, huh?”

He raises a brow, halfway through chewing the protein bar. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

You gesture at him with both hands. “You’re getting meaner. Like cutthroat mean. That was so mean, Taro.”

Karina stretches like she’s about to go limp again. “Honestly, I’m proud. He used to cry at butter commercials.”

Shotaro throws the snack wrapper at you and misses. “I did not cry. I teared up respectfully.” He throws another snack wrapper at Karina and it lands. “Now can we circle back to the part where Jaemin might be working a few blocks from here like a ghost doctor and none of you have filed a report?” You glance toward the laptop still glowing on the table, that anonymous playback log paused mid-loop, and the air shifts again—tension curling back in like a tide. The moment softens behind you, but the hunt sharpens ahead.

Later, the apartment is quiet again, not with comfort but with the kind of stillness that feels like it’s listening, like something unsaid is pressing against the walls. No one’s spoken Jaemin’s name in over an hour, but he’s in the room anyway—etched into the glow of the laptop screen, folded into the way Donghyuck keeps refreshing the same tab without reading it, stitched into the silence every time someone almost speaks and doesn’t. No one moves to leave. You’re all still here, caught in the slow gravity of a truth that keeps circling back.

You all knew about the voicemail, knew it had been left the same night Jaemin disappeared, a single minute of sound tucked into the hollow space between his resignation and his silence, a message that had waited untouched at the bottom of Karina’s inbox like a wound left to fester in the dark. No one could understand why she wouldn’t play it—not when you begged her in the thickest parts of night, not when Donghyuck asked with his voice stripped down to threads, not even when Shotaro said nothing at all and just reached for her hand like that might be enough to steady her but Karina only ever shook her head and whispered “I can’t,” like pressing play would be the thing that finally broke her open for good, and maybe it would have been, back then, when everything still hurt too raw to look at straight. But something’s shifted now, something quieter and more urgent, a sense that the gaps between you all have grown too wide to leave untouched any longer, and tonight, long after the playlist’s stopped looping and the candle near the sink has burned itself into a waxed-out crater of cold glass, Karina finally pulls her phone from the depths of her hoodie like it’s a confession she’s been hiding under skin, and the way her hands move—slow, deliberate, trembling just enough to betray her—makes your chest twist without permission.

No one says anything when she plays it—Donghyuck’s still half on the floor, the back of his hand covering his mouth like prayer, Shotaro’s chewing the end of a useless straw he finished over an hour ago, and you’re leaning against the kitchen frame with your arms crossed like a shield across your ribs, watching her thumb hover over the screen like it might detonate if she touches it too hard—and the room is holding its breath around you, every second stretched thin enough to snap, until she finally exhales through her nose and says, “Okay,” her voice low and unraveled and unfamiliar, like it’s been hollowed out from the inside. “I’ll play it but just this once.”

She taps the screen and the sound cuts in raw—no polish, no clean edit, just Jaemin’s voice soft and slightly distorted like it’s trying too hard not to shake, and even though he’s speaking low and slow like calm is something he thinks he can fake, there’s something wrong with the shape of it, something off-kilter and uneven, like his composure is being dragged across gravel just out of frame. “Hey. It’s me,” he says, and then nothing—just air and silence and the echo of a space that isn’t familiar, and when he speaks again it’s like he’s choosing every word as it comes. “I’m fine. I just needed space. Time to figure things out. I didn’t mean to worry you. I just couldn’t explain it yet. I’ll come back when it’s right. I promise.” His voice catches slightly then, just a breath too fast or maybe a tremor too small to name, but it’s there, and after that, something shifts—a movement in the background, fabric maybe, or footsteps, or a body brushing too close to a wall—and then the sound comes, clean and clinical and impossibly loud in the stillness.

Beep.

Then again.

Beep.

You don’t realize you’ve moved until you’re standing straighter, your weight redistributed like your body’s trying to get closer to something your mind hasn’t caught up to yet, and across the room, Karina freezes with her phone still raised like her arm’s forgotten how to move, and Donghyuck’s eyes are wide now, hands dropped to his lap, while Shotaro just stares like the walls might start answering for him.

“Again,” you say, quiet but certain, and though Karina flinches like she doesn’t want to hear it again, she rewinds without argument.

“I’ll come back when it’s right. I promise.”

Beep. Beep.

You exhale through your teeth but it feels like inhaling cold steel, and your voice comes out lower than you expect, flattened by something heavier than fear. “That’s a neonatal vitals monitor,” you murmur, more to the floor than to anyone else, but the words land sharp anyway. “NICU-grade, hospital only. High-frequency, linked to oxygen stats. It’s not some at-home baby tracker.”

Karina opens her mouth but nothing comes out, just a breath that shakes too hard to speak, and beside her, Donghyuck says, “But he’s a doctor. He works in hospitals—”

“Well he sent that months ago and we know he quit his job around that time, we went to the hospital and they told us,” you say, before he can finish, and it’s sharper than it should be. The timeline presses inward all at once, tight like gravity, and you see it laid out in sequence—the voicemail sent after he quit, after the hospital confirmed his resignation with no forwarding contact, after his apartment was emptied and left blank and meaningless, after his presence was erased from every place he was supposed to belong. This wasn’t left from a shift. This wasn’t a call between rotations. This didn’t come from the life he walked away from—it came from inside the one he shouldn’t have access to anymore.

Karina’s face folds slowly, not all at once but piece by piece, like the understanding is sinking under her skin with teeth, and when she speaks it’s more exhale than sentence. “So he’s not there as a doctor.”

Shotaro sits back like he’s been struck in the stomach, the straw slipping from his fingers. “Then what the fuck is he doing there?” he says, and no one moves.

You’re still staring at the floor, but your voice cuts through it like a wire pulled tight. “He’s not working,” you say. “He’s staying, he’s there as a patient.”

Karina blinks hard, her throat shifting like she’s swallowing glass, and then she shakes her head—not in protest, not in denial, but in correction, something sharper, more certain, something she’s been holding back because saying it out loud would make it too real to unfeel. “No,” she says, and her voice catches but she doesn’t stop, not this time. “He’s not the patient.” She looks at you then—really looks—and her eyes are wide with something terrified and bare, but beneath it there’s a clarity that slices cleaner than panic, something that shakes all the way down to the bone but still lands steady, and she swallows once, hard, her jaw tightening as if the truth might break her open even as she says it anyway. “He’s there as the father of one.”

And just like that, the air leaves the room. The silence that follows doesn’t echo—it spreads, it thickens, it settles across your shoulders like weight, and no one moves, because there’s nothing left to say that doesn’t feel like breaking something sacred in the air. Shotaro drops his gaze to the floor like it might offer a softer answer. Donghyuck blinks twice and says nothing, the disbelief too large to fit in his throat. And you—you stay exactly where you are, one hand gripping the edge of the counter like it might anchor you to the moment, but there’s a roar building behind your ribs now, something tidal and cold and rising.

Because of course it makes sense. The sound, the monitor, the pause in Jaemin’s voice, the way he spoke like his body was somewhere else entirely—of course it makes sense now. It explains everything. Except how he never said a word.

The laptop’s glow casts the room in a cold, artificial blue, and no one’s moved in fifteen minutes. Donghyuck’s pacing like his thoughts are running ahead of his body, Karina’s got her knees pulled to her chest with her sleeve over her mouth like she’s trying to keep something in, and you’re still at the table, headphones wrapped around your neck, knuckles pressed to your mouth as the voicemail plays again on loop, dissected down to the static. You’ve filtered it six different ways, dragged the audio into an editor you barely remember how to use, but you keep listening because something’s off—not just Jaemin’s voice, not just the beep, but something quieter beneath it, something no one else hears until you say it out loud. “Listen,” you murmur, dragging the cursor back again, volume low. “Right there. After the second beep, that’s a page. Three tones, then a voice.” You crank the gain and it’s almost lost to distortion.

You start cross-referencing layouts of the major locations, pulling up floor maps and old blog posts from nurses and interns who once filmed TikTok videos near Unit Twelve, and Karina’s staring over your shoulder now, her eyes glassy but sharp, and then her hand shoots out suddenly, jabbing at the screen. “There,” she says. “That corridor. That angle, the sound in the voicemail—it’s echoing like that. Hard tile, narrow space, no curtain buffer.” You nod, and Shotaro mutters something about ventilation sounds, mentioning metallic hums of older buildings.

Donghyuck throws himself into the search with the kind of intensity he usually saves for online scandals. “Okay,” he says, breathless. “We need something more direct. Something physical.” And then he curses under his breath, digging into his back pocket like it’s been hiding a secret this whole time, and pulls out the half-folded receipt. “Let’s dissect this again.”

You unfold it again, slower this time, smoothing the softened receipt against the tabletop like it might yield something new if handled gently enough, and it’s familiar at first—too familiar, the kind of paper your eyes have skimmed a dozen times without ever really seeing, the ink faded at the edges, the item codes a blur of numbers that meant nothing to you before. The timestamp still sits at the top like a wound you don’t touch—two weeks after Jaemin left—and the location is as unremarkable as it always was: a few blocks east, a street you’ve passed without thinking. But this time, your gaze catches on something you didn’t register before. A symbol.

It’s small—barely the size of your thumbnail—stamped into the corner like a watermark or an afterthought, a clean-lined insignia shaped like a triangle split through the center, one side hollow, the other shaded in like it’s holding something it can’t name. You tilt the receipt toward the light, squinting at the lines, and it starts to feel like you’ve seen it somewhere before—not in this context, but maybe in passing, maybe attached to something industrial and clinical, something you didn’t know you were filing away until now. You pull out your phone, snap a picture, and reverse image search it with shaky fingers, the screen glow reflecting in the laptop’s black frame like a second pair of eyes watching over your shoulder. At first, nothing. Then a match.

Holloway Medical Group. You say the name under your breath like it’s a password, and suddenly the rest of the receipt reconfigures around it. Not just a generic supply outlet, not some off-brand uniform store—it’s a licensed subsidiary under Holloway’s network, restricted to vendors, staff, and contract personnel affiliated with their medical partnerships. Donghyuck leans over your shoulder, brows pulled, voice quiet. “That’s a hospital supplier,” he says, more question than statement, and you nod, already pulling up their vendor delivery routes, cross-referencing purchase logs and site access histories against hospital facility records, and it narrows quick—too quick—down to two locations in the area. One is a small pediatric outreach center, low-capacity, designed for short-term care and routine follow-ups, no overnight staff, no NICU, barely a ward to speak of. The other is different—larger, established, not flashy but formidable, known for its cross-disciplinary research and high-volume surgical output, with specialists in pediatric medicine, general and trauma surgery, neurosurgery, and cardiothoracics flown in from across the country. It’s not just a hospital—it’s a flagship facility, a semi-private institution with federal backing and restricted-access wings, and its eleventh floor is listed as sealed to external access. Unit Twelve.

You don’t speak as you type, don’t blink as the screen flickers in front of you, the hospital’s internal directory locked behind a firewall that clearly isn’t meant for your hands, but you’ve cracked harder things with less reason, and tonight, reason is burning a hole through your chest. Karina watches from across the table, breath shallow, mouthing, “You shouldn’t—” but you already are. The guest portal is useless, restricted by default. No public access. No back doors. So you write your own—just enough code to ghost your way through the surface, no alarms, just static, and when the system coughs up a directory dump, you search his name, nothing, not a single trace—not in active staff, not in archived contracts, not even a flagged resignation file. It’s a clean absence, too clean, like someone swept it deliberately, and your mouth tightens as you scan again, reloading the system cache just to be sure. Still nothing—not within the last year. Which doesn’t make sense. That’s exactly when he disappeared. The exact window when everything went quiet.

So you adjust the parameters, pull the timeframe back—twelve months, then fourteen, and the second the list refreshes, your breath hitches in your throat. There he is. Chief Pediatric Surgeon. A three-month appointment. High-acuity work. Surgical lead on congenital heart defects, rare neurodevelopmental corrections, multi-system interventions in infants under two weeks old. You scroll faster, heart in your throat—two peer-reviewed papers in pediatric journals, one co-authored with a visiting trauma team from Boston, another documenting a successful experimental closure on a case other surgeons refused to touch. He was cited in a write-up on early-age stroke intervention, featured in a local op-ed about the rise of high-success surgeries under forty. He saved thirty three children in ninety-one days.

Then the record stops. No end date. Just a notation. Paternity Leave. You blink at the screen, once, twice, not because you misread it, but because the words land too quietly to process. Your cursor drifts down. There’s a patient name linked to his file—flagged for weekly outpatient evaluations. Pediatric cardiac recovery. Fridays. Every single one.

Tomorrow is Friday.

The city folds inward as you approach 87th and Crescent. The skyline narrows into teeth. Steam slicks up from the grates in rhythmic bursts like something breathing beneath the streets, and the wind doesn’t move around you so much as through you—threading the sleeves of your coat, brushing the inside of your collarbone, humming low between your ribs. Traffic presses forward in slow, glinting waves. A delivery truck exhales sharply into the curb. A kid on a scooter slices past and leaves behind the smell of burnt rubber and bakery sugar. But here—this block—feels peeled back. The noise thins. The color dulls. Time stretches just enough to make you notice the texture of the air.

The hospital rises without warning. No sign. No fanfare. Just mass. A monolith of stone and window tucked between two glass high-rises, squat and silent like it grew there by mistake and stayed. The stone isn’t cold, it’s ancient—scraped down by weather, smoothed by time, the kind of façade that absorbs secrets into its pores. The entrance—recessed, shadowed, framed in steel—doesn’t welcome you, it swallows. A single door, dark glass and pressure-sealed, blinks once before unlocking with a sound like breath caught in the throat.

Inside, the light shifts. It’s still artificial, but softer now, like it’s been diffused through skin. The air is warm and holds you in place. The floor tiles stretch in perfect grids, the faint shimmer of wax and fluorescence kissing your soles. The lobby hums low, like something alive and pulsing just below frequency—ventilation, elevator gears, a distant rolling cart wheel catching rhythm across linoleum. You pass through it like being moved by gravity. Your steps don’t echo, but you feel the weight of each one. Like the ground knows who you are. Like it’s counting.

To your left, a family sits pressed into blue waiting chairs, their coats still zipped, eyes blank in the way only people halfway between answers can look. To your right, a hallway draped in muraled paper—whales, giraffes, moons with smiling faces—trails off toward pediatrics. A paper butterfly flutters from a nurse’s clipboard as she passes. It lands on the tile and no one picks it up.

Karina walks like her spine is held by thread. Shotaro’s eyes keep moving—windows, corners, fire alarms—cataloging exits without knowing why. Donghyuck’s hands stay buried deep in his pockets, his shoulders squared like he’s forcing his heartbeat to stay inside his body. And you—you walk slightly ahead, chest tight, temples buzzing, like you’ve entered the part of a dream where everything starts to slow down but won’t stop. The elevator at the end of the hall glows under a brass sign stamped with floor listings that mean nothing to you. The up arrow is lit. The doors are closed. But it feels like the building already knows where you’re going. And it’s waiting.

The receptionist barely looks up when you approach the desk. Her hair’s pulled tight into a coil, nails long and lacquered, and she’s tapping through a scheduling interface like the keys owe her something. Her badge reads ‘DAYOUNG’ in pale block letters, and the lanyard around her neck is printed with a faded rainbow of hospital departments—trauma, cardiology, oncology, pediatrics. She doesn’t stop typing when she greets you. She doesn’t blink, she just says, “name of the patient?”

You exchange a glance with Karina, but she doesn’t speak. None of them do. It’s you who steps forward, pulling your coat tighter with one hand and resting the other on the edge of the desk like you belong there. “Na Jaemin,” you say smoothly. “We’re here to confirm his reassignment.”

That gets Dayoung’s attention. Her fingers slow. Her eyes flicker up. “Is he a doctor or patient?”

“Doctor, but he’s also the father of a patient,” you say. Calm. Steady. Not defensive. “Pediatrics. We’ve been told he was transferred back into the system, but we haven’t received floor confirmation.”

Her eyes narrow slightly. “And you are?” You don’t hesitate. You reach into your coat and slide out the APEX behavioral clearance pass—laminated, coded, issued from your last cycle in clinical psych research under a federal child trauma initiative. It’s old, but still active. Gold-stamped along the bottom edge. You lay it on the desk with care, letting the light hit the seal just enough. “External psych field liaison,” you say. “Na was flagged for a cross-disciplinary study last year. I need to verify the current ward assignment for our internal records. It’s policy to confirm direct placement in person. This isn’t for visitation.”

Dayoung looks down at the pass. Then back at you. You keep your face smooth, shoulders relaxed. Not too eager. Not too calm. Just a little bit annoyed—like you’ve done this too many times in too many cities to pretend it still matters.

She picks up the pass with two fingers, scans the barcode under a recessed reader built into the desk. The machine chimes. Approved. She exhales. “One moment.” Her typing slows into something more deliberate now—layers of access, redirections, protected floors. Her expression doesn’t change, but you know the system’s making her double-confirm clearance. Good. That means she’s in.

A few more taps. Then her gaze lifts. “Dr. Na is registered under pediatrics. Currently assigned to restricted-access ward, floor six, south wing.” She clicks again. “Room 611. Parent-only level. You’ll need to enter through the secondary elevator bay. East corridor. Take the south access hallway past lab intake. It’s unmarked. You’ll see a security panel to the left of a janitorial door. Input code seven-seven-four-zero-three. That’ll unlock the elevator control.”

Donghyuck exhales low behind you. Karina doesn’t blink. Shotaro shifts his weight but stays silent. Dayoung doesn’t flinch. She taps something into her own screen—likely logging the clearance, maybe flagging it, maybe not. “Once you’re on six,” she says, “follow the signs for the blue pod. Pediatrics splits into four wings—he’s in the far end. You’ll pass the imaging annex. If you reach physical therapy, you’ve gone too far.”

You nod, like you’ve done this before. Like you’ll do it again tomorrow. “Thanks,” you say, sliding the pass back into your coat.

Dayoung just shrugs. “Don’t get lost. That floor eats time.”

You don’t answer. You just turn. Karina follows first. Then the boys. And together, you step into the east corridor, your pulse syncing to the rhythm of your own lie, wondering if this—right now—is the moment Jaemin starts feeling real again.

The east corridor feels longer than it should. You move through it like a current pushed underground, surrounded by steel, concrete and quiet pressure. The lights overhead buzz faintly in rows, casting sharp shadows that slice across the tile like surgical threads. The air smells of citrus cleaner and iodine, and beneath that, something warmer—steam, maybe, or freshly laundered linens still clinging to heat. The signage is minimal. Color-coded bands on the wall. Blue for pediatrics. Green for surgical transfer. Red for restricted. No one speaks. Your boots click evenly across the floor like a metronome too fast for comfort.

You pass a group of interns whispering by a vending machine, faces pale from night shift, eyes flicking up but not long enough to clock you. A nurse jogs past wheeling an empty isolette, her badge flashing with every bounce. Someone calls out a code over a hallway comm: short, clipped, not urgent—but the sound still freezes something low in your spine. This place doesn’t feel chaotic. It feels sharp. Fast. Like every second is being held in a fist somewhere you can’t see.

A little girl walks past with a stuffed whale tucked under one arm and an IV pole dragging beside her like a companion. She waves at Karina. No one says anything. The hallway narrows where the light shifts. The south access hall isn’t labeled. Just a matte-gray stretch of wall that curves slightly to the left, too clean, too quiet. You spot the janitor’s closet first—faux wood door, mop sink visible through the crack—and then the panel.

On your left, a janitor’s closet nestles into the wall beneath a recessed arch, its door edged open to reveal the pale curve of a mop and the shine of a rust-streaked utility basin. To the right, smooth and recessed into the steel, the keypad waits. The panel is seamless—machine cut, flush with the surface, its presence unannounced yet unmistakable. You place your fingers gently over it and it wakes beneath your touch, blooming with blue light in a slow pulse that spills across your knuckles like breath catching under skin. The numbers rise, pale and precise. Your fingers move without hesitation. Seven. Seven. Four. Zero. Three.

The panel releases a single chime, soft and final. A mechanism shifts behind the wall. Then the elevator opens—steel-framed, doors gliding inward on silent tracks, the kind of entrance that feels like being accepted rather than permitted. You step forward, and the others follow without a sound. The interior gleams. The brushed metal walls reflect your bodies back to you, stretched in quiet motion, flickering under the narrow downlight like silhouettes inside a pulse. The air here changes—slimmer, more deliberate, as though the space is regulating breath. The control panel illuminates, offering no numbers, only a touchscreen glowing with a red key icon. You input the code again, deliberate and slow. The system swallows it without pause, the screen fading before a new one appears.

6R – Access Granted. The elevator lifts—fluid, gliding, no drag in the movement, only an ascension that feels inward and precise. Karina stands to your left, arms folded in tight restraint. Donghyuck holds himself steady without leaning. Shotaro’s gaze remains fixed on the floor display as the numbers rise, his eyes unblinking. Your heart syncs to the movement. Each breath feels shaped around what comes next. The silence between you all sharpens. There’s no room left for theory or guesswork. Just this—this rising. This certainty. And beyond the steel doors, a hallway waits. And inside that hallway, the weight of every answer you’ve spent months trying to survive.

The elevator opens without a sound. The floor greets you with quiet lighting, walls painted in ocean tones, soft and sleep-heavy, like this corridor was designed to mute the outside world. You step out first, and the others follow without speaking. There’s a curved bench tucked under a long frosted window, a row of closed doors marked with soft blue numbers, a glass bulletin board lined with paper cranes folded from hospital chart paper and pinned like a constellation across cork. The air carries a warmth that doesn’t feel artificial—like something’s been lived-in here, touched by presence, by breath, by lullabies and antiseptic and grief folded into routine. A monitor hums behind the wall. Somewhere, a child laughs, then coughs.

You see him before your brain finishes registering the shape of him. He’s seated just beyond the nurses’ station, half-turned from view, angled into a patch of light that slips down from the window behind him like a benediction. He’s dressed simply—sweatpants, a dark hoodie pushed to the elbows, a faint smear of something pale across the collar, maybe milk or formula or sleep-deep exhaustion—and his frame is different now, broader through the chest, shoulders set like stone, forearms pulled tight under soft fabric. There’s a heaviness to him that doesn’t weigh down so much as anchor—like he’s settled, like the gravity around him has doubled and found its center.

In his arms, small and impossibly still, is a baby.

A little girl, no more than a few months old, her head smaller than the palm cradling it. She’s swaddled in a soft grey blanket stitched with tiny stars, her face turned in toward his collarbone, tucked beneath the edge of his jaw where the light can’t reach. One of her fists is curled loosely near his chest, her fingers wrapped instinctively around the cord of his hoodie drawstring like she’s claimed him in her sleep. He shifts her gently, barely at all, just enough to realign her head against his skin, and you can see the flex of his hands—big and careful, protective without tension, like every nerve in his body is dedicated to keeping her exactly as she is. He murmurs something low, a soft string of sounds just above a whisper, then presses his mouth to the crown of her head like punctuation. The way he holds her—secure and slow and whole—is so tender it hurts to witness.

You don’t need to see his face to know it’s him. Every line of him speaks. The way his knee bounces just slightly. The slope of his brow in profile. The way his gaze doesn’t drift. The world ends at the edge of that baby’s breath and he’s guarding it like it’s his only task on earth. He doesn’t see you. Doesn’t sense you. His focus is sealed in the weight against his chest, in the tiny rise and fall of her sleep.

Even though the signs have been building for weeks, even though every line of evidence has led you here—receipt, voicemail, badge record, paternity leave—it still crashes into you with a velocity your body wasn’t built to absorb. Because he’s real. And so is she. Karina steps forward, but her body goes stiff like she’s walked into the wrong dream. Shotaro’s mouth opens and closes again. Donghyuck stares, unmoving, his grip tightening on the cereal bar he forgot he was holding. And you—you feel the thud in your chest, the pull in your gut, the sharp hum of thought slicing through disbelief but unable to stick to anything solid.

He’s a father.

And somehow, even with every breadcrumb, every piece of this built by your own hand, the shape of that truth doesn’t feel possible. It doesn’t fit. It doesn’t settle. You can’t imagine him that way. You can’t imagine how. The timeline feels warped. The version of him you knew doesn’t stretch this far. It bends. It resists.

And then—

A voice cuts through the air, sharp and passing. “Dr. Na,” a woman says, clipboard tucked under one arm, coat flaring slightly with her stride as she walks past. She doesn’t pause, doesn’t glance back. “Your daughter’s charts show her oxygen levels have finally stabilised. We’ll come check again in twenty minutes.”

Jaemin shifts her gently in his arms, one hand cupping the back of her head with a kind of reverence usually reserved for glass. His thumb moves in slow, instinctive circles against her spine, each pass like a whispered promise. Her breath is soft against his collarbone, feathering across the fabric of his hoodie as if even sleep trusts him to keep her safe. He leans in, mouth brushing the top of her head, one long, steady press of lips to skin, like he’s sealing something there. “I love you, baby,” he murmurs, low and warm, the kind of voice that can only come from the center of the chest. “I’ve got you. Always.”

The baby stirs a little, her tiny fingers uncurling and catching at the string of his hoodie. He lets her pull. He lets her hold. His arms tighten just slightly, the motion so subtle it feels like muscle remembering how to protect. He sways without realizing, a slow back-and-forth, the rhythm of someone who has been doing this long enough for his body to memorize the lull. His nose grazes the side of her head again. He whispers something else, barely audible, maybe a name. Maybe a promise.

He doesn’t see you yet, he only sees her.

You reach him slowly, every step drawn through molasses, like the air thickened the second you crossed into his orbit. His head remains bowed, breath syncing with the tiny one pressed to his chest. The light catches on the curve of her cheek where it peeks from the blanket, her skin warm and impossibly smooth, one fist curled into the collar of his hoodie like she was born knowing it belonged to her. Jaemin holds her with both arms wrapped around her, one hand cradling her back, the other resting along the top of her swaddle. His thumb moves in small, soothing arcs. He whispers into her hair.

The hallway has folded itself around him like it was built to carry this moment. Like this bench, this patch of light, this hour — they were waiting. Karina stops beside you, shoulder brushing yours, heartbeat loud enough to feel. You’re all watching him, watching them, watching a version of Jaemin that none of you have ever met. He’s still cooing to her. Still brushing her forehead with the backs of his fingers, rhythm soft, voice even softer.

And then Karina speaks. “Jaemin?” Her voice cuts sideways, choked and sharp at once. “What the fuck?”

Jaemin freezes.

The reaction is immediate. His head lifts in one motion, slow but full-bodied, like someone pulling himself up from underwater. His shoulders rise. His eyes snap toward the sound, and for a breathless second, he just stares—lips parted, lashes unmoving, gaze flicking from face to face as if the hallway has shifted into something he cannot place. He doesn’t speak. His hand on the baby stills completely. The rhythm breaks. She sighs once in his arms, adjusting slightly. He catches her instinctively, gaze dropping for a moment to check her weight, to shift her higher against his chest without disturbing her sleep. His body moves out of reflex. His mind is slower to follow.

You can see the question before it forms, sitting just behind his eyes—how the hell did you find me? But then she stirs. A soft sound escapes from the bundle in his arms, small but rising, a wet hiccup blooming into a whimper. Jaemin’s focus drops immediately, hands moving on instinct. He shifts her higher against his chest, one palm splayed across her back, the other brushing under her blanket to find the edge of her foot. “Hey, hey,” he murmurs, voice low again, quiet and certain, “Daddy’s here, I’ve got you.”

The fussiness crests, turns, then begins to settle. Her fingers twitch at his hoodie string again. He rocks slightly, rhythm finding him again then he looks at you. The recognition strikes him in full. First in his eyes, then in his mouth, which doesn’t speak but tightens just enough to reveal a language that only he’s caught. His throat works around a breath that doesn’t turn into words. The tendons in his neck pull taut. There’s nothing composed in his reaction—only the raw, stilled shape of shock pressed across his face like it was sculpted there.

You say nothing.

None of you do.

Because in front of you, Jaemin is holding a child. And the silence has never felt heavier.

“Hey,” he says quietly, voice rasped but steady. “You found us.”

No one answers right away. The baby’s breath hitches once in his arms, a little uneven puff that makes him glance down, adjusting the crook of her neck against his chest with a slow, practiced ease. The silence stretches until Karina’s jaw locks, her mouth opening again—but this time it’s not cautious. “You absolute bastard,” she hisses, stepping forward, voice pitched somewhere between cracked fury and relief. “I thought you were dead. I had Shotaro checking morgues. Do you know that? Morgues, Jaemin.”

“Technically only once,” Shotaro adds, holding up a hand. “And we didn’t go inside.”

“You ghosted us. You fell off the face of the earth. And now you’re just… here? At some unknown hospital? Rocking a literal baby?”

“Technically,” you murmur, arms still at your sides, voice calm in a way that feels vaguely misplaced, “this hospital isn’t exactly unknown. It’s one of the leading pediatric centers in the country. They’re affiliated with three different research labs, and they pulled top neurosurgery stats last year—”

Karina whirls on you. “You don’t need to correct everything, Y/N.”

Jaemin blinks at the two of you. Then glances down at Ha-eun again, his hand adjusting her sleeve, tucking her fingers in beneath the blanket like it’s the most important thing in the room. “She’s asleep,” he says under his breath. “Keep it down unless you want to watch me cry.”

“You cry?” Donghyuck scoffs. “Since when do you—”

“I cry all the time now,” Jaemin cuts in, eyes wide and unbothered. “I cried yesterday because her sock fell off and she looked betrayed. I cried last week because she rolled over and I didn’t record it. I cried this morning because she grabbed my thumb like she’d chosen me, and that’s insane because she doesn’t even know what a thumb is.”

Karina stares at him. “Who are you?”

He lets out a soft, breathy laugh, the sound cracked open at the edges. “I’m Ha-eun’s dad.” The name lands with a softness you didn’t expect. Ha-eun. It fits the shape of her, small and whole and safe in his arms like she has always belonged there.

“She’s one next week,” Jaemin says, softer now, barely above the hush of her breath. His eyes stay on her, every word kissed into the space between them. There’s wonder in his voice, quiet but steady—the kind that glows from deep inside instead of trying to reach the world around it. His thumb brushes the curve of her ear, gentle and rhythmic. “Feels like she just got here yesterday,” he murmurs, half to her, half to himself. “Feels like she’s been mine forever.”

You watch her more closely. Her cheeks are warm, her lashes long and soft against the curve of her face, her body curled inwards like she’s learned to keep herself small. Her head fits perfectly beneath his chin. Her blanket rises and falls in slow, careful rhythm. You swallow, tongue caught against the back of your teeth. “She looks really little,” you murmur, eyes still on her, voice barely threaded together. “For a baby who’s nearly one.”

You knew the answer the moment you stepped into this hallway—the moment you saw the way he held her, not like something precious, but like something that could slip away if he blinked too long. You knew when you realized his badge had no department, when his voice broke around the word daughter, when every inch of him bent toward her like prayer. This isn’t a man in uniform. This isn’t a doctor finishing rounds. This is a father on borrowed time, keeping vigil in a place that only holds what it cannot promise.

Jaemin sighs, the sound deep and almost silent, then presses a kiss to the top of her head. His hand strokes down the length of her back once before he looks up. When he speaks, the words come quiet and full, like he’s had to shape them gently to keep from breaking. “She was born with a congenital heart defect. The medical term is truncus arteriosus—it means there’s only one large vessel leaving her heart, when there should be two. It makes everything harder. Breathing. Circulation. Growth.”

Shotaro’s hand flies up to his mouth. His eyes blur with too many things at once. “Oh my god.”

“We have to stay strong,” Jaemin says quickly, his voice cutting in with a soft, insistent edge. “She’s strong. Stronger than anyone I’ve ever met.” He glances down at her again. His hand moves automatically, smoothing the edge of the blanket near her shoulder. “She’s had four surgeries since she was born. One at three days old. One at four months. Another when she turned six. And just last month, they had to go in again to adjust the graft. It’s been—” he stops, exhales, then nods like he’s saying it to himself—“a year of holding our breath.”

Karina wipes at her eyes in silence. Donghyuck doesn’t move. “She’s getting better,” Jaemin adds, voice firm now, like he’s anchoring the sentence in truth. “She’s getting stronger every single day. Even when it’s hard. Especially then.” And in his arms, Ha-eun sleeps on, untouched by the weight around her, as if her body already knows that love like this will carry her through anything.

Jaemin shakes his head slowly, eyes still fixed on her like he’s drawing strength straight from her sleep. “She’s more than what’s happening in her chest,” he says, and there’s a quiet edge to it—tired, certain, protective in a way that feels carved into bone. “She’s brilliant. You should see her when she’s awake. She studies everything—faces, voices, colors. She knows when I’m the one holding her, even if she’s half-asleep. The second I walk into the room, she lifts her head. She says ‘dada’ when she sees me, clear as anything. She doesn't speak to anyone else.”

His mouth softens as he speaks, and something in his expression changes—lightens without losing depth. “She sticks her tongue out when she’s concentrating. She gets really quiet when it rains, like she’s listening to something I can’t hear. And she hates socks. I mean—hates them. We’ve lost twelve pairs this month alone. She’ll look me dead in the eye and rip them off like she’s making a point.”

A smile pulls at the edge of his mouth, lopsided and full of something sacred. “She’s funny. She’s opinionated. She loves the color yellow and gets genuinely offended when I eat the last bite of her yogurt without offering it to her—like she didn’t just fling half of it across the table and reject the last three spoons with full dramatic flair. She makes this little growl when she wants attention and she knows exactly how to fake-cry to get what she wants. She’s got the weirdest taste in music, a total old soul. She doesn’t like any of the baby songs I play for her but she’ll fall asleep to Debussy, perks up for acoustic lullabies, but her favorite song in the world—no joke—is a stripped-down jazz cover of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit.’ I swear, if I play anything too upbeat, she looks at me like I’ve insulted her lineage.” And in his arms, Ha-eun stirs softly, her tiny fingers flexing once against his chest before curling back into warmth—like she knows he’s telling her story, and she’s letting him.

Donghyuck stares at him, expression halfway between awe and something deeply unhinged. “You… you have a daughter. Like a real, breathing, sock-wearing, Debussy-listening baby. You’re someone’s dad. How the hell did that happen?”

“Not someone,” Jaemin mutters, smoothing her hair with his palm. “I’m Hae-un’s dad.”

Karina makes a strangled sound and half-lunges at him—not to attack, but to slap his shoulder so hard he has to rock slightly to keep from waking her. “You idiot. You disappeared. You broke all of us. You broke me. You could have at least sent a fucking text!”

“I didn’t know how,” he says, and this time his voice folds inward, like he’s talking less to you and more to the version of himself that didn’t make it through. “After you and I fizzled out, everything around me got quieter but heavier. Like I kept walking through rooms that used to be full and couldn’t remember what I came in for. And I don’t mean it in a dramatic way. I just stopped knowing who I was when no one was looking.”

He glances down at her hand—so small it barely covers the center of his palm, her tiny fingers curled into him like they grew there. “Then she arrived and no one else mattered. I had to step up, it was only me, I had to do it all myself and it wasn’t easy, but she made it easy. There was one thing that mattered more than my shame, my pride or all the versions of myself I couldn’t live with. She came into the world already fighting for air, and all I could think about was whether she’d hear my voice first or the machines.”

His eyes flick up to meet yours, and there’s no mask left—just a tired, honest quiet. “I know it’s not an excuse but I needed time. To become someone she could trust without even thinking. Someone she could fall asleep on without wondering if I’d still be there in the morning. And maybe that meant disappearing from everything else. Maybe that’s the part I’ll always regret. But I couldn’t afford to mess this up, not this time, not with her.” He doesn’t add anything else after that. Just smooths the edge of her tiny sock where it’s slipped loose, then lets his hand rest there like it’s keeping the whole world in place.

Donghyuck breaks the silence first, tipping his head and raising both brows like he’s looking at a puzzle that somehow built itself while no one was watching. “So you just had a secret baby in the past year,” he says, voice too casual to be serious, too stunned to be joking. “I got a parking ticket. Shotaro dyed his hair. Karina joined a yoga cult and started meditating because of you. And you—” he gestures toward Jaemin with a flick of his wrist, “—you went full Witness Protection Program and showed up as someone’s dad.”

There’s a moment of stunned stillness, then a tiny snort from Karina that might have been a laugh if it weren’t drowned in disbelief. Shotaro shifts where he stands, something more serious pulling at his face now. His hands are loose at his sides, but his voice is careful. “Did no one know about this?” he asks quietly. “Jaemin… you should’ve come to us. We would’ve helped. You didn’t have to carry this all alone. Did you seriously tell no one?”

The silence is like pressure dropping in the room. Then you speak, quietly, your words more shape than sound. “You told Jeno.”

Jaemin looks up, and for the first time, his expression shifts—something flickering just beneath the surface. He doesn’t look surprised. He doesn’t ask how you know. He just nods, the movement slow, like it comes from a place that’s lived in this truth too long to hide it. “Yeah,” he says. “I told Jeno. He’s helped a lot. More than I can explain. When it got bad—when she had her third surgery and I didn’t sleep for days—he flew out and stayed with us. Slept on the couch. Took shifts with her when I couldn’t keep my eyes open. Kept the monitors from sounding like alarms. He was here for a while, a whole month, actually.”

Your stomach pulls tight.

The timelines add up. Too perfectly. That night last spring when the city felt too loud and too quiet all at once. The bar on West 38th, the one you never meant to walk into, the one where Jeno was already sitting, glass in hand, sleeves rolled to the elbow like he was trying to breathe. You never asked why he was in New York. He never offered. You both said things you didn’t mean and did things you never talked about after.

And now, standing here, the weight of it curls beneath your ribs like smoke rising from something you thought had gone cold. He was here because of Jaemin. Because of her. You blink once, slow. The hallway sharpens again around you. Jaemin’s still speaking, quiet and steady, eyes back on Ha-eun now like the rest of the world is just background. “I haven’t been alone,” he says, and there’s something almost grateful in his voice. “It’s been hard. But she makes it worth it. And I had help when it counted.”

Jaemin huffs a soft laugh, the sound tugged right from his chest, and glances down at her with mock betrayal. “She’s obsessed with her uncle Jeno,” he says, shaking his head. “When he’s around, I practically don’t exist. It’s like she forgets who changed her diapers at 3 a.m. for eleven months straight.”

His hand shifts slightly, brushing her tiny foot where it’s peeking from the blanket. “He walks into the room and she lights up like a lamp. Grabs at his shirt, tries to babble faster than she knows how. Do you wanna know the worst part?” He leans back slightly, eyes narrowing like he’s preparing to deliver a personal offense. “She flirts. I’m not kidding—she flutters her lashes. She gets shy and tucks her chin like she has a crush. Literally blushes. On cue.”

Karina snorts. Shotaro coughs into his sleeve. Donghyuck mutters something about being the forgotten godfather. But none of it reaches you, because something quieter has already taken hold, something slow and deliberate that rises not from what was said but from what lingers in the silence between their voices, something threaded beneath your skin in a place you have never named. It stirs when Jaemin speaks of Jeno, when he says his name like it belongs to something steady and sacred, when he smiles and recalls how she leans toward him like she has always known him, like he is home—and that is where it lodges in you, sharp and silent and echoing like a breath held too long. There is a ‘he’ in this room who isn’t here yet, but his shadow has already passed through you, has already marked you, and has already left something behind. And whatever it is that tightens now in the quiet curve of your throat, whatever it is that steals your breath before you can feel it—it’s already inside you, placing shape where none should be, forming quietly, unknowingly, and it moves like his.

There’s a pause. And then you ask it—softly, gently, like the answer might pull the light out of the room. “Who’s her mother?”

Jaemin exhales. Not like a breath. Like a weight. His mouth twists into something that tries to be a smile and fails halfway. His hand keeps moving over Ha-eun’s blanket in small, rhythmic strokes. His voice comes slowly. “That’s — it’s not important, I don’t wanna get into it.” And then he looks down at her again—like she’s the only thing keeping that story from unraveling in his hands.

Jaemin shifts her slowly, the kind of motion that carries memory in the muscle, like his body has learned her rhythm so completely it doesn’t need thought anymore. His arms fold in toward his chest, her weight still resting soft in his hands, and then he turns to you—not with words, just with his eyes, and something in them asks if you’re ready for something that might change you.

You reach without meaning to. He places her in your arms with the kind of care that feels ceremonial. Not cautious, but reverent. Like handing over a piece of sky. Like trusting someone with light. Her warmth bleeds instantly through the fabric between you, her head nestling into the inside of your elbow, her fingers twitching once in sleep.

She is so light. Lighter than anything with this much gravity. Your breath catches, quiet and sharp, like it was startled into stillness. And then she stirs—barely. Just a sigh through her nose, a flutter behind her eyelids, and the smallest sound leaves her lips, softer than a whimper, louder than a thought. You do not mean to coo, but you do, and the sound that comes out of you doesn’t belong to the voice you know. It’s quieter. Warmer. Older.

Her eyes blink open, clouded and bright all at once, unfocused but seeking, and for a heartbeat she just looks up at you, small chest rising slow against the side of your forearm. She doesn’t cry. She just looks, as if she knows something you don’t. The moment lands heavy, not in your arms, but beneath your ribs—because this feels like the kind of thing that can only happen once. Like something the universe allows before it takes it back.

And you’re not sure if she’s giving you something or saying goodbye.

Karina steps closer, arms half-extended, like reaching for Ha-eun might snap whatever spell is humming in the space between all of you. Her voice comes quieter than usual, softer, rounded at the edges by something fragile. “Can I—” she starts, then swallows. “Can I hold her?” Her gaze flickers between Jaemin and the baby in your arms, and it isn’t anger anymore that sits in her throat. It’s wonder. She looks at Ha-eun like she’s watching something sacred sleep. And for a moment, every cruel thing she wanted to say to Jaemin dissolves into the air between them, too small to matter. Too human to hold.

Jaemin nods. You shift slightly, ready to pass her over—but the moment breaks before it completes. Ha-eun stirs, just a breath, just a soft movement that feels less like waking and more like remembering. Her tiny hand uncurls from where it’s been nestled against her chest and drifts downward, clumsy, unfocused, yet drawn with the precision of instinct. Her fingers find your wrist.

And they tighten. Not harshly, not in pain but in a way that stills everything. Her palm rests against the bracelet there—your bracelet. The one you never took off. The chain cools against your skin, her fingers warmer than anything has a right to be. And for a moment, the air feels like silk being pulled through water. Slow. Soundless. Crushing in its softness.

She clutches it like she knows the story it tells. The bracelet wraps around your wrist like a timeline masquerading as jewelry—delicate, yes, but heavy with the weight of things that shaped you. Each charm is a relic, a kept secret, a chapter without words. The microphone gleams gold, dulled at the edges from years of skin and stage-light dreams, a symbol from the first time you chose your voice over silence. The basketball hangs beside it, small and scuffed, the color worn from afternoons spent under dying suns and the memory of someone who taught you how to want without shame. A miniature book with a cracked spine dangles from the center—its pages fused closed, no titles, no words, only the echo of everything you never said out loud. There’s a tiny theater mask, one side smiling, one side hollowed out, a gift from a winter that almost undid you, when pretending was the only way you survived. A wave curls near the clasp, silver caught mid-crash, from the summer you lost something to the ocean and pretended it was just the tide. A charm shaped like a safety pin sits next to it—thin, silver, unbending—a quiet nod to the year you held everyone together except yourself.

Near the clasp, where the chain begins and ends, rests the smallest charm—quiet in shape, but exact in meaning, a silver quill with its spine curved just enough to suggest movement, its tip narrowing to a point so fine it seems to tremble in the light. Each groove along the feather reads like a line already written, the surface cool and clean and carrying the stillness of something that has waited a long time to be found. Her fingers close around it gently, with a stillness that feels less like reaching and more like remembering, the motion dreamlike and inevitable, as if her hand was carved for this weight long before it ever found its shape, and in that quiet moment the charm begins to shift—no longer a feather, but a promise folding itself into form, a name blooming beneath silence, a future written so softly it settles into the air like ink that never needed a pen.

Now her fingers are wrapped around it, she isn’t letting go.

Karina stands with her arms open, but something stills between you—the baby’s hand wrapped around the bracelet at your wrist, her fingers curled with such delicate purpose it feels carved from something older than her body, and older than yours. Her grip is small, soft, but the weight behind it is immense, as if she’s touching more than metal, as if she’s pressing her palm to every shape and memory it’s ever carried. There’s no resistance in her hold, only certainty. The kind of certainty that steals breath. Your arms don’t move because it feels like passing her to someone else would unmake a moment that has already planted its roots inside your chest. And still, Karina waits. Her breath is uneven, her expression splintered somewhere between wonder and the ache of something breaking open. Her hands tremble as she reaches again.

You exhale, barely, and begin to shift.

The baby stirs, blinking once, her eyes cloudy but bright, lashes trembling with sleep, and the second Karina gathers her into her arms, something changes in the room. The air warms. The distance softens. And from the curve of Karina’s shoulder, a sound escapes—fragile, vowel-shaped, almost a laugh but shaped like language. A sound meant for her. Karina gasps, then smiles so suddenly it crumples her whole face. “You’re talking to me?” she whispers, voice cracked around the edges. “You’re saying hi?”

The baby gurgles again, a soft string of syllables that mean nothing and everything. And Karina holds her closer, rocking slightly, like her body remembers how even if her mind doesn’t. Her hair slips forward and brushes the baby’s forehead. The bracelet on your wrist is still warm. The space where her weight once was still pulses with memory. You stand there, breath folded sharp beneath your ribs, because even without her in your arms, something of her remains threaded through you—light as breath, deep as marrow—as if her weight carved a space inside you that hasn’t figured out how to close.

Donghyuck takes her next, arms slightly unsure at first, but cradling her with the gentleness of someone who knows how to make himself soft when it matters most, and the second she blinks up at him, he lets out a laugh so quiet it folds into a hum, bouncing her lightly as he murmurs something low and ridiculous, something about her cheeks being engineered in a lab to destroy him. She doesn’t cry. She watches. She settles. And then she sneezes once into his shirt and Shotaro chokes on a laugh, already reaching for his turn. When the baby passes into Shotaro’s arms, she sighs like she’s returning somewhere, her tiny fingers brushing his chest as he rocks slightly from heel to toe, his face open in the way only he knows how to be, full of wonder, full of awe, whispering “hello” like it’s a secret between them and only her eyes can answer it. They stay like that for a while, wrapped in a kind of silence that feels bigger than stillness, until her head tips slightly, her weight shifting again like instinct — and without needing to ask, without needing to speak, she comes back to you.

She nestles into the crook of your arm like she never left, her body folding soft into yours with a breath that shivers down your spine, and you shift her closer with hands that remember the rhythm now, your cheek brushing her temple, your voice cooing something senseless and warm just for her to hear. And behind you, quiet and unnoticed, Shotaro lifts his phone, screen dimmed low, not to interrupt, not even to remember—just to capture, to hold still the shape of something that might never happen quite like this again. The photo blinks into existence with a hush of light: you, holding her against your chest, your lips curved into a smile too soft to be posed, eyes half-lowered, your wrist glinting beneath her fingers as she touches your bracelet like it belongs to her. There’s something golden in the angle, something still. You don’t notice the click. You don’t hear it save itself. But when Shotaro looks down, the image quiets him. Because the moment is whole. And you are glowing.

Monaco is the twenty-sixth country this year, though it doesn’t unfold the way the others did—no flash, no skyline stretch, no chaos pretending to be luxury—just stillness, just silence, just the kind of coastal hush that costs more than gold to maintain, and Jeno moves through it like breath caught inside the body of something too old to speak, streets winding like thought, alleys clean enough to mirror bone. His name followed him here, first in the windows of storefronts where his face hung beside gold-trimmed logos and limited edition sneakers, then in the whispers of brand reps in linen suits who smiled too wide and asked nothing of him but presence. Twenty-six cities, twenty-six courts, twenty-six languages softened into endorsements and autographs. They hand him heat-pressed jerseys and gold-tipped pens, call him the future with smiles that stretch too wide across brand decks, clip microphones to his collar while cameras catch the angles they already studied, and his face—clean, balanced, carved by sweat and spotlight—moves from billboard to broadcast like it’s no longer something he owns, just a polished surface they pass between them.

The season ended three months ago, but the world hasn’t stopped asking for him—the NBA called it a peak, the numbers called it a breakout, and he called it none of those things because there was never a version of this that didn’t feel like a performance, like precision dressed as prophecy, like grief passed down through muscle memory and sold as ambition. Every stop is the same: photos under heat lamp bulbs, contract meetings in rooms where silence matters more than answers, gym sessions booked at three a.m. to dodge cameras, and a new country pressing its fingerprint into the back of his neck before he can forget the shape of the last one. He hasn’t unpacked in months. The suitcase lives open.

He still ties his own shoes before every game, double-knots them the same way he did at seventeen, sits on locker room floors with his elbows on his knees and his head bowed like he’s praying for focus and not forgiveness, keeps the first towel he was handed after his rookie debut folded in the bottom of his gym bag like a promise no one else remembers. The drivers call him sir, the stylists ask if they can post him, the agents float words like empire and legacy and icon, but he nods without lifting his eyes, always thanks them by name, always clears his own plates, always trains until his chest aches—not because the cameras ask, but because the work is the only place that feels honest, the only place that asks nothing but everything.

But Monaco slows everything, slants the light gold and long across stone like it’s trying to teach him how to mourn in style, and he lets it, walking with the weight of his father’s watch wrapped twice around his wrist, gaze pulled down the narrow corridors that taste like salt and dynasty, steps echoing against glass storefronts that sell stillness at premium. The buildings here feel like they remember names even after the families forget them, arches carved into silence, marble clinging to old heat. He pauses at the edge of the overlook, not for the view but for the shadow that stretches before him, lean and tall and motionless across the glinting water, and the way it folds with the curve of the rail makes it look less like his own and more like the echo of someone else’s—someone who taught him how to stand like that, how to disappear without leaving.

The air smells like money and memory, seafoam and steel, and the harbor below shifts with a patience that makes his stomach tighten, because here even the water moves with legacy. His phone buzzes against his thigh, another message from another brand, another opportunity to be seen, to be owned, to be sold. He doesn’t check it. He keeps his hands at his sides, eyes on the line where the sea meets the light, and waits for the ache to pass. It doesn’t. It only deepens, slides lower into his ribs, joins the rhythm of his breath like it was always meant to be there. And the city watches. And the shadow holds.

He doesn’t raise his voice because he doesn’t need to, the quiet does it for him, spreading slow and deliberate across any room brave enough to ask about lineage, each mention of legacy left to hang midair like smoke rising from something already burned. He lets it breathe, lets it sour, lets the pause between words collect weight until the question curls in on itself and disappears, and when he turns his head toward the sea, it isn’t for beauty or peace, it’s for the way the reflection handles him—how the surface holds his face like a secret, edges soft, eyes dark, the sky folding around him like it’s tucking him away, like it’s preparing to bury something without ceremony.

The watch speaks in silence against his pulse, thick leather brushing bone, gold dulled by time and sweat, ticking steady as if to remind him he’s still inside the hour Taeyong never outran, and the key rides hidden in the same place it always does—tucked beside gauze, resin, salt—never reaching the lock but never leaving the bag either, carried like breath, like superstition, like proof of a door that still exists. Grief doesn’t ask for attention anymore, it lives in muscle and scar, in clean form and cleaner footwork, in how he lands his shots with the kind of finality that belongs to legacy, in how he looks past the questions now, not to dismiss but to disarm, voice cut to the shape of ritual, steady and stripped and shaped by years of learning how to say everything without offering anything. Nahyun calls it control, calls it dignity, calls it the strength his father would have admired, but she never felt the cold behind Taeyong’s voice when he issued silence like a sentence, never learned how stillness can scream when it’s taught by someone who held power like a blade.

So Jeno folds everything into movement, places it in the flex of his jaw, the evenness of his breath, the weight he drops into every step like his bones are measuring distance not in steps but in cost, and when he finds himself alone in the late light of windows that reach the floor, he doesn’t look away from the reflection, because it gives nothing, asks nothing, holds the shape of him without judgment, and the city gathers around that image like a crown built from shadow.

He wakes to headlines before the sun reaches the windows, name printed in sharp fonts and sharper praise, called the future before he can rub the sleep from his eyes, voice already hoarse from the weight of questions he hasn’t answered yet, and by the time he’s walking through the terminal—hood low, sleeves cuffed, security flanking him like shadow—there’s already a crowd waiting, already a camera rolling, already a child pushing forward with sneakers in both hands and eyes wide like he’s seeing something holy. They call him king. They call him an icon. They call him inevitable. And he signs his name like he’s pressing a bruise into the fabric, smiles the way he’s been taught to, holds their gaze long enough to be remembered but nothing touches him. Not anymore.

The higher it climbs, the less it reaches. The air thins. The light glitters too cold. And every win drags something behind it, something heavier than celebration, something shaped like survival. Interviews stack on top of photo shoots, blur into press days, press days bleed into flights, into training, into sideline microphones asking him again and again what fuels him, what inspires him, what he’s chasing now. He tells them discipline. He tells them hunger. He tells them love for the game. He never says revenge. He never says father. You’re the one he never names. The one with ash on your smile and fire beneath your ribs, the one who held out your hand even as he stepped back, who stayed soft long after he’d gone silent. He left you in a breath, without warning, without apology, without giving you a place to set all the love he left burning, and he told himself that distance would erase the shape of you, that silence could starve what memory couldn’t kill. But you stayed. You stayed in the empty stretch between headlines and hotel rooms, in the stillness of locker rooms after the noise fades, in the way his chest pulls tight at every question he dodges, because your name still lives beneath his tongue like a secret bruising him from the inside out. And on the nights when everything else falls quiet—when the fans are gone and the lights are low and his hands won’t stop shaking—he finds you there again, not in forgiveness, not in fantasy, but in the part of him that never stopped asking why he left something that felt like being alive.

Nahyun keeps it all in motion, or at least gives it the illusion—schedules his fittings like they’re sacred, checks his call log before he can, turns down interviews with a smile that lands better than any statement he could’ve made himself. She walks through their apartment like she owns its quiet, adjusts the volume of the speakers without ever asking what he wants to hear, lays out clothes he never remembers choosing, hosts dinners where the wine is imported and the compliments feel rehearsed. Her hand curls into the crook of his arm just before the camera clicks, her laugh lands at the exact pitch that trends best on reels, and when she whispers “you’re the most wanted man in the league” it sounds like she’s reminding herself who she’s standing beside. He nods because it’s easier, lets her kiss land against his cheek with the softness of habit, but his fingers always drift to his chest after—just beneath the collarbone, to the hollow place that never closes, the one her hands never find, no matter how many rooms she fills.

Sometimes after games—after the roar fades, after the jerseys are swapped and the lights go down—he showers without speaking, moves through the water like it’s trying to baptise him into someone untouched by love, someone immune to memory, someone who never once stayed too long inside a goodbye. He wraps the towel around his face and sits there breathing, elbows on knees, head bowed, counting each inhale like it might bring something back that hasn’t had a name in years. And in that dark, inside that silence that wraps around him tighter than anything ever has, he lets the question come. If he stripped it all away—the cameras, the contracts, the kingdom built around his name—would anything remain but yours in the back of his throat, the syllable shaped like mercy, the one thing he never got to keep.

Outside the court, the pace never softens. The days spiral—early lifts in private gyms that smell like metal and intent, meetings held in penthouses where windows outnumber clocks, jet-black SUVs that move like shadows through cities that keep his name in lights. There are stylists waiting with garment bags he never picked, trainers adjusting macros to match analytics he never questioned, agents whispering forecasts like scripture between elevators. His phone doesn’t sleep. His signature moves faster than he does. He lands in one country before the sweat dries from the last, and when he walks into rooms, the air tightens—because even when the game ends, the game keeps playing. Just louder. Just cleaner. Just dressed in suits instead of jerseys.

There’s a building in Seoul’s financial core that rises sharper than zoning should allow, clad in obsidian glass that swallows daylight and brass so polished it throws reflections like weapons. It doesn’t shimmer. It stares. Security rotates every four hours. Every floor requires biometric clearance. The air smells like ozone and contract ink. Inside, the logo for ‘Vantae Group’ curves across a monolithic reception wall—matte black, unlit, unbranded—small enough to whisper, sharp enough to wound, the kind of design that doesn’t ask to be remembered, only obeyed. It began decades ago as a fashion house known for blood-slick runways and silk cut like shrapnel, but it expanded fast, teeth first—into luxury athletics, global media ventures, equity-controlled event syndicates, real estate portfolios spread across seven continents, and a closed-access network of neuro-performance labs buried beneath ex-military vaults in cities that never sleep. It doesn’t sponsor athletes. It engineers them. It doesn’t sell product. It trades futures. And if something moves the culture—Vantae already owns the patent on its breath.

The company began as a split vision between Taeyong Lee and Nahyun’s father—one known for his cold ascent, the other for his immaculate restraint—and now Jeno runs what they built. The partnerships are listed clean across documents, board seats shared, but in every meeting, the weight tips toward blood. He enters the first boardroom of the fiscal year in charcoal wool and shadow, jaw set like a warning, and they don’t stand. They don’t pause. They barely glance up from their numbers, seeing the face, the contract, the league asset, but not the threat. So he lets them. He flips the projections without speaking, listens to their pitch for a new digital rights package while silence gathers like static, letting the room warm itself with assumptions. Then he closes the folder with two fingers and says, “Not worth it.” Nothing more. And for the first time that morning, they stop speaking. By the next quarter, three directors step down, two entire departments restructure, and the company starts breathing through sharper lungs.

He learns quickly. Speaks slower. Lets silence drape across the table like velvet, eyes steady beneath tailored suits that sharpen the way his body already holds power, voice low enough to make people lean in, still enough to make them wonder if he’s waiting or watching. He wears less expression now, just precision—sits longer in rooms where men used to try to measure him, their smiles softening when they realise he won’t flinch. He ends calls with a glance. Fires with a phrase. Stands without needing to raise his voice, and the room folds around his absence like heat leaving silk. Every night ends the same: a cold dinner left untouched, half-read reports scattered in columns across the table, and Taeyong’s old memos sealed beneath glass—lines in red ink that feel more like warning than advice. One of them reads, ‘never trust a man who flatters before he listens,’ and Jeno keeps it folded in his coat pocket, right beside the place his heartbeat slows, pressed flat like a weapon made for silence.

So when an investor leans in over low firelight and a glass of scotch aged older than his father’s mistakes and says, “You’ve got his instinct,” Jeno doesn’t smile. He lifts his glass like agreement was never the point. That night he takes Nahyun to bed with the same hands he uses to close deals—measured, practiced, clean. He touches her like routine, moves through her like breath held too long, keeps his mouth pressed to her shoulder and exhales slow, as if the scent of her might drown out the part of him still listening for another voice. He finishes with his eyes open, his jaw tight, the quiet after feeling sharper than anything that came before. And before sleep thins the air between them, he whispers it—low, deliberate, the way someone says something they need to believe—“I’m nothing like him.” But silence holds memory like a knife under the tongue, and blood moves like handwriting through the body—unseen, unspoken, but always returning to its source.

Jeno’s days stretch like wire, tight and polished, pulled across cities that blur before they settle—training in glass-walled gyms where the mirrors breathe back precision, meetings in penthouses where coffee comes pre-sweetened and silence signs faster than language. His body moves through routine like ritual, protein calculated to the gram, recovery woven into ice, heat, shock, repeat. Security walks a step ahead, stylists wait behind velvet ropes, and agents speak in numbers that sound like legacy. So when a rest day arrives, carved out by publicists and trainers like a favour disguised as strategy, he takes it without question but never without weight. The world doesn’t quiet, it just tilts—less noise, more echo—and the stillness inside those hours doesn’t soothe so much as sharpen, because peace, when it comes, always arrives dressed like surveillance.

The villa stretches across the cliffside like it was poured from sun-bleached marble, every inch designed to keep secrets beneath silence—stone floors smoothed by time, glass walls angled to catch the sea without letting it in. The ocean sits far below, too distant to roar, humming soft like a machine that’s never broken. Inside, the air holds weight—sharp with citrus, brushed with something artificial, the kind of clean that feels curated. Security shifts behind mirrored doors, earpieces glinting once before vanishing. The chef slices into ripe fruit in the open kitchen, blades moving like punctuation. There’s jazz playing in another room, faint and unobtrusive, stitched into the background like a mood board someone forgot to mute. The house belongs to someone who understands appearances, and Jeno lets himself exist inside it like an echo, body submerged to the chest in saltwater blue, earbuds in but quiet, arms loose at his sides like he’s waiting for the weight to pull them deeper. His eyes track the edge of the sea with a stillness that feels like prayer held at knifepoint.

Jeno stands waist-deep in the pool, bare to the sun, shoulders gleaming with a sheen that comes from sweat worn down by ice baths and infrared saunas, from mornings that begin before the city rises, from training so strict even his rest days arrive with caution tape. His chest rises slowly. His spine stays long. There’s a stillness to him that feels uninterruptible—like his body has already calculated how many more breaths it will take before he moves. His abs tighten with each inhale, muscle etched into him by grind, not gift, and his hands float just barely away from his sides like something inside him is bracing for impact. His jaw is clean-shaven, cut sharp enough to draw focus. His arms ripple when he shifts. But nothing about him calls for attention. He’s sculpted to endure. To last. To outlive whatever it is still chasing him.

The water holds him like memory—gliding up to his ribs, curling around his wrists, cool and glass-like, but never forgiving. It mirrors him without distortion. Every ripple is earned. Every stillness earned more. His earbuds sit against his ears, silent. No music. No voice. Only the low static of his own mind, thoughts tight and quick, running in formation like they’re late for something. Headlines. Trades. Contracts. Time zones. Rotations. His trainer says the brain doesn’t rest until the body forgets how to fight but the body never forgets.

His phone buzzes once on the stone lip of the pool, then again, a pulse inside the quiet that doesn’t beg for attention but pulls it anyway, and while most alerts fold into background—business, agents, schedules wrapped in urgency dressed as relevance—this one carries a name that tilts the water. Jaemin. No sound, no shift, but his hand rises clean from the surface, droplets tracking down his forearm as he lifts the phone without hurry, thumb steady even as his pulse stirs, once, then twice, like something inside him already knows the shape of what’s coming. Anyone else, he’d leave on read and reply hours later, but it’s Jaemin so he opens it before the second buzz fades.

The first image arrives soft—Haeun swaddled in cotton blue, lashes feathered against her cheeks like closing curtains, one small fist curled around a plastic spoon with the stubbornness of royalty, and Jeno feels it before he processes it, the way something inside his mouth pulls open, subtle and warm, not a smile exactly but the beginning of one, the kind that lifts slow and lives behind the eyes. His body stills completely, chest loose, gaze locked, and it takes a beat for the shock to settle—the understanding that this is her, that this is real, that after a year of silence and sideways answers, after months of watching Jaemin vanish behind clinical phrases and guarded tones, he’s seeing the thing Jaemin never shared to anyone but him, the secret held so tightly it left no fingerprints, and it’s her, it’s his baby, and she’s everything.

He swipes again and the breath catches lower, deeper—Karina cradling her like it’s instinct, Shotaro caught mid-laugh with his eyes half-closed, Donghyuck blurred beside them with a snack pouch raised like a toast, and the light across their faces softens the air around them, the kind of gold that makes joy feel physical, that makes time slow into honey, and Jeno just looks, thumb resting against the edge of the screen like he’s afraid the image might slip away if he blinks too long. The smile comes again, realer now, a quiet stretch across his face that makes his cheekbones sharpen and his eyes crease slightly at the corners, but it’s the kind that carries ache beneath it, the kind he only wears when something beautiful arrives too late to touch.

The fourth photo opens like a trigger, velvet-wrapped and breathless, and his heart stutters so sharply it sends silence ringing through his ribs, the kind that only follows something you weren’t ready to want. It lands with the precision of fate disguised as accident—your image caught mid-laugh, your hands holding something fragile, and it doesn’t feel like a photo, it feels like a memory resurfacing in full color, sharp with light, brutal with beauty, and aimed straight at the part of him that remembers everything. Your hair is pulled low at the nape, knotted clean like it was meant to be undone slowly, and your shoulders curve bare beneath soft fabric that holds no shine but every kind of gravity. One hand cradles the back of Haeun’s head with a stillness that feels older than instinct, bracelet sagging just enough to show the charms—each one worn, gleaming in dull rhythm, each one the shape of something he remembers memorizing with his fingertips on nights when your breathing steadied him more than sleep. Your mouth is parted mid-laugh, caught in the soft blur between inhale and joy, and it hits him all at once—how alive it looks, how unscripted, how you’re looking at the baby like you’ve known her longer than language, like love is a memory that lived in your chest before it had a name. Haeun reaches up toward your lips, tiny fingers spread, and her touch lands on your mouth like it’s searching for the shape of a sound not yet spoken.

His gaze catches on the bracelet curled against your wrist, its shape so familiar it feels cruel, the way each charm still clings to its chain like no time has passed at all. He sees the book with its welded spine, the wave sealed mid-crest, the fractured heart held together by nothing, and near the clasp—the last charm, the one he pressed into your palm without a word, the one he thought you would have thrown away before the door even closed behind him. He had hoped you burned them, melted every memory down to ash, because the thought of them surviving—of them still touching your skin like a secret held soft—feels like a forgiveness he hasn’t earned, and he stares as the ache builds low and brutal, the kind that settles in the lungs like silence after goodbye.

Jeno doesn’t move, but the world inside him shifts. The water stays level against his ribs, warm from the sun and heavy from stillness, and his hand holding the phone lowers slightly, not in weakness but reverence. Light skips across the pool surface in small trembling arcs, and the horizon drags wider like it’s bracing to hold something bigger than distance. Then the messages arrive, sliding into place with the kind of softness that means something sharper waits beneath.

Jaemin — baby girl’s in good hands today, she’s obsessed with her.

Jaemin — she can’t stop smiling. thought you might want to see it.

He reads the messages once, then again, each word soft on the surface but sinking like lead, and the phone stays warm in his hand while the pool holds still around his ribs, tension curling beneath his sternum like a name carved into wet cement. His thumb brushes over your face with reverence more than touch, slow and exact, the way someone reaches for something holy not to claim it, but to be forgiven by it. He doesn’t zoom in because you’re already inside him, already threading through the part of his chest that applause never reached, already louder than every moment that tried to replace you. The ache comes without panic, without sharpness—just depth, just truth, just the quiet clarity that some things don’t leave, even when they’re gone. The sun slips lower behind glass, light bending over the surface like it’s bracing for the dark, and somewhere beneath the bone, the voice in his head steadies, quieter now, patient, familiar, shaped exactly like yours.

The screen’s glow reflects faint and ghostly across his chest, fingers resting idle around the slim weight of his phone, thumb unmoving on the glass. His head tilts in that unfocused, far-off way he gets when he’s disappeared into his own head, Jeno sits like a statue in the dusklight—bare thighs stretched out, muscles slack, unreadable. The screen glows against his chest, the only sign he’s even tethered to the moment. He doesn’t blink, doesn’t move, doesn’t notice the way the air changes.

Soft as steam, Nahyun emerges from the hall, her silhouette catching first—a glimpse of bare thigh, the dip of a waist, the shine of black satin brushing against her hips. She moves like something choreographed, like silk unraveling in slow motion, each step intentional, soundless, her bare feet gliding across the polished floor. The robe is black satin, cut short enough to tease the curve of her ass, cinched at the waist by a lazy knot that does nothing to hide the way the fabric clings to her like liquid. With every step, it shifts over her skin, catching the light, slipping up her thigh just enough to hint at what isn’t beneath. Her skin gleams—oiled, luminous, kissed bronze by the sun. Every inch of her is polished, perfected: collarbones carved clean, breasts full and high beneath the robe, nipples visibly hard and proud against the thin fabric. She smells faintly of warm sugar and expensive perfume, the kind that sinks into skin and stays. Her hair is pinned up in a loose twist, glossy and elegant, a few strands falling down her neck with studied imperfection. Her lashes are long, curled high, framing eyes that smolder without trying.

She’s not just pretty. She’s sculpted—every line of her body a deliberate, obscene kind of perfection. The high arc of her waist, the taut swell of her ass, the soft weight of her breasts pressing against lace like they were made to be unwrapped. Her thighs, toned and smooth, shift with slow, fluid motion as she walks, each step an invitation. She’s the kind of beautiful that makes men ache, makes them stare too long and forget their own names. The kind you want to ruin and worship at the same time. Fucked into form—like someone, maybe more than one, had shaped her with hands and mouths and need. Jeno doesn’t look, not yet, but the air tightens around her anyway, as if even his silence can feel her coming. There’s something coiled beneath all that glow, something sharp beneath the silk. The kind of beauty that makes men follow, even as the ground falls out beneath them. Like a queen in a fairy tale, hand outstretched—apple already bitten. She’s the kind of beautiful that kills slow—like a crown dipped in poison, regal and ruinous, glittering just enough to make you lean in before it slips the knife.

She stops beside him, leans one hip against the railing, head tilted just enough to let her hair fall slightly, as if offering her throat. Her body is lithe, legs long and toned, and there’s a kind of practiced casualness to the way she stands there, a predator in lingerie. She sighs, not loud—just enough to be heard, just enough to announce her presence. Her fingers find the knot at her waist and slowly, like she’s unwrapping a gift, she pulls.

The robe slides open with a whisper.

It slips down her arms, gliding over her shoulders and falling to the floor in a puddle of silk, forgotten. What’s left on her body is more suggestion than clothing: a lace bodysuit, jet-black and nearly transparent, hugging every contour of her with cruel precision. It’s cut high on the hips, making her legs look impossibly long, and the bodice dips low, exposing the curve of her breasts in delicate, floral sheer. A tiny satin bow rests between them like a tease, and the fabric is thin enough to leave nothing to imagination—nipples visible, hardened, the swell of her chest rising with each slow, deliberate breath. Thin straps cling to her shoulders, and at the base, near her thighs, tiny silver clips glint at the crotch, unfastened and waiting. There’s nothing underneath. Just bare skin, warm and flushed, thighs soft and parted slightly in her pose, the lace clinging to the slickness beneath.

“Hi bubba,” she purrs, voice low, syrupy, curling around the air like smoke. She shifts her weight just enough for the lace to stretch tight across her breasts, her hips angling toward him like an invitation. “You gonna keep ignoring your future wife?”

For a moment, something breaks. Jeno glances up. It’s brief, but real. His gaze drifts—slow, deliberate—tracking the slope of her body: the glossy swell of her breasts, the cinched curve of her waist, the open, slick line of her thighs framed in lace. His lips part without meaning to. His jaw shifts, tense for half a second. Beneath his shorts, there’s a twitch—small, quick, a reflex he doesn’t allow to grow. And then it happens. A flicker, so faint it almost passes unnoticed. His eyes narrow just slightly, the corners of his mouth pulling back in the barest twitch. Not a smirk. Not quite a wince. Something instinctive and unfiltered—like a taste gone wrong, like disgust he hasn’t named yet, rising from someplace deep and automatic.

Then, like a shadow slipping off his face, it passes. Whatever flickered in him—want, revulsion, something unnamable—fades beneath the quiet blankness he wears like armor. He doesn’t speak. Doesn’t look at her again. Instead, he moves with eerie calm, the kind that feels deliberate, cruel in its precision. His hand lowers, placing the phone down on the stone lip of the pool beside him, screen up, still glowing. The image doesn’t fade. It bathes him in pale light, steady and unwavering. Behind him, Nahyun stands—bare-skinned, lace-clad, every inch of her honed to seduce. Her voice still hangs in the air, velvet-sweet, sticky with suggestion. Her body is flawless, posed, gleaming like temptation. And yet—none of it matters. Because on the screen, in that lit little rectangle of loyalty, it isn’t her he’s been staring at.

It’s you.

He slides his shorts off without urgency, just a shift of his hips and they fall in one slow drag to the deck, gathering limp around his ankles like they were never meant to stay on him in the first place, his cock freed and hanging heavy, half-hard already, thick at the base and flushed at the head, a drop of slick catching the light where it glistens against the curve of his thigh, and he doesn’t look at her, doesn’t move, just leans back with his arms slack at his sides and his eyes unfocused, like this isn’t even about her, like this isn’t about anything at all except the weight between his legs and the sky overhead.

She climbs into his lap with too much sweetness in her voice and not enough control in her hands, one palm splayed across his chest for balance, the other fumbling between them as she wraps her fingers around his cock and lifts her hips, guiding the head through her folds with a practiced sort of urgency, like she’s done this in dreams or mirrors or private rehearsal, and when she sinks down, it’s slow at first, deep and tight and wet, her walls pulling him in inch by inch, her breath catching on every stretch until she’s seated flush in his lap, thighs trembling, cunt full, a soft broken gasp leaving her lips like she’s trying not to moan too loud, trying to keep it controlled and pretty for him.

“There you are,” she breathes like it’s intimate, like it’s meaningful, like it’s earned, and starts to ride him with a rhythm that’s just a little too perfect, all angles and control, the bounce of her ass sharp, measured, glossy with slick where her skin meets his, her knees bracing against him, back arched, her tits dragging lightly across his chest every time she leans forward, and still he doesn’t look at her, his head tipped back, jaw flexed, throat bare to the sky, one hand lazily resting on her waist and the other falling useless beside him, fingers twitching slightly like he’s aware of the motion but doesn’t care to shape it.

She rocks her hips harder, letting out these high, breathy little whines that sound polished and designed, her moans sweet like honey melting in her mouth, and she presses her chest against him again, lips near his ear, sweat slick on her temples as she whispers nothings with the cadence of agenda, her words tangled up with breath and heat and strategy, “We have the shoot at noon, don’t forget, I confirmed with the agency, and the dinner’s at seven sharp, black tie only, we’ll match in velvet, you’ll wear the Saint Laurent I picked in Paris,” her cunt tightening on him as she speaks, as if her body’s trying to make the words mean more than they do.

His cock bounces once inside her, thick and wet where her cunt drags around him, and it pulls a sharper whimper from her lips, her rhythm faltering as the friction builds, her body starting to stutter with effort, but Jeno doesn’t look at her, doesn’t shift beneath her, just leans his head back slowly until it rests against the warm edge of the pool’s stone border, the muscles in his neck flexing slightly as he stares upward, gaze locked somewhere deep in the darkening sky like it’s the only thing worth seeing, like her body means nothing, like this is happening around him rather than to him, his hands rest loose on her waist, barely holding her, just enough to keep her from falling off but not enough to claim or guide or want her, his breathing shallow but steady, the kind that rides the edge of release without ever tipping into meaning.

“Say you want me,” she breathes into his neck, soft and syrupy like a kiss, her voice trembling at the edges but sharpened beneath, sweet the way poison is sweet when you dress it in perfume, her hips grinding in circles now, sloppy and wet, more need than rhythm, her body pressed so tight against his it feels like she’s trying to climb inside, her nails digging crescent marks into his skin as she whispers, “Say it, Jeno—say you need me, say you fucking love me, say you want to come inside me, that you’ll give me everything, just say it — because if you don’t, baby, I might just have to make a scene at that dinner tomorrow, tell everyone your little secret, wouldn’t that be fun—”

His eyes snap open like the temperature changed without warning, like the air thickened and soured in the space between heartbeats, and for one stretched second nothing moves at all. Her hips are still working, her cunt still dripping around him, her breath still caught on that fake sweetness she coats everything in, but his body has gone still beneath hers, breath tight, pulse misfiring, pressure climbing in a way that feels wrong. His cock twitches once too hard and the warning hits behind his ribs, not fear but a reaction, not thought but refusal.

He grabs her hips hard and lifts her off in one motion, clean and unceremonious, her body dragged up and off his cock with a slick, messy sound that leaves her open and twitching, a high gasp spilling from her lips like she wasn’t ready to be emptied so fast. His hands drop away the second she’s off him. His jaw is locked. His knees shift slightly apart. He leans forward and wraps a hand around the base of his cock with a kind of focus that looks like control but feels like severing. He leans forward, jaw clenched, hand closing around the base of his cock with a grip too tight to be for pleasure, wrist working in short, hard pulls, no rhythm, no grace, just motion, just necessity, his thighs tense and still as if bracing against gravity itself, and with each jerk he angles away from her, his body curling slightly inward like the last thing he wants is for any part of this to land where she is.

She’s still breathing hard, still shaking beside him, cunt flexing uselessly around nothing, but he doesn’t look at her. His hand works tight, rough, no rhythm to it, just force and friction and the urgency of not letting it happen inside. They’ve used protection before, she’s on the pill but he’s never finished inside her, not once, not even by accident. He doesn’t care how many precautions she stacks up, the idea of her with even a trace of him inside, even for a second, makes his stomach turn. His grip tightens like muscle memory, like recoil, every motion small and controlled, the angle of his wrist turned sharp to keep the spill contained, his hips held still, thighs braced, not a single part of him tipping toward her, like his body knows without needing to be told that nothing from him belongs in her.

He comes in a breath that barely breaks the silence, shallow and sharp through his nose like pressure releasing from something sealed too tight, his stomach tightening beneath his own hand as thick streaks of heat spill across his skin, landing high on his abs, lower on his chest, nowhere near her. His cock jerks with each slow pulse, flushed and wet, twitching against his stomach while his fingers stay locked around the base a moment longer than they need to, like part of him doesn’t trust it to stop. He stays there with his head slightly bowed, jaw tight, shoulders drawn in like the tension inside him broke without easing. When it’s done, when the twitching fades and the grip releases, he lets his hand fall to the side, fingers sticky, thighs loosening under her but not inviting, his body starting to come down but his eyes never lifting from the surface of the pool, still rippling from the movement earlier, glowing faint blue under the lights like something colder than the heat between them.

She watches him for a moment, her breath still uneven, chest rising fast then slower, cunt still flexing around absence. Her thighs tremble where they straddle his, wet and aching, and her hands hover at her sides like she doesn’t know whether to touch him, hit him or curl into herself. Then she laughs, a small, disbelieving sound under her breath like she’s been slapped with something invisible. “What the fuck was that?” she asks, voice thin and fraying around the edges like fabric stretched too far.

He just shrugs, low and uninterested, “What it needed to be.”

“You didn’t even look at me.” Her voice is low, almost quiet, but it carries that sharp edge she doesn’t bother to hide anymore, the one that rises when sweetness fails. “You can’t even come inside me. You can’t even pretend to want to.” She says it like a joke, like it’s funny, like she’s still in control, but her mouth shakes slightly at the corners and her knees shift on either side of his, like she’s trying to stay on top even when the high is gone. “I’m not asking for much, Jeno. I’m right here. I let you—” her voice breaks off, just slightly, and she swallows, then reaches for his shoulder like it’ll ground her, like touch might make it true again. “It’s not a crime to give a fuck.”

She opens her mouth to scream, to sob, to demand answers, some flicker of validation, and then her eyes on land on the stone lip of the pool beside them, his screen still unlocked, still glowing, still untouched since before he even looked at her, and the image displayed is not her, not even close, but a photo of you, soft and unfiltered, caught mid-laugh, hair falling out of place, smiling at something behind the camera, and his thumb print rests just near the edge of the screen like maybe he had been scrolling through you the entire time.

Her chest caves in, her lungs forget how to move, her hands curl into fists on either side of her bare thighs and she swallows once, twice, bile thick in her throat as she whispers, “What is that?” Her breath catches sharp and wrong in her throat, like something hooked itself behind her ribs and pulled, and she forgets how to inhale, forgets where her body is supposed to move, the air stalled between her collarbones and her spine as her gaze locks on the screen. She doesn’t want to see him look but she can’t stop tracking the slow tilt of his head, the turn of his face toward the phone beside him, she sees it, sees the moment something changes behind his eyes, sees how the muscles in his jaw still, how his mouth slackens just slightly, how his whole face seems to ease in the smallest, most dangerous way.

There’s something in his face she’s never him give to her before, something unguarded, drawn toward the screen like gravity lives there now. It’s attention, pulled clean and direct, his eyes soft at the edges, lips parted just slightly, the kind of stillness that only comes with wanting. The way he looks at the photo isn’t passive. It holds him. His whole body quiets under it. There’s a flush at his throat, a softness around his mouth, and for one suspended second she sees what it looks like when he’s drawn to someone — not just physically, not just out of need, but want, deliberate, low and sure. He doesn't look like that with her. Not when she moans against his neck, when her body wraps around his, not when she rocks herself raw just to pull sound out of him. She does everything, she gives everything but he never looks like this.

Her lungs stay locked for too long and when they finally open it’s fast, shallow and uneven, a ragged inhale like a gasp she doesn’t want anyone to hear, and her hands curl into fists on either side of her bare thighs, nails sinking deep into skin that doesn’t even register, her whole body buzzing with something too sharp to be just breathless. Her vision tilts at the edges. The lights smear. Her knees press tighter and her pulse races so loud she can’t tell if it’s inside her skull or under her skin, and when she blinks she can’t stop blinking, can’t stop swallowing, her mouth dry and sour as she stares at his face. He’s still looking at it. He hasn’t looked away. He’s staring at the photo of you — your smile out of frame, your body lit soft and clean, a moment he wasn’t even in but somehow lives in his head anyway — and it’s not the image that breaks her. It’s the expression on his face. Gentle. Present. Like something inside him is actually there.

She breathes in, shallow and sharp, like she’s about to speak, then doesn’t, her lips stay parted just long enough to tremble. Her eyes flick from his face to the phone again, then back, like she’s still hoping he’ll look away from it first but he doesn’t. That stillness is still in him. That softness. Her mouth curves. It’s not a smile. “Wow,” she says lightly, voice stretched into something breathy and almost amused, like it’s just gossip, just banter. “So she got herself knocked up, huh? Is that what this is?” A quick laugh slips out of her, dry and mean, like she’s entertained. “Who’s the father? Are you guys picking names yet or do we need to line up a few paternity tests?”

His gaze stays on the water, steady, unflinching, breath pulled slowly through his nose as if each inhale chooses patience over instinct. The muscle in his jaw flexes once. Heat settles beneath his skin, clean and silent, and his mouth tilts just slightly, something like a smile but shaped with contempt. He gets used to tuning her out, used to the sugar-laced venom, the way her words always reach for something they can’t touch.

She leans in slightly as she says it, eyes glittering, voice sweet as sugar syrup. “I mean, come on, it’s not like she’s known for keeping her legs shut.”

His eyes stay on the water, steady, detached, the kind of stillness that says everything without shifting an inch. The glow from the pool cuts along his jaw, calm at the surface but carved clean underneath. Her voice scrapes at the air, bitter and thin, but he lets it roll past like wind he has already walked through. His fingers press once against the ledge, measured, his posture all silence and tension. Then he speaks, low and smooth, the kind of voice that holds weight no matter how soft it sounds. “Nahyun.” His tone barely shifts. “Just stop talking.”

Her pout deepens like she’s been wounded, like his voice bruised her pride more than any shove ever could, and she leans in again, lashes fluttering, hips brushing close to his. “Why?” She whispers, fingers curling over his wrist like sweetness might pry an answer out. “Why are you being like this?”

He waits just long enough for her to think he might not answer at all, then lets out the flattest, driest, most unbothered exhale of breath. “Because I have a headache.” The words land with no inflection, no smile, just cool finality, like she’s the migraine.

Her lips push forward in a pout, soft and automatic, like habit, like she can still play the game. “But I was joking,” she murmurs, blinking slowly, head tilted just enough to pass for sweet. “I didn’t mean it like that. You know how I get when I’m nervous.”

“Nahyun.” The pause holds. “Just stop before I decide I’m done being polite.”

Her mouth pulls into a pout, glossy and trembling, like the words tasted worse coming out than they sounded, and she shifts forward on her knees, hands crawling over the stone ledge and then to his thighs, slow and deliberate, her voice curling into something soft. “I’m sorry,” she whispers, head tilted, lashes lowered, already climbing into his lap like gravity called her there. Her knees slide open around his hips, satin skin brushing his as she settles down, body warm and pliant, all sweetness now. She presses her chest to his, her fingers sliding up his arms, across his shoulders, into his hair like she’s smoothing the moment away, and she leans in with a kiss that lands just below his jaw, hot and lingering, her lips trailing lower as she murmurs again, “I didn’t mean it, baby, you know I didn’t.” Her hips roll once, light, teasing, breath catching as she drags herself against him with slow, syrupy pressure, hands everywhere now — his stomach, his sides, his chest — like if she touches him enough he’ll forget the sound of her voice a minute ago, like she can pull the apology out of his skin instead of his mouth.

The silence stretches long enough to sting, long enough for her to shift on his lap, thighs pressing tighter around his hips, her hands curling around his jaw like she can coax a reaction out of stone. His face stays still. His breath doesn’t change. His eyes never leave the water. She swallows once, then twice, then lets her voice drop low, curious and sweet like she’s asking out of interest, not need. “Who’s the baby then?”

The question hangs, soft but pointed, and for a beat he considers keeping it closed but then he remembers Jaemin’s voice, calm as ever, from that last conversation they had: “I’m not keeping her quiet anymore. When she was born, I needed space, time to get things right, but that chapter is over now. We’re ready, she’s ready, her health is finally stabilising, I want her to live a normal life. Plus, people are going to start asking questions, so I’d rather show her to the world the way she deserves, on my terms. She needs to feel that love from the people I trust, the ones who matter.” So Jeno nods once, like it’s an answer to himself before it’s one for her, and when he speaks, his tone stays level. “Jaemin’s daughter.”

Nahyun scoffs, short and sharp, like the words offended her by existing. “Since when does Jaemin have a daughter?”

His eyes don’t shift. “Nearly one year.”

She pulls back slightly, enough to blink at him, enough for her hands to slip from his face to his shoulders like she’s trying to recenter. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Jeno’s gaze stays fixed, steady on the water, his voice low and even like the words have been sitting inside him for a while. “Because it was never yours to know. Jaemin didn’t tell anyone, not just you, so don’t take it so personally and don’t make it about yourself. He disappeared before she was born, no texts, no updates, nothing, he had completely vanished. I couldn't even reach him, and I tried every day. It didn’t start with Haeun, it started months before her. He needed out, it’s a blessing she came when she did because she saved him.”

His fingers press once into the stone ledge, slow and deliberate. “She’s had a rough first year and so has he. He needed privacy, not to hide her, but to focus, fully, on giving her a life she could hold onto. No noise, no pressure, no cameras or crowds. Just him and her, that’s what he chose and the only reason I found them is because I wouldn’t let go. I kept on looking until I found him, and when I did, I found a baby girl with a heart so fragile it scared me just to be near her. He didn’t stay quiet to shut the world out. He did it so he could give her the world first.”

She tilts her head like someone hearing bad news they already know won’t touch them, her lips parting into a small pout, eyes softening just enough to fake depth, trying to work out where in that story she’s supposed to care. One manicured hand lifts to her collarbone, fingers brushing lightly over skin like she’s reacting with emotion, but her breath stays even, her voice low and flat in the wrong way. “That’s… really sad,” she says, slow and delicate, like she’s reading from a card. Her gaze flicks to his chest, not his face, then away just as fast, already shifting her weight like the moment’s passed. “Must’ve been hard, I guess.” She doesn’t ask about the baby, ask how she’s doing, if she’s strong now, if her heart’s holding up. There’s no follow-up. No care. Only silence filling the beat before she steps right past it.

Her tone lifts before her face does, brighter now, lighter, already somewhere else. “Anyway,” she breathes, tucking hair behind her ear, “we really do need to talk to someone about the schedule—everything’s back to back next month and no one’s factored in Jaemin finally being back. We’ve got the Saint Laurent dinner, and Paris fashion week’s opening night, and I got the official invite for the Venice premiere. You know, the one where they’re expecting full couture and editorial coverage—” her eyes flick to his again, suddenly excited, mouth glossy and half-smiling, “it’s going to be so good for us. Press, photos, all of it.” Her hand lands softly on his leg, like she just remembered to be sweet. “We just need to stay ahead of it, right?”

Jeno exhales slowly, long and quiet, the kind of sigh that comes from somewhere low in the body, where patience used to live. He pushes himself up from the ledge without a word, water slipping from his skin in clean streams, his body bare under the low pool lights, tension rolling through his shoulders as he steps out with deliberate stillness. He doesn’t look back or reach for a towel. He walks naked and silently back into the house.

Behind him, Nahyun scrambles to her feet, nearly slipping on the wet stone as she grabs for her robe, her voice fluttering after him like tissue caught in wind. “Wait—Jeno, wait—I didn’t mean it like that, babe, I’m just saying—it’s just hard on everyone, that’s all—wait for me—” Her steps are quick, almost clumsy, legs too long for the panic in her voice, her movements all gloss and no gravity, like a doll trying to chase a man who already left.

The suite is dim when he steps through, the light from the pool still flickering faint on the glass walls, casting ripples across the white stone. The bathroom glows gold behind frosted glass, the shower already running, steam bleeding out across the floor like breath. He walks in without a glance back, stepping beneath the spray, the heat dragging over his body in heavy streaks as water pools at his feet and runs down the clean lines of his back. His hands press flat to the tile, eyes closed, water darkening his hair, breath even. He stands there in stillness as the steam builds and then she enters like she always does. Quiet but aching to be noticed, robe whispering to the floor, her silhouette soft in the light as she steps inside and slides her arms around him from behind, the press of her breasts slick against his spine, her hands curling around his waist. She tilts her head into him, lips brushing the curve where neck meets shoulder, voice syrupy against wet skin, something like apology threaded into sweetness as her fingers move down, over his stomach, around his hips.

He turns without resistance, catches her face in his hand, and kisses her like it’s not forgiveness, not affection — just muscle memory, clean and closed. His mouth drags hers open with heat and breath, no rush, no hunger, just pressure. She moans into it, soft, grateful, nails pressing into his back as she lifts herself higher, thighs wrapping around him before she even realizes how ready she is. He lifts her by instinct, her back pressed hard to the tile, one hand under her thigh, the other gripping her jaw as he pushes into her in a single slow thrust. She gasps — breath breaking, head tilting back — and the sound echoes across the glass like a ripple. His rhythm is relentless but calm, each movement deliberate, his eyes locked on her face like he’s watching a performance he already knows the ending to. She wraps tighter around him, arms shaking, voice faltering in praise, but he doesn’t answer, just keeps fucking her with the kind of control that feels surgical, her pleasure nothing more than a rhythm to hold.

When it’s over her cheek rests against his shoulder, lips parted, legs still trembling around him as the water runs down her back and his breath evens out again, his hands slow now, sliding over her hips, through her hair, resting for a second at the base of her neck before he speaks. “Tomorrow’s important.” He says it like a fact, tone nonchalant but filled with warning.

Her breath catches, her lashes fluttering once as her eyes lower, and her voice comes out soft, trying to stay sweet. “I know,” she murmurs, almost too quietly, like she hopes softness can rewrite what she knows is coming. “I’ll be perfect.”

His fingers move again, this time curling lightly under her jaw, tipping her face up just enough for their eyes to meet as steam coats the mirrors and his voice drops.“You better.” His tone doesn’t rise. His eyes don’t flicker. “You ruin that night and I’ll leave you standing in it.”

The Legacy Court Complex emerges from the cliffside with the weight of something sacred, every line carved into the Alpine stone like it was meant to exist before blueprints were ever drawn. From above, the structure appears as a dark cut through the white, glass catching sky at a sharp angle, obsidian stone drawing a boundary against the mountain, geometry so exact it feels like it was discovered rather than constructed. Helicopters move in coordinated intervals across the air, their descent slow and deliberate, rotors sweeping the snow into soft spirals that drift upward before dissolving. The landing terrace stretches wide and bare, the stone beneath polished to reflect more shadow than light, and each arrival plays out with choreographed restraint. Doors open with soundless precision. Figures step out one at a time, each one wrapped in wool and cashmere, coats belted high, gloves fitted close, platinum invitations held with fingers that have never fumbled. No lines form, no voices rise. The complex receives them like it remembers them.

Past the court’s edge, a corridor curves inward toward the archival wing, a long, dim hall lined in frames that climb the stone wall from knee to crown, each one inset with anti-reflective glass and museum-grade lighting. The first few hold black-and-white legends, their jerseys stiff with era, their expressions quiet and proud. The next shift into color, into sharper footage, into limbs extended mid-air, sweat glinting, teeth bared, motion frozen just before impact. One by one, they move forward in time, names that reshaped eras, arms that built empires, faces that lived across generations of screens. Jordan. Bryant. Garnett. Duncan. Curry. Every photograph in the hallway is dated and placed, each one selected from the moment that changed a season. The gallery reads like scripture. Each frame is a page, each face anointed.

At the very end, mounted beneath a new arc of white light, a final portrait waits. Jeno. Caught in the apex of a jump, mid-air, ball still lifting from his palm, breath visible in the cold above the court. His name is etched below in clean type, no embellishment, just fact. The plaque reads ‘Lee Jeno, Europa Trust Legacy Award, 2025.’ The wall has carried decades of greatness, but now it carries him. He stands before it without moving and his body stills, his suit doesn’t crease. The glass holds both, the image framed in stillness and the figure standing before it, their outlines nearly seamless, one suspended in motion, the other shaped by everything that followed. The light wraps them together in a soft gleam, reflection and portrait fused at the edge, twin echoes drawn from the same silence. The shutter clicks once, crisp and far away, but he remains exactly where he is. The moment folds into him like a thread pulled tight across the chest, something invisible, something ancient, something worn like iron beneath his skin.

At the end, the space opens with scale, the kind that holds its own silence, stretching into height with a stillness that feels earned rather than offered. The court reveals itself beneath the mountain like a preserved relic, a chamber shaped by reverence, each surface curated with the same care reserved for cathedrals and museums. The parquet floor gleams in long uninterrupted panels, hand-laid in a pattern that mirrors the golden ratio of the original Boston Garden, each plank sealed in lacquer so clear it reflects outlines before it reflects movement. The room’s proportions trace the legacy of the Chicago Palace, rebuilt by three award-winning architects whose lines bend like memory and precision combined, their names cast discreetly into the foundation beneath the marble edge. Above, the ceiling stretches into a vast inverted dome, structured in netted crystal, a constellation of shot arcs, rebounds, and suspended form, each piece hand-cut and strung in mathematical rhythm, refracting light across the court like breath caught mid-air. The shimmer moves without rush, soft and full of tension, casting gold across wood in long ripples. The temperature sits in perfect calibration, tuned for tailored wool and sculpted skin, designed to preserve elegance rather than react to it.

Along the perimeter, recessed lounges line the curve of the room, each one carved deep and upholstered in velvet the color of dried wine. The seats are spaced in clean, private symmetry, enclosed in gold trim and glass panels so subtle they fade into the architecture. Each one is marked discreetly, house crests, insignias, founding dates pressed into the corner in shadowed embossing. Guests step into their spaces like they are returning to them. Foundation directors, captains of defunct dynasties, firstborns and financiers all dressed in iterations of inheritance, monochrome suits cut like armor, evening dresses folded like sculpture. Each body holds its place with quiet precision, no slouch in spine, no flicker of distraction, only posture shaped by bloodline and silence carried like inheritance.

Jeno and Nahyun’s hands link with the kind of ease that’s been rehearsed, his fingers resting just behind hers, barely curled, skin against skin in a way that reads intimate from a distance but carries no anchor beneath it. Nahyun moves beside him in a dress the color of moonlit glass, cut to drape off one shoulder and slit high enough to part around each step like fabric made to chase camera flashes; her lips are lacquered, lashes curled wide, collarbone gleaming with something deliberately expensive. Jeno wears black, sharp and matte, collar firm, cufflinks discreet, the suit fit so exact it carries silence in the seams, and together they move through the gallery floor with the kind of slow authority reserved for people who no longer need introductions. Hands reach to greet them, nods tilt in their direction—veterans with weight in their names, men who once carved empires out of courtlines, suits that speak in legacies and trade history—Jeno meets each one with a nod so slight it borders on stillness, says nothing but lets his presence fold into theirs like he’s already surpassed the story they expected of him.

Music stirs above them, unannounced and unhurried, a quartet tucked behind a carved archway playing from shadow, the sound uncoiling with reverence rather than rhythm. It’s an anthem he knows—everyone does—but the tempo has been hollowed out, each note slowed to the breath between memory and echo, the melody rising soft like a eulogy hummed into glass, and as the first few measures melt into the room like polished stone, his spine pulls straighter, shoulders still. The projector comes alive without warning. No frame. No sound cue. Just a flicker on the far wall, a pulse of white light softening into motion, and before he even registers what he’s seeing, his grip on Nahyun’s hand releases.

His father.

Taeyong in flight. Taeyong in stillness. Taeyong mid-rotation, the ball leaving his fingers with the kind of precision that lives beyond physics, the arc clean, the form holy, sweat glinting at the base of his throat like it belongs there. There’s no commentary, no title card, just moment after moment stitched together from different years, different jerseys, different lighting, from his prime, all of them folding into each other like time never broke. Jeno doesn’t move. His chest expands once, slow and shallow, like surf dragging against the pull of tide, and he stays there suspended, breath caught high in his throat, gaze locked to the wall like it might split open and pour the past out in salt. He doesn’t blink, doesn’t shift, doesn’t speak—just stands with his mouth slightly parted, as if the shape of a name has risen behind his teeth but lost the sound to carry it, and when the voice comes, low and deliberate and cut from the same steel that once ruled the court, it doesn’t arrive like memory, it arrives like undertow. The room doesn’t fall quiet because quiet was already woven into its bones—it just holds still, like a wave stilled mid-rise, and in that moment he becomes part of it, breathless and bracing, spine upright against a current that only he can feel.

Jeno’s hand closes around Nahyun’s without looking, palm firm, grip tighter than it needs to be, and he leads her forward in silence, their steps echoing against polished stone as the projection fades back into the wall. The corridor opens in two clean angles, revealing the inner hall where the award will be given, the ceiling climbing higher, the air rich with the scent of cedar oil and ironed wool, the lights dimmed to dusk tones along the walls. The carpet underfoot runs deep and smooth, the kind that muffles heels and softens each step until it feels like walking through breath, and as they move through the threshold, the space stretches around them, rows of velvet seats dipped into the floor like theatre stalls, each pair centered with a candlelit table holding a single engraved program and two flutes of still champagne. Brass rails gleam at the edge of each tier, the floor subtly lit from beneath so the architecture glows without ever showing the source.

They are led toward the center row, front and exact, the seats placed directly across from the stage, a low platform set in ivory stone, the backdrop smooth and curved like the inside of a chapel, its surface empty but radiant, prepared to carry whatever name is about to be spoken. Nahyun lowers herself with a flick of her train, crossing her legs elegantly, the hem of her blue dress catching the gold footlight beneath the row. Her hand stays on his knee. Her perfume opens soft in the warmth. She leans toward him with a smile that touches only her mouth, whispering something that sounds rehearsed, “This is the moment, baby. You look like power.” Her nails tap lightly on the program as she glances around the hall, eyes tracing the coats, the house names, the cameras hidden like sculpture in the corners. Jeno doesn’t respond. He sinks into the seat with both feet planted, spine upright, his hands pressed to his thighs as he watches the empty stage. His father’s face is still printed behind his eyelids, etched into the air above the projection wall, not from the footage but from something older, something caught in the way his name was spoken, like stone cracking under its own weight. The speech lives behind his ribs, already memorized but constantly shifting, rewritten in the language of silence, of obligation, of everything he has trained himself to carry.

A single spotlight lands on the stage, slicing the hush with warmth, and the host steps into view, a former franchise star in deep navy velvet, his medals worn as accessories, his smile tuned to elegance. The mic waits for him like a cue. He speaks slowly, practiced, with gravity that flatters without imposing. “Good evening, distinguished families, honored guests, and keepers of the court. We gather tonight at the Legacy Complex not only to reflect, but to consecrate. “This award,” he lifts the plaque, silver set in white, gleaming under the light, “is more than a title. It is testament, to weight carried across seasons, to form held under fire, to discipline measured not by restraint but by how long it endures. The Europa Trust Legacy Award is granted only when legacy surpasses lineage, when performance turns myth, when consistency becomes history. Tonight it is awarded to an athlete whose name echoes across continents, stitched into languages that speak sport like scripture, whose record now stands unmatched, eighty-two consecutive starts without injury, highest point efficiency under pressure in the league’s modern era, three back-to-back franchise pivots with no loss in form. His balance redefined movement, his silence redefined presence, and his ascent was not a rise but a return to the place that always waited for him.” He looks up and his eyes find Jeno’s. “And so, without delay I’m honoured to present this award to Lee Jeno, this is your court.”

Applause rises like a tide pulled by moonlight, smooth at first, then swelling into something full and rhythmic, hands clapping in measured succession, camera shutters joining like quiet percussion beneath it. The lights above sweep slowly across the audience, picking up the gleam of velvet shoulders and champagne flutes, while the stage remains still, held in that suspended breath just after the name is spoken. Jeno doesn’t move, he remains seated in the center row, jaw tight, eyes fixed where the projection had once flickered, his face half-shadowed and perfectly framed by the overhead live feed, his image now cast large against the back wall, composed, breath shallow, mouth parted as if something unsaid still lingers between his teeth. His father’s voice echoes nowhere now, but Jeno still hears the cadence, still sees the arc of that shot frozen in time, still feels it hover just behind the eyes.

A warm hand presses against his shoulder, fingers firm, familiar, his manager, leaning in just close enough to speak low without a microphone. “Go on.” The words come like a click in the mechanism, a quiet shift that resets his spine. Jeno blinks once, eyes sharpening like glass under pressure, and rises in a single motion, legs straight, suit folding clean at the knee, collar sitting crisp against the cut of his jaw. Nahyun turns toward him with her smile already in place, mouth glossy, lashes dipped, and presses a kiss just below his ear, a whisper tethered to it that doesn’t quite reach his expression, “you’ve got this, baby.” The cameras catch the moment exactly how she wanted. His hand moves out of hers before the second frame. He steps into the aisle with the grace of something rehearsed in private, steps cut to soundless rhythm, the floor beneath him reflecting his movement like water catching shadow.

Jeno stands at the podium with his jaw set, his hands resting flat on either side like he knows exactly how much pressure to apply, his body cut into silhouette by the angle of the overhead lights, posture tuned, shoulders broad, collar perfect. The hall leans into the silence that follows, a silence he owns, and when he speaks, the voice that emerges carries no urgency, only gravity, a quiet command that tightens the room without force. “I spent the last twenty seven years choosing this,” he says, no rush in the words, only shape. “Choosing the pain, the loss, the repetition. Choosing to wake before light, choosing to lose before I learned how to win. Every movement cost something, blood when the cut didn’t stop bleeding, sweat when the court kept burning, and tears when no one else stayed to see it.” His voice stays even, but it holds. “None of it was chance. This is what it looks like when a body survives the pressure it chose for itself.”

He lets the pause stretch, lets the breath fill the space, then lifts his eyes just slightly, locking on no one and everyone at once. “I’m here because of who stood next to me. Because of the names I carried and the ones that carried me.” His tone shifts, quieter but firmer, his right hand sliding once over the edge of the podium before falling still again. “I want to thank my brother, Mark Lee. Playing basketball with you in our raven days changed my life.” His voice stays low, shaped by memory more than emotion. “Those courts built the way I move and you were part of every rep that made me sharper.”

Another breath, pulled clean. “My mother. Seulgi. Who gave everything before I understood what sacrifice looked like. She held the roof over me and told me I could build my own. She is the reason I know how to stand still and still be strong.” The crowd holds still with him, the air charged, shaped around his cadence. “Jaemin. My best friend. My mirror. My proof that love and loyalty don’t have to shout to be real.”

His gaze slips sideways, drawn to her through instinct more than intention, and for a breath that stretches too long to be casual, he just looks, Nahyun bathed in the low shimmer of the stage lights, her body coiled into a perfect seated shape, back straight, gown clinging like liquid foil, lips parted in a smile already timed for the flash. Her eyes catch his like they’ve been waiting, rehearsed, ready. There’s a softness she summons — glossy, practiced — the same one she’s used in interviews, the same one she wore the first time she slid a hand across his jaw and said ‘we’re unstoppable.’ He watches her long enough for the room to expect something. His manager probably would like it, even. A nod, a name, an acknowledgment to his fiance, a gesture that paints the right headline and for a second, he imagines doing it. Giving her the last slot. Letting her name carry the aftertaste of legacy.

But then the light behind his eyes sharpens, the projector still playing somewhere in the back of his skull, Taeyong’s frame frozen mid-jump, arm extended in that impossible line, mouth slack, eyes already beyond the arc. The silence of that image pulls tight around his spine, wraps itself across the base of his ribs like a weight remembered too late to drop. His father’s voice floats up again — not proud, not warm, just cut clean — and the echo feels like iron in the mouth. It reminds him of what matters. Of who bled for this moment. Of what should be spoken and what should be left to silence. So he looks back at the crowd, jaw tight, throat dry, and lets the tension stretch out one second longer before he closes his hand gently around the edge of the podium and says it, calm and exact. “That’s all.”

Nahyun claps before he finishes the sentence, her hands crashing together with too much force, too much rhythm, too much everything — the sound sharp, uneven, her nails catching against her rings like she needs to hear something louder than what he didn’t say. Her smile stretches too wide, teeth flashing under the lights, lips trembling from the strain of holding it in place, and her eyes lock on him with a shine that could pass for pride if it weren’t brimming with demand. She leans forward in her seat like she’s about to rise, chest high, shoulders squared, mouth already parted as if she thinks there’s still a chance he might look back, might double back, might say her name late like a plot twist written just for her, and when he doesn’t, when the stage swallows him in motion and silence, her expression flickers — not into sadness, but disbelief, like the world’s cut her from the scene by mistake.

Her fingers tighten around her clutch until the beading imprints into her palm, the silver catching in the stage lights like broken glass, and she shifts her weight as if moving might change what just happened, as if posture can rewrite omission. Her gown spills like liquid mercury across the seat and floor, perfect in every angle but heavy now, as if even the fabric is punishing her for waiting. She claps again, softer this time, mechanical, like she can’t remember how to stop, her face fixed in something breathless and brittle. Jeno never looks her way. He descends from the stage with the award in hand, eyes focused forward, footsteps unhurried, and holds the plaque like he’s forgotten it was meant to be precious, like it weighs exactly what she no longer does.

The applause has dissolved into conversations pitched just above candlelight, the sound of glass stems tapping against gold-plated rims, and Nahyun moves through it like she’s been choreographed, one hand still looped around Jeno’s arm, the other smoothing the edge of her dress with a touch too performative to pass as absentminded. Her heels click faster now, rhythm slightly off from the music in the room, posture taller than usual like she’s compensating for something unseen, and when she pulls him toward a man in navy velvet with a Legacy Sport pin at his collar, she interrupts mid-sentence with a smile like a mirror turned too bright. “We’ve been thinking about a spring ceremony,” she says, nails brushing the inside of Jeno’s wrist as she speaks, her voice styled to sound soft but slip into the space like perfume. “Seoul always photographs best in April.” The man glances at her, then at Jeno, then somewhere else entirely as he changes the subject without blinking, and her smile doesn’t fall but it tightens, like silk stretched across glass.

By the second round of drinks she’s speaking in wedding syntax, weaving it into conversations that had nothing to do with her, turning small talk into strategy as she gestures just wide enough to catch the downlight against her ring. “He helped design it, you know, I said no diamonds at first, but he wanted something timeless,” she tells a woman whose badge says investor but whose earrings say old money, her fingers grazing the rim of her wineglass, each swirl of her hand angled to flash the stone. “I’m still getting used to the weight,” she adds, louder, as someone walks past behind her, and when no one responds, she sips without breaking eye contact. Every question she asks is baited — “Would you choose lace or silk for a winter ceremony?” “Do you think candlelight photographs better than uplighting?” — and each time, her smile holds until it bruises. A photographer passes and she shifts toward the lens like her body already knows how to find the light, like there’s no difference between being in love and being in frame.

Jeno stays beside her, but his stillness grows louder with every minute, the shape of his silence sharper than any disagreement could be, and when people speak to them both, his answers cut diagonally through hers like wires misaligned. “That’s more her vision than mine.” “We’re figuring it out.” “It’s a process.” His mouth moves but his eyes stay elsewhere, and when someone jokes about punctuality — “Don’t be late to your own wedding, Lee” — he smiles with his teeth but not his mouth, the kind of expression that doesn’t sit well on camera. Nahyun laughs too hard, touches his cheek like she’s turning him toward the spotlight, but he moves just enough for her to feel it, the recoil subtle, precise, real.

She guides him toward the media wall after that, arm still wrapped around his, and the flash goes off the moment he steps away to adjust his cuff, catching him mid-turn, his jaw in profile, expression unreadable, alone. The image hits feeds within hours, clean, striking, untouched by context. while the second photo, the one where she’s laughing at something he’s already turned away from, circulates with captions that sting in their simplicity. One says, She thinks this is still about her. Another: When the ring is the only thing in focus. By the end of the night, she’s heard enough to know what people are saying without needing to ask. A woman near the exit murmurs, “She’s trying to marry a legacy.” A man nearby says, “That’s not a couple. That’s a costume.” And a gossip blog posts a candid of her reaching for his hand mid-step while he’s already walking forward, the headline clean and cruel, ‘you can’t hold onto someone who already let go.’

She finds him near the marble hallway behind the main floor, where the air is cooler and the lighting falls in gold streaks along the walls, and she pulls him by the wrist like it’s an emergency masked as affection, her voice still sugar but thick at the edges. “You didn’t tell anyone about the date, or the venue, or the ring.” Her eyes shine with the kind of disbelief that doesn’t understand how to die quietly. “You didn’t say my name.”

He doesn’t speak right away, just breathes slowly, eyes low, jaw tight from holding in something that never needed to be said until now, and when it comes, it’s flat, no edge, no effort. “Because we haven’t even planned the wedding.” His voice stays steady, each word measured like it’s been waiting in his chest. “And they didn’t ask.”

Her breath stutters, lashes batting hard, mouth parting like the sentence wounded her, not just hurt but humiliated, and her voice rises too quickly to sound stable. “That’s not true.” It spills before she means it to. “You said you wanted something small, you said you didn’t care about the venue, that it could be anywhere, as long as I was there. You said that. So now what — now it’s not real just because we didn’t put it on a fucking Pinterest board?” Her hand tightens against his jaw, nails digging slightly into his skin like pressure will make the moment true, and her face twists with that bright-sharp pain she always wears when she’s cornered, glossy eyes, trembling lips, performance made from panic. “I’ve worn this ring every single day like it means something. I’ve changed my name in my notes app. I’ve had conversations with people about what to call me after we’re married. Do you even see me anymore, or do you want me to be someone else?”

He exhales once, slow, the weight of her emotion sliding over him like water on stone, and his voice comes lower, steady, shaped to anchor her without offering anything more than the bare minimum. “I see you. You’re here. This is happening.” His thumb brushes over her wrist as if that could pass for tenderness, and he leans in, closes the space between them with a kiss, not cold, not empty, but not pulled from heat either. It’s containment. A gesture built for peace and it almost lands until the sound of leather soles breaks the hallway quiet, and a voice cuts clean through the air behind them, bright, familiar, irritatingly amused. “There you two are,” says Jeno’s manager, stepping into the light with a grin too wide for the atmosphere. “The night isn’t over yet.” His hand gestures back toward the hall like an invitation, but his tone makes it a command, already turning to lead the way as if he never noticed the tension bleeding down both their wrists.

Jeno pulls back first, the kiss half-finished, breath still caught between them as he turns away without a word. Nahyun blinks, lips still parted like she might chase it, but he’s already walking. Already following. Already back in the shape the world expects him to fill. They return to their seats like nothing happened. Only the cut of the silence has changed.

The lights dim again, low and slow like a curtain drop, and Jeno exhales as he settles into the velvet seat, the pressure still lingering beneath his ribs like residue. He can feel Nahyun beside him, stiff, breath quick, thigh pressed hard into his, like she’s still trying to stay in the moment even though it’s already passed. Her energy is sugar-laced panic, too still to be calm, too alert to be composed, and he knows what comes next if he doesn’t intervene, the quiet unraveling, the questions, the voice that rises behind closed doors. He doesn’t want that. He wants sleep tonight. So he leans in, arm sliding around her shoulders like he means it, his lips brushing her temple in something that looks like comfort and tastes like surrender. “You looked beautiful tonight,” he whispers, the words warm but weightless, soft enough to soothe but hollow enough to pass, and her body stills slightly beneath his hand, her breath catching like maybe this is the moment that saves her.

The host’s voice returns, now smooth, rich with nostalgia. “Before we close the night, we want to take a moment to celebrate the journey of one of our own, Lee Jeno. The heart of modern basketball today. This is for everything it took to get here.”

The screen lifts in slow light, the kind of golden that lives behind the eyelids when you close them too long under the sun. A boy runs across uneven pavement in a backyard just wide enough for a game and just private enough to make it sacred, a plastic hoop bolted high against a crooked fence, wood splitting under rust and weather, the net tied back with string where it frayed. His sneakers slap too hard against the concrete, the ball bouncing wild under hands still learning how to control weight, not because he’s weak but because he loves it too much to let go. His laugh doesn’t belong to the camera, it belongs to the air, and the shot holds just long enough to show him chasing after the bounce even after it rolls past him, his fingers curling over it like it carries something more than rubber. Jeno feels his own throat tighten, a heat behind the ribs. That ball was his first secret. His first rhythm. His first way of keeping quiet without ever being still.

The screen cuts to an older video, softer in grain but sharper in meaning, two figures in frame. One small. One made of legend. Taeyong dribbles slowly, one-handed, bent slightly at the waist, eyes locked on a boy no taller than his ribs. Jeno stares up at him like the world exists in his palms. The ball bounces between them, deliberate, slow, rhythmic like a heartbeat passed back and forth, and then Taeyong steps back and gestures for him to try. Young Jeno plants his feet, lifts the ball, and shoots with every muscle in his arms — the motion clumsy, imperfect, too strong, but the sound of the swish lands clean. Taeyong claps once. Jeno looks at him and grins so wide it splits through the grain. In the chair, Jeno’s jaw tightens, his breath shallow, his posture frozen like muscle memory caught in motion. This was the first time the hoop opened like a doorway instead of a target, the first time the weight in his hands felt like belonging instead of pressure, the first time greatness bent low enough to meet his eyes and said ‘everything worth chasing already lives in your reach so take it and keep going.’

The footage shifts into the echo of a gym, the Little League season when the jerseys still came in a plastic bag, numbers printed too high on the back, everything oversized except the pressure. The sound of shoes squeaking on waxed court fills the speakers, high and close, and there he is — smaller than most of the team, faster than almost all of them, arms loose, form wild, dribbling down the side of the court with his tongue between his teeth. His face is serious in that way only children playing with purpose can be, expression pulled tight with concentration, even when his pass goes wide and the point doesn’t land. The ball returns to him and he moves again, no pause, no tilt of the head to check the scoreboard. Just the want. Just the movement. Just the decision to be better before he’s even learned what better means. Someone calls his name and he glances once toward the sound, a quick flick of attention, then takes the shot with his feet just shy of the line. It doesn’t need to land for the moment to hold. It just needs to be seen.

The footage sharpens into the Seoul Ravens era, the high school years where things stopped feeling like a dream and started demanding blood, the gym wider now, bleachers packed in navy and silver, the Ravens logo stretched across the court like a seal of initiation and Jeno moves through it with a focus shaped by repetition, his jersey no longer oversized but claimed, number stitched tight against his spine, feet sure, cuts clean, the pace faster but the rhythm calmer like his body had finally caught up to the ambition behind it. Coach Suh stands at the edge of the court in a structured jacket, face unreadable, arms crossed, only speaking when the moment earns it and every time Jeno looks his way he receives nothing but the expectation to rise so he does, over and over, even when his legs burn and his lungs scrape raw, because that’s what the Ravens meant — not flight, but fight. Jaemin runs beside him in one clip, eyes quick, hands signaling before Jeno even turns, the pass connecting like it was rehearsed in another life and the shot goes up without hesitation and drops clean through the net just as the gym erupts, and Areum appears next, barely in the frame but smiling wide with her fingers pressed to the glass, mouthing something he doesn’t read but still remembers, and in the next beat it’s Jeno on the bench during a timeout, towel over his shoulders, sweat catching on his jaw as he nods once to himself like the future had already introduced itself and he’d decided to answer.

The screen flares once more, light cascading like liquid gold through the stadium rafters, bathing every surface in radiant clarity as the state championship footage settles into view. The camera trembles slightly—breathless, urgent—but still manages to capture the decisive seconds counting down, numbers burning away into nothingness, as the court blooms into an ecstatic chaos. The ball arcs toward Jeno with almost poetic inevitability, spinning serenely as if guided by invisible threads only he commands. His feet slide effortlessly to the three-point line, a single perfect stride anchoring him firmly to the earth before he rises skyward, arms slicing through the air with a grace so precise, so practiced, it resembles scripture etched against dusk. The release is holy, a quiet prayer set loose, the basketball spinning serenely through the air before slicing through the net—smooth and effortless, silk splitting beneath glass.

The buzzer erupts a moment too late, overwhelmed by the roaring wave of sound pouring forth from the crowd, thunder wrapped in velvet, exploding in euphoric celebration. Teammates surge forward, voices raw with triumph, but Jeno remains momentarily rooted—eyes wide, mouth parted, frozen not in disbelief but in profound recognition, as though every nerve in his body had already whispered this outcome to him, and reality had merely caught up. He's barely taken a full breath before you collide into him, sprinting from the sidelines, face alight with wild, boundless joy, hair streaming behind you like a banner carried through battle.

He watches as you leap into him, your cheer skirt flying up with the force of your sprint, thighs flashing under the stadium lights as your pom poms tumble from your hands and scatter across the court like offerings, forgotten the second your body collides with his, legs wrapping around his hips without hesitation, your fingers diving into his hair while your lips find his with a gasp that’s half-sob, half-laugh, your hips grinding forward instinctively as he catches you with both hands gripping under your thighs, pulling you tighter into the cradle of him, breath spilling into your mouth like heat caught between two people who’ve waited too long to pretend this is just adrenaline, the kiss tipping into something deeper as you moan into him, soft and sharp and shaking, your skirt bunched around your waist and his hands flexing over your bare skin like memory and muscle had planned this all season.

Your lips find his cheek before intention registers, and his eyes flutter closed, surrendering immediately to the quiet sanctuary your touch creates amid the storm. His forehead dips to yours, his breathing ragged, chest rising and falling with breaths you've chased all season, your fingers knotting urgently into his jersey—holding onto more than fabric, anchoring him to this ephemeral now, grounding him as the world fractures open around you both. His hand rises tenderly, thumb tracing the delicate line of your jaw, noses brushing softly, lips parting just enough to taste the corner of his mouth, not fully a kiss but something hungrier—a whispered promise ignited in the heat of victory.

Confetti descends slowly, gold and white drifting lazily like snowfall inside a dream, catching in your lashes, brushing your skin in delicate caresses, but neither of you moves, locked in the quiet gravity of your shared orbit. And then the moment deepens—the kiss lands fully, your mouths melting together hot and open, your hand sliding possessively into the warmth at the back of his hair, the roaring celebration fading to insignificance beneath his absolute focus. He molds perfectly against you, his hips pressing insistently forward, fingers sinking into your curves like they've memorized every contour, the kiss neither polite nor reserved—it's fierce, greedy, raw. It speaks of victories earned, wounds healed, scars worn proudly; a kiss that knows intimately every sacrifice made to reach this pinnacle. You arch subtly, shifting him gently off balance, and he anchors you instantly, arm tightening protectively, mouth moving with silent, relentless devotion. A camera flash bursts briefly—neither of you blink—and his tongue sweeps tenderly against your bottom lip, pulling back just enough to whisper your name into your mouth, syllables reverent and heated, a prayer woven from sweat, triumph, and something deeper still.

Watching himself from the darkened audience, Jeno breathes differently now, the rhythmic certainty of his lungs disrupted, chest constricting sharply beneath his tailored suit, pulse visible at his throat like an unsteady heartbeat beneath thin ice. His gaze remains riveted to the screen, intensity cracking open something unseen within him, jaw tightening reflexively, hands resting deliberately still upon his thighs. It's not the win that unravels him—it's the raw intimacy of his past self, captured vividly in the way he once held you, claiming you not just as part of his victory but as its very essence. The way your mouth sought his without question, certain and unapologetic, a truth recognized in skin and soul. Nahyun beside him is utterly motionless, her eyes locked forward, knuckles blanching as they tighten against her satin clutch. Her carefully poised smile doesn't falter, though her stillness seems an attempt to rewrite a story already etched irrevocably into history. The footage fades. The room exhales collectively. But Jeno remains unmoving, pulse throbbing quietly, awaiting the inevitable—what comes next, the unraveling, the reflection, the ultimate reckoning with choices now impossible to escape.

Nahyun doesn’t blink for a full ten seconds after the screen fades, her body rigid in its posture like the fabric of her dress had hardened around her bones, her chest rising faster than it should beneath the sequins as though her heart is racing toward a truth her mind refuses to accept. Her hands stay curled on the clutch in her lap, knuckles stiff and bloodless, as she forces a soft laugh under her breath — high, almost musical, but too sharp to land as joy — and her voice spills out sweet and breathy like an actress closing a scene. “That clip was so old,” she says with a tilt of her head that looks like grace but tastes like panic, her tone styled for cameras that aren’t even on her. “We’ve filmed so many better moments. Paris, that week in Rome, that boat in the Maldives when you said I looked like a woman someone would fight for.” Her fingers glide along the inside of Jeno’s sleeve, feather-light, too rehearsed, her smile flickering wider as if daring the lights above them to turn back on and redo the scene with her in it this time. “They chose it because of the score. That’s the only reason, it has nothing to do with her, she doesn’t even look pretty —”

Nahyun turns toward him with the force of someone coming undone from the inside out, her breath catching before her words even form, her hands flying up to his arm and gripping it hard like a lifeline she has to hold or drown, her voice breaking the moment it leaves her mouth but still rising, still reaching. “You said she was just a phase, Jeno,” she says too loud, too fast, too breathless, like each syllable is chasing the one before it, like if she stops now the truth might slip through the cracks. “You said college never mattered to you, you said none of it lasted, you said you didn’t even remember what she looked like anymore, you said that win didn’t matter because you’ve won bigger ones with me, with me, with me.” Her smile shatters as it forms, mouth shaking into a laugh that doesn’t sound human, eyes wide with something too sharp to be sadness, too wild to be joy. She grabs his hand with both of hers now, pressing it against her chest like that touch could rearrange what just happened, like heat alone can rewrite the timeline. “We have real history. Real memories. Real life. I’ve already booked our honeymoon. I ordered matching rings for our dog tags. I’ve already spoken to Chanel about the gown. I’m the one who’s going to walk down the aisle, not her. I’m the one who’s going to get your babies, your name, your future.”

She leans in too close, her body pressed into his side, hands still locked around his as she breathes fast, uneven, almost gasping now as if the thoughts are too many to speak at once, as if the entire theater is shrinking around her and he’s the only anchor left. “You love me, Jeno. You said I was your peace. You said I made you feel still. You said you didn’t want anything else but me. You said I was your home.” Her fingers clutch tighter, her grip panicked now, frantic, nails digging lightly through the sleeve of his suit as she searches his face for proof, for softness, for anything that will tell her this isn’t the moment it all slips away. “Tell me that clip means nothing. Tell me it was just nostalgia. Tell me I’m the only thing that’s real now. Tell me. Right now. Please.”

Jeno’s eyes widen just enough to register the shape of the warning, his pulse tightening low in his throat as the sound of her voice coils sharper than the words themselves, and he recognizes it instantly, the pitch she only uses when she’s already crossed into the version of herself that speaks in ultimatums dressed as declarations, the tone that wraps desperation in sweetness and throws it like a blade, the one he’s learned to read like weather, like instinct, like a threat dressed in satin. His body stills beneath her grip, jaw flexing once as if weighing every possible version of wrong, and he moves only when the silence between them begins to drag too long, his hand lifting with practiced gentleness as he brushes her hair back behind her ear and leans in just enough to let the world think it’s affection. “I know,” he says, voice low, even and warm at the edges like comfort, like concession, like control shaped into calm. “I know what we are.” His lips press to her temple, light and slow, his hand staying against her cheek like he’s grounding her, but his eyes don’t close and his breath doesn’t shake and the words never touch the inside of his chest.

They come back to the hotel just past midnight, and the silence between them is louder than the echo of her heels on the marble floor. The clatter cuts through the hallway like a warning shot, sharp and deliberate, every step a wound neither of them acknowledges. He walks ahead, keys still in his hand, jaw tight, eyes unreadable. The front door clicks shut behind them, but the tension that’s been building all night doesn’t settle. It tightens. Coils. Gathers itself in the corners of the room like storm clouds. She doesn’t speak—not in the hallway, not as she shrugs off her coat, not even when she kicks off her heels with more force than necessary, letting them land where they fall. Her dress clings to her, satin and spite, the same deep blue that earned her camera flashes all night, the same blue he refused to even glance at.

“You didn’t touch me. All night.” Her voice isn’t raised, but there’s a crack underneath it, something trembling and furious. She’s not asking for an explanation—she’s offering a challenge. He turns slowly, meets her eyes without flinching.

“You didn’t shut up all night.” That hits. She laughs—sharp, cutting, nothing like joy. She steps forward, dress slipping around her thighs as she closes the distance.

“Is that what this is?” she spits. “You couldn’t kiss me because I was too loud? Because I smiled too big? Talked too much? What, am I too embarrassing for your legacy now? Is Nahyun too messy for your pristine little highlight reel? You didn’t even look at me, Jeno, not once, not after they played that fucking video, not after the entire world saw you kiss her like she was yours and smile like she mattered, like she was the reason you won, like I was never even in the story to begin with.”

He loosens his cuff in one slow motion, gaze cool, head turned slightly toward the window like the night might answer instead, and when he speaks it lands like fog, distant and dry. “It was the state championships, it was such a big moment, people remember the shot and I wasn’t with you then.”

She laughs instantly, too fast to sound real, and her voice jumps an octave as she storms across the room, dragging her earrings off and throwing them onto the bed like the sound might punctuate the unravelling. “They remember the way you looked at her. Don’t lie to me — don’t sit there like a statue and pretend you didn’t feel it too, like your fucking soul left your body and went back to hers when they played it. You’re still in that clip, I watched you relive it, I watched you breathe like she was still in your arms.” Her hand shoots out and grabs his wrist and she presses it against her stomach, breath shaking, lips parted. “You’re with me now. You promised me everything. You said you didn’t want the past, you said I was your future, you said I was forever.”

His head snaps toward her like a trigger pulled without hesitation, the calm in his jaw gone, his voice tearing through the space between them with sharp, final weight. “I never said that.” His hand drops from her grasp and he steps forward once, not to hold her but to break the rhythm, to cut the scene before she can twist the next line into fiction, his breath tight now, jaw locked, the heat in his eyes no longer soft but forged. “Not everything is about you,” he growls, louder this time, each word carved with precision and held long enough to hurt. “I was there to receive an award, for my game, for my name, for what I built. It wasn’t a party, it wasn’t your goddamn runway, it was my moment, and you walked into it like it owed you something, like I owed you something.”

She throws her hands up, laughing again, but there’s fire behind it now. “Oh, fuck you. You loved it when they chased us down in Milan. You loved it when they called us the power couple of the year. You loved it when I was a trophy for you. But now—what, I wear one tight dress, and suddenly I’ve ‘stolen your moment’?”

He moves toward her then, sudden and close. “You turned it into a photo op. You couldn’t even let me have that.”

“You make me lose my fucking mind, you—”

His eyes flash. “What did you lose, Nahyun? A brand deal? A stylist? Or did one of your pet photographers miss the shot?”

The slap comes fast, heat cracking across his cheek like a fuse finally touched flame, her hand trembling after the impact like it hadn’t caught up to what it just did. His head turns with it, the sharp twist of his jaw drawing the light across his cheekbone, but his body stays still, rooted, spine straight, breath measured as if every part of him had already braced for this. She stares at him, wild and shaking, chest rising too fast, fingers curling like they want to throw something else, and he only breathes — once, deep and slow, then again, deeper, sharper, like he’s dragging oxygen through restraint. And then he moves.

His hands find her waist like impact, rough and immediate, and he turns her so fast her back hits the wall with a thud that silences everything. Her dress rides high around her thighs, the fabric crushed between them as he grips her hips and yanks her flush against him, one hand at her jaw, the other at her waist, and still he won’t kiss her, won’t touch her mouth like it deserves softness. He pulls her panties aside with a motion that feels like war, not seduction, and when he thrusts into her it’s raw, brutal, full-bodied and breathless, the air between them hot with hate and heat and the kind of desperation that doesn’t wait to be forgiven. His jaw is clenched, throat tight, eyes burning at something behind her, through her, inside himself, and every thrust feels like punishment, not just for her, but for everything he’s never said out loud.

Her moans come fast, high, fraying at the edges like fabric too thin to hold weight, and she claws at his back, thighs trembling, breath breaking as she rocks against him harder, needier, frantic for friction, for proof. “What’s our future, Jeno?” she gasps, voice cracking like glass underfoot, “Don’t you want something that’s yours? Don’t you want my babies? Don’t you want to stay?” Her hands cup his face then, dragging his gaze to hers, mouth searching for connection, for closeness, for something real. But he doesn’t kiss her. He just fucks her harder, eyes dark, locked on hers like the intensity might disguise the emptiness behind it.

His breath catches for a moment at her words, not in tenderness, but tension, his jaw tightening as her voice breaks like crystal across his chest and her hands reach up like they could pull something true out of a face that no longer mirrors anything back. His rhythm doesn’t falter, it deepens, sharpens, the force of his body driving harder into hers like refusal shaped through motion, like denial disguised as devotion, and he stares into her eyes as if holding her there might force her to understand.

“You know what this is, you know I have no choice” he says, voice steady, almost quiet, but threaded through with something raw and buried. “You know why it keeps happening. You know what your father set in motion and what mine never got the chance to stop.” His fingers tighten at her side, not to bruise, to remind. “You know what was lost and what was owed. What this was meant to fix.” He pulls her hips forward again, slow and deliberate, like gravity is doing the work for him. “You know I didn’t ask for this and you know why I never walked out.”

His thrusts slow but never soften, rhythm tightening into something mechanical, unfeeling, a rhythm set by memory not desire, and his hand finds the back of her neck with a grip that doesn’t threaten, just holds, like a weight pressed to glass, like a warning left unsaid. “You want something to keep,” he murmurs, breath hot and unshaking against her cheek, “You think a child would make this permanent, that blood would bind me the way memory never could, but you don’t understand what’s already been traded.” His voice deepens, darkens. “You don’t know what my father had to erase to keep my name clean. You don’t know what yours offered in return. You want babies, Nahyun?” His grip tightens, final. “I would never bring a child into this, into this lie, this family, this fucking performance you’ve built like it’s a future. I wouldn’t trap my worst memory in this house, Nahyun. Let alone my blood.”

And just as her body begins to come undone, just as her thighs tighten and her voice lifts and she arches toward release, he pulls out, breath ragged, falls to his knees like gravity snapped the last thread in him, fists clenched against the floor, cock twitching once before he comes hard on the marble between her feet, head bowed like he’s praying to something no longer listening. She braces herself against the wall, dress twisted, hair falling from its pins, skin flushed and trembling with nothing left to hold.

She doesn’t move for a full breath, her eyes fixed somewhere above him like the ceiling holds an answer or a script or maybe a timeline where everything went the way she planned, and when she exhales it comes out through a laugh, small at first, soft and melodic, but it twists too quickly, brightens into something that shakes at the edges, and she turns to face him like the argument never happened, like the sex meant everything, like the story hasn’t already ended. “You always do this when it gets scary,” she says, voice sweet and rushing, eyes wet and full, hands smoothing her dress like she’s about to walk down an aisle no one else can see, “you push me away and pretend it’s fear but it’s not, it’s just habit, it’s just what happens when you’ve never had anything worth staying for until now and you don’t know how to carry it, but you will, you will, because you love me and you know this is real.”

She crosses the room slowly, her heels unsteady now, hair falling from its pins, lips parted like she’s still whispering to a dream, and she picks up her clutch from the dresser like it’s delicate, sacred, sets it down again and reaches for nothing, just air, just the space between them, then speaks again in a voice full of bridal lilt and practiced control. “They’re going to ask about the video,” she says, smile curling even as her throat tightens, “they’re going to say she looked happy, that you looked at her like she was the last thing you’d ever lose, but they’ll never understand what that really was, you were young and naive, you were chasing a feeling, she was just a moment that got filmed too well, and you didn’t know what forever looked like until you saw me in that Dior fitting room holding your ring.”

Jeno has no fight left in him, the space between them expands until the bed feels impossibly wide when they finally lie down. Nahyun curls onto her side, her back to him, eyes open and staring blankly at the far wall. Jeno remains motionless on his back, gaze fixed to the ceiling as if answers might bloom there, slow and careful like cracks in plaster. Eventually, their breathing aligns into something steady and shallow, slipping toward sleep in a rhythm of resignation. Nahyun's breathing evens out first, delicate and careful as if afraid to disturb the fragile truce of the moment. Jeno listens carefully, muscles wound tight beneath sheets that feel cool against his skin, thoughts circling relentlessly around the images of the night. Slowly, finally, he falls into restless sleep, dreams tangled and dark, his subconscious haunted by moments he can neither reclaim nor erase.

Morning arrives like an eclipse, sudden and consuming, the light aggressive and merciless as it bleeds through the curtains, spilling relentlessly over the bed. It feels apocalyptic, the warmth searing into his skin as though punishing him for every thought he kept hidden through the night. Nahyun wakes first, phone buzzing urgently on the bedside table, screen glowing ominously, relentless alerts stacked on top of each other like waves cresting before the crash. She reaches for it blindly, eyes barely open, heart dropping as headlines flood her vision—each more damning than the last, each tearing into a carefully maintained reality she had begun to trust.

By the time Jeno wakes, the room feels starkly different—tension hanging thick, air charged like before a storm breaks. Nahyun sits upright, rigid, phone clutched tightly, eyes hollow. He doesn't have to ask what's wrong; the silence already screams volumes. She hands him the phone without looking, and he scrolls through headlines with numb fingers, each title slicing deeper, sharper, bleeding truths he'd buried far too long.

“Lee Jeno: Love, Legacy, and the Woman Missing From the Montages” — The Athletic The Legacy Invitational Gala was designed to honor greatness, yet it exposed a fracture far deeper. Amid tributes to the late Lee Taeyong, a moment of startling clarity emerged—a clip from the Seoul Ravens' state championship victory resurfaced, capturing Lee Jeno’s euphoric kiss with renowned Apex Analytics strategist Y/N. While the moment drew collective awe, the conspicuous absence of Lee’s current fiancée, Kim Nahyun, sparked immediate and fierce public discourse. Analysts are left dissecting the delicate intersection between personal history and public legacy, questioning if perhaps Lee’s true legacy lies not in his heritage but in the woman who quietly disappeared from view, only to resurface in a flash of undeniable intimacy.

“The One That Got The Crown” — We all saw it—the glow, the exuberance, the unmistakable way Lee Jeno’s face softened at Y/N’s touch. The gala tribute, intended as a celebration of dynasties and inherited glory, inadvertently crowned someone else entirely. Legacy isn't only about bloodlines; it's about those who stand beside you, those who rewrite narratives and inspire victories. Perhaps, as Y/N stepped back into collective memory, the world realized they'd crowned the wrong queen all along. This isn't just gossip; it's a reckoning with public perception and emotional authenticity, proving once again that history—and legacy—often belongs to those we never saw coming.

“Who is Y/N?— Forbes Culture” — Until last night, Y/N was a name whispered mostly in niche industry circles. Known for revolutionizing player analytics with emotive storytelling, Y/N transformed Apex Athletics' Seoul branch into an influential powerhouse. But beyond professional acclaim, her personal history with Lee Jeno during the Seoul Hill Ravens era had largely faded from view—until a single clip resurrected her role in his narrative. Sources confirm she left Apex quietly a year ago, slipping beneath the public radar. Now thrust unwillingly back into spotlight, Y/N stands at the intersection of nostalgia, speculation, and legacy, prompting fresh curiosity about her abrupt departure and what lies ahead.

“The Forgotten Fiancée: gossipforum.tv” — The Legacy Invitational’s editing oversight—or deliberate choice—sparked an unexpected firestorm online. Kim Nahyun, celebrated influencer and fiancée to NBA star Lee Jeno, found herself erased from the evening’s key tribute montage. Fans quickly polarized: many condemning the gala for disrespect, others revealing a harsher reality—that few had even noticed her absence. Social media narratives spiraled rapidly, turning Nahyun into a symbolic figurehead of forgotten partners everywhere. With each repost, like, and biting comment, Nahyun faces not just public humiliation, but an undeniable truth: the world was looking elsewhere, focused on a past she'd believed was irrelevant.

Nahyun doesn’t blink as the screen fades, eyes glassy but dry, fingers curled around her phone so tightly the metal frame digs deep into her palm like a blade she doesn’t plan on letting go of, and even though the room stays still around her, quiet, unbothered, untouched, she can feel the entire narrative collapsing under her, the ground shifting beneath her spine, like waking in a life that’s no longer hers, like lying in a bed she spent weeks designing only to realize someone else had already left their imprint in the mattress. She doesn’t hand the phone to Jeno so much as discard it toward him without turning, as if looking at his face would confirm something irreversible, something sickening, something she’s already decided to ignore.

She moves with the stiff poise of a woman betrayed by fantasy, not reality—chest lifted, chin sharp, like she’s the one being wronged by the world for not clapping hard enough. She scrolls through every post and headline like she’s feeding off them, dragging them deeper and deeper into her bloodstream, and each image of you, smiling, glowing, being looked at like that, etches itself behind her eyes until the jealousy rots into something feral. She memorizes the photos like studying an enemy, like preparing for a face transplant she believes the world will thank her for, reading the captions like gospel, like scripture, like a prophecy that went wrong because someone cast the wrong lead, and when she stands in the mirror later that night, hair tied up like yours, lips glossy like yours, necklace subtle like yours, she doesn’t see herself at all, and she doesn’t care.

She dyes her hair darker two hours after the last article drops, chooses a cooler undertone to match the lighting in your college interviews, asks for volume and shape through the ends, shows the stylist a blurry screenshot she cropped to hide your face, and when she leaves the salon she walks past every reflective surface with her head tilted slightly, strands bouncing softly around her shoulders like they belong to someone with memory worth chasing, and when she gets home she waits by the mirror for Jeno to come out of the shower, hand already mid-swing to casually toss her hair back, neck exposed like a dare, but he doesn’t pause, doesn’t slow, just pulls on his hoodie and leaves a damp trail behind him on the carpet, and still she smiles into the mirror like she won something, because even his silence feels cinematic if she frames it hard enough.

The makeup comes next, soft and luminous with sheer foundation and cream blush pressed into her cheekbones exactly where you wear it, brows brushed upward with restraint, lashes curled and left almost bare, lips filled in with a mauve balm she had overnighted from a niche brand she saw in the background of a locker room clip where you smiled after someone called your name, and she studies the light across her face in different rooms of the apartment until she knows which lamp mimics golden hour best, sits there practicing her expression—neutral, open, gentle—with the camera just below her chin to catch her jawline the way yours turns when you laugh, and she waits by the kitchen doorway when Jeno walks past, radiant in soft light and practiced stillness, but he barely lifts his gaze, just nods once with a flat “hey,” and she holds that word inside her mouth for three hours like it might reshape into something more if she doesn’t breathe too hard.

The bracelet comes after—the same silver thread of charm links you used to wear, delicate and soft and clinking when you gestured in videos, except this one is hers and empty, bare except for a single heart she picked herself from a mall kiosk, and she wears it to bed the first night, letting it knock gently against her wrist as she scrolls through old photos of you at galas, laughing with friends she doesn’t recognize, zooming in to count the charms you once wore, memorizing them like symbols in a language she plans to steal, and when she passes Jeno the next morning, she lifts her arm casually to brush her hair behind her ear, the charm flashing in the light like an invitation.

He notices, and it hits her like a spark catching fabric, because the moment she lifts her wrist, his gaze lands there with precision, eyes locking on the flash of silver, the faint glint of the charm she angled perfectly toward the light, and there’s a stillness in him, something shifting behind his eyes like a memory rising too quickly to name, and for a breathless second she watches the shape of his mouth change like a question forming in silence, the crease between his brows deepening with something that feels like recognition, and for a heartbeat she’s certain he sees it, the styling, the weight, the mimicry carved into every decision and there’s a quiet thrum of shock beneath the tired slope of his shoulders, but he doesn’t speak, instead he nods softly, like a thought he’s still catching up to, murmurs something about needing to call Jaemin, and reaches for his phone, his fingers brushing the counter without looking back. She stays frozen in the doorway, the charm still swinging as if hoping to be touched, replaying that look over and over as she lies in bed later, her body stretched perfectly across the sheets, the bracelet imprinting gently against her wrist while she stares into the dark, imagining how much closer she must be now, how the next one might be the charm that makes him stay.

She shifts again, this time without subtlety, shedding whatever softness she had left in favor of silk and lace and skin, wearing versions of your old outfits with an eerie kind of precision, she pairs sheer mesh with oversized jackets the exact way you used to in winter, wears cardigans half-slipped from her shoulders with bralettes peeking beneath, keeps the lingerie visible, deliberate, curated for effect, and even the things meant to look accidental feel staged, like she’s dressing for a memory that doesn’t belong to her but still clings to the seams of Jeno’s past like perfume that never faded. One morning, she steps into the living room barefoot in the same sheer slip you once wore to an afterparty, the hem brushing her thighs, her collarbone framed with delicate lace, and the look on Jeno’s face flickers with recognition, immediate and exact, like watching a rerun of a scene he never asked to relive.

He doesn’t say anything at first, just lets his eyes travel down and then back up with the kind of silence that burns hotter than words, and when she crosses the room with a smile that tries to mimic your alluring confidence—soft, unbothered, a little sharp around the edges, his posture changes, shoulders stiffening, hands curling around his phone like he needs something to ground him, because he knows, fully and precisely, what she’s doing. She tosses her hair back in the exact rhythm you used to when you laughed in bars past midnight, when you danced barefoot on balconies, when you wore those same low-slung jeans and camisoles without ever asking for attention but earning all of it anyway. She starts wearing the bodysuit—the exact one, or close enough—a ribbed black piece with snap closures and a neckline that plunges at the same slope, and one evening she stands at the edge of the kitchen island in it, waiting for a reaction, leaning her hip just slightly into the marble the way she’s seen you do in photos, and Jeno looks up once, says nothing, but his eyes hold longer than usual, jaw tight, and then he turns away, almost too fast, retreating into the bathroom and closing the door like it’s a break he’s forcing into the timeline.

She begins organizing her outfits by moodboard, your moods, not her own and not casually, not as inspiration, but with the obsessive precision of someone reconstructing a ghost wardrobe piece by piece, down to the cut of your jeans and the exact shape of the neckline that once made his eyes linger half a second longer. She tapes screenshots inside her closet doors, cropped, zoomed, sharpened stills she’s pulled from fan accounts and background sightings, building a catalog of your expressions, your silhouettes, the subtle hierarchy of how you dressed when you knew you were being watched versus when you didn’t care. She doesn’t label her drawers by type anymore—no bras, shirts, skirts—but by scenario: studio drop-by, post-game silence, backseat of the car after a win, hotel breakfast in someone else’s hoodie. It becomes a ritual, it becomes warfare. She studies softness like it’s weaponry, takes lace and crumples it in her fists just to see how it wrinkles against her palm, practices leaning against counters with your posture, rolling sleeves with your carelessness, existing not as herself but as an echo she’s desperate to make louder than the original.

Jeno notices. Of course he notices. He watches every outfit like déjà vu bleeding into high definition, every loose cardigan and half-buttoned shirt scraping across his memory like nails down a familiar wall, and though he says nothing, though his expression stays fixed and neutral, there’s always a second too long of pause when she walks into the room, always a beat where the air stretches tight with recognition, but he doesn’t speak because he doesn’t trust himself to say it kindly yet. His silence isn’t ignorance—it’s restraint. He’s biting his tongue until it bleeds because he knows the second he opens his mouth, something irreversible might snap in her, in him, in this space they’re both pretending hasn’t already caved in on itself. He hasn't commented yet but he could, at any moment. And the weight of that unspoken possibility is something she wears more intimately than any of the clothes.

After Nahyun falls asleep, still in the bodysuit, still smelling like the perfume she thinks might remind him of something better, Jeno steps out onto the balcony and wraps a blanket around his shoulders like he’s trying to disappear without leaving, the air too warm for comfort but just cold enough to help him breathe. The city hums quietly below, soft streetlights stretching across the pavement like veins beneath glass, and he lowers himself into the lounge near the far edge of the railing, phone heavy in his hand, chest heavier still. For a long time he doesn’t scroll. Just sits there, still and quiet, thumb hovering but unmoving. And then the feed updates.

The first post that loads is Areum’s. It’s the kind of photo that makes your breath catch, sunlight soft and honeyed, the ocean behind them quiet and wide, her hand held up to the camera in a casual gesture that hides most of Mark’s face but reveals everything else: the shape of their closeness, the comfort in their knit sweaters, the familiarity in the way his body tilts toward hers. The ring sits perfectly on her finger, sparkling even in the warmth of late afternoon light. Her caption reads, ‘forever sounds like him, marked for life.’ It’s simple, bare, and real, and Jeno doesn’t scroll past it—he reads it twice, maybe three times, something in his chest cinching tighter with each word. He remembers how nervous Mark was picking out that ring, how he’d dragged Jeno into a quiet boutique on a Tuesday afternoon and held up every option with trembling hands, how he paced the aisles like he didn’t trust himself to choose something worthy. Jeno stood with him for over an hour, made him laugh, offered him steady words, told him she would love whatever he gave her because it was him giving it. When Mark finally picked one, Jeno took a picture of it on the velvet stand and texted him later that night: You did good, so proud of you man. Now it’s here, on her hand, in the middle of the life they built. Jeno double-taps before he even realizes it, the sound of the ocean almost audible in the stillness around him, and his heart presses heavily behind his ribs as he keeps looking, and looking, and looking.

The next post is Jaemin’s. The image opens to a soft, low-angle shot of his daughter lying on her back, dressed in a pale embroidered dress with delicate eyelet detail, her cheeks full and flushed, hair messy from sleep and spread out in dark waves across a cream pillow. Her smile is wide and open, showing tiny teeth, her eyes caught mid-laughter, and there’s a white clip tucked gently into her bangs like something chosen with care. The lighting is warm, the carpet in the background blurred into soft tones, and the entire moment feels private but lovingly offered, like he couldn’t keep her to himself any longer. The caption reads, ‘world, meet my girl.’ One grey heart. Nothing else. Jeno stares, chest drawn tight beneath the blanket still wrapped around his shoulders, thumb hovering over the post until it lights up red, then lingering there even after it’s done, and without thinking he presses the save icon too. The glow from the screen softens the edges of the night around him, and he keeps looking at her face—so free, so bright, so unfiltered—wondering when the last time he felt that kind of peace in his own skin was, and why it aches in his throat now.

Then the tag hits. A fan account. One he doesn’t follow, but the post floats into his feed like fate. It’s a throwback—college game night, a flash, a moment he never knew someone captured. You’re on his shoulders, laughing so hard your mouth is wide open and your head is tilted back, hair flying in waves. He’s crouched slightly, hands gripping your thighs, and his lips are pressed to your ankle like it was instinct, like it was holy. You’re both backlit by stadium lights. He’s smiling like nothing bad has ever happened. The caption cuts through him. remember when his smile looked like this? The next inhale doesn’t come easily. He swipes out of Instagram. Locks his phone. Keeps the screen pressed to his lips for a second longer than he should. And then he just sits there, heartbeat shallow, blanket bunched in his fists, the night wrapping around his shoulders like the only thing left that knows what he’s holding back.

The moment he closes the app, the decision feels inevitable, like he’s been quietly walking toward it for months without knowing, like his body knew long before his mind caught up. He stands from the balcony with the blanket still wrapped around his shoulders, breath shallow, pulse slow, the glow of the screen still ghosting the inside of his vision as he walks back through the apartment without turning on any lights. Nahyun is still asleep in their bed, one arm stretched into the space where he used to be, her face soft, lips parted, breath slow and unaware, but he doesn’t pause, doesn’t hesitate, doesn’t give her any part of this moment, because this isn’t hers. He opens the drawer, pulls out his passport and wallet, slips his phone into his pocket, and walks out of the apartment without checking if the door shuts gently behind him, because it doesn’t matter anymore.

He books the flight in the back of the cab, fingers fast and practiced, eyes scanning departure times until one appears that leaves just after three a.m., a direct one-way ticket to Seoul with no return, no extras, no baggage added. He doesn’t tell anyone, doesn’t text Nahyun, doesn’t alert his manager, doesn’t clear it with the team or send a calendar block to his agent, doesn’t even open the group chat, because the silence feels better, purer, more honest than any explanation he could try to give. The driver doesn’t speak and Jeno doesn’t ask him to, just stares out the window at the city flashing past, already detaching from it, already untethering himself from every version of the life that’s still running behind him on autopilot.

At the airport, he moves like a shadow through the low glow of overnight terminals, hoodie pulled tight over his face, cap low, sunglasses hiding the weight in his eyes, and he doesn’t stop for food or water or distraction, just walks to the gate with nothing in his hands and everything in his chest, the ache pressed right beneath his sternum like a secret. He boards without hesitation, phone set to airplane mode before they even ask, and when the plane lifts into the dark sky, the city falls away beneath him with a kind of quiet relief, like he’s finally slipped beneath the surface of something he was never meant to keep surviving.

He doesn’t sleep, doesn’t watch a movie, doesn’t speak to the flight attendants, just folds the blanket over his lap and stares at the clouds outside the window as they start to shift from black to blue, dawn slowly curling at the edges of the earth like it’s making space for something to begin again. He doesn’t know if Mark will be home, doesn’t know if he’ll pick up when he lands, doesn’t know if you’ll even be in the same time zone, he doesn’t know where you are but none of it matters, because he’s going back to the only place that’s ever held him right, and this time he isn’t looking for answers, he’s just looking for air.

[continuation — 53k words]

taglist — @clblnz @flaminghotyourmom @haesluvr @revlada @kukkurookkoo @euphormiia @cookydream @hyuckshinee @hyuckieismine @fancypeacepersona @minkyuncutie @kiwiiess @outoforbit @lovetaroandtaemin @ungodlyjnz @remgeolli @sof1asdream7 @xuyiyang @tunafishyfishylike @lavnderluv @cheot-salang @second-floors @hyuckkklee @rbf-aceu @pradajaehyun

authors note —

if you've made it this far, thank you so much for reading! it truly means the world to me. i poured so much effort into this, so if you could take just a moment to send an ask or leave a message sharing your thoughts, it would mean everything. your interactions-whether it's sending an ask, your feedback, a comment, or just saying hi gives me so much motivation to keep writing. i'm always so happy to respond to messages, asks and comments so don't be shy! thank you from the bottom of my heart! <3

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