Page 80

Iseul

The dead are alive.

The dead are alive.

As Iseul bursts through the double-doors of Gyeulcheon’s sickbay, breathless and panting hard, she is absolutely certain that she is hallucinating. Because right now, she’s watching the formerly very much dead Ijun sweep Jae into a crushing hug, joined by a somber-looking man at her side. Gyeulcheon’s hospital wing is flooded with patients Iseul knows died—patients she and Seojin watched slip into the underworld, eyes glazing over, pulses stopping.

“What,” gasps Iseul, “the fuck …”

She pants through her teeth as she scours the sickbay for Seojin, barely able to stand on her shaking legs. The war is over, the war is over and they have won , but she cannot comprehend that. Her body is still surging with adrenaline, and she is half-convinced that she is going to die somehow, that she’ll die if she doesn’t find Seojin—

And then she sees him, sitting in shock on a cot, all slumped head and shaking hands…and that manacled wrist…

In a flash, Iseul is running, leaping over cots and barreling toward her friend, her love, her Ryu Seojin. With a low sob, she flings herself into his arms and breathes in the familiar scent of him—ginseng and wood, his warmth wrapping around her as his hands lift to hold her close.

He looks up with a gasp as Iseul guides his lips to her, kissing him deeply, hungrily, shaking from the want of him.

“Seojin,” she cries against his lips, pulling away to cup his face in her hands, “ Seojin. ” And they look at each other as if for the first time, as if they have never done so before—and in their gazes exist a promise.

“You came back,” he breathes. “You came back to me…” Iseul’s heart leaps as he kisses her again, sliding his hands through her hair, crushing her against his body until there is no telling where one ends and the other begins. It is only a faint prickling on the back of her neck that alerts Iseul to the fact that they are being watched, and it is an effort to tear herself away from Seojin’s lips, to turn over his shoulder and meet the eyes of the man watching him.

Her heart stops dead in her chest.

She knows him, doesn’t she? The man with scarred hands and chestnut curls, hazel eyes that soften as he watches his Seojin, seeing him as the man he has become. A hand rising to her lips, Iseul slips from his lap and steps aside, unblocking Seojin’s view of his brother.

Slowly, so slowly, Seojin’s eyes move to him. Iseul watches through blurry vision as he freezes, his face bloodless, his dark eyes wide as he sees…

Sang, to his members.

Ryu Seokjun, to Seojin.

“Brother,” Seojin breathes, and his brother smiles crookedly. “Seokjun,” he says again, rising to shaking legs. “I… You… How… ”

Seokjun nods in that gentle, understanding way of his that Iseul remembers from their childhood. “I know,” he says quietly, embracing his younger brother, folding him close to him. “I know.”

Iseul, for once, is at a loss for words. “How— how are you here?” she manages, unable to catch a breath through her stupefaction and shock.

Seokjun meets Iseul’s eyes.

“She brought me where I needed to be,” he replies softly, and there is a glimmer of something in his hazel eyes that tells Iseul that somehow— somehow —Shin Lina is at the center of this. She looks around for the small girl with the teardrop scar, for her silver-eyed emperor, but Lina is nowhere to be found.

And some kernel of bittersweet truth within Iseul tells her that although she will see Lina again one day, it will never be in the world of the living.

With a bittersweet smile, Iseul watches as, against his brother, arms wrapped around his solid, living, breathing body…Ryu Seojin finally allows himself to cry.