#black crystal bride | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

youthguk · 2 days ago

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Black Ribbon Bride ۶ৎ | jjk (m)

Mafia AU · Dark Romance · Arranged Marriage · Angst · Smut ·

“I want this one,”he said, eyes on you like a predator. A marriage sealed in diamonds and blood. You were supposed to hate him, but monsters don’t let go of the things they’ve claimed.

wc: 18k

WARNINGS: explicit content (minors do not interact), explicit smut, forced marriage, power imbalance, slight graphic violence, death threats, mentions of murder, forced intimacy

Jungkook's voice cuts through the discord like a knife through silk. His eyes, when you meet them, hold neither pretense nor mercy. Just certainty. "I want this one." The words fall like destiny.

His touch, when it comes, is winter-cold against your cheek. Your soul flinches from those precise fingers even as your body remains still. He carries the scent of woodsmoke and exotic spice, foreign and dangerous.

The smile he offers holds neither warmth nor malice - just the satisfied smile of a man who always gets what he wants. "Don't look so scared," he murmurs, voice silk over steel. "We're going to have so much fun."

One week ago.

Dawn hasn't broken, but consciousness seeps in like winter frost. Your body knows the rhythm of secrets - when to rise, when to fade, when to become nothing more than a shadow against stone walls.

The pre-dawn air tastes of endings. Each breath crystallizes before you, little monuments of everything you can't keep. Your fingers, sheathed in black silk, trace meaningless patterns on frozen glass - a language of loss you're still learning to speak.

The chapel path recognizes your footsteps. Frost shatters beneath each step like promises, like futures, like the carefully constructed cage of expectations you've lived in since birth. Even your older sister Nora, who shared these halls with you for three years, never discovered this sanctuary where ancient pines hold their breath and weathered stones keep their silence.

Beyond the courtyard, the other girls drift between rose gardens and marble benches, their uniforms pressed to perfection, their laughter measured in careful octaves. But here, in this forgotten corner where mist meets morning, you've found something raw and real - a holiness that has nothing to do with their polished prayers.

Your Saint-Margaux winter uniform clings like a second skin, ivory wool buttoned to the throat like armor against uncertainty. The black ribbon anchoring your curls might as well be a crown of thorns.

"Je ne suis pas prête," you breathe, watching Lake Geneva stretch below like quicksilver. The French makes it sound poetic. Then, softer still, in Italian: "Non sono mai stata pronta per questo."

Your carefully constructed future lies shattered at your feet: The UN internship you earned through sleepless nights. Geneva's diplomatic corridors where you were meant to walk. Rome's ancient streets calling your name. All those perfect grades, those meticulously practiced curtsies, those debate championships – sacrificed to your father's unexplained whims.

London. The word tastes like ash on your tongue. Why there? Why now?

Your mother's note burns against your ribs, her elegant script a funeral dirge: "Be ready by sunset. They're coming."

École Saint-Margaux rises behind you, a cathedral to calculated futures. Here, where tears are forbidden unless quoted in Ancient Greek.

"We don't raise dreamers here," Madame Directrice always says, her smile sharp as cut glass. "We raise queens."

They're forged into living weapons, taught to smile while drawing blood.

"Queens who smile through gritted teeth," you whisper to the dawn. "Queens who negotiate peace while swallowing war. Queens who marry power because they're not allowed to claim it for themselves."

Your schedule mocks you with its pristine normality:"En garde!" at noon brings your final dance with steel, four o'clock tea with Professor Valbonne - discussing Machiavelli while pretending your world isn't crumbling.

Lavender-lined suitcases wait in your room, packed by your mother's trembling hands. Your sister's muffled sobs echo through the halls like ghostly footsteps. Your brother Luca's silence speaks volumes. And your father... his absence is a wound that both terrifies and relieves you, his iron grip on your future tightening even when he's not here.

Something crackles in your pocket - a dried white peach blossom, edges curled like fingers reaching for yesterday. Its fragrance unlocks a memory: blood on snow, trembling hands, a boy whose name you never learned but whose life you saved many years ago with nothing but quick thinking and forbidden fruit.

The blossom slips from your fingers, caught in the morning breeze. You watch it spiral toward Lake Geneva's steel-gray surface, this final piece of softness you can't afford to keep. Your sister's allergy to white peaches - your most cherished scent and flower - feels like fate's way to mock you once again.

A motorboat violates the lake's surface, its wake splitting the silence like an omen. You trace a cross in the frozen air - half benediction, half curse - and whisper words that taste like goodbye. The chapel bell announces noon with solemn finality. You turn toward the university, spine straight as a blade. Non importa più.

Queens don't look back, and prisoners learn to watch without turning. You've been both.

The salle d'armes wraps you in familiar scents - chalk dust hanging thick in afternoon light, ancient leather padding worn smooth by generations of calculated violence. Trophy cases line the walls, their glass clouded with age, each cup and medal entombed like frozen dreams that never learned to fly.

You move beneath centuries-old beams, your breath a whispered prayer behind cold mesh. The blade in your hand sings with deadly grace, an extension of everything you've been molded to become.

Your opponent dances the steps she's been taught - precise, controlled, a perfect puppet of propriety. But there's wild electricity in your veins today, something that makes your movements liquid lightning. You strike not with the measured grace they demanded, but with elegant fury barely contained.

The lunge comes like destiny - inevitable, beautiful, terrible. Your blade cuts through air like fate itself, writing tomorrow's grief in today's perfect form. Steel kisses steel with a sound like breaking promises.

Her parry comes a heartbeat too late. Your point finds her heart with butterfly gentleness, the touch both caress and condemnation. This is how we end - not with violence, but with devastating grace.

"Touché," falls like judgment in the hollow air.

You retreat with practiced poise, each step a study in contained rebellion. This is Saint-Margaux's secret language - not fencing, but warfare dressed in silk and centuries of refined cruelty. They taught you to fight like falling snow - beautiful, silent, deadly. To strike with a smile, to kill with courtesy.

But beneath your perfect form writhes something untamed - a creature of starlight and stolen chances, something they couldn't breed out or break down. It's the same force that once made you save instead of strike, that makes you wear defiance like perfume and weaponize tenderness.

Victory brings no applause - only silence thick as cemetery snow. The maître d'armes nods once, your wild heart thundering rebellion against your ribs as you lower your blade.

That's when you feel his presence - Professor Valbonne, half-shadow and unspoken truths at the gallery's edge. His stillness speaks volumes in this temple of calculated violence.

He waits until the salle empties, approaching like truth itself- inevitable, terrifying.

"Your blade speaks what your voice cannot," he says softly, studying you with that terrible gentleness that makes your ribs ache. "You fence like someone who has learned to turn cage bars into wings.”

A laugh escapes you, sharp as broken glass. "Wings are just prettier prisons, Professor."

"Perhaps." His eyes hold yours, steady as truth. "But they remember what freedom tastes like."

You turn away, sweat-damp black ribbon clinging to your neck like a collar. White peach and rosewood cling to your skin - soon to be scrubbed away, replaced with the sterile scent of duty and diplomacy.

"You look haunted today," he observes. "Or you’re just not happy to see me.”

"I’m not happy to leave," you answer, truth slipping past your guard like a blade between ribs.

Silence stretches between you like a bridge neither dares to cross. He leans against cold stone, a scholarly revolutionary in this fortress of careful conformity.

"If I could write you a future," he says, "it wouldn’t begin with someone else's last name.”

Something in your chest splinters, words hanging between you two like shattered stars. You both understand everything, there is no need to name things vocally. "I was born to be a transaction."

His jaw tightens, grief etching itself in the corners of his mouth. "You were born to be a revolution."

His arm appears like an offering - this small rebellion, this moment of pretend equality. You take it with the care of handling broken dreams.

The walk to the chapel gates is a funeral march in slow motion. Words would only pollute this last pure thing between you - this shared understanding of cages and wings.

At the threshold, he pauses, eyes fixed on horizons you'll never touch.

"When they write your name in history," he says, "make sure they spell it in lightning."

You look up at the ghost-pale sky, where even clouds know better than to break formation. He'll never read your name the way he hopes.

You slip away like morning frost before the sun, before he can watch another future die.

Raindrops streak down the airplane window like tear tracks you weren't allowed to shed at every carefully orchestrated farewell. The sky bleeds into the same shade of steel that haunted every funeral where your spine had to remain straight as a blade.

First class feels like a gilded cage - all polished chrome and hushed whispers. The flight attendant's eyes slide past you like oil on water, trained to see nothing, hear nothing. Somewhere between Geneva's promises and London's threats, you're suspended in limbo, watching France blur beneath cotton-wool clouds.

A quiet sob catches in your peripheral vision. Nora. Your sister - your perfect and pristine Nora - has mastered the art of beautiful devastation. Even now, she's practicing for her future role: the tragic bride. Her fingers tremble against Chanel-painted lips, but her posture remains museum-worthy. The tears that escape are precisely timed, like crystal drops in a champagne fountain.

"Have you heard-" her voice cracks like fine porcelain, "-what they whisper about him? The youngest Jeon?"

You trace patterns in the condensation on your window. Each swirl feels like writing epitaphs for the futures dying in your chest. The glass fogs with your silence.You don't answer - she's not speaking to you but to whatever god abandoned girls like you to fates like this.

Nora's laugh sounds like shattered crystal. "Last spring - crashed a Maserati through the Louvre's courtyard. Called it 'performance art.' Three million in damages, swept under imported Persian rugs."

"The auction incident," she continues, voice dropping lower, "when he used Van Gogh's 'Starry Night' as an ashtray. 'Too pedestrian,' he said. The curator nearly had a stroke."

"And the women-" her voice catches, "God, the women. Like butterflies in his collection. He pins them down with diamonds, watches them suffocate in luxury, then adds their tears to his champagne."

The papers call him 'l'héritier de marbre' - the heir carved in marble, as though his beauty could excuse his barbarism and his wealth could cleanse the blood from his hands.

The Jeon empire rises like a gilded fortress: Jeon Antiquities & Restoration. They polish history until it gleams, restore broken things until they're worth more than they ever were whole. But beneath every restored masterpiece lies a massacre; behind every preserved beauty, a battlefield. They don't just collect beauty - they weaponize it.

Their public face gleams like polished marble, but beneath? It's all gunmetal and old blood. The Jeons don't just run an empire - they curate violence, frame it in gold, and sell it at invitation-only auctions. They don't just kill enemies - they transform them into art, into debt, into whispered warnings.

And Jungkook Jeon? He's their youngest sin. Trust fund terror with a smile that breaks hearts and necks with equal elegance. The whispers follow him like perfume: genius, they say. Rebel, they whisper. Monster, they mean. Every society photo shows the same warning: beauty sharp enough to draw blood.

"He'll destroy me," Nora whispers, pressing her forehead against the cool window. "Like one of their marble angels - pretty and hollow and broken."

"Isn't that the point?" Luca's voice cuts across the aisle, sharp as a blade between ribs. "Better broken than worthless."

The temperature drops ten degrees. You turn, ice crystallizing in your veins.

"One more word," you breathe, "and I'll show you exactly what Saint-Margaux taught us about making pain look elegant."

"Truth hurts, doesn't it?" He doesn't look up from his Financial Times fortress. "At least crying prettily might raise your market value."

Nora's whole body flinches, a butterfly pinned to silk. Your mother's voice slides through the tension like a poisoned blade. “Fix your face, Nora. Tears age you. The Jeons prefer their art unmarred."

The silence that follows tastes like ash and dying dreams. You grip your armrest until your knuckles match your mother's pearls, trying to anchor yourself to something - anything - that isn't falling apart. But there's nothing solid left to hold.

Jungkook Jeon. The name sits like lead on your tongue. You've never met him, but you know him - the way prey knows predator. A man carved from privilege so ancient it's crystallized into cruelty. Living art with venom in his veins. A marble god with gunpowder for blood. And your sweet sister is being gift-wrapped for this demon in Dior.

Grief fractures through you like safety glass, a web of tiny breaks held precariously together. The pain comes in relentless waves - not just for Nora, but for the shadow of your own future. Her tragedy is merely a preview of what awaits you in the procession of sacrificial daughters, your fate already sealed in your father's ledgers.

Your family fortune bleeds out in frozen accounts and foreclosed dreams. The name still glitters - just enough to barter away daughters like vintage jewelry. Your father's already pricing your future, weighing your worth in potential alliances. He'll find someone hungry enough, cruel enough, rich enough to buy the last of his daughter's freedom.

London materializes beneath you like a tomb of fog and steel. As you watch Nora reapply her Chanel Rouge with surgeon-steady hands, you see her clinging to composure like a lifeline, still believing grace might be armor enough. Something hot and sharp lodges in your throat - she thinks dignity will save her, and you pray she never learns how wrong she is.

Rain hammers against the windshield as your car crawls through the rusted gates of Amare estate. The ancient iron groans like a wounded beast, London's sky weeping harder as though trying to wash away the shame of what you've become. Each raindrop feels like an accusation against the facade you're desperately trying to maintain.

"Home sweet home," Nora whispers beside you, her voice trembling like the droplets sliding down the glass. You say nothing, watching the ghost of your childhood dreams loom before you - a castle turned prison.

The marble steps are cracked now, nature's fingers prying apart what wealth once held together. You trace the familiar path with your eyes, remembering how your smaller self used to dance here, spinning tales of ivory moldings and enchanted corridors. Now the walls tell different stories - of water stains mapping your decline, of paint peeling away like shed skin, of chandeliers that sputter and gasp rather than sparkle.

The door creaks open before you reach it, and there he stands - Father, a shadow cut from faded glory. His suit whispers of too many wears, though his pocket square stands at attention, starched with the last remnants of your pride. The silence between you stretches like a taught wire.

"Twenty-three minutes late," he says, each word falling like ice. "I suppose punctuality wasn't part of that expensive education."

Nora's breath catches beside you, a butterfly trapped in a jar. You feel her fingers brush against yours, seeking anchor, but you both know better than to grasp it.

He steps aside - not an invitation but an order. As you pass, his fingertips graze your shoulder, light as frost but heavy with unspoken threats. Your body remembers before your mind can catch up - memories of shattered crystal, of cold water, of darkness behind locked doors. The bruises have faded but the lessons remain, written in your bones.

Mother's heels click against warped wood, a metronome counting down to something inevitable. The foyer air hangs thick with mildew and Chanel No. 5 - decay dressed in designer perfume. Each breath feels like swallowing stones, the weight of this homecoming settling in your chest like lead.

"Your rooms are prepared," Mother announces to no one in particular, her words floating in the shadows like lost things. "I trust you remember where they are."

Your suitcases land with hollow thuds against marble that's seen better days. Your father's presence fills the space like frost, immediate and biting.

"The Jeons arrive in two days." Each word falls like a death sentence, precise and final. "We'll be ready."

His eyes rake over Nora like winter wind, cataloging every imperfection. "Go upstairs. Fix yourself. You look weak." The last word snaps like a whip, and Nora - sweet, fragile Nora - folds in on herself like origami crushed in a cruel child's fist.

The question that's been poisoning your thoughts since Geneva claws its way past your lips, "Why would the Jeons even want us?"

Your father's smile is all broken glass and tarnished silver. "Because our name still matters." He savors the words like aged wine. "Because even monsters want their sons to marry nobility." He turns away, leaving you to drown in the acid truth of it. You don't push further - this rare moment of actual answers instead of his usual artillery of screams and humiliation feels like a trap you're too tired to spring.

Rain drums against the window panes like a metronome counting down to dawn. The sound almost - but not quite - drowns out Nora's muffled sobs filtering through the wall. Each hitched breath feels like a dagger between your ribs as you trace the sound to her room, finding her curled into herself at the edge of her bed. Her silk robe pools around her like spilled moonlight, mascara-stained tears mapping constellations of despair across her pillow.

"Don't-" she chokes out before you can speak, her fingers twisting in the sheets. "Please, just... pretend you can't hear me falling apart."

The mattress dips beneath your weight as you settle beside her. Some wounds run too deep for words to reach, so you let the silence speak instead.

"God, you don't even see it, do you?" Nora's laugh shatters like crystal against marble. "The way they look at you - at Saint-Margaux, at every gala, every breath you take. Like you're something rare and precious. While I..." Her voice cracks. "I'm just... here. Taking up space. Fighting for scraps of attention."

The words hit like ice water. You want to laugh, but the sound dies in your throat. You've spent years perfecting the art of invisibility, of folding yourself smaller and smaller until you barely cast a shadow.

"Nora, I-" But she cuts through your protest like a blade through silk.

"There was someone," she whispers, each word falling like a confession. "In Switzerland. Behind the old cathedral where the shadows grew long in winter. His hands were gentle - like he thought I might shatter. He looked at me like I was art worth preserving, not just another pretty thing to be sold."

Your heart stops. Dating wasn't just forbidden - it was heresy against the careful cultivation of your worth. You were precious commodities, after all. Pristine dolls waiting to be auctioned to the highest bidder.

"He loved me." Her voice breaks on the past tense. "And I thought... for once, someone chose me first. But then the Jeons...I never thought anyone would ever want to marry me when we have you." She presses her face into the pillow, shoulders shaking. "Who would want the spare when they could have the masterpiece?"

Something fractures in your chest - not a clean break, but a spiderweb of cracks spreading outward. All this time, she'd carved out this tiny paradise of stolen moments, while you... you were an open wound she kept comparing herself to. The realization burns like bitter poison in your throat.

But looking at her now, trembling like a bird with clipped wings, how could you be angry? She'd dared to grasp at happiness in a world that offered only gilded cages. The secrecy stings, yes, but her pain cuts deeper than any betrayal.

Save her, your heart screams. But what power do you have? You're just another pretty puppet with strings of silk and obligation, taught to bend but never break, to endure but never fight.

Words fail, so you reach for her hand instead. Your fingers intertwine - a bridge across the chasm of secrets between you. You can't rewrite her tragedy, but you can stay there with her. At least for today.

Midnight strikes with mechanical precision, each chime reverberating through the drawing room like fate's own countdown. Through leaded glass, you watch them arrive – three obsidian vessels cutting through the rain, their polished surfaces drinking in what little light remains. No emblems mark their passage. No flourish announces their intent. They move with the silent certainty of apex predators.

At your vanity, fingertips ghost over the black ribbon – your chosen weapon for tonight's battle. Beside it, the perfume bottle gleams with poisonous promise. White peach, innocent as first love, deadly as the last. You anoint the silk with calculated precision, watching droplets seep into darkness like secrets into skin. When you weave it through your hair, the scent wraps around you like a lover's promise – or a noose.

Your mother's approval comes in glacial silence. Luca's scorn breaks it like thunder.

“Still playing the grieving virgin?” he sneers, eyes catching on your ribbon, your carefully crafted despair. “Or are we mourning your relevance, sister? The Jeons didn’t come for you.”

You meet his gaze with the weight of winter. “You’re standing in a house that’s falling apart.”

“Which is why we’re selling the prettiest thing we have left.” he hisses, teeth gleaming. “And it’s not you.”

The words dissolve like frost as you descend, each step carrying you closer to the awaiting storm. Your father stands sentry at the door, his spine curved in submission to powers greater than pride. The air shifts – not with cold, but with the kind of sharpness that precedes bloodshed.

They enter like darkness given form. The matriarch first, towering in her sovereignty. Her nineteenth-century choker catches light like a blade – emeralds and onyx, beauty and warning intertwined. She surveys your home as one might examine a failing empire: cataloging weaknesses, calculating worth.

The grandfather follows, silence his scepter. One nod to your father speaks volumes – here, at last, is someone who makes even your tyrant tremble.

Their entourage filters in like smoke – advisors, guards – until finally, he appears.

Jungkook.

He moves like sin made flesh, each step a study in controlled chaos. Power clings to him like shadow to night – from his obsidian gaze to his deliberately disheveled elegance. His suit, artfully askew, mocks propriety while his presence commands it. Dark hair kisses his throat like spilled ink, and raw energy radiates from him like heat from a forge.

His disinterested sweep of the room stutters when it finds you. Something flickers in those depths – recognition, perhaps, or hunger – as your carefully chosen scent reaches him. His posture shifts minutely, like a predator catching prey's scent on the wind. His gaze lingers, heavy as prophecy, and something molten coils in your core.

You don't yield. Nora materializes beside you, trembling like autumn's last leaf. Perfect in her dress, betrayed by the rising flush on her throat, her glassy eyes, her failing breath. Your mother makes introductions like offerings at an altar, your family name wrapped in silk and shame.

The scene unravels with terrible precision. Nora's curtsy falters. The white peach blooms around you like judgment. Her allergy reveals itself in stuttering breaths and panic-wide eyes, her composed facade cracking like ice in spring.

Guilt lashes you even as hope whispers that your plan might work. But the Jeons' reaction isn't pity – it's disdain.

"We were promised perfection," the matriarch pronounces, each word a blade. "Not fragility."

Your father's mask slips, pride warring with fear. "She's merely overwhelmed—"

"She's weak," Luca interjects, venom dripping.

The room descends into chaos – old money snarling at older money, wounded pride clashing against cold contempt. Until…

"She's not the one I want anyway."

Jungkook's voice cuts through the discord like a knife through silk. His eyes, when you meet them, hold neither pretense nor mercy. Just certainty. "I want this one." The words fall like destiny.

The room falls still as breath catches in throats - your mother frozen mid-gesture, Nora swaying like a reed in winter wind, the matriarch's face transforming to cold, unforgiving marble.

"Jeon Jungkook—"

But his gaze remains unbroken, and the white peach at your throat burns like a brand. This wasn't the sacrifice you had intended to make - your carefully laid plans had twisted into something unrecognizable, leading you down a path you never meant to walk.

A silence falls like velvet, heavy with unspoken words that press against the gilt-edged walls until even the shadows hold their breath.

Your father's eyes dance between you and Nora like a master appraiser examining jewels. His gaze is cold arithmetic - measuring worth, calculating losses, tallying gains. To him, you were never daughters; merely assets in his grand portfolio. Two precious stones: one crystal, one porcelain. Now one bears a fatal flaw.

His lips curl into something between a smile and a sneer as he delivers your fate with businesslike efficiency. "If that's the one the Jeons want..." A careless shrug seals your destiny. "Then she's yours."

The words strike like winter frost, crystallizing the air in your lungs. Beside you, Nora's choked sound of despair is quickly muffled by your mother's gloved hand.

Your plan shatters — delicate, doomed, never yours to control. You were meant to be the savior, not the sacrifice. The thought of becoming his choice had never even whispered across your mind.

Memories assault you in violent flashes: your father's leather-bound ledger, your mother's desperate mantra of survival, the wicked glint of Jungkook's rings catching lamplight, white peach perfume clinging to black silk like a death shroud. The sound of breaking - not glass, but your very essence - as your name is bartered away without consent.

You shrink into yourself, a child's instinct to become invisible. But his gaze pins you like a butterfly to velvet. There is no hiding now. You are seen. You are chosen.

The Jeons regard you with clinical interest, recalculating your worth like merchants at auction. The matriarch's lips press into a blade-thin line. The grandfather's slight nod falls like an executioner's axe.

As they file out, you remain rooted, a marble statue carved from pure shock. Nora trembles beside you fragile as frost about to crack, but your arms hang useless. Screams build in your throat - take her instead, take me back, unmake this moment - but they die unspoken, turned to stone by terror.

He approaches with lethal grace, each step a claim of ownership. His presence weighs on you like storm clouds heavy with lightning. You've become his territory now, marked without permission.

The doors seal your fate with thunderous finality. You sink to the marble floor, barely conscious of the movement. Around you, the scene arranges itself like a baroque tragedy - Nora's muffled sobs providing the score, your mother's absence speaking volumes, Luca's triumphant smirk completing the composition.

Reality settles over you like a burial shroud: you are no longer daughter or sister or savior. You have become property, his property. And as this truth sinks its teeth into your heart, you wonder if anything of you will remain when he's done.

Time slips by like grains of sand through an hourglass, each moment dissolving into an infinite stretch of silence. The world outside your window fades to watercolor impressions, bleeding at the edges like a painting left in the rain.

You exist in whispers now. Food remains untasted, questions unasked. The house holds its secrets close - rewound clocks marking phantom hours, curtains drawn against persistent daylight. From your perch on the velvet chaise, you watch raindrops trace silver paths down windowpanes, each one carrying away fragments of the freedom you once knew - freedom lost by your own design.

When they come to take your measurements, you don’t move. The Jeons’ tailors arrive with tape and notebooks, their hands cold and precise. They don’t look at your face. They pull the fabric of your nightdress taut against your hip bones, murmur numbers in a language you don’t understand, and note the curves like they’re assessing a statue to be replicated.

Their fingertips brush against your skin as they take measurements - the inside of your arm, the curve of your neck, the gentle slope of your back. One whispers to the other in hushed tones, no doubt commenting on your rigid posture and reluctant demeanor.

Your mother hovers nearby, her voice drifting through the air like wisps of smoke. "Add more stones," she murmurs. "She needs to shine beside him. Something from the Jeons' blue vault - something rare." She pauses, eyes critical. "Yes, longer sleeves. Hide the ribs."

Your father's voice cuts through the room, sharp and businesslike. "If we're going to do this, make it count. Double the diamonds. Let it be known what house she's marrying into."

You stand motionless, a butterfly pinned beneath layers of silk and expectation. Numbness flows through your veins like winter frost - you neither flinch at the bite of pins nor stir at honeyed compliments. In the mirror, a stranger stares back: a creation of ice and diamonds, beautiful and hollow, already half-ghost.

Time blurs in the silence of the house, each day melting into the next. The halls have grown quieter, more hollow, with only the ghostlike passage of untouched food trays marking the hours.

But it's Nora's absence that weighs heaviest on your heart, making each breath more difficult than the last. No footsteps outside your door, no whispered conversations through the wall, not even the faintest sign of her presence in the dark hours.

You find yourself unable to cry, your grief crystallized into something too solid for tears. Instead, a single poisonous question haunts your thoughts: What was the purpose of your sacrifice if she doesn't comprehend what you tried to do for her?

And Nora - sweet, fragile Nora - remains distant, unreachable. She neither visits nor acknowledges your presence, as if the space between you has become an uncrossable void. Perhaps she harbors hatred for what you've done, or maybe the truth is more painful: she was never meant to be saved, and you were never meant to be her savior.

The veil floats like a whisper of tulle and threat, weightless as frost yet heavy with fate. Before the gilt-edged mirror, you sit wrapped in ivory and diamonds, a bride sculpted from winter's essence. The silk remembers your shape, clinging to your ribs while stones adorning your sleeves scatter morning light like scattered secrets.

Behind you, voices blend together - the dressmaker's soft murmurs, rustling house staff, and your mother's instructions cutting through the air like sheathed knives. But your mind wanders elsewhere, to someone unexpected.

Valbonne. His calm, curious voice echoes in your memory, speaking of how your mind was a cathedral and your anger a kind of music. He saw you differently then - the girl who fenced with restrained grace, never allowed to truly run free. His words linger like an unfinished promise: "If I ever read your name in history books..."

You wonder now if he would even recognize you. You look at your reflection, skin glazed in peach and powdered rose. This is not the girl who wrote essays in French about revolutions and smiled over Latin conjugations at dusk. This is not the girl who debated in the courtyard until her voice cracked, or the one who wanted to work for the UN, who wanted to be something.

“Je ne suis plus moi-même,” you whisper to the mirror. I am no longer myself.

The door opens without warning. Through the mirror's reflection, you see her - Nora, her hair pulled back too tightly, her lipstick perfect, looking like grief painted in gold.

"So this is the masterpiece," she says, her voice cutting through the silence. The words hang in the air between you, heavy with accusation.

"You came," you whisper, your breath catching.

She moves into the room with controlled fury. "I had to see it - the moment where you finally became what you always wanted."

Confusion breaks through your numbness. "What are you talking about?"

Her laugh rings out like shattering crystal. "Don't act innocent. YYou didn’t just take my wedding — you took the one time I was finally enough."

"But you said you'd rather die than marry him," you protest, your voice weak. "You were crying about someone else-"

"You think tears meant I didn't want this?" She advances closer, each word precise and sharp. "A man like him - rich, young, beautiful. I could have thrived. Do you know how many girls would kill to be chosen by Jungkook Jeon?"

Your pulse thunders in your throat as she continues, her voice turning to ice. "I would have let the other one go for this. For once, I wasn't second choice. But you-" her eyes narrow, "you couldn't stand it."

"That's not true," you manage, rising on trembling legs. "Tu pleurais. Tu disais que tu voulais disparaître-" ["You were crying. You said you wanted to disappear-"]

"You're so greedy," she cuts you off, ignoring your French plea. "You needed to be both savior and sacrifice, martyr and bride. You couldn't let me have anything without making it about you."

You can only stare, your carefully constructed world unraveling thread by thread.

"I hate you for it," she says simply, then turns and leaves. You want to scream that it wasn’t supposed to be this way — but guilt is louder than truth.

The door closes behind her with the finality of a tomb being sealed. In the silence that follows, you stand motionless before the mirror. The veil trembles in the breeze, but your eyes remain dry. There's no room for tears in a girl made of lace and betrayal - only silence, the lingering scent of peach perfume, and the sound of your heart shattering beneath a cathedral of lies.

The cathedral is carved from light and silence, its vaulted ceilings vanishing into shadow. Golden ribs and silvered arches trace delicate patterns overhead, while chandeliers hang like captured constellations. Candlelight pools along marble, dancing across a sea of couture-clad guests draped in legacy, their hollow eyes and diamond-adorned faces watching with barely concealed hunger.

You stand at the center of their attention, both masterpiece and sacrifice. Your gown, threaded in silver and framed with pearls, shimmers like a dying star. The train follows you like a whispered surrender, while your veil - long enough to mask your doubts but not your trembling - floats ethereally around you. In this moment of pristine ceremony, everything glows with an intensity that burns.

Your body glides down the aisle — but your mind lags behind, somewhere in the crushed space between Nora’s voice and your father’s warning. You don’t remember when the music began. You barely register the clicking heels, the cameras, the smell of roses imported from Florence. Everything is white and violent.

Your father walks beside you with measured grace, his hand firm on your wrist and posture iron-stiff with pride. You sense his movement before the words come — his mouth dipping close to your ear.

"If you dare to ruin this," he hisses through clenched teeth, "I will destroy everything you are."

Your breath catches as he continues, his grip tightening painfully, "One wrong move in Jeon’s mansion and you'll wish you were never born. No one will take you in after you displease Jungkook. You'll be ruined, discarded, a broken doll no one wants to touch."

Wordlessly, you nod, your gaze fixed on the endless expanse of marble before you - a pristine river of white that stretches like fate itself, each step bringing you closer to him, inevitable as gravity pulling stars from the sky.

Jungkook waits at the altar like a marble statue come to life, all sharp edges and cold beauty. His black suit might as well be carved from midnight itself, perfectly fitted to his frame like a second skin. The single pearl at his throat gleams like a tear frozen in time - a beautiful "fuck you" to tradition. His hair falls in a precise line across his nape, ink-black against stone-white, and you hate that you notice. You hate that you care.

You hate how your traitorous mind catalogs every detail - the fresh haircut, the way his jaw clenches slightly, the calculated perfection of his appearance. Each observation feels like a betrayal of yourself, like you're collecting precious stones to add to your own cage.

His eyes don't leave you as you approach, dark and assessing, like he's appraising a rare artifact he's already purchased. Your footsteps echo through the cathedral - not because you're walking slowly, but because each step feels like signing away another piece of yourself.

When your fingers finally meet his, the air shifts like it always does around him. His hand is warm, steady and sure against your trembling one. You try to hide it, this weakness, but his knowing smirk tells you he feels every quiver. Of course he does - the self-satisfied glint in his eyes suggests he anticipated your trembling long before you arrived. Nothing escapes that calculated gaze.

The vows dissolve like sugar on your tongue, crystalline and too-sweet, while the officiant's words blur into a symphony of carefully chosen platitudes. Unity, power, bloodlines, blessings - "eternity" floats past like a butterfly with broken wings, and "legacy" follows, heavy as a curse.

The ring they give you burns cold against your skin - platinum and promises binding you tight. Your "I do" emerges barely above a whisper, like a secret you never meant to tell, the words feeling foreign in your mouth as if borrowed from someone who knew how to want this. But Jungkook's response rings clear as church bells, sure as sunrise, as though he's been rehearsing this moment since birth.

When the ceremony concludes and the crowd rises in a wave of silk and diamonds, he leans in close enough to count your heartbeats. The kiss isn't proper - that would be too kind. Instead, his lips find the corner of your mouth, precise as a knife's edge yet soft as a threat, tasting of possession.

You freeze, a perfect statue in white as the cathedral carries on its ancient dance of sparkling chandeliers and clicking cameras. But deep inside your chest, something ancient and angry begins to stir, like the first crack in winter ice.

The ballroom unfolds, adorned with champagne and ancient bloodlines. Beneath vaulted ceilings, strings swell while crystal and candlelight dance together, every surface glinting with gold, diamond, and carefully crafted deception. At Jungkook's side, you stand like a statue carved from pearl, his arm a ghostly presence at the small of your back while you receive strangers masquerading as friends - your smile and curtsy perfectly measured, your voice carefully contained.

The first dance ends and your gown whispers warnings as the floor fills with aristocracy. Distant royals and international moguls move through the space while women drift by in couture worth fortunes. The air is heavy with imported orchids and centuries of refined violence, threatening to pull you under.

The Jeons move through the room like gods draped in tailored suits, untouchable and unreadable. His mother maintains her regal pose, wine glass pristine and untouched, while his grandfather sits motionless as heated marble, observing all. Around them, guests trade danger and influence with practiced ease, their diamonds and secrets competing for brilliance.

Though Jungkook's fingers remain steady at your waist, his eyes retain their coldness. Behind you, the Jeon security team emerges from the shadows - Namjoon, Jin, Hoseok, Taehyung, Jimin, and Yoongi. Their beautiful suits barely conceal the violence in their bones, each man moving with purposeful intent, awaiting instructions.

The music shifts. Your first dance has ended. The floor is filling again with distant royals and corrupt diplomats, soft laughter smeared across every corner. Toasts rise like smoke. Cameras flash. Every mouth says “congratulations” while every gaze says “how long until she breaks?”

The numbness, ritual, and pretending almost bring relief, until everything shifts. You sense their presence before you see them - in the subtle falter of musicians, the way Jungkook's posture stiffens, and how Namjoon and Jin move closer without touching, just hovering near.

When you look toward the entrance, they materialize: The Maranzano Syndicate. Their appearance is immaculate - perfect suits, gleaming shoes, and smiles that stretch too wide. Though you know nothing about them specifically, you recognize their nature - the kind of silence that's been trained to kill.

Leading them is a man your age, his presence commanding attention. Handsome and controlled, he moves across the floor with deliberate grace, champagne in one hand and clear intent in the other. As he approaches, you feel the temperature drop and every Jeon ally tense. When he stops before you, his smile carries weight.

“Forgive the intrusion,” he says, tone velvet-smooth. “It would be rude to leave without congratulating the bride.”

Jungkook’s hand twitches at your waist.

The man takes your hand — slowly, theatrically — and raises it to his lips. His mouth doesn’t touch. But it hovers just enough. Long enough. The entire room stills.

"Leo Maranzano," he murmurs. "Piacere."

The glass shatters from Jungkook's grip as he lunges forward, seizing Leo by the shoulder. His face transforms from marble to murderous fury. "Disappear," he growls.

Leo's smile widens with deliberate provocation. "You're not the only one who appreciates women's beauty, Jeon."

Violence erupts in an instant - too swift for the guests to follow, but precisely what these trained men anticipated. Tables crash and champagne sprays as chaos unfolds. Jin materializes to shield you while Namjoon steps protectively forward. Through the mayhem, you glimpse Taehyung dispatching an attacker, Yoongi's blade appearing and vanishing like lightning, and Hoseok moving with lethal grace.

At the center of it all stands Jungkook - sleeves torn, chain gleaming against his throat, transformed into something dangerous and wild. He doesn't command; he simply acts, throwing bodies aside with ruthless efficiency.

You remain frozen, deaf to Namjoon's urgent words. Your eyes fix on Jungkook - your husband - as he hurls another man to the ground. The wedding ring seems to tighten around your finger, a burning reminder of your vows.

Jungkook whirls toward you, blood staining his collar, eyes fierce. "Why the fuck are you still here?! GO!"

But your legs won't move. Namjoon curses and drags you backward as another violent crash reverberates through the floor.

And then silence descends as a single gunshot echoes through the room. At the center stands Jeon Grandfather, holding a pistol with an ivory-inlaid grip. His expression carries not anger, but disappointment as he raises the weapon, wielding it like a priest might hold a cross during sermon.

His voice slices through the tension. "Back in my day, men didn't dishonor women and children with their cowardice. They handled their vengeance where it belonged - in the dark, out of sight."

The assembled crowd remains motionless as Leo steps forward with deliberate confidence. "I came to honor the bride," he states simply. When Jungkook moves to retaliate, Jin restrains him with a firm hand and whispered warning.

Turning to you with a gaze both gentle and menacing, Leo continues, "The Jeon family killed my father. They will answer for that, but not tonight. My grandfather learned patience, as will I." His smile transforms into something sharp and dangerous as he adds, "Try to enjoy the wedding night, Mrs. Jeon."

Jungkook lunges forward, his face contorted with murderous rage. "Keep my wife's name out of your dirty mouth before I fucking kill you," he snarls, muscles coiled like a predator ready to strike. Namjoon's arm shoots out to block his path while Hoseok grabs his shoulder from behind.

"Not here," Namjoon hisses through clenched teeth. "Think of the consequences."

Jungkook's eyes burn with barely contained violence, but he stills under their restraining grip, every muscle in his body taut with suppressed fury. Leo's satisfied laugh echoes through the room as he and his men retreat, the heavy doors closing behind them with finality.

In the tense silence that follows, a single voice dares to ask, "Shall we continue?"

The music returns, violins gliding back into waltz-time as champagne flows freely. The guests — trained creatures of legacy and fear — seamlessly resume their practiced dance of pretense, their laughter echoing through the hall as if violence had never touched these marble floors.

Jungkook, temple still stained with blood, vanishes down a darkened hallway while waiters weave through the crowd with fresh glasses. Under the glittering chandeliers, toasts rise and fall like waves against the shore, each clink of crystal a studied performance of normalcy.

You stand frozen, diamonds cold against your trembling collarbones, and face the terrifying reality of what you've married into — and wonder how long it will take to learn the art of survival in this glittering, dangerous world.

The ride is long and silent. One black car glides through the night like a hearse, and behind it — two more, identical in their gleaming precision. Their engines hum low like beasts beneath chains, headlights slicing through London fog as if daring the dark to follow. The city blurs past in streaks of silver and neon, but inside the car, everything is still.

You sit beside Jungkook, trembling quietly in a cage of lace and diamonds. Your gown spills over the leather like a spilled secret, crushed and wrinkled at the knees. You keep your hands folded like a prayer that will never be answered.

Across the seat, he is all silence and shadow.His jaw is clenched. His breathing even. But his mind is somewhere else — you can feel it, like storm clouds gathering in the distance. One leg draped loosely, his ringed fingers tapping once against the edge of the window. There is blood at his collar, dried now, half-hidden beneath the pearl.

No one speaks. Outside, security guards on motorcycles flank both sides. A third car follows behind, lights off, ready. One of the men in the front seat glances back, but neither of you look up.

The Jeon penthouse rises above the city, all glass and power, its windows gleaming with cold wealth. You don’t even remember how you got out of the car — just the blur of doors opening, voices murmuring orders, arms lifting packages and flowers and boxes of gifts wrapped in gold paper and blood-colored ribbon. They carry everything inside.

The penthouse is breathtaking in its silence — a towering open space where the walls don’t hold memories, only expensive taste. Marble floors echo under your shoes. The scent of white roses hangs in the air like a threat disguised as beauty. Chandeliers glimmer above you with a cruelty sharper than candlelight. Even the air here feels conditioned to perfection — expensive, perfumed, untouched.

Jungkook strides ahead silently, his jacket unbuttoned and fists clenched tight. His people dissolve into the shadows with practiced efficiency, bowing once before they disappear. The heavy doors seal shut with a decisive click, leaving you utterly alone.

You remain frozen where they abandoned you, rooted to the pristine living room floor like some tragic modern art installation. Your wedding gown - this beautiful, suffocating thing - pools around your feet like spilled moonlight. The veil still clings to your hair, a gossamer reminder of promises made under crystal chandeliers. Each breath is a battle against the corset's cruel embrace, while your legs have long since surrendered to numbness.

The silence stretches between you like a taught wire, ready to snap. He's there, a dark silhouette against darker shadows, methodically undoing his cuffs with elegant, calculated movements. Without a word, without even the courtesy of a glance, he vanishes into the bedroom.

When exhaustion finally drives you to follow, the bedroom rises before you like a gilded cage - all emerald walls and gleaming gold, with a bed that could swallow kingdoms whole. The sharp edges of wealth cut through any notion of comfort. You're a sparrow in a falcon's nest.

And there he is - sprawled across silk sheets like sin incarnate, jacket discarded but otherwise fully dressed, radiating the casual danger of a predator at rest. His silence fills the room like smoke.

"Why are you still dressed?" The words fall like ice between you.

You stand paralyzed, breath caught in your throat as your fingers nervously twist in the yards of white fabric. His eyes rake over you methodically, dissecting every tremor and fear until his expression settles into something more cutting than cruelty - pure disappointment.

His words shatter your composure, unleashing a tide of fury that drowns your fear. "I never wanted this," you whisper, voice trembling with raw emotion.

"What?" His expression darkens dangerously.

The truth pours out, bitter and sharp. "This marriage, you, this entire twisted world - I only did it to save her."

He rises like a storm gathering force, each movement a study in controlled violence. City lights paint him in shadows as he stalks closer. "What the fuck are you talking about?"

Words become weapons: "You were never wanted. Not by her, not by me. You were a death sentence, and I stepped in because she was dying at the thought of you."

Something dangerous flickers in his eyes - not shock, but a terrible fascination. His smile unfurls like a blade. "Interesting."

He advances slowly, and you instinctively back away, feeling every bit the cornered prey he sees you as.

"Did you think we'd sleep in separate beds on our wedding night?" he murmurs, fingers moving to his buttons. One by one, they come undone like falling stars.

You can't look away as skin appears - beautiful and brutal, carved from marble and midnight. He undresses like someone who's never known shame.

Then he's behind you, his presence radiating heat and shadow as his breath ghosts across your neck. His fingers find the buttons of your dress, methodically undoing them one by one while panic floods your veins, causing you to tremble uncontrollably.

He pauses, lips brushing your ear: "Anyone would want this night with me. But you're shaking like prey about to be devoured."

The warmth vanishes. His voice turns to steel. "I don't need this."

He collects his jacket like gathering shadows. At the threshold, without turning: "If you change your mind, I'll be in the other room."

Then he's gone, leaving you alone with your fear and your fury and your wedding dress coming undone.

You lie in the dark, cocooned in too much silence and too little peace. The sheets whisper over your bare skin as you shift — lace against skin, skin against memory. You hadn't meant to take the dress off so soon, but the corset had left bruises across your ribs, and your legs gave out the moment he left. Now you wear only your underwear and the quiet pulse of your thoughts, lying in the center of a bed too large, in a home too vast, after a night too violent to forget.

Sleep eludes you as memories of the night replay endlessly in your mind. The echo of gunfire lingers, accompanied by Maranzano's haunting presence - his smile forever imprinted in your thoughts, the way he regarded you like a silk-draped warning. Yet what truly unsettles you is the image of Jungkook - bloodied fists, disheveled collar, claiming you as his before a room of demons.

In a strange twist of fate, you realize he became your sole defender, choosing you for reasons still shrouded in mystery. This revelation propels you from the bed.

You wrap yourself in a robe of pure seduction - flowing silk that caresses your skin, its shortened hem and plunging neckline suggesting intentions you hadn't consciously formed. Or perhaps you had.

Moving silently through the penthouse, you find yourself before the open double doors at the hall's end. The room beyond bathes in amber light, where Jungkook reclines on an enormous bed, his bare chest catching gold like sculpture. A MacBook rests in his lap, screen light playing across his jaw, while his legs - long, parted, powerful - stretch across the duvet, clad only in black boxer briefs.

His eyes meet yours and he freezes, the air between you transforming into something tangible. You witness the exact moment desire overtakes thought in his gaze as it traces the curves beneath your silk-draped form.

Setting aside his laptop, he leans back with calculated grace, the embodiment of sin made flesh. "Knew you'd come to your senses," he drawls as he tilts his chin and widens his legs slightly, a silent command. "Go ahead."

Instead, you voice your turmoil. "The wedding... the Maranzanos... I can't sleep."

His jaw flexes, a slight tell. "I don't know what I'm more afraid of," you confess softly. "Them... or you."

Something in your words spurs him forward, his predatory grace on full display as he rises, his arousal evident against the thin fabric of his boxers. You try to steady your breathing as he approaches with measured steps.

"I will never let those filthy fuckers touch something that's mine," he declares, voice cold and sharp. "And you are mine."

Your slight nod draws his scrutiny. "Still afraid?"

"I believe you're powerful..." you hesitate, "but power itself can be terrifying."

His smile turns razor-sharp as he closes the distance between you, until his breath mingles with yours. "You think I'm a monster."

"I know you are."

His laughter - deep, rich, dangerous - slides down your spine like poisoned silk.

“Everyone’s a monster,” he murmurs. “You just happened to be lucky enough to marry the most dangerous of them all.”

His hands find your thighs. His thumbs drag slowly upward — grazing, pressing, testing. Your robe parts beneath his touch. You feel heat spread like fire through your veins, breath catching as his fingers brush over your hips, then the curve of your waist, the dip between your breasts. Your body trembles, not from fear anymore but from something deeper, more primal.

"Let me pull back the curtain," he whispers against your neck, "and show you what I might give you."

At your subtle nod, he guides you to the bed with the careful precision of someone handling their most precious weapon.

You’re guided gently into his lap — your thighs folding around him, your knees pressed to the mattress, your robe already falling from your shoulders. His hands don’t rush. They devour.

You begin to move — hesitant at first, your hips swaying forward with tentative rhythm, the silk of your underwear dragging against the heat straining beneath his boxers. It’s an unbearable kind of friction, featherlight but charged, as if every breath you take draws fire from the contact.

Jungkook exhales harshly — the sound low, broken — his head tipping back slightly as your hips grind again, slower this time, deeper. His hands stay resting at your thighs for a moment, as though he’s restraining himself, letting you move, letting you lead. But his muscles twitch under your touch, like a storm waiting to shatter the sky.

You find your rhythm. Back and forth, your hips brushing his with increasing urgency, and the softest moan slips from your lips, unbidden — a sound that startles even you.

His reaction is immediate as his mouth trails to your neck, pressing a kiss just below your jaw — hot, open, unhurried — then drifts lower, brushing over the hollow of your throat, your collarbone, teeth grazing so lightly it sends shivers down your spine. He’s not in a rush. He explores you like he’s reading a language he already knows but wants to savor syllable by syllable.

Your breath catches as his lips skim the edge of your bra, teasing the skin above the lace. He doesn't ask. He doesn’t need to. His hands slide up your ribcage, palms wide and reverent, finding the soft swell of your breasts and cupping them through the fabric — thumbs stroking lazily over the thin material, coaxing gasps from your throat like he’s plucking at the strings of some hidden instrument.

Every moan you release feeds the hunger in his eyes. And he’s watching you — every twitch of your hips, every parting of your lips, every flutter of your lashes. It consumes him.

You can feel his arousal beneath you, hot and solid, straining harder with every roll of your body. His hands move again — one gripping your waist with bruising intent, guiding your movements, while the other trails along the curve of your lower back, holding you flush against him.

The rhythm intensifies — friction now slick, pulsing, unbearable. Your thighs tremble. His jaw clenches. Every breath is shared now, your open mouths hovering close, not kissing but just existing in that charged space where desire lives and burns.

You can feel the tension building, hovering at that delicious edge. When he moans - low, guttural, nearly a growl - something inside you shatters. As you arch forward, his hands tighten their grip possessively. You feel yourself unraveling — not with shame, but with the devastating knowledge that no one has ever made you feel like this before.

You’re close — so close — when his hands suddenly shift.

With a strength that feels effortless, Jungkook lifts you in his arms as though you weigh nothing at all, his grip steady beneath your thighs. The motion steals your breath. The loss of rhythm makes your body cry out silently, aching and wanting.

He lays you down onto the bed like he’s placing something sacred — your hair fanning over silk, your skin burning against the cool sheets. The robe hangs loosely at your elbows, forgotten now, as your chest rises and falls with a rhythm that has nothing to do with breath and everything to do with him.

He kneels beside you, his gaze slow and molten, taking in every curve, every tremble, every shiver that escapes you now without resistance.

His hand skims down your stomach — fingers dragging with maddening slowness. The silk of your skin, the shallow dip at your navel, the heat blooming beneath every inch of his touch — he traces it all, not as a man in a hurry, but as one who means to memorize you.

His fingers find the center of your heat, where friction once burned and now aches for more. A gasp escapes your lips as he pauses, his other hand reaching for the clasp of your bra. Before you realize it, your palm presses against his chest, stopping him.

Not yet. Whether from fear, pride, or the need to maintain some control, you can't let go completely. The tension between you crystallizes into something quieter than rejection as he studies you, his expression unreadable.

He leans in, lips brushing your jaw as he speaks in a voice both molten and low. "This act of patience," he murmurs, "is exclusive. For you."

His words sink into your skin more than they reach your ears, and then he moves lower. He doesn’t remove the bra — doesn’t try again — but he does not ignore you. His mouth descends over the lace, hot breath seeping through the delicate fabric. His tongue flicks, teasing just above the cup. Then lower. The edge of your breast. The underside. He kisses there, open-mouthed, savoring the way your body arches, how your thighs tense around nothing.

His hands slide down across your waist, steadying you before moving lower with deliberate intent. You feel him shift, his shoulders slipping between your knees, parting them with a reverence that only makes the air leave your lungs faster.

He presses slow, searing kisses along the inside of your thigh. His fingers draw your underwear aside with maddening control, brushing lightly against sensitive skin before his mouth descends.

The first drag of his tongue is like nothing you were prepared for — slow, wet, deliberate. Your back lifts from the bed as your hand shoots out, gripping the sheets like they might anchor you to the earth.

He moves with the precision of someone who has studied power — who knows exactly how to wield it and when to be cruel with pleasure. His tongue circles slowly, testing you, tasting. Then deeper — firmer. His mouth closes over you, lips parting to suck gently, then harder, then teasing again, and again.

You cry out, a sharp, desperate sound you’ve never heard from your own throat before.

Your hand finds his hair. Your fingers tighten in the dark strands as his rhythm deepens, his moans vibrating against you, low and hungry. Your thighs tremble as your breath breaks apart.Your body begins to spiral faster, helplessly — his tongue working in endless rhythm, his grip steady on your hips as you start to fall apart in his mouth.

You cum like something tearing open inside you — high and hot and trembling — your gasp catching, then breaking, then disappearing entirely as your body arches up into his mouth like it belongs nowhere else.

He maintains his steady devotion, drawing out every wave of pleasure until you lay completely still, breathless and undone beneath him.

When he finally rises, his mouth glistening and eyes dark with pride, he presses one final kiss to the inside of your thigh before meeting your gaze with a satisfied smirk. His voice comes rough with shadow.

"Now that," he purred against your trembling thigh, voice dripping like honey and sin, "was just the beginning of what I can give you."

You wake tangled in silk and shattered moonlight, sin still sticky-sweet on your tongue. Your robe whispers secrets against feverish skin, one sleeve sliding down like a lover's touch, sheets still singing hymns of his warmth. There's an ache threading through your muscles like golden honey, each pulse a reminder of hands that knew too well where to press, where to bruise, where to worship.

The air is thick with him still - spice and shadow and something darker, something that tastes of stolen prayers and midnight confessions. You stare up at a ceiling that gleams like polished bones, willing yourself to forget.

But memory is a cruel mistress. She paints his hands in watercolor bruises across your mind. His mouth - oh god, his mouth - the way he consumed you like you were his last meal, like you were salvation itself. And you? You broke apart like stained glass beneath a light, scattered and sacred and his.

You must have lost your mind.

You press trembling fingers against closed eyes, shame and want warring in your chest like caged birds. It should repulse you - this descent into darkness, this willing fall from grace. Some part of you remembers innocence, remembers when touch meant tenderness instead of torrential need.

But there's a monster living in your ribcage now, purring at the memory of worship wrapped in violence. It remembers the weight of him, the raw intensity of his focus, the way he made devotion feel like damnation.

Have you always been this hollow, waiting to be filled with fire?

The bedroom holds no answers. Just cold marble and colder air, roses drowning in some foreign scent that wasn't there before. Everything's too sharp, too sterile, too vast.

He's gone. Of course he is. Demons never linger for too long. The penthouse feels different now, hollow and cold in his wake. Stepping into the hallway, you're greeted like fine china - precious, pristine, breakable. The world wants its doll back, wants to forget how she shattered in the dark.

There's a ritual waiting by the window: breakfast laid out like an altar. Poached eggs under crystal domes catch morning light like tears. A blood orange bleeds perfectly on white china. Fresh brioche exhales steam into the silence. The Jeon family crest watches from your napkin, judging.

You don't dare touch any of it.A maid ghosts through the room, her "madam" falling too quickly, too properly, gaze skittering away like scattered pearls. Another servant arranges your armor for the day: silk blouse with a collar high enough to hide secrets, modest skirt, pearls to match your cage.

Steam curls from behind the bathroom door, a siren song of hot water and false comfort.Your feet refuse to move. This attention scrapes against your skin like sandpaper wrapped in silk. It's not luxury - it's surveillance dressed in gold leaf.

Watched. Always watched.

Every gesture is a report in waiting. Every bite you don't take will be noted. Every wrinkle in your robe tells stories to ears you'll never see. The mirrors - god, the mirrors - they're everywhere, reflecting your uncertainty in infinite angles until you're drowning in your own discomfort.His presence lingers like smoke, invisible but choking. The walls have eyes, and they all belong to him.

You perch at the table like a bird about to flee, clutching silk around yourself like armor.The perfect breakfast dies slowly in the sunlight.Your appetite fled with the night.

It starts like this: a whisper of rebellion, soft as moth wings against silk. Your fingers find the white peach perfume, its crystal bottle cool and dangerous in your palm. One spritz — delicate, precise — finds your wrist. Another graces its twin. The hollow of your throat accepts the third like a blessing. The scent blooms in the air, all summer-sweet defiance, honeyed memories that curl through empty halls like forgotten prayers. And no one — no one — dares stop you because of some allergies.

These marble halls may cage you in gold and expectations, but they can't dictate the way you smell anymore, can't police the way your bare feet whisper secrets against cold floors. Your robe trails behind you like a queen's cape, leaving echoes of fruit and rebellion in your wake. Deep in your belongings, the black ribbon waits. It remembers you, this small scrap of darkness. It remembers the shape of your defiance.

The silk slides home against your hair and it for a moment it feels like armor. He materializes like a dark fairytale - no warning, no preamble. Just the whispered code at the door and footsteps that paint promises across marble floors. When he enters, the room holds its breath. Storm-cloud presence, predator grace. His skin still gleams from whatever violence he's been courting - white shirt, rain-slick hair and a towel draped carelessly around his neck. Cedar and sweat and danger roll off him in waves.

Your ribbon-bound hair and peach-sweet defiance catch his attention like matches to gasoline. His grin splits the atmosphere. "Miss me, Pesca Mia?"

The Italian drips like honey-coated thorns - My Peach - far too gentle for a man whose smirk could cut glass. You answer with silence, with measured steps past him, with carefully crafted distance.And of course he follows, tigers don't let prey walk away.

"Playing ghost bride still?" His voice chases you down the hall. "We share a home, Peach. Looking at me won't turn you to stone."

But then the air thickens, and his shadow swallows yours whole. His hand finds your wrist - a brand of heat that stops your heart.

He materializes before you, all aristocrat skin and lethal grace. Too close. Not close enough. Your eyes refuse to trace the dangerous landscape of his chest.

"Why?" Confusion bleeds into his voice, softening its edges. "You're my wife, yet you treat me like a stranger."

You meet his gaze at last. Your voice comes arctic cold. "You are."

Two words, quiet as falling snow yet sharp as winter wind. Something flickers in his expression - pain, maybe, before pride swallows it whole. His laugh comes out all broken glass.

"You think I'm desperate for your attention?" Arrogance wraps around his words like armor. "Girls would kill to wear your crown, peach. Don't think you're irreplaceable."

Your silence lingers, though his statemnt stings. He exhales - one sharp breath that carries worlds of frustration. And he urns away like you're not worth the oxygen.

"I won't beg you to claim what's already yours," he mutters, defeat dressed as disdain. "You don't want me? Fine."

His exit is soundless, but it echoes in your bones. The door slams like punctuation. But the halls still whisper of peaches and regret.

IIt's 2:17 a.m. and the universe holds its breath.

Your heartbeat counts time with the expensive clock on the wall, both of you locked in this infinite moment of waiting. Silk sheets coil around you like living things as you sit there, spine straight as a blade, every nerve ending electric with that delicious cocktail of rage and loneliness. The lamp bathes everything in honey-gold light, making shadows dance across the pristine emptiness beside you - a canvas waiting for a body that isn't there.

He hasn't returned. You tried maintaining your cold façade, denying how the empty space beside you slowly hollowed out your chest, how the silence grew unbearable. You called it strategy, convinced yourself it was necessary breathing room. But now? Now you're done waiting. Your fingers find your phone with lethal grace.

Namjoon picks up on the second ring, his voice heavy with sleep yet carrying an edge of anticipation, as if he'd been expecting this call.

"Is he with you?" The words slip out like ice daggers.

The pause speaks volumes. "...No. He's at The Roselace."

Your lashes lower once, slow and dangerous. "A club?"

"Yes." The word hangs there, heavy with implications that flicker like warning lights in the dark. But you stopped needing warnings the moment you tasted rebellion on your tongue. Your voice doesn't just turn to steel. No, it crystallizes into something far more dangerous: diamond-sharp certainty wrapped in velvet menace. "Bring the car around. I want to go."

Another heartbeat of silence, shorter this time. "I'll be outside in five."

Night bleeds neon across rain-slick streets, your revenge wrapped in a dress that fits like a promise. The city's a living thing tonight, all electric pulse and wet concrete confession. And you? You're winter made flesh in the backseat, ankles crossed like loaded guns, while Namjoon pilots the car through streets that taste of destiny. He knows better than to speak - you can't small talk with gathering storms.

Jin materializes at the club entrance like a harbinger, umbrella in hand, face carved from marble. His words fall soft as burial dirt: "Back lounge. Always."

You ghost past him without acknowledgment. Some moments don't need words.

The Roselace wraps around you like sin in silk stockings - all crushed velvet shadows and dripping crystal light. Bass thrums through your bones while bodies write poetry against each other on the dance floor, everything drenched in rose-gold desperation and champagne dreams.

Then the VIP lounge opens its maw and your world tilts sideways. There. Him.

Jeon Jungkook. Sprawled like fallen royalty across black leather, shirt undone like an invitation to sin, silver chain catching light like stolen stars. A glass of scotch hangs from his fingers.

But it's the women that make your blood crystallize. They're draped across him like living jewelry, all velvet curves and sheer promises. Their hands map territories you were claiming last night, lips writing stories against skin that was against yours yesterday. One whispers something that pulls a smirk from him like poison from a wound.

His eyes find yours across the chaos.

And smiles like the devil has just been entertained.

Your body moves without conscious thought - a bullet made of silk and fury. The click of your heels against marble sounds like a countdown to chaos. Your fingers find soft flesh, yanking the nearest woman away from him with the kind of graceless violence reserved for scorned goddesses.

Her shriek pierces the air like shattered crystal. She stumbles backwards, a doll thrown from its perch.

"You selfish, arrogant, fucking idiot-"

His laughter cuts through your rage like a knife through velvet.

"You're so fucking sexy like this," he purrs, voice dripping with dark honey, watching your anger like it's the most exquisite show he's ever seen.

"I swear to God, if I ever see…" The words die in your throat. Because his mouth claims yours like he's signing a contract in sin.

He kisses you like he's trying to steal your soul - all open mouth and wicked smile. One hand cradles your face like you're made of precious things, while the other brands your lower back, pulling you into his lap like you're the missing piece he's been waiting for.

Time stops breathing.The bass still pounds through the walls but the world goes quiet. The women dissolve like smoke. Staff melt into shadows. Even the velvet walls seem to lean away. There's nothing left but the dangerous heat between your teeth and his. He breaks away just enough to trace your bottom lip with his tongue.

"Don't look at me like that in public," he whispers, eyes like molten gold. "I'll forget every rule I've ever learned."

Your palm finds his cheek - not gentle, not cruel but Jungkook only grins wider.

The city blurs past like smeared watercolors as Namjoon guides the car through rain-slicked streets. Jin's profile cuts a careful silhouette against neon-lit windows. The air between you all feels like the moment before lightning strikes.

You're a study in barely contained fury next to Jungkook - all crossed arms and white knuckles, electricity crackling beneath your skin. He's sprawled in his seat like a fallen angel, that split lip you gave him worn like a badge of honor, watching you with the kind of smile that makes devils nervous.

"Still giving me the silent treatment after that kiss?" His voice drips honey-sweet venom.

"Touch another woman," you breathe, each word dipped in ice and promises, “and I will bury your body in the same marble your family worships.”

Up front, Jin's cough shatters the tension. Namjoon's eyes catch yours in the mirror - a flash of pure amusement you choose to ignore.

And Jungkook? He laughs like you've just told him the most delicious secret, leaning in until his breath ghosts across your ear, voice pure sin, "Baby, your jealousy looks better on me than designer suits."

You don't give him the satisfaction of a response. But your traitor pulse skips like a scratched record, and the devil's smile says he knows exactly what he does to you.

A knock that sounds like the universe holding its breath. Like fate writing the first line of a tragedy.

You're poised at the edge of the grand sitting room like a statue carved from anxiety and expensive silk. Your blouse is buttoned to your throat - armor, really. Chandeliers drip gold light like honey. White roses perfume the air with your false hope of Nora coming to visit you too with your family. And then the door opens the past comes crawling in like poison through your veins.

Your mother glides in first - her hairspray a helmet, her lipstick a warning sign in crimson. Then Luca, wearing wealth like a borrowed skin, pressing family obligation against your cheek in a kiss that tastes of nothing. And finally - because the universe has a cruel sense of dramatic timing - your father.

He moves through space like a black hole, warping reality around him. The kind of presence that makes rooms smaller, air thinner, daughters invisible. His suit whispers of faded glory but his eyes? They gleam with collector's greed.

Your flinch is barely perceptible, but Jungkook - beautiful and dangerous - catches the subtle movement like a treasured secret. He's sprawled in his armchair like it's a throne, all devastating grace and calculated nonchalance. Whiskey glass dancing between elegant fingers, watching, waiting. The temperature drops ten degrees when his gaze sharpens.

"Where's Nora?" Your voice plays at lightness. Fails.

Your mother's hand waves away concern like smoke. "Unwell."

Luca's jaw twitches. He won't meet your eyes. Your father has no such restraint.

"Well?" The word drips disdain. "This is all... quaint. But when are you buying me a proper mansion?"

His words splatter against the pristine air like acid on silk.

You straighten your spine. "The Jeons have already given enough."

Jungkook's laugh of disbelief is velvet-wrapped steel.

"Enough?" Your father's scoff could curdle cream. "I gave Jeons my precious daughter. Raised you right. Paid for her schooling. Trained her to speak six damn languages. And they give what? A glorified cottage and few millions on bank account. This is not serious."

Jungkook shifts - barely a movement, but it rewrites gravity. You speak first.

"Don't embarrass us." You aim for ice. Your voice cracks like spring thaw.

Your father whirls. "Since when did you grow fangs, little girl?"

His hand rises - a familiar choreography of pain, promising bruises that would match your designer earrings. But the blow never lands.

Jungkook's fingers wrapped around your father's wrist with quiet, absolute authority - a prophecy written in bone and blood.

“My grandfather raised me with manners,” Jungkook muses, voice soft, “taught me to never strike someone older.” He leans close. "Don't make me disappoint him."

The silence has teeth. Your father's face performs an ugly dance between rage and humiliation. He retreats, inch by inch. Jungkook releases him like dropping something contaminated.

Then, quiet as a blade between ribs: "And don't ever think of hitting my wife."

The room stills. Your mother's face turns to marble while Luca shifts uneasily on his feet.

They retreat like storm clouds dispersing - your father leading with violence still coiled in his shoulders, your mother trailing behind him like winter fog. At the threshold, Luca pauses to mumble an apology before disappearing, leaving only traces of expensive cologne.

When the doors finally close, silence blankets the room like fresh snow. You exhale years of fear.

Jungkook stands beside you, offering neither touch nor words - just his presence, steady as gravity, protective as shelter. In this space where fear once lived, something gentler takes root.

Warmth.

Maybe love isn't some grand revelation inscribed in starlight. Maybe it's quieter than that - like finding shelter during a storm you didn't know was coming.

There was something about that moment in the sitting room. The way his hand caught your father's wrist mid-strike, precise as a knife's edge, gentle as snowfall. Not a word spoken, just the weight of his presence beside you, heavy as gravity and twice as constant.

Protection wrapped in silence. Devotion dressed in designer suits.

And how it caught in your throat - this unfamiliar feeling of being shielded rather than shaped, protected rather than possessed. Like watching a bruise bloom backwards, violence turning to velvet beneath your skin.

You've spent so long being a prize to be won, an asset to be traded. But here, in the aftermath of that infinite moment, you taste something different on your tongue. Something that whispers of possibility, of paperback endings you never dared to want.

Because maybe love isn't about grand gestures or flowery declarations. Maybe it's in the way he caught your flinch like a secret worth keeping. The way he stood guard over your fear without trying to own it. The thought haunts you like perfume, sweet and lingering, as you drift through marble halls in bare feet. Past crystal that catches light like promises, through silence that feels, for once, like peace.

Tonight, you could let the walls down brick by brick. Maybe tonight, you could let the curtain open just a little wider. Not in surrender, but in hope of something softer. Something that tastes less like warfare and more like coming home.

The clock says 11:42 p.m. when you finally allow yourself to move. Your robe slips to the floor like dusk shedding its skin, and you reach for the lingerie that still carries its tag, something delicate and barely-there — lace the color of antique ivory, with ribbon straps that whisper against your shoulders like secrets.

You spray white peach across your collarbone, behind your knees, over your wrists. The scent hovers in the air like the memory of hands you don’t flinch from. You find the black ribbon — a little wrinkled now, a little tired — and tie it loosely in your hair. A small crown. A little defiance. A reminder that this softness is yours to give.

Then — because courage needs ritual — you pour yourself half a glass of wine. You sip it standing by the window, your reflection doubled against the city: bare legs, trembling fingers, a girl sculpted from want and silk and something beginning to resemble hope.

What if I’m allowed to be held gently? the thought hums behind your ribs. What if I’m not just a transaction in pearls?

Tonight, you want more than to be protected like property - you want to be wanted like a woman. You want to feel that warmth again and maybe dare to discover more of it. Setting down your glass with shallow breath, your heart presses against your ribs like a caged bird seeking freedom. Then, with quiet certainty, you call his name. “Jungkook.”

Not a shout, nor a whisper - just your voice carrying through the stillness. And somewhere in the penthouse, you sense the shift in the air, hear the soft footsteps approaching. You wait, your heartbeat marking time in the silence.

───────── ౨ৎ ─────────

When the door finally creaks open, the light from the hallway carves his silhouette in gold.

Jungkook enters shirtless, barefoot, and breathing like he ran. The low waistband of his black boxers hugs his hips like sin sewn into fabric. His dark hair is tousled, damp at the ends. His chest gleams faintly from the shower or the gym — you can’t tell — but the muscles move tight beneath his skin as he scans the room, jaw clenched.

"Did something—" His words trail off as he takes in the sight before him.

Laid out across the pale sheets like a prayer wrapped in lace and quiet invitation. The ivory lingerie clings to you like mist, your legs tucked slightly to the side, bare shoulder framed by long hair and black ribbon. One hand holds the edge of the sheet. The other rests over your stomach — steady only in appearance.

You don't speak, simply holding his gaze and letting him take in the sight before him. His breath catches in his throat as he stands motionless, a moment of pure reverence washing over his features. Something raw and unguarded crosses his face, as if witnessing something he'd only dreamed of. You offer a gentle, uncertain smile and reach for him with tentative fingers.

“Jungkook.” A whisper. A gift. Like a flame lit in the darkness.

His expression shifts, tension and panic melting away in a single breath. What replaces it is hunger - not the violent kind that devours, but the kind that worships.

“Fuck,” he breathes, crossing the room like gravity commanded it. “Do you even know what you look like right now?”

You open your mouth to answer, but the words catch as he drops to the edge of the bed, body sinking against yours in one fluid, dangerous motion.

His skin is hot — all over, everywhere. His thigh presses to yours, bare and hard. His hands hover at your waist like he’s afraid to touch too much. But his eyes... his eyes consume.

“Say it again,” he whispers, voice hoarse.

You swallow. You’re trembling now, but it’s not from fear. “I wanted you here.”

That breaks the last thread of his restraint. His mouth finds yours in a kiss that starts tenderly - cautious at first, his hand cupping your cheek with careful reverence. But when you respond, matching his intensity, the gentleness gives way to something deeper, more urgent.

Your arms wind around his shoulders, your body pressing to his instinctively, lips parting under the low groan that leaves him like the last tether snapped.

That’s when he loses himself. His body crushes into yours, warmth and weight and scent — white peach still fresh on your throat, and he moans against your mouth like it’s the first time he’s ever been given something soft.

Is this what it means to be wanted? you think, dizzy under the weight of him.

His hand slides down to your hip, then your thigh, pulling you closer, and you feel it — his arousal, hard and unmistakable, pressing between your legs through the thin barrier of his boxers.

You gasp softly into his mouth. He pulls back, just enough to whisper — breath ragged, lips brushing yours. “You have no idea what you do to me, Peach.”

He leans down and begins trailing kisses down your throat, hot breath dragging over your skin, and then his fingers move to the front clasp of your bra — slow, teasing — as if asking silently. You nod once, breath catching in your throat as the fabric falls away. He pauses, eyes darkening with desire as he takes in the sight of you. With a low, reverent sound, his mouth finds your breast - tongue teasing your nipple with exquisite tenderness until you arch up against him, fingers threading through his hair.

"Jungkook," you breathe, voice trembling.

"Yeah?" he murmurs against your skin. "Want more, baby?"

He switches to the other side, tongue dragging in a spiral before sucking — hard. The sound that leaves your throat isn’t gentle. He groans in approval then he’s back at your lips again, devouring you now, and his hand slides between your legs, palm pressing against the damp lace.

“Shit. You’re already this wet?”

Your hips buck as his fingers slip past the fabric, dip down, find you with terrifying precision. He circles once, testing. “Let me hear you,” he whispers against your mouth. He sinks one finger in and you cry out softly — not from pain, but from the sudden fullness.

“So tight,” he breathes, “fuck—” and adds another. He curls them both — slow, precise, devastating — and your body trembles like silk beneath a storm.

You gasp, head tipping back into the pillows, eyes fluttering shut as his fingers stroke deeper, searching and finding the ache you never let yourself name. His mouth is at your neck again, tongue warm, breath hotter. He doesn’t rush and doesn’t demand. He explores you like he’s learned you — like every moan, every arch of your back, is a sacred response he’s waited lifetimes to unlock.

The pressure builds, low and thick, like a fire rolling beneath your skin. His palm grinds against the base of you with every push, every curl, and it lights you up from the inside — slow-burning, tender, terrifying.

“That’s it,” he whispers, lips dragging against your throat. “Let go. Just feel me.”

And so you surrender to it completely, allowing yourself this precious first taste of freedom. You let go of the shame, the cold hands of your past, the bruises you were told to hide and the hunger you were told to deny. You let go of every time you were touched only to be controlled, looked at only to be priced. Because this is different - his mouth leaving trails of reverence across your skin, his voice a mixture of raw need and gentle wonder.

This is the silk of your thighs shaking against the sharp cut of his rings, and the way he slows his fingers just when your breath catches — just to listen to the sound of you breaking open.

And in the chaos of it, a thought blooms. You feel good. The revelation hits like lightning in slow motion. God, you feel so good. You didn’t know it could feel like this. Like warmth without danger. Like pleasure without debt. Like being touched and not owned, kissed and not erased.

His lips find yours again, and this time it’s deeper — slow and thick and intoxicating. He kisses you like a man no longer teasing, but claiming. You moan into his mouth, your fingers tangled in his hair, nails grazing his neck. He groans low, a vibration that pulses down his chest, straight through to the way his fingers curl again, firmer this time.

“You feel this?” he breathes against your lips, his voice barely coherent. “How your body’s taking me so fucking sweet? You were made for this.”

You whimper — a sound of surrender, of disbelief, of joy. You’re trembling now, the pleasure cresting fast, and he knows it. He sees it. He watches you fall apart under him like he’s watching art come to life.

“You’re close, aren’t you?” he murmurs, nose brushing your cheek. “Let me see you fall, baby. Let me feel you break.”

And when he whispers “Come for me, Peach,” the world splits open. Your thighs tense. Your breath stutters. And the moan that spills from your lips is broken and holy, like a prayer finally answered. Your body pulses around his fingers, over and over, as he coaxes every wave from you, patient and wicked and tender.

He doesn’t stop until you collapse back into the pillows, breathless, limbs heavy, the world spinning in white peach and warmth. You blink up at the ceiling, then at him, marveling at how the space between you finally feels like sanctuary instead of battlefield. Though familiar with pain, this experience is different. For the first time, pleasure flows through you without guilt or fear, and you find yourself yearning for more, unashamed of your desire.

You’re still trembling in the aftermath, breaths shallow, lips parted, your whole body drawn tight like silk thread loosened from its spool.

Jungkook kisses your throat — soft, slow — and you feel his breath against your skin, warm with awe, not just desire. His hand strokes gently along your thigh, then stills. For a moment, he just watches you.

You nod, breath trembling, body already molded to his heat. He shifts lower, moving from your mouth to the space between your legs, his skin brushing yours in a trail of quiet possession. The soft rustle of fabric draws your gaze downward — his boxers sliding off his hips with effortless ease, revealing him fully.

Your breath catches, but you don’t look away. The sight of him — aroused, bare, utterly unashamed — steals the rhythm from your lungs. There’s fear, yes, curled low in your belly like something primal and unspoken, but it’s laced with something stronger, deeper: anticipation that feels like hunger, and the dizzying ache of knowing there’s no going back.

He sees the shift in your eyes — the tension, the heat, the way your thighs press together unconsciously — and his gaze grows darker, steadier. There’s no smirk now, no cocky remark, just quiet reverence carved into every line of his face as he settles over you, breath warming the skin below your ear.

“Tell me if you want to stop,” he says, voice rough but patient. “I’ll never take what you won’t give.”

You swallow, fingers curled around the sheets. “I want it,” you whisper. “I want you.”

And God, the look in his eyes — something wounded, something honored — like he’s trying not to fall apart just from hearing you say that. He kisses you again, slower this time. His hand cups your cheek. You feel him guide himself to your entrance, his length brushing against the soft slickness between your thighs. He presses forward, just the tip, and you gasp — a sound that’s more surprise than pain.

“Breathe,” he murmurs. “Let me take care of you.”

You inhale, long and slow, and when he begins to push in deeper, you feel the stretch — unfamiliar, thick, slow. Your body adjusts to him inch by inch, heat curling deep in your belly as he moves inside you, every second filled with breathless restraint.

“Fuck,” he groans, burying his face in your neck, “you’re so fucking tight—so warm—it’s driving me insane.”

You whimper as he settles fully inside you, his hips finally flush against yours. He doesn’t move at first — just stays there, forehead against yours, eyes half-closed.

“You’re doing so well,” he whispers. “So fucking perfect, Peach.”

You shift your hips slightly, and the sensation ripples through you like wildfire. “Move,” you breathe. “Please.”

His first thrust is slow, careful. He draws out almost entirely, then presses back in — deep, deliberate, letting you feel every inch. The rhythm is slow at first, aching and tender. Every time he sinks into you, you moan softly, your fingers clutching his shoulders, legs trembling as they wrap tighter around his waist.

“That’s it,” he groans. “Take me, baby. Let me in deeper.”

“You feel so good,” you whisper, dazed. “It’s… it’s so much—”

“You can take it,” he breathes against your mouth. “You were made for me.”

His rhythm builds. Not frantic, not rough — just sure. Deep. Intentional. You feel every part of him, each thrust grinding you deeper into the mattress. His name spills from your lips like confession. His hands grip your hips tighter as you start to move with him, arching, circling, giving as much as you take.

“You’re perfect like this,” he whispers, panting against your shoulder. “So fucking wet, so tight—fuck. You were made to take me.”

You moan louder — the sound shameless, raw, a full-body ache turned into voice. The pleasure builds so fast it almost frightens you. Your walls pulse around him, fluttering each time he hits that spot inside you that makes the world collapse.

He thrusts deeper now, hips snapping with desperate rhythm, sweat-slick skin slapping against yours. The room fills with the sound of skin meeting skin, of breath and moans and curses bitten between kisses.

You can feel the edge. You’re tumbling toward it, helpless to stop.

He starts to move faster — still careful, but no longer holding back. Your moans rise to meet his as he thrusts deeper, fuller, the wet sound of him filling you over and over echoing through the room, joined by skin meeting skin and both your voices breaking into the air like shattered stars.

“You’re mine,” he growls, each thrust harder, rougher now, “say it—say it.”

“I’m yours,” you gasp, legs tightening, eyes rolling back. “Only yours.”

Your climax builds like a storm held too long behind trembling sky — not sudden, but rising, demanding, layered with sensation you can barely hold.

Every thrust winds you tighter, every kiss unravels something old in your chest, every whispered word — you’re mine, you feel so fucking good, you were made for this — leaves you burning, open, filled. Your nails dig into his back as your moans dissolve into his mouth, thighs trembling around his waist. And then — it hits. Hard, deep, unstoppable.

Your body arches into him as if trying to fuse, your cry breaking against his lips like something holy, too raw to be pretty, too intense to be silent. The wave doesn’t crest — it shatters, again and again, your walls pulsing around him as pleasure rushes over you in waves so sharp it almost hurts. You barely register the curse he chokes into your neck, the way his rhythm breaks.

His hands grip your hips — tight, desperate — and he buries himself to the hilt one last time, hips jerking as he spills inside you with a guttural groan that shakes you to the bone. The sound he makes is not triumphant — it’s wrecked, torn from his throat like he was holding it back too long. His forehead drops to yours, breath trembling, body shivering as he rides the aftershocks with you still wrapped tight around him.

When he finally pulls out, you whimper from the loss. He kisses your lips to soothe you, then your shoulder, then your hip. Then he lies beside you, pulling you to his chest, both of you still catching your breath. You wrap your arms around him. Your leg stays hitched over his waist, like your body doesn’t know how to stop holding him.

His hand rubs lazy circles into your back. “You okay?” he whispers.

You nod against his skin. And for the first time in your life — in this warm, slow silence — you feel safe. And maybe, just maybe…

…a little bit loved.

Stillness hits different in the morning-after glow. And then there's the heat between your hips, like your body's keeping secrets from last night.

The black ribbon is tangled in the linen near your waist half-unraveled, like a confession. The air's thick with white peach and memory, and you're breathing it all in like it might disappear if you don't.

Love. The word sits in your chest like a bird that forgot how to be afraid. Is this it? This quiet after the storm, where nothing hurts and everything's warm and your body remembers kindness instead of fear? Where peace isn't just a pretty lie people tell in daylight?

His voice reaches you first - all sleep-rough and commanding, drifting through the penthouse like smoke. He's on the phone somewhere in the kitchen, words too far to catch but tone saying everything.

The silk of your robe whispers against your skin as you tie it. Your feet carry you toward his voice like you're caught in the undertow of last night's tenderness. Maybe you just want to see him. Maybe you just need to know this isn't another beautiful dream your mind made up. Maybe it's because for once, someone held you like you wouldn't shatter. You turn the corner.

And you stop.

You find yourself frozen in the archway, dawn's first light painting you in half-shadows. He hasn't noticed you yet.

There he stands - a study in contradictions. Bare chest catching morning light, sweatpants riding low, silver chain kissing his throat like a whispered threat. His shower-damp hair curls at the nape of his neck, soft in a way that makes your heart ache. The untouched water glass in his hand trembles slightly.

But his voice - winter steel now, nothing like the honey-warm murmurs from last night. All sharp angles and cold professionalism. You clutch your robe tighter, silk whispering against your skin like a warning. The transformation happens in heartbeats - his tone flattening, sharpening, becoming something familiar in its danger. Like watching a knife being unsheathed.

"No." The word falls like ice. "Don't bring him in." Silence stretches, taut as piano wire. "Leave him where he is. I'll handle it myself."

Glass meets marble with a gentle accusation. "I said leave him. Yoongi—this one's mine."

He turns, and time stops breathing. There you stand, a portrait in morning light - bare feet on cold floors, white silk clinging to last night's memories, hair still tangled with black ribbon. Peach perfume hangs between you like a broken promise.

The call ends abruptly, leaving silence to crystallize between you like. His phone finds its place on the counter with deliberate casualness. He shrugs, voice light as smoke. "What?"

Words fail you. Your eyes speak volumes. "It sounded like you were giving an order," you whisper, throat desert-dry. "To kill someone."

The pause that follows feels ancient. His response comes without hesitation even thought you see slight regret in his eyes. "I was."

Words echo through the kitchen like a shot that didn’t need a bullet. Your breath hitches before you realize it’s even left you, chest tightening under the satin tie of your robe. The morning light has turned unforgiving now — too clear, too sharp, too holy for a confession like that to survive without tearing something apart.

He doesn’t blink. Doesn’t shift. Just watches you with that maddening, polished calm — the kind that doesn’t come from confidence but from certainty. The certainty of someone who has never had to regret his actions because power paved over everything that came after them. Jungkook stands there in black sweatpants and bare skin, the picture of a man too rich to be touched by consequence, too young to be so terrifyingly composed.

And you realize it — fully, bone-deep — that last night, you kissed a man who was capable of this. You let him touch your body with hands that break other men open. You slept in the arms of someone who casually decides whether another heart should keep beating.

You let him inside you. And he’s let death inside himself.

“I…” Your voice breaks like glass against tile.

He tilts his head slightly, unreadable. “Are you surprised?”

You open your mouth to speak, but nothing comes out. He takes a step closer, but it’s not enough to reach you. Just enough to feel the weight of his presence settling into your skin like smoke.

“I never lied,” he says, quieter now. “You called me a monster. I never disagreed.”

You want to scream. You want to shake him, claw your way out of this invisible trap you’ve stumbled into, this house with velvet floors and bleeding walls, this man who kissed you like worship and murders without flinching.

“I know,” you whisper, and it’s all you can manage. “It’s just—”

The sentence never lands. It crumbles halfway through, pulled down by the gravity of your throat tightening. Your face crumples, lashes wet before you even know what you’re crying over — the shattered illusion or the horror of having ever believed in it. Tears spill silently down your cheeks as your trembling fingers fail to wipe them away.

“I was so stupid,” you whisper, and your knees almost give. “I am just so fucking stupid.”

He takes another step forward. His voice is softer now, unsure. “Y/N—”

“Don’t come near me!” It tears out of you like thunder, shrill and broken and sharp. He halts, hands open at his sides, stunned — and something flickers in his eyes then. Not guilt. Not remorse. Just something… hurt.

“You knew what I was,” he says, his voice rising now too, cracking like heat through glass. “Don’t look at me like I’ve changed. I didn’t pretend to be anyone else.”

You can’t stop the shaking. You want to run and tear and scream and break all the mirrors that ever told you this was safety. “I know. I just—I didn’t know it would feel like this,” you cry, wiping at your face with the back of your hand. “I didn’t know I’d be the kind of girl who could fall for someone who kills people like it’s breakfast.”

He flinches. “You think this is easy for me?”

Your laugh is bitter, strangled. “Easy? It’s not normal to kill, Jungkook. It’s rotted. I guess I thought—God, I guess I was just confused. Maybe I mistook this all for love because I never saw love before? And maybe I am just broken—maybe I let you touch me and hold me and fuck me because I don’t know what else love could feel like.”

Silence slams into the room again. He stands there, chest rising, jaw tight.

"Could I ever be with someone like you?" you whisper, wiping under your eyes. "A man who deals in death? No. What you offer... this isn't love. This is just velvet and guns. And God help me, I got lost in how good they felt."

You turn then, robe twisting around your legs, footsteps already thudding back toward the bedroom before he can speak. “Y/N, don’t—”

“Don’t follow me!” you scream from the hallway, a sob catching on your throat. “I can’t even breathe around you anymore.”

For a moment, you hear nothing. Just the hum of the fridge. The distant city beyond the window. The silence that only comes after something inside you snaps. Then his voice, low and bitter behind you, cutting through the air like frost on glass.

“This is life,” he says, not loud, but deep enough to sink. “You’re either prey or predator. You think marrying a monster’s hard? Believe me, you wouldn’t want to be married to a coward.” You hear the door close seconds later.

He’s gone.

The bedroom is filled with lingering traces of your shared intimacy. Of everything that happened between midnight and morning — the black ribbon fallen half beneath the bed, the white peach still clinging to the hem of your robe, the echo of hands and lips and breath where silence now smothers it all.

You stand there for a while, motionless in the center of the room, one hand pressed to your lips like that might keep the sobs down. But they claw their way up anyway — low, gut-wrenching sounds that don’t belong to any version of yourself you’ve ever let survive.

Your fingers tremble as you reach for the edge of the dresser. It’s instinctive, almost mechanical — the way you slide the drawer open, the way your hand curls around the strap of your old black backpack, the one you brought with you the day you arrived. It still smells faintly of Switzerland, of pressed notebooks and old perfume and snow.

Your body moves with the strange grace of someone else's strings - mechanical poetry written in desperate motion. Each movement is sharp, decisive, divorced from thought. Clothes tumble into the backpack like falling stars, necessities gathered by muscle memory while your mind screams white noise. Underwear. Blouse. Jeans. The basics of a life you're trying to rebuild, tossed together like a prayer. Your hands work faster than your heartbeat, racing against the clock of his inevitable return. You have to go - have to run - before his gravity pulls you back into orbit, before the dangerous warmth of him seeps back into your bones and turns your resolve to stardust.

With trembling fingers, you slip your ring off and place it on the marble counter of his bathroom beside his cologne. The note you write by hand comes out unsteady, the paper remaining crumpled as your shaking hands set down the pen.

If I ever meant anything to you, please don’t come after me. Let me go in peace. Let me have whatever life I can build without this. Don’t ruin it.

Your signature lingers at the bottom of the note, an inked farewell that feels heavy with finality. Placing it gently on his pillow, you turn away from the life you're leaving behind, knowing there's no turning back now.

The elevator descent feels like falling, each floor counting backwards as seconds slip by like shards of glass against your spine. When you reach the street, a grey and uncaring sky looms overhead as you step into a taxi, hood drawn up and voice carefully controlled while giving the driver your destination.

In the silence that follows, only the steady hum of tires and the blur of an indifferent city keep you company. Your phone's screen blazes too bright as you retrieve it with trembling hands. You try your sister first - one ring, two rings, then voicemail. You end the call before leaving a message.

When you dial Luca next, the four rings that pass before he answers feel heavy with unspoken weight.

"Luca," you whisper, voice trembling, "I left him. I need to come home."

There's a heavy silence before his voice comes through, flat and serious in a way that makes your stomach drop.

"You can't come home, Y/N. If Father finds out you walked out, he'll kill you."

His words carry no drama or shock - just the bleak certainty of someone intimately familiar with their father's nature.

"But where can I go?" Your voice breaks.

He exhales slowly before responding, "I'll send you an address. I have an apartment no one knows about. You can stay there while we figure things out."

"An apartment? I don't understand, when did you even…"

"Don't ask questions," he cuts in, his tone growing darker. "Just get off the street. Now."

The line goes dead and a message appears moments later - coordinates falling into your phone like a stone into still water. You read the address twice, memorizing it before turning to the driver.

He nods at your new instructions, changing course as the indifferent city slides past your window.

And then—time fractures like glass beneath winter's first frost. The world lurches sideways, reality splintering at its seams. The door bursts open with a thunderous crash, shattering the silence. Dark figures emerge as rough hands grab you, pressing a chemical-soaked cloth against your face.

You fight with every ounce of strength, your body thrashing against the iron grip of your captors. But the chemical-laden cloth works quickly, and consciousness begins to slip away like all the maybes you’’ll never get to live. The world around you blurs and distorts, reality folding in on itself until finally, mercifully, everything fades to black.

there’s a second and final part already finished and available exclusively here

(if you have any issues with it - message me directly, not anon pls)

your feedback means the world to me. 🖤

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from-memphis-with-love · 2 months ago

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Just Because - an Elvis Presley oneshot

Synopsis: When she wrote Elvis Presley a letter so many years ago, she had no idea he'd become her destiny.

TW: None! This is a fluffy story about Elvis and his new bride on their wedding night. Enjoy <3

Las Vegas glittered outside the window of the Flamingo Hotel, a carnival of neon and promise. Inside suite 702, Elvis Presley turned the key in the lock and pushed the door open, standing back to let his bride enter first.

"Well, Mrs. Presley." Elvis dropped the room key on the side table and loosened his black tie. "Think we gave ‘em enough of a show?"

Lizzie kicked off her white satin heels, wiggling her toes against the plush carpet. Her wedding dress - a simple, elegant sheath - whispered around her ankles as she moved.

"If I had to smile for one more camera, my face might have cracked." She massaged her cheeks. "Pretty sure my jaw is permanently damaged."

"You looked beautiful the whole time," Elvis said. "Even when Senator Wilkins talked our ears off about his hunting dogs."

"I counted," Lizzie said, laughing. "Seventeen minutes about beagles. I timed it on your watch."

"Atta girl. Always paying attention to the details." Elvis shrugged off his tuxedo jacket and slung it over a chair.

The suite was extravagant even by Vegas standards - a sprawling living room with a crystal chandelier, plush white couches, and a panoramic view of the Strip. Flowers covered nearly every surface, congratulatory bouquets from friends, fans, and industry people. A table by the window held a pyramid of champagne bottles and gift boxes wrapped in silver and white.

"Did ya see who sent this?" Elvis called, holding up a bottle of champagne from the collection and wiggling his eyebrows.

Lizzie unzipped her small suitcase on the king-sized bed. "If it's the one with the red ribbon, that's from Frank."

"Sinatra knows his champagne." Elvis studied the label. "Think we should save it?"

"For what?" Lizzie pulled out her nightclothes, neatly folded. "Another special occasion? Elvis, we just got married. I think this qualifies."

"Good point." He searched for glasses. "Although technically, we've been married for" - he checked his watch - "eight hours and twenty-two minutes. The special occasion ship might have sailed."

"Are you saying our wedding night isn't special?" Lizzie arched an eyebrow.

"I'm saying" - he popped the cork with practiced ease - "that every night with you is special, so we'd better start drinking now or we'll have a serious backlog of champagne."

Lizzie laughed, the sound warm and real in the artificial perfection of the suite. She turned back to her suitcase, unpacking with methodical precision. A sundress for tomorrow, toiletries, a dog-eared paperback.

As she lifted out a pale blue nightgown, something slipped from between the folds - a piece of faded pink stationery that fluttered to the carpet.

Elvis, crossing to hand her a glass of champagne, bent to pick it up.

"What's this?" He turned the worn paper over in his hand. His eyebrows lifted as he read the envelope. "Elizabeth Colasanti Presley." He whistled low. "Been practicing that name for a while, honey?"

Lizzie lunged across the bed. "Give me that!"

Elvis held it up, just out of reach. "September 1956," he read from the top corner. "Dear Elvis Presley." He looked at her with growing delight. "Is this what I think it is?"

"It's nothing." Her cheeks flushed pink. "Just something silly."

"Don’t look like nothing." He unfolded it carefully. "This paper's been folded and unfolded a hundred times."

"That's private." But there was no real fight in her voice.

"Not if it's addressed to me," Elvis countered, eyes twinkling. "Besides, what kind of secrets could my wife be keeping on our wedding night?"

He perched on the edge of the bed, smoothing the letter across his knee.

"'Dear Elvis Presley,'" he began, his voice in a singsong imitation of a young girl. "'I saw you on Ed Sullivan last Sunday. My daddy says you're corrupting the youth of America.'" Elvis glanced up. "Your daddy sure changed his tune."

"Keep reading." Lizzie hugged a pillow to her chest. "It gets worse."

"'I told him music that makes people feel something real can't be bad.'" Elvis paused. "That's pretty profound for a teenager."

"I had my moments."

"'When you sang "Don't Be Cruel," I felt like you were singing just to me-'"

"Oh God." Lizzie buried her face in the pillow. "Skip ahead."

He ignored her. "'My mama's been sick, and sometimes your songs are the only thing that makes the house feel normal. Like there's still good things in the world.'" His voice softened. "Lizzie..."

"I was sixteen," she said, her voice muffled by the pillow. "We found out mom had cancer that spring. It was a rough time."

Elvis continued reading: "'I know you'll never read this. But sometimes I imagine you're just a regular boy from Tennessee, not a star, and we might run into each other at a soda shop. You'd smile at me, and I'd finally work up the courage to tell you how your music makes even the bad days better.'"

His eyes moved down the page. "'I'm going to be somebody too someday. I'm saving up for design school. Maybe one day I'll make costumes for your movies, and you'll never know that the girl fixing your collar once wrote you this letter.'"

Elvis looked up at her, his expression soft with wonder. "'Yours truly, Elizabeth Colasanti.'"

For a moment, neither spoke. Then Elvis carefully refolded the letter.

"How long have you been carrying this around?" he asked.

"Since I wrote it." Lizzie lowered the pillow, her embarrassment fading. "It's my good luck charm. I take it whenever I'm starting something new. First day of design school, first apartment, first job..." She shrugged. "First marriage."

"You never mailed it."

"Of course not. Famous people don't read fan mail from nobody girls in Maryville."

"I read my fan mail." Elvis looked wounded.

"You read some fan mail. You get thousands of letters a week, Elvis."

"Still." He tapped the letter against his palm. "Funny how things work out."

"Funny strange or funny ha-ha?"

"Both." He nodded toward her suitcase. "You keeping anything else I should know about? Lock of my hair? Chewed gum?"

"Very funny." She snatched the letter back. "You know very well I didn't even talk to you until Blue Hawaii. I wasn't some obsessed fan."

"Blue Hawaii." A smile played at the corners of his mouth. "You never did give that handkerchief back. I kept waiting."

"You remembered that?" Lizzie looked genuinely surprised.

"’Course I did. It was my lucky one. Had Dodger embroider EP on it and everything."

She moved to her suitcase and carefully extracted a small fabric square from an inner pocket. "You mean this old thing?"

Elvis stared at the worn handkerchief. "You actually kept it? All this time?"

"It was my something blue today." She placed it in his palm. "I figured after the wedding I should finally return it."

His fingers closed around it. "Three years for a handkerchief to find its way home. That might be a record."

"I did try to return it the next day," Lizzie said. "But you were filming that beach scene-"

"-and you decided to keep it instead."

"I was going to mail it to you."

"Sure you were." He tucked the handkerchief into his pocket. "Hold that thought."

Elvis went to his suitcase, digging beneath his clothes until he pulled out a wooden box about the size of a cigar box. A small crown was burned into the top.

"What's that?" Lizzie asked.

"Just a little collection." He sat beside her on the bed and opened the lid. Inside were dozens of folded notes, ticket stubs, and small scraps of paper.

Lizzie picked up a faded receipt. On the back was her handwriting: Coffee, black. Two sugars. I noticed. She looked at him. "You kept this? It was just a coffee order."

"It was the first time anyone had paid attention to how I take my coffee without being told." He shrugged, almost embarrassed. "The little things matter."

She sifted through more papers. "There must be fifty notes in here."

"Fifty-seven." He didn't hesitate. "Including the one you left on my dressing room mirror after our first fight."

"Our first fight wasn't a fight," Lizzie protested. "It was a minor disagreement about your inability to be on time for anything."

"Sure felt like a fight. You didn't talk to me for three days."

"Two and a half." She picked up another note. "'Elvis - Dinner at 7. Not 7:05, not 7:15, and definitely not 7:45. Some of us respect punctuality. - LC.'"

He grinned. "You were so mad."

"You showed up at 8:30."

"But I brought flowers."

"Dead flowers. You left them in the car with the windows up. In August."

Elvis laughed, the deep, genuine laugh that so rarely made it to television or film. "I did, didn't I? God, you're the only woman I know who would've thrown them straight in the trash."

"I have standards."

"You certainly do." He nudged her shoulder. "Lucky for me, punctuality wasn't a deal-breaker."

Lizzie's fingers found a movie ticket stub. "Our first real date."

"Was that a date? I thought you were just taking pity on the poor ole lonely movie star."

"You asked me to go. You paid for the tickets. You bought me popcorn. That's the textbook definition of a date, Presley."

"Huh." He took the ticket, studied it. "Guess I've been dating you longer than I thought."

Her expression softened. "Remember what you said after the movie?"

"I said a lot of things. I was nervous."

"You said, 'It's nice seeing a movie without being in it.'"

"I meant it. That night..." He hesitated. "That was the first time in years I felt like a regular guy."

Lizzie picked up another scrap of paper. "What's this one?"

He glanced at it. "List of baby names."

"Baby names?" Her eyebrows shot up. "Whose baby names?"

"Yours and mine, someday." He took the paper gently. "You fell asleep in my trailer last year, and you were talking in your sleep. You said we'd have a daughter with hair like mine and your mother's eyes."

"I don't remember that."

"You wouldn't. You were out cold. Lettie Ann and Celie Jane, those were the names you said."

"And you wrote them down?" Lizzie looked at him with soft surprise.

"Told you. The little things matter." He touched her cheek. "You matter."

In that moment, Lizzie saw not the Hollywood draw or the magnetic presence that dominated every room, but the boy from Tupelo, Mississippi who'd once been as ordinary as she was. She leaned in and kissed him softly.

"Who would've thought?" she whispered against his lips. "The fan and the star."

"I'm not the star tonight." He kissed her back. "Tonight I'm just the luckiest man in Vegas."

"Now who's being profound?"

"Must be your influence." His smile faded to something more serious. "You know what's crazy? If the Colonel hadn't insisted on those sequined costumes for the charity show, and if the regular costume designer hadn't quit in a huff, and if they hadn't hired your boss as a replacement..."

"...and if I hadn't been assigned to your dressing room..."

"...we never would have met." He brushed a strand of hair from her face. "Thank God for small miracles."

The mmemory rushed back, vivid as yesterday:

The Blue Hawaii set, 1961. Lizzie sat in a corner of the costume tent, struggling with a torn Hawaiian shirt. Her first week as a junior costume assistant, and she was already drowning in a sea of alterations.

"Need that in five, Colasanti!" Mr. Hanson barked as he passed by, arms laden with garments.

"Yessir," she mumbled, jabbing the needle through the fabric with more force than necessary.

She'd been working since five that morning. Her fingers were sore, her back ached, and the humidity was making her hair curl in ways that defied professional appearance. But she wasn't about to complain. Jobs like this didn't fall into the laps of girls from Maryville who were seven credits short of a design school degree.

"You're new here." The voice came from behind her, casual as a Tennessee breeze.

Lizzie nearly stabbed herself with the needle. Elvis Presley stood not three feet away, wearing street clothes instead of his costume, twisting a ring over and over on his finger.

"Yes." She managed the single syllable. "First week."

"Tough break, getting stuck with the repair pile." He nodded toward the mountain of clothing beside her. "Hanson's got a reputation."

"He's just particular." She defended her boss automatically.

"That's a nice way of putting it." Elvis smiled, and it was different from his album covers. Even better in person. "You from back home? I can hear Tennessee."

"Maryville," she admitted. "Nothing special."

"I've played Maryville. Good people."

"I know. I was there." The words tumbled out before she could stop them. "At the Parkway Theater."

Something lit in his eyes. "No kidding?"

"You wouldn't remember." She bent her head back to her work, feeling foolish. "It was sold out."

"The Parkway's not that big." He leaned against the workbench. "Good acoustics, though."

"Need something, Mr. Presley?" Mr. Hanson emerged from the racks of costumes, his voice sharp.

"Just checking on my blue shirt for tomorrow." Elvis straightened. "The one with the palm trees."

"Being pressed as we speak. I'll have it delivered to your trailer within the hour."

"Thanks." But he made no move to leave. Instead, he watched as Lizzie fumbled with the needle, her hands suddenly clumsy under observation.

"Colasanti!" Hanson snapped. "That's the third time you've threaded that needle. Stop wasting time."

Lizzie's cheeks burned. The needle slipped again, and she pricked her finger. A bright bead of blood welled up, threatening to stain the pale fabric.

"My fault," Elvis said, stepping forward. "I was distracting her with questions."

Before anyone could react, he pulled a pale blue handkerchief from his pocket and gently pressed it to her finger.

"You'll want to use peroxide on that," he said to her, his voice quieter now. Then to Hanson: "Got any of those blue and green shirts for the backup dancers ready? I'd like to see one."

Hanson hurried off to find the requested items, leaving them momentarily alone.

"You didn't have to do that," Lizzie said.

"Do what?" Elvis winked. "Just looking out for the costume. Blood's hard to get out."

She tried to return the handkerchief, but he shook his head.

"Keep it for now. Might need it again in this place."

As he turned to go, she noticed the embroidered initials in the corner: EP.

"I'll return it," she called after him.

He glanced back, that half-smile playing at the corner of his mouth. "I'm counting on it."

But she never did.

"Earth to Lizzie." Elvis waved his hand in front of her face. "Where'd ya go?"

"Just thinking about that first day." She smoothed the handkerchief between her fingers. "You were kind to me when you didn't have to be."

"I'm always kind to pretty girls from Tennessee."

"Uh-huh." She rolled her eyes. "That's why you have such a sterling reputation."

"My reputation is greatly exaggerated." He sniffed with mock offense. "Unlike my talents."

"Modest, too."

"Never claimed to be modest." He gathered the scattered notes from the bedspread, returning them to the box. "Just talented."

Lizzie watched him, this man who now belonged to her in a way the teenage girl who wrote that fan letter could never have imagined. Not just the most famous man on the planet, but the man who kept handwritten notes and remembered her coffee order. Who'd asked her father's permission to marry her with the same nervousness as any other suitor.

"Hey." Elvis grabbed a sheet of hotel stationery from the desk. "We should write a new one."

"A new what?"

"A letter." He found a pen in the desk drawer. "To mark the occasion. Your letter brought you to me. Maybe this one..." He shrugged, suddenly self-conscious.

"Maybe this one what?" Lizzie prompted.

"Maybe this one carries us forward." He sat beside her, their shoulders touching. "I'll start."

He wrote a few lines, then passed the paper to her. Lizzie read silently: To my wife on our wedding night. I used to think fame was the best thing that would ever happen to me. Then I met a girl from Maryville, Tennessee.

"Your turn," he said.

Lizzie took the pen, her handwriting a stark contrast to his bold scrawl. I used to think loving your music meant I knew you. Now I know that the real Elvis Presley talks in his sleep, can't match his socks to save his life, and makes me feel like the most important person in any room.

She passed it back. Elvis read her words and smiled. "I don't talk in my sleep."

"You absolutely do. Mostly about food."

"Lies and slander." But he was already writing again.

They passed the paper back and forth, adding lines, building something new together. Outside, the lights of Vegas continued their electric dance, but in suite 702, time seemed suspended.

I promise to cherish our quiet moments above all else - the ones where it's just us, with no cameras or crowds, Lizzie wrote.

I promise to always hear you, even when the noise of everything else gets too loud, Elvis added.

Lizzie finished the letter with a final line: I promise to keep every moment, good or difficult, like a note in a wooden box - safe, cherished, and ours alone.

She placed the pen down. "There. What do you think?"

Elvis read over their joint creation, his shoulder pressed against hers. "I think we write pretty well together, Mrs. Presley."

"It's strange, hearing that name." She turned to face him. "Good strange."

"I like how you say it." His voice dropped lower. "Like it's just another name, not something that comes with a whole lot of baggage."

"To me, it's just your name." She reached up to touch his face. "The name of the guy who saved my button-sewing career."

He laughed quietly. "Is that all I am to you? A career savior?"

"Among other things." The space between them had shrunk to almost nothing.

"What other things?" His eyes held hers, gentle but intent.

Instead of answering, she kissed him. This time, the kiss was honest, a little clumsy, and entirely theirs. His hand came up to cradle the back of her head, tender as if she might break.

When they pulled apart, the air between them had changed. Three years of knowing each other, of careful waiting, of building something real beneath the spotlight's glare - it all converged in this moment.

The truth was, they'd come close before. In the darkness of his car after late-night drives, in stolen moments between filming scenes, even once in her small apartment when a thunderstorm had knocked out the power. They'd explored each other in countless ways over these years, his hands and lips teaching her body things she'd never known to want. But they'd always stopped short of this final intimacy - this sacred line that Lizzie had determined to save for marriage.

"Lizzie." His voice was rough at the edges. "We don't have to-"

"I know." She smiled, though there was a slight tremble to her lips. "I want to."

A single tear slipped down her cheek before she could catch it.

"Hey." Elvis brushed it away with his thumb. "What's wrong?"

Lizzie took a shaky breath. "I've never done this before."

"I know, honey."

"But you have." It came out smaller than she intended, almost a question.

Elvis hesitated, then nodded. "I have."

Her eyes dropped, and something like a pout formed at the corner of her mouth.

"No, no." He tilted her face back up. "That's not a bad thing, Lizzie. It just means..." He paused, searching for the right words. "It means I know how to make it good for you. I'll show you."

"You'll show me?" The tension in her shoulders eased slightly.

"I'll be gentle," he promised. "We'll take it slow." His fingers traced the line of her jaw. "I want this to be something you remember for all the right reasons."

Lizzie nodded, leaning into his touch. "I trust you," she whispered, and the simple truth of those three words seemed to affect him deeply.

"I won't let you down." He pressed a kiss to her forehead. "Not in this. Not ever."

She moved closer, her nervousness giving way to curiosity. "Will it hurt?"

"Maybe a little," he admitted, honest even now. "But then it gets better. I promise."

"You'll tell me what to do?"

The hint of vulnerability in her question made his expression soften. "You don't need to do anything but be yourself. That's all I've ever wanted."

She nodded, drawing courage from his steadiness.

With the same deliberate care he'd shown that first day with the handkerchief, Elvis reached out and turned off the bedside lamp. In the semidarkness, the neon lights of Vegas filtered through the curtains, painting patterns across the ceiling.

"Come here," he whispered, and she did.

The first hint of dawn was breaking when Lizzie stirred awake. For a moment, she was disoriented. Then she felt the weight of her husband’s arm around her waist, heard the steady rhythm of his breathing, and remembered: She was Mrs. Elvis Presley now. The thought made her smile.

"What're you smiling about?" Elvis's voice was husky with sleep, his eyes still closed.

"How do you know I'm smiling if your eyes are shut?"

"I can feel it. You radiate when you smile. Like a little sun."

"That's the corniest thing you've ever said to me."

"Give me a break. It's not even eight AM." He opened one eye. "And I stand by it."

She shifted to face him, studying the familiar lines of his face, softened now by the dim light and intimacy. "Did you ever imagine this? Back when I was just the costume girl with the bleeding finger?"

"Not exactly this." His thumb traced the curve of her shoulder. "But I knew I liked you a lot.”

"I was terrified of you."

"No you weren't." He grinned. "You're not scared of anything."

"I hid in the supply closet three times that first week when I saw you coming."

"Yet here you are."

"Here we are," she agreed.

Elvis reached over to the nightstand where their letter lay beside the wooden box. "One more for the collection."

He folded the paper with careful precision and opened the box. As he placed the letter inside, something in his expression shifted, grew serious.

"You know it’s not gonna be easy, right? Being married to... all this." He gestured vaguely, encompassing not just himself but everything his name entailed.

"I didn't sign up for easy." She propped herself up on one elbow. "I signed up for you.”

"There will be lies in the papers. Rumors. People who want pieces of me that I can only give to you."

"I know."

"Tours, movies, time apart."

"I know that too."

"So why'd you say yes?" His voice held genuine curiosity. "You could've had a normal life with a normal guy. White picket fence, Sunday dinners, no flashbulbs in your face."

Lizzie considered this. "Remember that song you did? 'Just Because'?"

"Sure."

"That's why." She settled back against the pillows. "Just because."

Elvis whistled, a sound that conveyed both surprise and pleasure. "I've heard a lot of answers to that question in interviews. That might be my favorite."

"Good." She yawned. "Now go back to sleep. We've got brunch with the guys at eleven, and you're impossible when you're tired."

"Yes, ma'am." He settled beside her, his arm finding its place around her waist again.

Just before sleep reclaimed him, he murmured, "Lizzie?"

"Hmm?"

"I just remembered. You've got another letter to write."

"What's that?"

"Thank you note to Ed Sullivan. For getting us together."

#elvis presley #elvis #elvis fans #elvis fanfic #elvis presley fanfiction #elvis fanfiction #elvis presley fic #elvis presley fanfic #elvis fic #elvis x oc #fluffy fanfic

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eu-nicola · 7 months ago

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the family [part 1]

sinopsis: In Italy 1850 Lucien a former priest gets involved in a game of seduction with his girlfriend's younger sister; what begins as flirting becomes a destructive obsession

warnings: love triangle, forbidden relationship, tension

word counter: 3720

author's note: english is not my first language, the tags are not correct so don't tell me anything cause I ALREADY KNOW, then I'm going to correct

It was a summer afternoon in Italy, in 1825. The sun was sliding lazily over the green hills and terracotta roofs, illuminating the elegant palazzo that stood on the outskirts of Florence, home of the Ricci family. Lucien arrived accompanied by a black carriage and a pair of suitcases that seemed to contain everything he owned. With the past still fresh in his mind, he got out of the carriage with a calmness that did not reflect the tumult inside him. He had left the life of a priest a couple of years ago, seeking redemption and new experiences. But in Giuliana, his fiancée, Lucien had found something unexpected: a discreet love that seemed to offer him a second chance at peace.

Giuliana greeted him with a radiant smile at the foot of the entrance stairs. Dressed in a soft sky blue that highlighted her eyes, she radiated elegance and simplicity.

—Lucien, my love! “I am so glad you have arrived,” she said, extending a gloved hand and looking at him with the reserved affection of a bride.

“You don’t know how much I have been waiting for this moment,” he replied, leaning down to kiss her fingers softly.

Giuliana smiled, her cheeks flushing slightly, but her gaze soon turned to the door.

“I want to introduce you to my family. They are very excited to meet you.”

Lucien followed Giuliana into the palazzo, as they walked through a hall filled with ancient frescoes and the scent of freshly polished wax and fresh flowers. Upon reaching the large room, his gaze fell on every detail: the portraits of ancestors hanging on the walls, the chandeliers filled with crystals, the mahogany furniture, all witnesses to the wealth and prestige of the Ricci family.

Around a tea table sat Giuliana's parents and her younger sister, Isabella. Seeing Lucien, the father stood up and greeted him with a firm nod, while Giuliana's mother gave him a polite smile.

"Lucien, dear, allow me to introduce you to my parents," Giuliana said with a smile, feeling proud to have him at her side.

"It's an honor to finally meet you," Lucien said, bowing respectfully to them.

After the formal greetings, Lucien turned his attention to the young woman sitting next to Giuliana. Unlike her sister, who possessed the serenity of a well-bred woman, Isabella exuded an almost wild vitality, even if she tried to hide it under the manners that the situation demanded. Her hair fell in dark waves around her shoulders, and her eyes—a shade between amber and honey—watched him with curiosity and a slight smile that she tried to hide. Isabella looked to be about nineteen, and there was something in her bearing that reminded her of a wild animal, trapped in a fine suit and impeccable hairdo.

“Isabella, my younger sister,” Giuliana announced. “Isabella, this is Lucien.”

“Nice to meet you, Lucien,” Isabella said, her voice soft but with a hint of irony, a spark that immediately caught Lucien’s attention.

Lucien noticed how Isabella examined him closely. Unlike the others, her eyes did not reflect the courtesy that good manners required; there was an intensity in them that she did not bother to hide, as if she wanted to see him as he was, without filters or appearances.

“The pleasure is mine, Isabella,” he replied, bowing slightly and keeping his gaze fixed on her for a few seconds longer than necessary.

As the minutes ticked by and tea was served, Lucien tried to concentrate on the conversations about family business and the upcoming festivities Giuliana had planned in honor of his arrival. But something inside him kept him from paying full attention; whenever he could, his gaze returned to Isabella, who seemed to have no intention of hiding the effect she had on him.

During tea, Isabella made some irreverent comments that provoked awkward laughter at the table. His mother gave him a disapproving look, but Lucien couldn't help but find a freshness in those comments that surprised him. Giuliana, always calm, tried to divert attention to more appropriate topics, but Isabella seemed to enjoy her reactions, as if she found pleasure in testing the limits of everyone's patience.

As the afternoon drew to a close, as the Ricci family showed Lucien around the gardens and showed him the orchard they maintained at the back of the palazzo, he lingered beside Isabella. Isabella had been quiet during the walk, observing the flowers and fountains with a thoughtful expression, until she noticed Lucien's gaze following her.

"Are you surprised to find me silent?" she asked, shooting him a glance.

"Perhaps a little," Lucien replied, choosing his words carefully. He didn't want to be too obvious, but he couldn't deny that curiosity consumed him.

"You shouldn't let my words fool you," she replied, locking eyes with him. "Maybe I'm just a mirage in a garden."

Lucien smiled. There was something about Isabella that was magnetic to him, something he'd never felt with Giuliana, though he tried hard to remind himself that he was there as her fiancé. Isabella, however, had a way of looking at him that made him feel naked, as if she saw beyond his facade of a reformed gentleman.

“A mirage that, however, seems very real at the moment,” he said, unable to resist returning her gaze.

Isabella lowered her gaze, but a lopsided smile appeared on her lips. The tension between them was palpable, as if the air between them had become thick and charged with unspoken promises. For Lucien, this was something new, a spark of life and risk that drew him irremediably.

Isabella had always been a vivid contrast to her sister Giuliana, like shadow and light, or fire and water. While Giuliana was calm and serene, dedicated to pleasing her parents and honoring her family, Isabella was a burning flame, always ready to be fanned by any small breath of adventure. Although they shared the same education in the arts, language, and sciences proper to young ladies of her status, Isabella had grown up with a restlessness that her parents never managed to appease, as if something inside her always yearned for more.

Since she was little, she had stood out for her inclination towards daring ideas, and although she knew how to present herself as a perfect lady in front of everyone, those who knew her well knew that she was unpredictable, capable of disappearing without warning and getting lost in the nearby forest or in the streets of the town. Isabella did not obey rules in the same way that Giuliana did; she knew the rules, yes, but she preferred to break them rather than follow them.

As a child, she had been found more than once hiding in the stables, trying to ride the horses on her own without the help of a groom. Unlike Giuliana, who would never have questioned her mother's instructions on what was appropriate for a lady, Isabella had always been direct and shameless, defying every expectation. Even now, as a woman, she had not lost her tendency to behave in a brazen manner, always on the edge of what was allowed.

During family dinners, Isabella would often provoke her parents, sometimes with little jokes, other times with questions that she knew would make her mother uncomfortable. Although Giuliana would often try to intervene with a disapproving look, Isabella would always return an amused smile, as if the conflict was just a game she had invented to entertain herself.

The next day, Lucien watched her again as they ate breakfast together. Isabella had arrived a little late, apologizing with a smile that didn't seem apologetic at all. Her parents didn't say anything, though her mother gave her a disapproving look. Lucien noticed that Isabella seemed to enjoy every chance she got to make her parents uncomfortable. She took a seat next to Giuliana and gave Lucien a fleeting glance before focusing her attention on her tea. However, when she thought no one was looking at her, he noticed how her expression changed, becoming more open, less restrained.

"Did you have a good rest, Lucien?" Isabella asked in a casual tone, but with a hint of irony that didn't go unnoticed by him.

"That's right, thank you," he replied, smiling slightly. "The house is really cozy."

"And even more so if you have the freedom to explore its corners," she added, giving him a sidelong glance. Or to disappear whenever you want.

Giuliana frowned slightly, as if she sensed the underlying tone in his words, but said nothing. Lucien, however, understood the provocation. With Isabella, it seemed that every word was double-edged, every smile. Over the next few days, Lucien watched her more closely, fascinated by that duality of hers. There was something about the way Isabella moved, how she constantly sought to escape the gaze of her parents, the expectations imposed by her surname.

One such evening, while Giuliana was helping her mother with the preparations for dinner, Lucien decided to take a walk around the palazzo. It was a beautiful evening, with the sky covered in golden and pink hues, and the wind carried with it the scent of jasmine and wet grass. He was walking aimlessly through the gardens, admiring the fountains and classical statues, when he heard a light laugh coming from the hedges. At first, he thought it was some maid of the house; However, when he peeked out a little, he saw the figure of Isabella, who, without noticing his presence, was busy picking small wild flowers that had sprouted between the stones of a path.

Lucien watched her in silence, captivated by her naturalness, by the way she let herself be carried away by the moment. She looked carefree and full of life, as if this garden were her own secret refuge. Lucien felt the urge to come closer, to share this moment, even if only as an invisible observer.

Isabella, however, noticed him before he could do anything.

“Oh, Lucien,” she said with a playful smile, her eyes shining at the sight of him. “Do you like spying?”

Lucien blushed slightly, although he tried to hide it.

“Not at all, but it seems that fate insists on putting you in my path,” he replied, maintaining his composure and sketching a slight smile.

“Fate?” she replied, arching an eyebrow. I'd never heard him apologize so blatantly, though I suppose there's something to be said for interrupting someone else's moment.

Isabella gave him a mocking look, but deep down Lucien felt she was testing him, as if she wanted to see how he would react. Undaunted, he moved a little closer, until only a couple of steps separated them. Isabella didn't back away; on the contrary, she looked him straight in the eye, not losing a drop of her confidence.

“I didn’t mean to interrupt,” he said, adopting a softer tone. “I thought you would be inside, helping your sister.”

“Giuliana is the one with the virtue of patience,” she replied with a touch of irony. “I prefer to be here, rather than sit and listen to my mother talk about what a lady should and shouldn’t do.”

There was a brief silence, and Lucien felt the air around him grow thicker. Isabella’s proximity, her scent of wildflowers and her gaze awakened in him a longing he couldn’t deny. He knew it was inappropriate, that his role was that of a faithful and devoted fiancé, but in Isabella’s presence, all that determination felt like a thin thread about to snap.

“You don’t like that life?” he dared to ask, unable to contain his curiosity.

Isabella looked at him for a moment, as if considering whether to answer him honestly.

“Not entirely.” It’s a nice life, of course, but it’s not the one I want for myself,” he finally answered. “Giuliana can have all that; she’s perfect for that world. I…” he looked down at the flowers in his hand. “I want something different.”

“And what is it that you want?” Lucien asked, not taking his eyes off her.

Isabella looked up, and for a second, her expression was serious, without a trace of the mockery or disdain she often used. There was a deep sadness in her eyes, a kind of melancholy that Lucien had not seen in her until that moment.

“Freedom, perhaps,” she murmured. “The freedom to live without so many rules, without having to answer to anyone but myself. Sometimes I feel like I’m like one of these birds,” she added, pointing to a bird flying above them, “trapped in a golden cage.”

Lucien felt a pang in his chest as he listened to her. He had expected some light response, some witty comment, but instead Isabella had let her guard down, if only for an instant, showing him a vulnerability that touched him. For a moment, he was tempted to tell her that he understood her, that he shared that desire to escape, even if it wasn’t exactly the same.

Isabella turned to him suddenly, an intensity in her gaze that almost made him recoil.

“Tell me, Lucien,” she said in a whisper, “do you ever feel like this? Like you’re trapped in a place that’s not yours?”

The question surprised him, and although his instincts told him to keep his distance, something in her eyes pushed him to be honest.

“Yes, sometimes,” he admitted, without taking his eyes off her. “Though, unlike you, I don’t think I have anyone to blame but myself.”

Isabella watched him intently, as if she were weighing his every word, trying to decipher what he wasn't saying.

Suddenly, Isabella smiled, a smile that was a mix of complicity and defiance.

"Maybe you can escape, Lucien. Maybe there's something, someone, who can make you remember what it feels like to be free."

The implication in her words was so obvious that Lucien felt a heat rise to his face. But instead of backing away, he leaned a little closer to her, keeping his gaze fixed on Isabella's eyes. He could feel her breathing, and every fiber of his being asked him to break all the rules, to give in to that impulse that whispered to him to take her by the hand, to cross that invisible line that he himself had drawn.

"And you, Isabella?" he murmured, in a tone that sounded more intimate than he intended. "Do you think there's someone who can give you that freedom you so desire?"

Isabella looked at him intently, and for a moment, it seemed she was going to respond. But instead, she simply smiled and stepped away from him, taking a few steps back.

“Perhaps,” she said, her tone both light and deep. “But if there is someone capable of that, they will have to be very bold.”

Without saying anything else, she turned and began walking back toward the palazzo, leaving Lucien alone in the garden, lost in his thoughts and in the echo of her words. She knew there was something dangerous about that attraction, that every time they met, they came closer to a point of no return. And yet, Lucien couldn’t ignore the growing desire that drove him to want more, to find out how far he could go in this game that Isabella seemed to have started.

This little game continued on Giuliana’s birthday which was cause for celebration, the night of the ball, the palazzo was filled with light and music, with the chandeliers shining over the crowd dancing in the main hall. The guests, in their evening gowns and sparkling jewelry, moved gracefully to the tune of a delicate melody that filled the air. Lucien stood next to Giuliana, fulfilling the role of the perfect fiancé as he surveyed the guests, exchanging polite greetings and responding with a discreet smile.

Every time his gaze swept the room, his eyes unwittingly sought out Isabella.

She, on the other hand, seemed perfectly oblivious to him, laughing and chatting with a few family friends and maintaining an expression of innocent amusement. Isabella wore an emerald silk dress, which fell in delicate layers and moved with each step she took. Lucien noticed that the color highlighted her eyes and made her seem an even more ethereal figure. Despite his effort to stay focused on Giuliana, Lucien couldn't help but look towards her, trying to find some sign, some gesture that would welcome him to seek her out.

Finally, Isabella surprised him. Barely sparing him a glance, she slipped away from the crowd, leaving her companions with an improvised excuse and disappearing through one of the side doors that led to the gardens. Lucien felt his pulse quicken, and even though he knew he shouldn’t follow her, his body moved before he could stop himself. He waited a few seconds, bidding farewell to Giuliana under the excuse of needing some fresh air, and, making sure no one was watching, he headed towards the garden following Isabella’s footsteps.

He found her in a secluded corner of the garden, surrounded by rose bushes that filled the air with a sweet scent. She was standing under the moonlight, watching the stars as if he wasn’t there, as if his presence didn’t matter. Lucien looked at her for a moment, captivated by the image: Isabella, in her silk dress, illuminated by the silver light and the night air gently playing with her hair. Finally, he dared to approach.

“Escaping the party?” —he murmured in a low tone, trying to maintain his composure, although his words sounded more intimate than he intended.

She turned her head slowly and gave him a smile that seemed to know much more than he wanted to admit.

“Escaping is something that gives me a certain pleasure,” she replied in a carefree tone, her eyes reflecting the light of the stars. “Though, if I'm being honest, I didn't expect anyone to follow me.”

“Maybe I was looking for a moment of peace,” he replied, moving a little closer. “But seeing you here, I thought that maybe peace wasn’t what I really needed tonight.”

Isabella stared at him, and for a moment that seemed like an eternity, she said nothing. Then, she smiled mischievously and extended her hand towards him, as if she were making a tacit invitation to cross the line that they had both been skirting since they met.

“So, what do you need tonight, Lucien?” she asked, her voice low, almost a whisper.

Lucien looked at her hand, and although he knew that accepting meant entering into a game of no return, he took her hand firmly. Feeling her skin, warm and soft, he felt an electric shock run through his body, a spark that ignited all his senses. Isabella intertwined her fingers with his, and without saying anything, she began to guide him through the garden, away from the music, the lights, and any prying eyes.

After walking a bit, they reached an even more hidden corner, near a marble fountain that stood imposingly in the middle of the garden. There, far from any interruptions, Isabella stopped and turned to look at him, her eyes shining with an intensity that seemed to challenge him.

“I suppose my sister would never understand why I prefer to be here instead of in the ballroom,” she said softly, without letting go of his hand.

“Giuliana has a very different spirit than you,” Lucien replied, with a sincerity that came out almost without thinking. “You are…” he paused, searching for the right words, although they all seemed insufficient. “different.”

Isabella smiled with a glint of mischief in her eyes, aware of the effect her words had on him.

“Is that a compliment?” she asked, leaning slightly towards him, shortening the distance between them.

Lucien noticed how his breath mixed with hers, and, without thinking, he slid his hand to her waist, pulling her gently. In any other situation, it would have been inappropriate, but in this corner, under the cover of night, there were no restrictions or formalities. Isabella did not resist; on the contrary, she moved a little closer, allowing their bodies to brush against each other, the space between them to become almost nonexistent.

“What do you think?” he murmured, his lips almost brushing hers.

Isabella kept her gaze fixed on him, her dark eyes reflecting a mix of desire and defiance.

“I think you've been playing at being someone you're not for too long,” she whispered, and, without giving him time to respond, she leaned in and brushed her lips against his in a soft kiss, barely a touch, but intense enough for both of them to feel the heat between them.

Lucien felt every fiber of his being ignite at that kiss, and, casting aside all doubt, he pulled her to him, deepening the kiss. Isabella responded immediately, with the same restrained passion, the same silent desire they had both suppressed for so long. Their lips moved urgently, as if that kiss was a need they couldn’t ignore, as if it was the answer to a question that had been left unresolved since the first moment they met.

They finally broke apart, breathing heavily, and Lucien looked at her, trying to process what had just happened. He knew it was crazy, that this moment could change everything, but he couldn’t ignore the fire burning inside him, the desire Isabella had awakened in him.

Isabella smiled, a mischievous glint in her eyes, as if she had gotten exactly what she wanted.

“I’m afraid if you keep crossing the line, Lucien, there will be no turning back,” she said in a soft tone, but filled with an unspoken promise.

“What if I don’t want to turn back?” he asked, his voice barely a whisper.

Isabella looked at him for a moment, and then, instead of answering, she took his hand and brought it to her chest, right over her heart. Lucien felt her heartbeat accelerate, and in that moment, he understood that what they shared was something neither of them could ignore. Lucien knew there was no escape now.

#fanfic #oneshot #imagine #nicholas alexander chavez #nicholas chavez #nicholas chavez x reader #nicholas chavez x y/n #x reader #grotesquerie #charlie mayhew #charlie mayhew x reader #charlie mayhew x y/n

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