Chapter Forty-One: The Anatomy of a Lie
●Author's Pov
The warmth of the blanket he tucked under your chin felt like a lie. The careful massage of your swollen ankle was an apology written in silence. The bitter pill he placed on your tongue and the water he held to your lips were the sacraments of a penance you didn't yet understand.
You didn't realize when sleep pulled you under, a mercy you hadn't earned.
He didn't sleep.
Kim Taehyun lay beside you, a statue of grief in the dark. One arm was a rigid bar beneath his head, the other lay a breath away from yours—not touching, a self-imposed exile. His eyes were open, fixed on your profile in the faint moonlight, drinking you in as if you were a ghost already beginning to fade.
He was memorizing the way your lashes fanned against your cheek, the soft part of your lips, the trust that sleep forced upon your features. He was carving the image into the back of his eyelids so he would never forget what he was protecting, even as he became the thing you needed protection from.
A sound escaped him, not a word, but the scrape of a soul against stone. "I'm sorry." It was a confession to the night, to the empty air, to the God he'd long since stopped believing in. "You were right to hate me."
His hand lifted, trembling with a fine, violent tremor. It hovered over the crown of your head, where your hair fanned across the pillow. He didn't dare touch. His touch was contamination. His love was a curse.
"You thought I was heartless," he breathed, the words raw and shredded. "You thought I didn't care. But caring…" He swallowed hard, his throat working. "Caring is what made me a liar. I couldn't look at you. Every time I did, I saw them."
A tear, hot and shameful, traced a path from the corner of his eye into his hairline. He didn't wipe it away. He let it fall. Let it be his flagellation.
"Leo is in a steel box, fighting for every breath. Machines are his mother now. And our little tiger…" His voice fractured completely, collapsing into a whisper. "Our tiger is ash. He's gone."
The silence that followed was a physical weight, pressing the air from his lungs. Your breathing was slow, even, a peaceful rhythm that felt like a mockery of the war inside him. He didn't know if you were asleep. In that moment, it didn't matter. The truth was a poison he had to expel.
"I thought pushing you away was a kindness. A brutal mercy. I thought my distance would be a shield between you and the rot of my world." He let out a sound that was half-laugh, half-sob. "But I am the rot. And all I did was let it fester between us."
Finally, his resolve broke. His fingertips, calloused and cold, brushed a single strand of hair from your cheek. The contact was electric, a jolt of agony and solace. He whispered the words into the sacred space between your skin and his breath, a vow for the shadows alone:
"You are not sick. You are not broken. You are the only sanctuary I have ever known. And I am the storm that razed it to the ground."
The storm outside had quieted. But in the room, in the marrow of his bones, it raged on, eternal.
He turned his face toward you, pressing his forehead gently against the pillow near your temple. The tears came silently then, a torrent he could no longer stem, soaking into the linen.
"Please," he begged the darkness, the words a broken prayer. "Even if I deserve the hell you'll give me… please don't leave me in it alone."
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♠ FLASHBACK: The Night the Message Was Delivered
"Sir, are you certain this is wise?" The guard's voice was low, his eyes scanning the tree line of the private forest. Ahead, under the fractured moonlight, two shapes tumbled and played—Leo, a bolt of golden energy, and the tiger cub, a silent, striped shadow moving with liquid grace.
Taehyun stood apart, arms crossed, a rare, unguarded softness in his eyes as he watched them. "Let them run," he murmured, his voice almost gentle. "To her, they are not beasts. They are her heart. We are training them to be its guardians. Soon, they will be the shadows even my men cannot be."
It was a ritual. A secured perimeter. A controlled moment of freedom under a guarded sky. Until the night the sky cracked.
THWIP.
The sound was wrong. Not a bang, but a suppressed, professional sigh of air parting for death.
Taehyun's blood turned to ice.
THWIP. THWIP.
Shouts erupted. A raw, guttural scream of animal agony—the tiger cub's final sound—ripped through the peace. Chaos erupted in a silent ballet of violence.
Taehyun's world narrowed to a single, horrifying frame: the tiger cub, mid-pounce, collapsing as if its strings had been cut. A dark bloom flowered instantly on its striped side.
Leo, pure instinct overriding pain, lunged over his brother's body, a snarl tearing from his throat—a tiny, golden king defending his fallen prince.
THWIP.
Leo jerked, a choked yelp escaping him as he stumbled, a crimson stain spreading through his fur.
"NO!"
Taehyun's roar was not human. It was the sound of something primal breaking. He surged forward, but his men were already a wall of muscle and duty, hauling him back as he fought like a madman, his eyes locked on the small, broken forms in the leaves.
"LET ME GO! THEY'RE MINE!" he screamed, the words tearing his throat.
He was forced to his knees in the damp earth, watching as Leo's whimpers faded into shallow, wet breaths. The tiger cub was already still, its vibrant eyes glazing over, reflecting a moon that no longer mattered.
The shooter was a ghost. Vanished. The message was not in the bullets, but in the target.
It was a declaration. A line drawn in the blood of the things you loved most.
And Taehyun understood, with a clarity that felt like a bullet to his own soul: This was not an attack on his assets. It was a promise. A preview. She is next.
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♠ LATER: The Study – Where Lies Are Forged
The study was a tomb. The only light came from the amber hell in his glass and the cold glow of a single security monitor, frozen on a grainy image of the forest edge.
His fists were clenched on the desk, knuckles white, his sleeves stained with earth and the dark, drying blood of a cub he'd carried home. Your voice was a ghost in the room, sweet and haunting: "Promise me you'll protect them, Taehyun. They're my heart."
He wanted to run to you. To fall at your feet and pour the horror into your lap. To let you scream, and rage, and grieve with him.
But he saw your face—the way it lit up when Leo nudged your hand, the way you laughed when the tiger cub stole your sock. He saw the fragile peace they brought to your eyes, the first real peace you'd known since he'd wrecked your life.
How could he be the one to extinguish that light? How could he hand you the ashes of your "heart" and ask you to survive it?
So, the strategist took over. The kingpin. The monster.
He built a lie.
"Sir…" A guard stood at the door, his face ashen. "The tiger cub… what are your orders?"
Taehyun didn't look up. His voice, when it came, was stripped of everything, flat and dead. "Bury him. In the east garden. Under the white roses. No one touches him. No one speaks of him. He never existed."
The guard bowed, understanding the finality, and left.
Alone, Taehyun looked at the shattered glass in his hand, at the blood welling from his palm. The physical pain was nothing. A distraction.
He picked up his phone. The zoo director answered on the first ring, his voice wary. "Sir?"
"Prepare the NICU. Top facility. Anonymous donor. A lion cub, critical GSW. He lives. Whatever it costs. He lives, or you and your family follow him into the ground. Do you understand?"
The silence on the other end was absolute. Then, a trembling, "Yes, sir."
Taehyun ended the call. He dropped his head into his bloodied hands, his broad shoulders shaking not with tears, but with the sheer, violent effort of containing the scream that wanted to eviscerate the world.
"Forgive me," he choked out, the words raw and wretched in the empty room. Not to you. Not to the dead cub. To himself. For the sin he was about to commit. "I couldn't protect them. So now… I must destroy you to save you."
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♠ THE MORNING AFTER: The Delivery of the Lie
He watched you from your bedroom doorway. You were curled on your side, one hand tucked under your cheek, innocent in sleep. The softest sigh escaped your lips. He ached with a violence that terrified him—to crawl into that bed, to bury his face in the curve of your neck, to shatter and let you hold the pieces.
Instead, he turned to stone.
When you stirred, blinking sleepily, your first instinct was to reach for the warmth that wasn't there. "Leo? Toro?"
He was already at the window, his back to you, a silhouette against the grey dawn. "They're gone."
You sat up, the sheets pooling at your waist. "Gone? What do you mean? Did Mrs. Han take them for a walk?"
"I took them to the zoo." He kept his voice cold, clinical. A surgeon making the first incision. "They're not coming back. They're a distraction. A liability."
The air left the room. You stared at his unyielding back. "You… you took them? Without asking me? Without even telling me?"
He finally turned. His face was a mask of polished indifference, but his eyes… his eyes were dead. "I don't need your permission. They were never pets. They were a lesson that's over."
"They were my family!" The cry was ripped from you, laced with a betrayal so profound it shook the windows. "They were the only good thing in this nightmare! You can't just… throw them away!"
His jaw was a granite ledge. "I can. And I did." He took a step closer, and the chill that radiated from him was arctic. "Forget them. They're where they belong. With their own kind. Not here, playing house with a fantasy."
"Liar." The word was a whisper, but it held the force of a verdict.
He flinched. A microscopic crack in the mask. For a heartbeat, the raw, bleeding truth was right there, screaming in his eyes—the grief, the guilt, the desperate, tragic love that had engineered this cruelty.
Then he shut it down. He rebuilt the wall in a blink, his gaze turning to flint. "Believe what you want." He turned on his heel, his dismissal absolute. "It doesn't change the facts."
He walked away, each step echoing in the hall like a nail in a coffin. His shoulders carried the weight of two graves—one in the east garden, one in the sterile silence of an ICU, and the third, most terrible one: the grave of your trust, which he had just dug with his own hands and leapt into, willing to let you hate him forever if it meant you never had to mourn.
The lie was his masterpiece. A prison of silence to keep your heart safe. And he would be its warden, even if it meant becoming the monster you always feared he was.