Chapter Seventy-One: Red Wine, Red Face, Red-Hot Chaos
The mansion had settled into its usual midnight stillness—that heavy, velvet silence that felt both oppressive and safe. I'd changed into one of his shirts hours ago, the black silk hanging loose on my frame, and had been pretending to read for the better part of an hour. The words had long since blurred into meaningless shapes.
I wasn't waiting for him.
I wasn't.
The door creaked open with a loud thud that shattered the quiet.
I looked up from the bed just in time to see Minho standing there—calm, deadpan, his expression carved from the same stone he always wore. As if what he was about to do was completely ordinary. Completely acceptable.
Then he shoved something—someone—into my arms like a damn delivery box.
"Your hormonal idiot," he said dryly, brushing off his sleeves as if he'd just handled contaminated goods. "Do something before he eats the walls. Or you."
Before I could form a response, he was gone. The door slammed shut with a finality that echoed through the room.
I stumbled back, barely catching the man who collapsed into me like a dramatic Shakespearean lover—red-cheeked, floppy-limbed, heavy as a bag of bricks soaked in expensive whiskey. His head lolled against my shoulder, his breath warm and syrupy against my neck.
"Wifeeeee…"
Taehyun's voice was a slurred melody, thick with alcohol and something softer—something that sounded dangerously like adoration. His eyes sparkled unnaturally, pupils blown wide, like he was floating in some forbidden dream he never wanted to wake from.
"I missed you," he mumbled, nuzzling into my collarbone. "I came home… f'r you…"
"You literally left this morning, idiot."
He leaned in closer, his face suddenly far too near mine, lips pouting with theatrical offense. "I waited centuries for this marriage. Don't ruin it with logic."
I blinked at him. "Oh God. They really got you drunk."
"Minho said…" He tugged me closer, his nose brushing mine, that expensive cologne mixing with the warm, smoky scent of alcohol on his breath. "…if I don't confess tonight, you'll leave me for Namhyun's baby…"
I choked on air. "Are you jealous of a five-year-old?"
"He kissed you," he whispered, as if confessing a crime of the highest order. "On the cheek. That's sacred territory. Marked. Claimed. Mine."
"You're insane."
"I'm in love." He said it simply, like it was the most obvious fact in the universe. Like the sky was blue and water was wet and Kim Taehyun was irrevocably, catastrophically in love with his wife.
And then—like flipping a switch—something shifted.
His gaze darkened. The drunken haze didn't clear, but it sharpened, focusing on me with an intensity that made my breath catch. His voice dropped, low and husky, as his hand snaked around my waist and pulled me flush against him.
"Do you know," he whispered, his lips brushing the corner of my mouth, "what you do to me when you wear my shirt and glare at me like I'm the biggest mistake of your life?"
His voice was too smooth, too confident for someone supposedly this drunk. The slur was still there, but beneath it ran a current of pure, undiluted want.
I stared at him, my heart hammering against my ribs. "Taehyun… are you acting?"
"Nope." He grinned, slow and wicked, then bit his lower lip in a way that should be illegal. "Just… very honest. Alcohol doesn't lie, little wife. It just… removes the filter."
He leaned in again, his mouth grazing the shell of my ear, his breath hot and intoxicating. "You look like temptation," he murmured. "You smell like mine. And you talk like a challenge I've been dying to accept."
I shivered, my hands pressing against his chest—not to push him away, but to steady myself. The heat of him seeped through the fine fabric of his shirt, branding my palms.
His fingers slid under the hem of the shirt I was wearing. His shirt. The touch was slow, gentle, teasing—fingertips tracing the bare skin of my waist like he was memorizing the landscape.
"You always push me away," he murmured, his lips brushing my jaw, trailing fire with every whispered word. "But you always end up in my arms, don't you? Always come back. Always stay."
"Stop talking," I whispered. My voice was barely audible, my heart thundering loud enough to drown out the world.
"Why?" He pulled back just enough to meet my eyes, that infuriating, beautiful smirk curving his lips. "Scared you'll give in?"
The challenge hung in the air between us, electric and undeniable.
Before I could respond—before I could summon the walls I'd spent weeks rebuilding—he moved.
He pinned me to the mattress. Not with force. Not with violence. But with something far more dangerous: desperation. That kind of raw, aching hunger that had been caged too long, finally straining at the bars.
His body was a warm, solid weight above me, every line of him pressed against every curve of me. His forearms bracketed my head, his face inches from mine, and in the dim lamplight, his eyes were endless pools of darkness and want.
"You think I don't crave you?" His voice trembled now—real and raw and stripped of all pretense. "Every second of every day? You think I don't lie awake at night, watching you sleep, wondering how I got so lucky that you're still here?"
My throat tightened.
"I wanted to wait," he continued, his voice cracking. "I wanted to wait until you remembered. Until you loved me for real—not from some diary, not from a past life you can't recall, but now. Here. With everything you know about me—the blood, the lies, the cage I built around you."
"Then why this?" The question escaped before I could stop it, barely a whisper.
He buried his face in the crook of my neck, his breath hot and uneven against my skin. His arms wrapped around me, pulling me impossibly closer, as if he could fuse us together.
"Because," he breathed, the word a broken confession, "I'm tired of pretending. Tired of pretending I don't want to hold you like this. Kiss you like this. Breathe you in like you're the only thing keeping me sane in a world that's spent years trying to break me."
My hands found their way into his hair, fingers threading through the dark, silky strands. He made a sound—something between a sigh and a shudder—and pressed closer.
"I'm not going to touch you if you don't want me to," he whispered against my throat, the words a vow and a plea. "I'll stop right now. I'll sleep on the floor. I'll chain myself to the other side of this bed. But God…" He lifted his head, his eyes meeting mine in the dim light, and I saw everything there—the fear, the hope, the desperate, drowning love. "Tell me to stop now. Because I'm so close to falling apart in your arms. And if you let me… I don't think I'll ever be able to put myself back together."
The silence stretched between us, thick with possibility.
I could have stopped him. Should have stopped him. Every rational cell in my brain screamed at me to push him away, to protect myself from the inevitable pain of loving someone this dangerous, this consuming.