After the meeting was over, and the nobles retreated, Yewon turned to Seungcheol, expecting an explanation from him. She was so confused: not only did he not divorce her, but he also praised her?

“What?” he asked when she looked at him with an expectant look in her eyes.

“Explain yourself,” she asked.

“I didn’t do it for you,” Seungcheol claimed, “so don’t get too confident with me.”

“Then why did you do it?”

“I would like to know that too,” Soonyoung suddenly into the conversation, approaching them with crossed arms and narrowed eyes. “I thought you hated this marriage.”

“I don’t owe either of you an explanation. Now if you would excuse me, I have to prepare to ride out for war in a few days,” Seungcheol told them, standing up and leaving Soonyoung and Yewon alone.

It hit her how much of an awkward position Seungcheol’s decision to stay married to her had put her in with regards to Soonyoung. She didn’t know how to act with Soonyoung anymore. She had seduced him and promised to sleep with him if he married her, and now, he couldn’t marry her, and her promise was all in vain.

“Well, congratulations,” Soonyoung said to Yewon with a shrug. “This is good news for you.”

“I wouldn’t say it like that,” Yewon replied softly, looking down on the floor.

“Why are you avoiding my eyes?” Soonyoung said with a hearty laugh. “Just forget everything okay? What happened between us the last five days, let’s erase it.”

Yewon nodded in agreement, but she couldn’t help but feel guilty, like she had just broken a promise to him, and he was just nice enough to forgive her for it.

-

That night, as Haein was bathing her, she said: “you should go to his room tonight, Princess.”

“What?”

“Seungcheol. If he won’t come to you, you go to him. Your marriage right now is as fragile as ever, and if you want to maintain it, you have to at least consummate.”

Haein was right. Yewon remembered how much she regretted not having consummated before. But now, they were married and planning to stay married (as far as she knew, at least). She needed to grab the opportunity while she still had it.

After she was done with the bath and was dressed, she made her way to Seungcheol’s room. She prayed it would work out this time. She prayed he would accept the advances she was planning to make towards him.

She realized in that moment that all significance she had ever attached to was gone now. didn’t mean love or affection anymore like it does in all the novels. meant gaining an upper hand in politics. Her body was nothing but a tool she could use to attain it.

The fact she was not even afraid of anymore made her understand just how desensitized she was to what it actually was. She wasn’t afraid of the pain, nor was she anticipating the pleasure. It was nothing personal or deep.

Her mind went back to something her brother Jihoon had said to her father. Her body was nothing but tilth for her husband to sow. She never thought she herself would come to internalize that.

She knocked on his bedroom door and called out to him. Please let me in. Please let me in. Please let me in, she prayed in her head.

For the first time in a very long time, he did let her in.

He was sitting on his desk, reading letters when she entered.

“Why are you here?” he asked her, putting down the letter that was in his hand.

She didn’t know what to say to him. How does a woman ever go about requesting for a man to bed her? She hesitated for a while before she decided to do what she did with Soonyoung a few days back. She reached for the back of her dress and began to untie it.

It took him a few moments to realize what she was trying to do, and when he did, he quickly shook his head: “don’t do that,” he told her.

He wasn’t as encouraging as Soonyoung had been. He didn’t have the same spark in his eye that gave her the stimulus to keep going with her seduction.

“I really want to do this,” she told him, her arms dropping to her side when he didn’t seem open to this at all.

“I know,” he said. “And it will happen eventually. But not now.” He sounded calm, soothing her ever so slightly out of the impatience she had started to feel.

“Eventually. What does that even mean? Until when do you want to wait?”

“It’s too soon right now,” he stated simply.

“So you want to finish mourning him? You might divorce me before that happens.”

“Rest assured, Princess Yewon, I’m not going to divorce you anymore.”

“Why the sudden change of heart? You went from hating me and wanting to kick me out of Solen to publicly praising me and saying you’ll stay married to me? I don’t understand you.”

“I’m only doing what Jeonghan would have wanted me to do.”

“That’s nonsense. Jeonghan hated me. He would have wanted me out too,” Yewon claimed.

“He didn’t hate you,” Seungcheol revealed. “He did at the beginning, but you got through to him from how you treated his patients. He told me that you were good with them.”

That was news to Yewon. She never knew that Jeonghan had ever thought of her as anything other than a Galacian menace who stole his lover and was there on account of a peace he never wanted.

“Anyways,” Seungcheol said as she processed this, “I will explain why I’m still married to you, just so that you don’t get the wrong idea. Arti told me about the funds you wanted to allocate to the discharged patients, and I realized that the patients need you. They need someone who cares for them enough to constantly be watching out for them, or else the whole endeavor would fail. Now that Jeonghan’s gone, there’s no one else but you. I want you to stay here, because I believe Jeonghan would have wanted that. He cared about the young men in that hospital even more than he cared about me, and I think staying married to you is a small price to pay for the welfare of the hospital into which put his heart and soul.”

“That explains a lot,” Yewon said, finally understanding that Seungcheol was indeed thinking about Jeonghan when maintaining the marriage. “I feel stupid for thinking it was because you actually wanted peace. Or because you’re fonder of me than I thought you were.”

“Believe it or not, Princess, but I am fond of you,” Seungcheol told her suddenly. She narrowed her eyes at him. That was the first time he ever said anything like that to her.

“No you’re not,” she managed to say through her surprise.

“I’m not going to argue with you about this,” Seungcheol said. “I don’t care if you believe it or not.”

“You said you hated me at least four times,” Yewon told him. “And now you’re saying that you’re fond of me?”

“When I told you I hated you, I never meant that personally. I meant I hate the country you represent.”

“You’re confusing,” Yewon told him with narrowed eyes.

But the more she spoke to him, the less confusing he became to her. It was like the more she spoke to him, the more the cold haze that surrounded him began to clear, and the more she saw of who he actually was. And now that she was actually having an extended conversation with him, the haze was starting to clear, and he was talking to her about himself. She was only just starting to get through to him, and she liked it. She didn’t want it to stop.

He was like a puzzle she had to solve. She had to choose her words carefully or it might tip him off the edge, and he would close her out. If she wanted to get through to him, she had to be smart about it. She had make it so that he wanted to keep speaking with her and not abruptly end their conversations like usual.

“The day before he died,” Yewon revealed randomly, “Jeonghan told me something.”

“What?” Seungcheol asked curiously, his eyes probing her with interest.

“It was kind of sad. He asked me not to turn you away from him.”

Seungcheol then averted his eyes from hers and instead fixed his gaze on his hands . He began fiddling with the corners of the papers on the table in front of him, not saying anything. Her words had clearly gotten to him.

“I told him that I don’t have the power to turn you away from him, but then he told me that I already have,” Yewon continued, watching his reaction carefully.

“That idiot,” Seungcheol muttered under his breath. She could tell from the way he said it that he was extremely distressed by what Jeonghan had said.

“The last thing he told me was that even the patients were starting to like me more than him,” Yewon revealed. “I felt bad.”

“Jeonghan loved his patients,” Seungcheol said, more to himself than to her. He looked saddened, and she felt like she was succeeding. He was continuing the conversation; it was a good sign.

“I can see that,” Yewon replied.

“You know that boy patient without a leg? Dino?” Seungcheol asked her. Yewon was elated that he was actually conversing.

“Dino? What about Dino?”

“Jeonghan used call him his ‘baby.’ I always found it so annoying when he did that,” Seungcheol revealed nostalgically. “I told him to stop it, but Jeonghan kept doing it. He never listened to me.”

“I didn’t realize that Jeonghan cared about Dino so much.”

“Oh he did,” Seungcheol said. “He did very much.”

“Did you love him?” Yewon tried to continue the conversation, but it seemed like she had gone too far.

He narrowed his eyes at her, but then smiled at her attempt to get him to answer that personal question. Yewon felt accomplished. Even if he didn’t answer, at least he smiled.

“You got enough out of me for now,” he told her, still smiling. “Now go to bed, Princess.”

“Just admit you loved him,” she pressed.

“Go away.”

“You have a nice smile,” she complimented. “You should smile more often.”

“Just go before I call the guards,” he threatened, trying (but failing) to suppress that smile which was still on his lips.

“Why do that? The conversation was going so well.”

“Guards!” he yelled out to the guards outside. She frowned at him, surprised he actually called the guards. Now she was forced to leave. “ Princess Yewon to her room,” Seungcheol told the guard who had entered.

“I’m going to ask you that question again,” she warned him, before standing up and walking towards the guard who was waiting for her at the door.

“Good night, Yewon,” he said suddenly, making her stop and turn to him. It was pleasant to hear him call her Yewon and not ‘Princess Yewon’ or ‘Your Highness.’ It was like a barrier was suddenly broken between them for the very first time since they met.

“Good night, Seungcheol,” she replied carefully.

She walked back to her room wondering how in the world she was able to make him talk with her for so long about something so personal. He was so fickle, she thought. So extremely fickle.

And it wasn’t even that he ‘accidentally’ opened up to her or anything. He seemed to know exactly what he was doing when he was conversing with her. It felt as though he wanted to talk about Jeonghan with her.

As she tried to make sense of it, she came to the conclusion that it wasn’t about him opening up to her. It was about his burning desire to speak to someone, to anyone, about the person he lost. The culminating memories of Jeonghan were trapped in his thoughts with no one to hear them. Who did Seungcheol have to open up to now that the closest person to him was killed? His guards? His servants? All the nobles and politicians around him? He was a lonely person, Yewon realized. A terribly lonely person who needed a friend that he did not have anymore.

Her mind went back to something that Wonwoo had written in his last letter to her. Seungcheol may seem ice cold and unkind, but deep inside Seungcheol is a man who needs a friend.

Behind his ice-cold demeanor, he was simply a grieving man who wanted to keep the memory of Jeonghan alive by talking to someone about him.

-

The following morning, Haein asked what had happened with Seungcheol the previous night as she was dressing her for breakfast. Yewon told her that they didn’t sleep together as she had planned.

“But he did say that he was willing,” Yewon added. “After he done mourning Jeonghan.”

Haein seemed suddenly saddened at the mention of Jeonghan.

“Did you know Jeonghan?” Yewon asked Haein curiously, remembering how much Haein had cried the day after Jeonghan’s death.

“Not really,” Haein answered.

“Whenever I talk about him, you avert your eyes and look at the floor,” Yewon noted. “I can tell the thought of him distresses you.”

Haein smiled nervously. “I didn’t realize I was that obvious. You have a good eye, princess. But honestly, I didn’t know him. I had only spoken to him once or twice. But when he died, it felt like my world went darker. If even I feel that way, I really can’t imagine how Prince Seungcheol feels. He must be hurting a lot…”

At this point, Haein went to the closet to prepare Yewon’s dress for the day.

There was a knock on the door as Haein slipped the dress over Yewon's head.

“Just a minute,” Yewon called out to whoever it was.

“I’m waiting,” came the pleasantly familiar voice of Wonwoo.

A/N: I’M LATE. But you know how my update schedule is Sunday and Thursday? My schedule this semester makes it easier to update Monday instead of Sunday so I’ll just change it for now.

I’ll try to get Thursday’s update on time though! TT