Jinye was apparently to stay for a few more weeks before she journeyed back to her hometown. When Yewon found out about that the morning after the banquet from Haein, she couldn’t help but feel slightly frustrated. Jinye’s presence made her uncomfortable though she hardly knew the girl. She was just so beautiful that Yewon felt diminished in front of her.

It was not only Jinye that was there; it was also her father who had come to the palace to give funds to the war effort and support Solen. Yewon learned from Haein that Jinye’s family was extremely wealthy and were often giving money to the palace administration to help fund the war. Because of that, Jinye’s family was considered important enough to lodge in the palace and dine with the royals.

She therefore had to see Jinye and her father at breakfast the following morning. When she entered the dining room, she found Jinye making Yulhee laugh. Yulhee looked so happy today, Yewon noted. She guessed that Yulhee really loved Jinye too.

When Jinye saw Yewon, she stood up immediately, clumsily making the chair behind her fall. She bowed to her a lot, smiling sweetly.

“Princess Yewon! Please forgive me for not greeting you nicely yesterday!” Jinye chimed, “When I saw Wonwoo, I forgot about etiquette and everything!”

She had a strange manner of speaking: high-pitched and childlike almost. Yewon was surprised; for someone as beautiful and as high-class as Jinye, you would expect her to sound more elegant.

Yewon bowed back to Jinye, who lifted her head and gazed intently at Yewon for a long time. She had a wondrous look in her eyes, making Yewon feel a little uncomfortable.

“Thank you for saving him,” Jinye continued. “You saved Wonwoo when he was in Galacia, right? Thank you so much for saving him. Thank you for saving all of the hostages. You are amazing!”

Jinye was clearly in the dark about the fact that Wonwoo broke off the engagement because of her.

“I really admire you, princess,” Jinye continued. “Everyone loves you! You are strong and faithful, and you also read a lot! I wish I could read.”

Yewon tried to hide her surprise, but she couldn’t. She narrowed her eyes at Jinye and asked her, “you can’t read?”

Jinye shook her head, and a pout formed across her lips.

The rest of the breakfast with Jinye was filled with surprises. Jinye was much, much, much different than Yewon would have ever expected. She was not elegant at all. Not only was she illiterate, but she was very simple-minded and naïve. What was most surprising about this was that she was the woman who had been engaged to Wonwoo.

“She is not the kind of person I imagined that Wonwoo would ever fall for,” Yewon told Haein later.

Haein nodded in agreement.

“She can’t even read! How could Wonwoo have fallen for someone who can’t read?” Yewon was truly puzzled by it all. Yewon imagined the girl to which Wonwoo had been engaged to be much, much different. She imagined her to be intelligent and erudite, someone who engages with him in his most favorite hobby of all time: reading.

“She’s beautiful, rich, and comes from a powerful family,” Haein reminded Yewon. “It’s hard for any man not to fall for that.”

But still, Yewon expected Wonwoo to be different.

-

She didn’t understand why Jinye and Wonwoo occupied her thoughts for so long. But Yewon slowly began to piece things together.

Wonwoo could not possibly have been engaged to Jinye out of love. It didn’t make sense for someone like him to fall for someone like her.

She began to see that Wonwoo only pretended to love Jinye, probably for power. He most definitely had the tendency to be dishonest. She also thought so because of the fact that it wasn’t the first time Wonwoo pretended to love someone for his own interests. She had flashbacks to the time Wonwoo admitted he only pretended to care about Yewon because he wanted to keep her happy, because he didn’t want her father to wage a war against them.

She also came to that conclusion because of how quickly he was able to call off the engagement with Jinye, and how quickly he fell for Yewon instead. It didn’t make sense that he was engaged to someone he supposedly loved and fell for someone else so easily. Therefore, the only logical conclusion Yewon could come to was that Wonwoo was pretending with Jinye.

-

“Your highness,” Haein said as she entered Yewon’s room one night. “Wonwoo is outside and requests to speak to you alone. Should I let him?”

Yewon agreed, and Haein bowed one before leaving and motioning Wonwoo inside.

Wonwoo looked nervous as he approached Yewon, who was sitting at a desk writing letters. He took a seat on a nearby chair and faced her.

“Yewon, I have something to ask you,” Wonwoo said. “And don’t say it doesn’t involve you, because you know very well that it does.”

“What?”

“I know you met Jinye. Seeing her again has made me feel numb on the inside,” Wonwoo admitted. “I care about her deeply,” he continued, “and I think I may still possibly marry her. But before I make the decision, I just want to know whether you’ve absolutely closed all doors to anything that could happen between us.”

Yewon narrowed her eyes at him and replied, “so is she a second choice to you?”

“Yes,” Wonwoo said with confidence, as if he were not saying something quite cruel and unusual. “And she knows this too.”

“That’s not fair to her,” Yewon replied bitterly. “And you shouldn’t be engaged to someone who’s a second option.”

“Then tell me, what does someone do when their first option is out of reach?” Wonwoo asked her, eying her intently.

“They move on,” Yewon answered.

“And that’s what I’m planning to do. With her. But before I do, I want to know if my first option is indeed out of reach. That’s why I’m here.”

“I feel bad for her,” Yewon said, “why are you taking advantage of her like that?”

“What do you mean by that?” Wonwoo asked.

“Don’t pretend with me,” Yewon frowned. “I know you enough to know that you never actually fell for her…”

“Wait. Why do you think I was engaged to her then? For ? Money? Power?”

“I don’t know,” Yewon replied. “But you could never have legitimate feelings for someone who can’t even read…”

Wonwoo laughed all of the sudden, shaking his head in an expression of amused disbelief. “You’re so wrong about that, Yewon. So very, very wrong.”

“Come on, Wonwoo. You two are nothing alike…”

“Even if that were the case, that doesn’t mean I could not possibly have feelings for her,” Wonwoo replied sharply. “And you’re being very unfair and judgmental right now, to both me and to her. Jinye is not just an idiot who can’t read, and I am not some opportunistic scum who would marry someone for something so superficial like money or power.”

This may have been the first time that Yewon had ever seen Wonwoo irritated with her. She was slightly taken aback, but also felt very guilty for making assumptions that clearly offended him.

“It’s no wonder that you don’t have feelings for me anymore. You don’t even know me,” Wonwoo said before standing up and turning to leave.

Yewon wanted to save the situation, but she could think of nothing to say.

-

When he was gone, Yewon reflected on her assumptions and why it was so easy for her to make them. Wonwoo denied her assumptions with a sternness that made it hard to believe he was lying, and that made her feel guiltier than ever. So he really did care about her. It wasn’t fake. She had been so certain that it was fake, and suddenly believing that it wasn’t gave her a lot to think about.

She realized that believing that Wonwoo was faking it gave her some kind of mental assurance. It made her feel better and set her heart at ease and so she subconsciously chose to believe it even though the evidence to support it was far from sufficient.

She felt that she needed to apologize for her false judgment and for the jealousy which made her assume the worst in him.

The first place she looked to find him was the library, but she was however met with someone she did not expect.

Jinye was walking between the shelves, her eyes scanning the spines of the books. It surprised Yewon to see her there.

“Lady Jinye?” Yewon asked when she saw her. Jinye’s eyes widened slightly when she saw Yewon. She quickly bowed in the clumsy way that she often did.

“Your highness! It’s nice to see you here!”

“I thought you couldn’t read.”

“Oh, I can’t,” Jinye replied. “I’m just remembering some things from the past that happened here.”

“What kind of memories would you have in a library if you can’t read?” Yewon asked curiously.

“Wonwoo was always here;” Jinye stated matter-of-factly, “I met him here, and we spent a lot of time together in this place.”

“Oh,” Yewon replied, feeling a little defeated. Yewon had also grown close to Wonwoo in this library. She had always considered it their own special place, but she now realized that it wasn’t specially theirs at all. Yewon also realized that she had no idea about the nature of Jinye and Wonwoo’s relationship; the fact they met and grew close in a library told her that she was very wrong in assuming that his engagement with Jinye was superficial; there was a lot more to it than just beauty, fortune and power.

Yewon was very curious at this point, and she asked further about how they met and how Jinye grew close to him. Before long, the two of them were seated together on the table, talking as if they were friends as Jinye recalled her memories with him.

Jinye had met Wonwoo after running away from a royal banquet trying to hide from drunk men who wanted to touch her. She had found herself in the library, lost in the middle of the palace with no idea how to return. Wonwoo was the one who had helped her find her way back. After that incident, Jinye had kept going back to the library, and the two of them started to grow closer.

Because Jinye had not been able to read, Wonwoo read to her. Everyday, they would meet in the library, and she would sit down and listen to him read to her.

“He likes reading to people,” Jinye told Yewon. “He likes reading out loud, and he likes when people listen to him, even if they don’t understand what he’s saying. I usually didn’t understand the kind of stuff he read to me, but I just enjoyed listening to his voice.”

Yewon had only realized it then, but it was true that Wonwoo like reading out loud. She remembered how in the first weeks after they met, he would read some things out loud to her, although Yewon found it a little unusual, because she thought she could just read it herself. She also got flashbacks to when he read out that poem to her many months back, the poem through which he confessed to her.

She understood Wonwoo a lot better through what Jinye had told her, and she also understood why he fell for Jinye. Although Jinye didn’t understand what Wonwoo read to her, she still listened to him, and Wonwoo craved that. He wanted be heard, but he was just a voiceless, illegitimate bastard son to most everyone. No one gave him any attention or took his opinions seriously. But Jinye came along and listened to him. Too Wonwoo, that must have been a gush of fresh air after being suffocated in silence for so long.

Small wonder he fell in love with Jinye. Small wonder he fell for Yewon as well. Just like Jinye, Yewon also listened to him, but not just to him reading. She heard his political opinions and validated them; she was even the reason he was appointed the advisor, and so his voice was magnified and heard by officials. She knew that Wonwoo was thankful for that, but it was only now that she understood just how much it meant to him.

As the talk with Jinye continued, their conversation strayed to personal questions like what kind of books Yewon like to read to what Jinye liked to do. It was through that conversation that Yewon began to see that although Jinye had a simple mind, she was not an idiot. Not in the least bit. On the contrary, Yewon found that Jinye possessed a kind of wisdom that not many people had: the wisdom of attraction. She knew exactly what to do so that others would like her. She smiled at the right time, said the right things, and had this warmth in her expression that Yewon did not think she saw in anyone else but Wonwoo.

The two were so much more alike than meets the eye. They were both calm and sweet, and they both possessed a kind of familiarity that was beyond most people.

Yewon felt stupid for judging her and stupid for ever thinking that Wonwoo had only been pretending to have feelings for her.

At one point in their conversation, Jinye began to tell Yewon about one of the memorable books that Wonwoo had read to her.

“I was actually looking for it before you came in. I thought I could recognize it by the color of the spine, but I really couldn’t,” Jinye admitted.

“Maybe I can help you with that. Do you know the title?”

“Something about myths and religion,” Jinye answered.

“Oh, I think I have that book in my room,” Yewon answered, recalling that this was the book Wonwoo had given her to read a while back which had the information about Hita and her hair. “Siberian Myths and Religion.”

“Yes! That one!” Jinye replied.

Yewon invited Jinye to her room, and when they arrived, Yewon immediately went the pile of books she had at her bedside and scanned the spines until she found the right one. She handed it to Jinye, who took it excitedly and immediately sat down and flipped through the pages. She arrived at one particular page, one that she had obviously been looking for. She stared at the page for long. Yewon read the title: “Venus.” Drawn onto the page was a picture of the Goddess Venus. She had long, beautiful hair, fair skin and beautiful eyes.

That bitter feeling came back to her, hitting her like an unwelcome gust of wind. She realized that Wonwoo’s gesture of calling her after some mythical Goddess was not original or special or anything. It was a move that was recycled from his old lover and used again on her. She had been fooled, she thought, under the delusion that everything Wonwoo had done for her was special and exclusively for her, but it wasn’t. She didn’t really know why it bothered so much, but it did.

Jealousy. That’s what it was, and she knew it. She was jealous, and she hated it.

It was then that the door was knocked and Haein walked in.

Haein was a little surprised to see Jinye. “Lady Jinye, I didn’t expect to see you here,” Haein said politely with her head bowed.

Jinye bowed her head back towards Haein, eyes lowered to the ground.

“Your highness, I’ll come back later to change you,” Haein said to Yewon, bowing her head towards Yewon and leaving.

When Haein left, it was very obvious that Jinye’s expression had changed completely; her eyes filled with a dim, pitiful sadness which made Yewon feel bad.

“Your highness,” Jinye managed to say, her voice wavering slightly. “I want to ask you something. Please, please answer honestly.”

“Yes?”

“Wonwoo told me that he broke our engagement because there was someone else that he fell for,” Jinye said. “And I think I know who it is.”

Yewon froze.

“It’s Lady Haein, right?” Jinye looked towards Yewon.

Yewon stumbled on her words as she tried to think of the appropriate answer to that question. Of course, it wasn’t Haein who had stolen Wonwoo’s heart. It was herself, but Jinye could not suspect that. Yewon was his brother’s wife and the future Queen of Solen; she was way out of reach and way out of bounds, bounds that Jinye could never imagine that Wonwoo had transgressed. Instead, Jinye imagined that it was Haein who had taken her lover’s heart and left her heartbroken.

“Why would you say that?” Yewon asked Jinye, choked up and unsure of what to say.

“He talks about her a lot,” Jinye said. “She’s intelligent and reads just as much as he does and probably more. He even recruited her to work in the palace so she could be closer to him. I know it’s her. I think you know too, your highness. She’s your maid; you spend a lot of time with her. Please tell me if you know,” she begged earnestly. “I just want to be sure…”

“No, it’s not her,” Yewon answered. “Haein and Wonwoo are good friends, but I never saw indication that there was anything more between them.”

Jinye nodded, eyes lowered in dejection.

Guilt overcame Yewon as she watched the light in Jinye’s eyes fade. She felt insensitive for never considering Wonwoo’s fiancée before now. She never dwelt too much on how his fiancée must be feeling on account of the feelings that had formed between them before. Wonwoo was to blame for most of it, but she was also to blame for leading him on, for living in the fantasy of a romance with him and forgetting that real people would be hurt by it.

She needed to end it once and for all.

-

The next time she saw Wonwoo, she came up to him to apologize for her earlier judgmental assumptions.

“I know you’re not the kind of person to marry a girl for her beauty or her money; it just made me feel better to think so. I was wrong, and my assumptions were unfounded and mean. I regret it, and I ask your forgiveness,” she said to him.

“Granted,” Wonwoo said with a soft smile on his face and without giving it a second thought. “But what do you mean it made you feel better to think so? How it could possibly make you feel better?”

“I was jealous, and I know I have no right to be, and I promise I won’t be anymore…”

Wonwoo narrowed his eyes, “jealous? What do you mean jealous?”

“I didn’t like the idea of you with another girl, and so I made myself believe that this girl wasn’t anything special. But she is, and I understand that now after speaking to her. I think she’s a wonderful person, and yes, you should marry her and be happy with her; I think she’ll make you happy.”

Wonwoo eyed her intently. There seemed to be a lot of thoughts running through his head, but he didn’t know how to translate those thought to words.

“About what you asked me earlier,” Yewon continued when she saw that he was tongue-tied: “yes, I have absolutely closed all doors to anything that could happen between us. So please, don’t think about me like that ever again. Jinye doesn’t deserve to be a second option, and so please eliminate me as an option at all.”

Wonwoo nodded his head. “I see.”

“I’m sorry to have ever gotten between you,” she said, lowering her head in regret.

 “Please don’t think like that,” he said. He then reached out and reluctantly pulled her closer to him and wrapped his arms around her. He tightened his grip around her body and buried his nose in her head. Yewon was weary of the intimate physical contact with him, but she didn’t push him away, because somehow, it felt like this was the final intimate gesture before the end. It was a goodbye of some sort, a goodbye to the potential for anything more between them. And so she let loose and wrapped her arms around him too, letting herself lean into his shoulder as he embraced her.

He pulled away slightly and kissed her forehead, and it was at this point that Yewon lowered her head, stepped back broke their contact.

An awkward silence ensued, which Wonwoo broke saying, “this conversation was very important,” he said. “If you would excuse me, I have to talk to Jinye now and set things straight once and for all.” He bowed formally towards her, turned around and left.

And for the first time, as she watched him leave, Yewon felt closure regarding her relationship with Wonwoo.

A/N: sorry for the lack of cheol but I think the next chapter will be a cheol chapter haha.

Also right now im studying abroad, and idk what that means for how often I update. It seems like I’ll still have time to update often though ^^