Idyllic days, passing like sand grains rushing into the bottom of the hourglass, are numbered and ticked off. One by one, this picket white fences of a dream inching closer to an open grave.

Idyllic days, passing like sand grains rushing into the bottom of the hourglass, are numbered and ticked off. One by one, this picket white fences of a dream inching closer to an open grave.

Eluding capture is effortless as an unattached person, Luna learns. It is much, much harder when the constant worry of slip-ups by a man unused of role-playing, buzzing at the edges of her fingertips.

Luna appears once again, when the studio she’s cleaning is flooded by armoured men and their guns pointing squarely on her head. She expects death by a hail of bullets, half-expects that her head’s being blown off, her body perforated like a sponge in the thunderstorm and a smile curving on her lips.

The storm does not come.

Her would-be-killers are rigid, their grips tighten over their metallic guns and their index fingers hovering, trembling over the triggers.

There is a man, holding his hand up in the air. His other hand flicking the tip of his sheathed sword at her wrist, enough force to crack a fractured line in calcified limbs.

She pulls her wrist a second late—her grasp around the blade’s handle loosens. The pocket knife clangs unceremoniously on the floor. The men around her move closer tensed, fingers are set ghostly on the triggers.  

“Stand down,” the man says.

She recalls him. The ice-hard, black glint in stark-empty eyes. The unhesitant click of a gun, the whizzing bullets piercing through eyes, splatting the walls with acrid red and brain matter. The contemptuous smirk twisting the corners of his lips.

Oh. The emperor.

“I want her alive,” he commands, unblinking.

One of the men exchanges his high-calibre gun for a tranquilliser one. This time, he shoots three darts into her chest and questions, “How about her partner, Your Majesty?”

The room spins. Rapidly, she’s on a malfunctioning carousel. Her eyelids heavy, the weight of a thousand bricks sitting on them. Her screams of warnings are incomprehensible moans, lost to handcuffed wrists and quavering knees.

“Him too,” he utters, an afterthought.

The last of her consciousness—Hyeon-min, Hyeon-min, Hyeon—drifting.

Jo Yeong takes it upon himself to apprehend the absconded terrorist. This rematch only serves a reminder for those watching, speculating eyes that there is a reason Yeong is the youngest to serve as the king’s shadow.

Right after his gloved-knuckles pummel Hyeon-min into kneeling, Yeong peels his gloves off and tsks at his blood-specked balmorals. Seok Ho-pil hurries the paramedics to administer assistance.

“Sir, His Majesty requests you to attend to him in his study at 1900 hours,” In-young informs.

“Understood,” he replies, wiping his shoe with a silk handkerchief and LG monogrammed at its bottom corner.

Like before, Yeong answers his emperor’s summons, impeccable in his attire and pristine appearance. “On the contrary to popular belief, Your Majesty, I gave him a bloody nose. The news of him on the brink of death is highly exaggerating.”

“Never once I doubted your restrain, Yeong,” Gon says, curling rubicund-lined lips into a soft smile. “Are the accommodations ready to welcome their new residents?”

“Hers are done. His, there is a slight renovation considering the injuries he incurred when he tripped during transportation,” Yeong states dryly.

“Ah, that is so unfortunate the fun that to wait until he heals,” Gon clucks at his tongue, his smile turns hazard glee. “That leaves you free to put on your hacking hat on.”

“Information on both?”

Gon rises to his feet, stepping away from the desk. He shakes his head sideways, a mirthless laugh escapes between his baring teeth. “Only one. The woman.”

Yeong rarely needs to shape his words into substantial sound waves. His crow-arched brow raises, forehead lightly creasing.

“Seung-ah already gave me the military records of one Kang Hyeon-min. She hasn’t yet being allowed full access to the database. Some information are harder to come by. I like to keep it that way.”

“So it is not Ho-pil I should be wary of, it seems like Miss Myung might be a real contender for my position,” he laments, pasting a purplish hand over his chest in subdue dramatics Gon’s fond of.

“Quash such nonsense, Yeong.” His king brushes lithe fingers across Yeong’s knuckles, airy and tender, and they linger. Gon leans in, that his mouth hovers over Yeong’s reddening ear, and he croons,  “My shadow is yours to guard. And yours only.”

They maintain a distance, a professional rapport, between the kingdom’s emperor and its first female prime minister in daylight. Not all pleasantries are feigned. The cowed animosity is sizzling genuine in the space they share with others.

By night fall, Koo Seo-ryeong slips away from her own guards, into a commonplace car, polished black and its requisite tinted windows.

Her driver is a woman with cheekbones sharper than Yeong’s, with expressions far readable than the captain and certainly without the frosted glares Yeong’s favours in Seo-ryeong’s presence.

The cloak and dagger approach is highly unnecessary, she thinks. It borderlines to the point of ism. Even so, she enjoys it. Dare she admits a little, she looks forward for clandestine weekends like this.

She discards everything—and anything—that connects to her public persona.

Opting for helix-studded earrings on both, spidery-black leather choker circling her pale neck, kohl-lined eyes to evoke feline gaze, and violet defining her lips. Careful considerations went into the riveted biker boots, ripped blue-faded jeans, plain navy tank top and the clunky bracelets.

“We’re here,” the driver announces, her appreciative glance doesn’t escape Seo-ryeong.

“Don’t need to wait for me,” Seo-ryeong says, rhetorically redundant and flashes a coy grin.

She cruises her way through the lobby with the swagger of a motorcycle aficionado. While heads briefly turn, recognition remains elusive.  

He hardly stands out in the café.

The first time though, she nearly misses him, an eighteenth century Gothic aristocrat, by the corner booth. A radical sight. While she seamlessly blends in, he painfully attracts inquisitive stares. Dinner was a short affair then.

Tonight, he employs supplementary accessory of black-framed aviator glasses and tanned folio briefcase. Lee Gon motions for the waiter to come nearer. “What do you think?”

He trades the embroidered swallow-tail coat, the laced long sleeve shirt and guyliner for a tweed coat, chunky green sweater layered over a chequered shirt and emerald school tie.

She tosses a roundabout glance around the room. “No babysitter this time?”

“He is needed elsewhere,” he says, indifferent.  

No one stops twice to gawk at the man with his black hair neatly parted to a side, with his oversized reading glasses tacked above his nose and his shiny forehead unhindered. It helps vastly that he isn’t clean-shaven as the king’s portrait behind him.

The waiter takes the menu from Gon, skitters for the kitchen. As always, he takes it upon himself to choose their appetisers, main course, desserts and the wine.

She elects not to crack a wise remark on his other accessory. “If this is your best offer to your queen, I pity the girl who is to bear the crown and your heir.”

“The queen does not need to hide like a criminal.” His laugh is a blithe snort. “This is the closest you’d get to my crown.”

“Me?” Seo-ryeong deliberately flinging her voice a little louder, and her grin is a cat’s cruel smile. “The prime minister, you mean.”

“No. As a child born without the benefit of clergy or an altar,” he retorts, tracing a callous finger over the mouth of the wineglass. “This is all you will ever get.”

“You should do something about your unhealthy obsession with pedigree. It’s charming at first, now it’s like a kink or something, Your Majesty,” she murmurs, stapling mockery to his title of respect with a smidge of warmth, fighting off the burgeoning desire to stab her fork into the back of his palm. “So are we going to stay here or move elsewhere?”

“The penthouse is already reserved.” His reply misses its mark by a margin, a rare episode, in place of his usual charm-touched witty answers. He doesn’t rectify it. Curious.

“Hilton?” Seo-ryeong prompts.

“Four Seasons,” he says, dreamy.  

Her mulling silence goads a glance from his steak and a satisfactory emendation.

“You don’t like it? You have never voice a protest before,” he says. “There are others.”

“Four Seasons is fine. I thought we’d be having a slumber party in Hilton,” she concedes, without losing the amusing brilliance of her grin and spiked bracelet dangling as she waves a curated hand over her neck.

His darkling eyes blink, inspecting her with the perfunctory scrutiny. “Ah. That explains the outfit. And do tell, who are you playing tonight?” The elaborate disguise he has could never truly whittle the spirited disparagement from his teasing smirk.

“The hipster college professor’s mistress, of course.”

He rubs his forefinger and thumb over the absolutely bogus goatee on his chin. “I think the college professor’s type is more elegant than biker chick gang.” The glued-on facial hair nearly convinces her that he is a haggard college employee subsisting on caffeine, boxed wine and Cuban cigars.

“He married the elegant one, but their love life is stale, ordinary, hence he engages in a capade with the biker chick,” she trills, running her tongue along the blunt edge of the steak blade. “You’ve missed three cabinet meetings, should I be worried?”

He a wild brow. “I thought you prefer to reign alone. My absence should be a blessing.”

“It is much as blessing as it is a curse, Your Majesty, for your signature and seal are required to keep the government functioning,” she chides, her fingers curling tighter over the steak knife.

“You proved yourself a capable woman. With or without my approval, you’ve always run the government as you envisioned. What’s stopping you now?”

“Those are menial tasks. My legs are shackled, remember? What I’ve done is to mitigate the problems within my powers outlined in the constitution you drafted and implemented.” Her smirk turns cutting glass shards, whetted by the partial moonglow. “Impermanent solutions.”

“I will bear in mind the next time I feel the need to update the constitution, I should return some of your executive powers. But I’m afraid my time is entirely unavailable for such endeavour.” He displays her a full set of pearl-white teeth.

“Last I checked, your schedule isn’t occupied with grave royal matters.”

“You can’t always rely on Secretary Mo’s intel,” he sighs. “But to answer your inquiry, the university has my utmost attention presently. Mathematical problems don’t solve themselves.”

The king spends less hours on arithmetical equations, algebra formulae, and chalk-stained fingers barely riffle through complex textbooks or scribbling big words describing the convoluted numerical theorems.

Seo-ryeong does not call out his lies.

The night ends when they both fall in bed together, she presses black-tipped fingernails into his skin, marking raw crescents  all over his spine and he imprints a necklace of kisses, squeezing the air just enough to both excite and petrify her.

She catches herself in the grey-slate screen, all sprawled out, slicked with sweat and heat coiling in her belly and wonders.

Should this little arrangement leaks, will her decade-long work be stripped off its respect, will the movement she pioneers will falter, wilting as her name desecrated or—perhaps she never has any dignity, any soul. Lost, sold them somewhere in her quest to topple monarchy.

Koo Seo-ryeong contemplates flapping defeat in the breeze, to relish in surreptitious amorous entanglement, to work in accordance to Gon’s laws, to live an untroubled existence.

Her fortitude, to mend the festering rot within the empire, returns and reinforced with vengeance. She steels herself for the depths she would have to sink to wrestle victory from Gon.

Lee Gon is an emperor that relishes in challenges, be it cerebral or somatic. Some rose to oppose him, fewer dared to air their contention of the empire, the king. Those who did are drugged flies drowning in their own faults and sins.

Soon the opposition trickles into submissive men, the king seeks his challenges elsewhere, burying his nose in algebraic coursebooks and flaking chalk dust streaking his fingers.  

The late traitorous prince is the last to merit obstinate viciousness from Gon. The current prisoner, a man of the military bearing, garners a placing among Gon’s interest when bombings are frequent.

Now, Gon abides his time for the prisoner’s return to perfect health and abating his brutal famishment with the curious case of the female con-artist wrapped in the vendetta of disgraced ex-military officials.

The Unbreakable Sword and his boy-king endured adolescence years without the entrapment of teenage expectations. They cruise through the tempestuous period, skirting the pitfalls of hormones and burgeoning search for identity and sensual curiosity of the female species.

The king is charitable with his smiles, the air of benevolence endears him to his subjects. The attention, piled on their feet, is a crowded, one-sided street. But Lee Gon does not spare these women any more attention than he does to a sick child in front of clicking cameras and rolling video crew.

And yet.

He finds Gon in the state of increasing solitude, encasing himself in his private study, with his personal laptop. His disregarding of the dignitaries waiting for an audience, barely touching the reports he so often pours nights into, are tolerated, beget no questioning.

Once, Yeong stumbles into an oblivious Gon and his laptop screen in Yeong’s periphery. Dark circles fashioning a new home beneath Gon’s metal-black eyes—an echo of an insomniac boy-king sets Yeong’s nerves unlacing, one strand at a remembrance.

Of all the footages the Royal Guards have on their prisoners, it’s the highly-refined recording of the enforced undressing, a full disclosure of the female forn, that warrants thousand repeated viewings.

No caprices alarm Jo Yeong the most than his king’s reaction to living enigmas, sculptured in the feminine form, equipped with ruinous talons.

It starts innocently. Always, a taunting grin and silvered enchanting tongue stir the embers of fascination within his king. Over the course of a night, wit and seduction dance in tango swirls until dusk peppers the skies, one slips into obscurity and the other returns to golden glided castle.

Then, his king rests in slumber, and Yeong works his roughened fingers across the keyboards, a pianist performing a regular ode, the hunt for dirt and skeletons. His findings is bittersweet, for Yeong completes his task to perfection and Gon’s chosen act could damn them all.

There is two, and only two to elicit such aberrant move from Lee Gon.

Koo Seo-ryeong is the other side of the Lee Gon coin.

Unapologetic in her illegitimate heritage. Relentlessly driven in pursuit of her ambition. Shamelessly exploiting her beauty and wiles to undermine her rivals. Outspoken in her insolence for the monarchy.

Yeong cannot find it in himself to heap nonsensical hate on Prime Minister Koo.

Even when it is her who descents into Gon’s toned arms, her heat thawing the ice-priced frost of his bed. Escaping his king’s clenched jaw and iron-locked throat are the pleasurable moans she coaxes with fiery-red kisses and varnished claws grazing at the imperial clavicles.

She is fiercely devoted to her cause, to her people, and so viciously resourceful in circumventing the firecrackers they unleashed in her meteoric rise in the political battlefield. It is admirable even, to see her bloodless hands are devoid of the many, many enemies she’d amassed over the years.

She is regal, in spite of the fish-monger boots and hairnet guarding thick, flowing long-black hair. Regardless her lowborn extraction, she is intellectual provoking—a worthy adversary Gon welcomes at arm’s length, appreciates on lusty silk bedsheets.

She’s the queen in every and all conceivable ways, but name.

Perchance another lifetime, the empire would covet for a queen and her eternal piety to the kingdom, alas, this is not—Koo Seo-ryeong will never lay a finger on his king’s throne.

The other is a breathing ghost. Nameless. She values a nickname over her natural one. The moon.

Jung Moomyung is a mystery, and far, far forbidden. She is a taken woman. Mated to the man he almost sent to six feet of freshly disturbed and dug-out ground.

She is a fighter, incisors stained with arterial red, and a switchblade is an extension of the perpetual feral child’s being.

Her history is coloured with allegations of juvenile assault, lawless solicitation of swindling, and her arrest records is harrowingly thin. She’s a champion of prison evasion, world class fugitive from the law.

Together, these two are a hurricane of silk and steel, and their lips are damnation his king cannot fall for.

Even so, if he’d to choose which death he could live without earning the ire of his king, Yeong supposes, better a woman who lived fending dangers with snarls and unrestrained bloodlust than a woman who fights with her words and cunningness.

The portent bells are hustling, ghostly shrieking in his eardrums. Cataclysmic nightshades are weeding in the lush, well-managed garden, sprouting faster than Yeong could sickle it out with his scythe.

It is by pure coincidence Lee Gon chances upon Koo Seo-ryeong bereft of her immaculate delightful smile and her frazzled eyes seething at Myung Seung-ah. Her authoritative voice recoils into belligerence in vacant anteroom—something about the abysmal rate of backlogged documents getting his signature and royal seal and the appalling state the Royal Public Affairs office.

“Miss Myung, a moment of word, please,” he calls out, beckoning her to attend him. “This is a private meeting, Prime Minister. I would appreciate it if you could excuse her.”

Seung-ah is a deer trapped in the headlights, oscillating between the king and the prime minister. She hugs her tablet and folders tighter, a life raft and neutral space. One foot aimed the woman in front of her. The other foot tapping at Gon. Comical.

“We’re in the middle of an important discussion, Your Majesty.” Her reply is a terse almost-snarl, instinctive politeness injected into the last two words.

“So as the nature of my meeting with Miss Myung. Now, Miss Myung, my study.” Gon suppresses a smile threatening to make itself known on his lips. He folds his hands behind his back, walks away.

Seung-ah obeys, harried and furiously apologising to Seo-ryeong, adding the promised assurance to deliver favourable changes to her office.

Over his shoulder, Gon tosses a jubilant smirk and a smug-laced wink.

Seo-ryeong’s cheetah-printed stilettos clicking her dissatisfaction against the parqueted flooring, as she spins around for her exit.

Two years of service, not once, Gon is alone with Seung-ah. Much of their interactions are second-handed, mediated through various arbitrators and it works fine—until today.

“I hope Prime Minister Koo didn’t give you an earful over my tardiness,” Gon says.

The sloppily gawkish silence descends on the study in a flashing instant. Seung-ah blinks at break-neck speed, hangs open.

“Take a seat, since this is supposed to be a meeting.”

“Am I in trouble, Your Majesty?” Her question is a stuttering squeak, she struggles to meet Gon’s eyes, staring at all directions and never on his face.

Seung-ah resists to squirm underneath his gaze, carving spirals with the pointed tips of her moccasin. She’s pure clumsiness draped in ill-fitted, teal pantsuit and butterfly-framed glasses, and chews her shilo-coloured lips.

He shakes his head. “You’re not in trouble, Miss Myung or should I call you ‘Seung-ah’?”

“You can call me anything you want, Your Majesty,” she stammers.

“Yeong tells me that you’re a budding fortune teller,” Gon quips, in his sternest tone, “and you carried a deck wherever you go.”

Mortification settles on her face, and her words stumble over each other in a rushing breath. “Fortune teller? No. Maybe. I read tarot. But-but I don’t get paid. Usually only when people ask, not popular. Mainly Rider-Waite deck.”

He holds a hand up to intercept her rambling. “Great. Tell me my fortune,” he urges, twisting his lips into an easy grin.

She procures the deck from the inner pocket of her blazer, reluctance rings loud in her sigh. Reticence oozing from the shuffling of her expert hands. The shift in Seung-ah is blatant, confidence tugging her strings, engrossing her like a woman possessed.

“Shuffle the deck, Your Majesty and draw three cards.”

He cuts the deck twice, selecting three cards to a made-up tune and spreads it in front of him. Here he is, a staunch believer of science, awaiting the fortune teller’s golden words—a penurious farmer expecting the shaman for a scrap of rainfall.

The first card is a laureled equestrian carrying a staff decorated with a wreath of laurel. Footmen accompanying the rider with staves of their own.

“Six of Wands is upright,” she remarks, “in the past, you’ve overcame tragedies to achieve peace, and those victories you’ve secured are hard-fought and so much of it are hidden.”

The second card is unmistakeably Death. Common sense and a set of logical eyes would tell anyone the same. The skeleton carrying a black standard flag, ornamented with a pale white flower and a Pope-like figure folding his hands in prayers, a pair of living boys kneeling and a corpse beneath the skeleton’s alabaster steed.

“Is someone going to die?” Gon says, lacking his customary humour. “Or will I be in the one sealed in a casket, Seung-ah?”

Her short hair sways from left to right, the same time she utters a sharp, “No!” Seung-ah tries again, this time, a whisper barely louder than her gasp. “I mean, not necessarily. This card is known as Death, but sometimes it’s being called as ‘The Card with No Name’. It usually means a metamorphosis or symbolises big changes.”

“I see,” he says, indifferent. “And the last card? What does it say?”

The final card is a depiction of a floating hand with its palm upturned, emerging from a cloud, an imitation of a Communion cup. A white dove flies downwards, with a cross-patterned coin in its beak. Water springs stream upwards from the cup into the lily-padded lake.

“The Ace of Cups is upright, so that means, in the future,” she trails off, hesitation draw her arching brows together, “the empire will experience a new period of blossoming lo-passion, the birth—surge of fruitfulness.”

Well then, a new wave of expected disappointment flows and really, his fortunes are vague and unhelpful, no different than the peculiar prophecies of an eccentric Nostradamus. Nevertheless he cannot shed the nag of an incomplete—bowdlerised—interpretation of this reading.

“And so how much I owe you for the reading?”

“No, no, Your Majesty, it’s free,” Seung-ah squeals, sweeping his laid out cards back into the deck, “this is something I do for fun.”

“Consider a raise for your regular service to the Royal Public Affairs Office as a payment for this reading,” he says, with a finality of nail hammered into wooden coffin planks.

The sighting of Lee Gon in his chambers is a hearsay developing, not quite the wildfire of a rumour that the king wandering alone in the underground labyrinthine corridors beneath the palace.

It is less of a fabrication when Jo Yeong locates his king mimicking a ghostly presence, in the darkened room. He sits unmoving for hours end, watching the sleeping prisoner—Prisoner Jung curls on her side, facing the walls—through the translucent glass and steel barricades.

The sudden rush of cold air as oak door ferociously yanked open to announce an irate prime minister. She abandons curated sophistication and courtierly high heels for impatience urgency of oversized blouse and wrinkled trousers.

“Where is he?” she demands.

“Unavailable as your visit is beyond the realms of office hours, Prime Minister,” Yeong retorts, levelling his annoyance to a monotone. “Perhaps you could wait until the next morning. Until then, please leave.”

“It’s a matter of national security and the possible violation of the Geneva Convention,” she says, the corners of her redless lips revealing a muted snarl.

“There are no records of mistreatment of prisoners. Our facilities and prisons are ranked within the top ten of most humane prisons worldwide.”

She laughs a hollow chuckle. “That is because they neglected to file any, so there is no paper trail. I wasn’t born yesterday, Captain Jo,” she accuses, a glare that is all diamond slits deficient of any impishness.

Wordlessly, Yeong understands the attraction existing the king and his adversary, clearer than ever. The unfathomable mania to things that could bleed Lee Gon in all dimensions is an addiction.

“So where is His Majesty? He is certainly not in his bedroom and I see only you in his private study,” she warily asks. Hostility ebbs away, resignation and fatigue settle on her already sluggish shoulders. “Did he pull an Edward Cullen move or something?”

“I’m not familiar with that reference and I don’t know who Edward Cullen is,” Yeong says, honest and not an ounce of envisioned malice present.

“Of course, you don’t,” she sighs, dark tresses shaking loosely and she scrapes an amused smile. “Why would you even bother with reading romance, when you’re living your own personal gender-flipped harlequinade romance.”

Yeong coughs. “I-I do not discuss the affairs of His Majesty without his consent. Mine is not within the purview of Prime Minister’s duties.”

“We can’t measure up to his ridiculous standards. The perfect woman doesn’t exists. But the perfect man,” she pauses, her impish smirk returns to a widening curve and wiggles her sculptured eyebrows in solidarity, as if they’re a couple of scorned women. “Worry not, Captain Jo, His Majesty would lose interest eventually.”

“Prime Minister,” Yeong begins, exasperation insisting to press itself upon his features.

“My office has worked themselves to the bone, trying to stabilise the economy after the housing market crash and the declining demand for oil,” she hisses, the shrilling cleaver of her voice resembling a curse. “We can’t move without his approval and our relief efforts are locked.”  

“Why are you here, Prime Minister Koo? You are scheduled to meet His Majesty anyway this weekend,” he murmurs, the question is foreign to his tongue but his puzzlement is not.

“I need to see it for myself. Now that it is much dire than I anticipated. I fear he leaves me without much of a choice. Removal of the distraction is the only way,” she says, the vestiges of regret imprinting on her face. “Good night, Captain Jo. Allow my people the courtesy of five hours before you chase them.”

The news of an escapee from a prison that exists on no map but the one of his own making blows the bolted lid of his rage-containing pot into shards.

Lee Gon summons Koo Seo-ryeong into his chambers, banishing her armed escorts to the main palace hall. “Is this your doing?” he glowers, tampering down a guttural roar to a strained smile.

“And what did I do, Your Majesty?” she parrots his sentiment back. Her smile unflappable, a neutral curve but her eyes are obsidian blade fliting rebellious sparks.

“That prison break you engineered it,” he says, fangs gleaming the glint of iron.

“What use would a prison break brings me, Your Majesty?” she counters, afire.

“I have no desire to play your petty little mind games,” he says, treading a hazardous step forward.

She doesn’t flinch, eager to flash her own brand of catlike grin. “So do I, Your Majesty. I respect your overprotectiveness of the empire and it served well despite how antiquated this empire is and it’s time for a different modern future.”

The distance between them exists as a flimsy cardboard fortress. He towers over her easily, there is menace pulsating in his veins.

She leaves no opening for him, forging ahead with impervious calm on. “Let us not pretend that you are not a tyrant and I am not a conniving . As much as it pains me to admit you are a tyrant who knows how to prioritise at least. Your distractions cost lives and the people are suffering.”

Contempt accentuates her features into a blade of elegance and Gon wants nothing more to scratch the beauty off with his fingers until her magnificence turns a wretched legacy.

“Now look at you, you’ve gone off your rails for what? For a female prisoner that you spent hours creeping on,” she scoffs. “You’re no different than the scoundrels I dated, Your Majesty.”

Her condescending-tinted dismissal is corrosive on his control. The serrated edges of her words, harsh and gasoline, flaming his blue-raw fury.

He seizes her by the dress’s neckline, flinging her at his bed. The pastel fabric torn apart by his furious and heartless hands. He unbuckles his belt one-handed, fumbling momentarily, not enough for conscience to lasso him back.

His tongue fails him. The words he tried grasping to form a protest, slipping from desperate fingers. Yet his body moves, primal wrath guiding each action.

Gon isn’t bother by the implication. Nor is he moved by her muffled pleas.

Lady Noh Ok-nam dies of a heart-attack. The details of her sudden passing is scant.

There are no other alternate narratives than the account Myung Seung-ah reported.

Certainly, the tale of the late Lady Noh’s unfortunate discovery of Prime Minister Koo Seo-ryeong whimpering, bruised and scantily cloaked in the ragged dress she came when summoned, is lost to perishing rumours.

Or the last words of a dying frantic woman is an order for Seung-ah to usher the catatonic prime minister to safety, away from the palace and to have this incident erased from existence.

Deep down, Seung-ah could not scratch the image of Lee Gon and his taut back lined with desperate scraping by ragged fingernails off from herself.

She feeds her colleagues—even Secretary Mo—misdirection and carefully crafted lies. No one inquires any further clarification.

The following day, Prince Buyeong suffers a , slipping into a coma he does not wake up from. The Royal Family decides to stop the life support a week later.

The funerals, held separately, are equally lavishing and grand. Citizens halt in wallowing their own suffering, united once more, to mourn with their king.

Prime Minister Koo Seo-ryeong is last seen at the funeral, with a gargantuan inked flappy hat, showily obscuring half of her face. Then her whereabouts breath a mystery for amateur conspiracy theorists to tinkered with.