Chapter Twenty-Eight: The Weight of Silence
The drive back to the mansion was a journey through a frozen wasteland. The seats were heated, the car was armored and silent, but a deeper cold had settled in the space between us. I sat beside him, physically unscathed, wrapped in his coat that still smelled of gunpowder and his skin. Yet, I had never felt more exposed, more condemned.
Taehyun didn't speak. He didn't look at me. His profile was a sculpture of hardened marble against the passing city lights, his jaw clenched so tight a muscle ticked relentlessly. One hand rested on his knee, curled into a fist so rigid the knuckles were white. It was the fist of a man holding back a hurricane.
The silence was a physical entity, thick and suffocating. It pressed against my eardrums, filled my lungs. I opened my mouth, once, twice, my throat working around apologies that felt like ashes, explanations that were nothing but excuses. No sound emerged. What could I possibly say? Thank you was an obscenity. I'm sorry was a pebble against the mountain of my betrayal.
The great iron gates of the estate swung open, not like a welcome, but like the maw of a beast swallowing us whole. I slid out of the car first, my legs unsteady. He emerged after me, but kept a distance, his presence a cold shockwave rather than a shelter.
Inside, the grand foyer felt funereal. The usual soft lighting seemed harsh, the vast space echoing with our unsaid words. Mrs. Han appeared from a doorway, her kind face etched with concern. She opened her mouth, but Taehyun swept past her as if she were air, his stride long and purposeful up the central staircase.
I followed, a ghost trailing a storm. My guilt was a leaden weight in my stomach.
He stopped outside the door to our—his—bedroom. His hand didn't reach for the handle. He stood there, his back to me, a wall of tailored black wool and impenetrable hurt.
"I'll sleep elsewhere tonight."
The words were delivered calmly, cleanly. A surgical incision. They carried no heat, only a finality that froze the blood in my veins.
I nodded, a jerky, pathetic motion he couldn't see. "Okay," I whispered, the word crumbling.
He began to turn away, to walk down the hall to one of the many sterile guest rooms. But he paused. Slowly, he turned his head, and his eyes finally found mine.
It wasn't anger I saw. That, I could have weathered. It was pain. A deep, bruising, bewildered pain that made him look younger, vulnerable in a way I had never witnessed.
"I would have burned the world for you, Aish," he said, his voice so quiet it was almost inaudible, yet it echoed in the cavernous hallway. "And you were the one who lit the match under my name."
Then he was gone, his footsteps fading into the silence he left behind.
I stood there, hollowed out, choking on the quiet I had crafted with my own deceit. I was drowning in the guilt of a man who had, without fail, always come for me, even when I had already given up on him in my heart.
---
The Telegram
The next morning, the silence had solidified into a new routine. He wasn't at breakfast. My tea was brought to the sunroom by a stone-faced attendant. When I passed him in the west wing hallway, he looked straight through me, his gaze fixed on some distant point, as if I were a pane of glass.
He didn't speak to me. Instead, he spoke through them.
I was sitting on the cold stone steps leading to the winter garden, clutching a cup of coffee that had long gone lukewarm, trying to swallow the lump of misery in my throat. Mrs. Han bustled out with a basket of linens, her expression unreadable. She didn't sit, but she paused beside me.
"He said not to leave the grounds today," she stated, not looking at me as she shook out a tablecloth.
I blinked. "He… said?"
"And to wear the cashmere sweater from your closet. The grey one. And that you should eat the soup at lunch. The one with ginger." She snapped the cloth with a sharp, irritated flick. "And not to talk to anyone who calls or comes to the gate. Strangers." She finally glanced at me, her eyes rolling heavenward. "Teh. As if I'm his personal telegraph service for sulking husbands."
My fingers tightened around the ceramic cup until I thought it might crack. A hot, defiant spark ignited in the pit of my stomach. The guilt was still there, a heavy sediment, but on top of it now floated a layer of pure, unadulterated fury.
I'd had enough.
---
A Scene in Front of His Men
I found him near the grand front entrance. Three of his men, immaculate in dark suits, stood in a semi-circle around him, receiving low, murmured instructions. The black SUVs idled softly on the gravel drive.
I didn't hesitate. I walked straight into their midst, my socked feet silent on the marble, my borrowed sweatpants and oversized sweater making me look like a child, but my posture was all spine.
"Taehyun."
He didn't acknowledge me. He continued speaking to his man, Joon, about perimeter security.
"Kim Taehyun."
Nothing. He might as well have been carved from ice.
The fury boiled over. My jaw tightened, then snapped. "If you don't speak to me," I announced, my voice clear and sharp in the vaulted space, "I am leaving this mansion. Right now."
The air crystallized.
His three men stared at me as if I had just pulled the pin on a grenade. Joon's eyes widened almost imperceptibly. The quiet hum of the cars outside seemed to stop.
I took a final step, planting myself directly in his line of sight. "I mean it. I'll walk out that gate with nothing but the clothes on my back. I'll sleep in a subway station. I'll sell flowers on a street corner. But I will not stay in a place where I'm being punished with silence like a disobedient dog."
He didn't blink. Didn't seem to breathe.
"If you're hurt, then say it," I hissed, my voice trembling with emotion. "Scream at me! Tell me I'm a fool, a traitor, whatever you want! But don't you dare talk to me through Mrs. Han and expect me to sit quietly in my gilded cage, waiting for your forgiveness to thaw!"
Still, only silence. But it was a different silence now—crackling, volatile.
So I leaned in, getting up on my toes to glare directly into his cold, shuttered eyes, and growled the threat in a voice low enough that only he and his closest men could hear. "Talk to me, or I swear I will push your ridiculously expensive concert grand piano off the east balcony. And then I'll start burning your precious black suits. One by one. Starting with the one you're wearing."
A faint, choked sound—almost a snort—escaped one of the bodyguards before he could stifle it.
Taehyun slowly, very slowly, turned his head fully toward me. His jaw was a granite ledge. His eyes, which had been frozen, now burned with a dangerous, banked fire.
But then, something in them fractured.
---
His Voice Returns
His hand shot out, closing around my wrist. Not to hurt, but with a firm, undeniable possession. He pulled me away from the group, down a side hallway, and into his private study, slamming the oak door shut behind us.
The room was dark, lit only by the grey daylight from the windows. For a moment, there was just the sound of our ragged breathing.
Then—
"You impossible little brat," he hissed, the words laced with a fury that was finally, gloriously audible. "You think threatening to vandalize my property is going to make this better?"
He released my wrist to run an agitated hand through his hair, pacing away before whirling back. "If I had to listen to you plotting your flower-stand future for one more second, I would have lost my mind." His voice shook, not with volume, but with intensity. "Do you have any idea? Any concept at all, of what it felt like that night? Hearing your fear over that phone? Knowing you were there, in the dark, because of a choice you made to trust a snake over… over…"
He couldn't finish. He stepped closer, his presence overwhelming. "I have been calm for you. Patient. I've bitten my tongue until it bled. I've given you silence when I wanted to shake you. I've tried to be gentle. But this?" His voice dropped to a raw, wounded scrape. "You shattering my trust. Lying to my face. Running headlong into a trap just to get a weapon to use against me? That night, I wasn't just fighting to get you back. I was fighting to keep myself from burning the entire city down and burying myself in the ashes with you."
He stopped his pacing and stood directly before me, his chest heaving. "You want me to talk? Fine. This is me talking. This is anger. This is fear so deep it feels like dying. This is a love that doesn't know how to exist in halves." His gaze searched my face, desperate and fierce. "I don't know how to love you in a quiet, safe way. I only know how to love you completely. Possessively. Recklessly. And it terrifies me."
The silence that followed was no longer cold. It was electric, charged with his confession.
My anger had evaporated, leaving me trembling for a different reason. My heart ached, a confused, treacherous organ.
He exhaled a harsh, broken breath, and when he spoke again, his voice was softer, pleading. "Don't you ever say you're leaving me again."
His eyes locked onto mine, and in their dark depths, I saw it all—the kingpin, the monster, the man—utterly undone.
"Angel," he whispered, the endearment a shattered thing, "you can hate me. You can scream at me until your voice gives out. You can hit me if it makes you feel better. You could even poison my wine if that's what your heart demands." He reached out, his hand hovering near my cheek before his fingers gently brushed a stray tear I hadn't felt fall. "But don't you ever, ever put yourself in danger just to hurt me. Don't let the world, or strangers, or your own beautiful, stubborn pride be the reason I have to live in a world without you in it."
He leaned his forehead against mine, his eyes closing, our shared breath the only sound in the room.
"If you want to destroy me," he murmured, the words a vow and a surrender, "then do it with your own hands. Look me in the eye and break me. But don't do it by throwing yourself into a hell I can't reach. That, I could not survive."
His words, raw and unvarnished, washed over me. This wasn't a lecture. It was a hemorrhage. A bleeding out of a love so vast, so all-consuming, and so terrified of its own intensity that it could only express itself in extremes—in suffocating silence or in this torrent of desperate, possessive care.
I didn't know how to answer. There were no words for the storm he had unleashed, for the terrifying, beautiful truth of a love that was both my prison and my only true shelter. So I did the only thing I could. I leaned into him, my head finding the hollow of his shoulder, and let the silent understanding pass between us in the beat of his heart against my ear.
The war wasn't over. The betrayal still stood between us like a shattered mirror. But the silence was broken. And in its place was something far more dangerous, and far more real.