Wi Saheon immediately classified this as something requiring suppression, and moved at once into the judgment that it had to be dealt with without delay.
He started by lowering his own breathing. It was to keep from losing control by inhaling the other person’s body scent.
Breathing at a slow, measured pace, he suppressed his own heartbeat. His jaw tightened as he worked to hold down the overactivated desire stirring deep in his abdomen.
“Mmh…. Hah….”
Shin Yigyeom sat with his back against the wall, pressing his inner thighs tightly together.
He didn’t seem to know who had come in. Disordered breathing and fever-flushed skin. The eyes looking in this direction had no focus.
Shin Yigyeom was the kind of person who never lowered his guard even at his weakest. And yet right now he was exposing his ragged breathing and groans with no defense at all.
Wi Saheon found that displeasing.
“Close your eyes.”
Wi Saheon did not make eye contact when subduing a Yin Person whose Chunheunggi had surfaced. Eye contact amplified signals. If contamination occurred from that, his own aggression and sexual impulse would heighten and his concentration would scatter.
“…….”
Shin Yigyeom stared at Wi Saheon with the face of someone whose mind had gone blank.
This was no situation for bravado. The heat inside his body tangled together in every direction, and the man before him was the only person who could resolve this. And yet he did not comply. More precisely — the meaning of the words reaching his ears was not registering properly.
“…Ha.”
Wi Saheon let out a hollow laugh. Even in this urgent situation, he couldn’t help but find Shin Yigyeom’s refusal to avert his eyes baffling.
Wi Saheon held Shin Yigyeom’s gaze and released his ki-scent.
In the space churned thick with turbid heat, the two men’s gazes began to tangle together, slowly and stubbornly, like a knot being drawn tight.
Under the illusion that smoke wrapping around his body was wavering and spreading, Shin Yigyeom bit down on his bandaged hand. He was trying to use greater pain to suppress the suffering.
The sweet peach scent gradually receded deeper into the holding cell. In its place, the smell of dry firewood laced with heavy metal spread outward. It was a sharp, dry scent with a sense of weight to it.
Rather than completely swallowing Shin Yigyeom’s scent, Wi Saheon let his own ki-scent wrap around it in a wide, rounded embrace. It slowly pressed down over the peach scent across an ever-broader area and dominated the entire holding cell with unhurried, deliberate force.
At last, the texture of the air changed entirely.
“…Hah—”
Shin Yigyeom felt a suffocating pressure, and alongside it, the steadying sensation of something formless pulling him into a firm embrace.
The body scent — carrying a uniqueness like one person’s fingerprint — felt familiar from somewhere. The longing that familiarity triggered, to put it into words, was something close to a vague, inexplicable yearning, though he had no capacity to spare for working out where it came from.
As the excessive arousal quieted, humiliation and rage swept through his entire body at the same time. Shin Yigyeom trembled in fine, minute shivers.
He had surrendered himself once again to the same person he had already begged for his life from. His private, intimate Chunheunggi, at that.
“…….”
Wi Saheon regarded Shin Yigyeom in silence.
Once the holding cell had been converted into his own domain and he had succeeded in blocking the Yin Person’s Chunheunggi, his eyes returned to their original temperature.
Rather than becoming sexually aroused, Wi Saheon turned cold.
His brow furrowed slowly. The Chunheunggi of a moment ago had nothing to do with seduction — it was a signal Shin Yigyeom’s instincts had simply let loose.
Wi Saheon was not the kind of person to be pulled along by another’s heat. If anything, he was the kind to quench it.
“…Hah, mmh….”
Shin Yigyeom’s fingers scraped at the floor. It was a movement born of fever and pain and animal desire intertwined.
Since being brought to Gamsimwon, Shin Yigyeom had always been keyed to a blade’s edge. He wore the face of someone who would rather die than fail to draw blood.
And yet the person before Wi Saheon now had every one of those outer layers stripped away, leaving nothing but instinct.
Wi Saheon’s brow creased at an unease he could not account for.
“S….”
He was muttering something, but it was hard to hear. No — it was better not to hear it.
Wi Saheon narrowed his eyes and observed Shin Yigyeom’s breathing, his response speed, his vascular reaction with careful attention.
His lips, far too red, were provocative. In his parted mouth, his wet tongue moved with a strange restlessness.
Shin Yigyeom looked at Wi Saheon with barely enough awareness to hold on to consciousness.
Even faced with those provocative eyes, Wi Saheon’s expression did not change.
“You won’t die from something like this.”
Wi Saheon closed the distance and went down on one knee. He pushed aside — with an air of mild annoyance — the bandaged hand that Shin Yigyeom kept trying to bring to his mouth.
“…And you can’t die yet, either.”
He murmured under his breath and lowered his head a little further. Close enough that his breath reached.
“Hah….”
The sweetly ripened peach scent was like fruit just before going soft — as though it would burst if pressed just a little more.
The heat that had not fully dissipated clung to Shin Yigyeom’s pale white skin like a thin membrane. The suppressed heat rose grazing along the skin and then was pushed back as it collided with Wi Saheon’s ki-scent.
“Hh…. Mmh…, ah.”
Shin Yigyeom, who had been arching at the waist, suddenly seized Wi Saheon’s collar.
Wi Saheon’s eyes darkened in an instant. Moistly breathless exhales scattered beneath his chin.
Shin Yigyeom’s pupils had lost their focus, but his instinct alone was sharp. The moment it sensed the hot body warmth of the Yang Person drawing near, every cell in his body surged into motion again.
“…Hah….”
Unable to push Wi Saheon away and yet unable to lean into him fully, Shin Yigyeom swayed precariously. His fingers, not knowing themselves what they had grabbed onto, trembled finely in the air.
“…….”
Wi Saheon’s gaze came to rest on the blood-soaked bandage, then returned.
Against his heavy ki-scent, Shin Yigyeom’s wavering breath began slowly reclaiming its original pace. It hadn’t fully settled, but at least the runaway surge was subsiding.
Even after the suppression was complete, Wi Saheon watched Shin Yigyeom for far longer than was necessary.
The dazed face with its grip on reason loosened was also a face of Shin Yigyeom’s that he knew well.
More precisely — a face he had forgotten. The face from the time before Shin Yigyeom was a traitor to the empire or a Mumyeongdan member, before he had yet learned to be wary of anyone.
Wi Saheon realized what he was recalling and slowly closed and opened his eyes.
Then, on an absentminded impulse, he reached out — and stopped just before his hand touched Shin Yigyeom’s cheek. Force gathered at his fingertips. There was no need to confirm anything further here. The fever had subsided, and his breathing had steadied.
Wi Saheon looked down at Shin Yigyeom for a moment with the face of a person confronted by something they couldn’t understand, then slowly withdrew his hand.
Even after concluding it was an unnecessary thing to do, his gaze remained stubbornly fixed on Shin Yigyeom’s cheek.
The passageway leading deep into Gamsimwon was long and quiet.
“Sogun.”
Wi Sagyun spotted Wi Saheon coming from the opposite direction and called out to him.
Behind each of the two princes, their respective attendants stood at a remove. The Inner Guard Bureau’s military officers and the Dark Bureau’s Shadow Guards were each aware of the other, yet deliberately avoided meeting each other’s gaze.
Dozens of men filled the corridor, and yet not one made a sound. Conversation between the brothers was, at times, more dangerous than a drawn blade.
“What brings you all the way down here.”
Wi Saheon, with fine droplets of blood splattered across his face, looked down at Wi Sagyun naturally by virtue of their difference in height.
His uniform showed not the slightest disarray. It was difficult to believe he had been in an interrogation room just moments ago.
The upper garment fastened neatly to the very top, and the silver epaulettes carried a cool sense of authority. Only the blood spattered on his face and the backs of his hands told of where he had come up from.
Wi Saheon’s expression was as flat as though he had just stepped out after reviewing some documents for a moment, rather than having just cut someone down.
“There should be a reason for still keeping the Mumyeongdan alive. You’ve gone so far as to bring them back into Gamsimwon — do you intend to leave them as they are?”
“As it happens, the execution of one unit member is scheduled four days from now.”
“Is that so.”
“Gamsimwon is a place for extracting confessions — not for determining truth.”
Wi Saheon took the silk handkerchief the Deputy Commander offered and wiped his cheek and hands, wearing a faintly put-upon expression.
“What do you mean by that?”
“Your standard has become clouded, Imperial Brother.”
“What did you say.”
“The reason you’re rushing the execution isn’t clear. The organization’s structure hasn’t been fully exposed, and the chain of command is still unclear — and yet you keep pressing.”
Even at the word “pressing,” Wi Sagyun maintained only silence. His gaze traveled past the other’s shoulder, then returned to Wi Saheon.
“Is the one being executed tomorrow Yunbaek?”
“…….”
A faint smile crossed Wi Saheon’s lips.
