C34 - Soul-ed MATE

“His father, Kim Yongdae. That’s who she was going to see the night she was murdered.”

The night she was murdered??? Murdered not accident? Murdered? When she was still married to my father. When she wore rubies and a beautiful dress.

Stay home, sweetheart. Stay small. That’s when you’re safe.

Stay safe.

“She didn’t have an affair,” I say, not quite believing it.

“I didn’t say that. Only that she didn’t feel safe. She told her old lover. He promised to protect her, and on the night she planned to leave Sejin, she died.”

Cold doubt slices through me. “You think it was my father. That he killed her.”

“It’s more important what you think.”

“You’re just saying that so I’ll abandon him. The ultimate victory, that’s what you called it. Checkmate...you say,” And if I turn away from my father, he will have truly lost. “He couldn’t have been the one lurking outside the house at night. He wasn’t the one who vandalized my house.”

“If you say so,” Yoongi says, sounding unconcerned.

“He wouldn’t have hurt her. He loved her.”

Except I remember the way he’d talked about her flaws, with the horrible acceptance. As if he could have blamed her.

“You say that as if it’s a good thing. Love. In my experience it makes everything worse. It makes people do horrible things, things they’d never commit otherwise.”

He isn’t talking about my parents anymore. He’s talking about himself.

“What are you so afraid of?”

“Afraid? No. I think fear is a more rational feeling. Like hunger. Desire. Natural expressions of the human condition.”

“So is love.”

“No, love is a game. Like chess. One you’re going to lose.”

I don’t have anything left—not if I doubt my own father, my only family. Not if I’m afraid of the walls around me.

“Like my mother lost?”

“Did she?”

“You know what happened to her.”

“I really don’t.”

The answer has been hovering at the edge of my consciousness for a long time—before I found the diary. Before Yoongi ruined my father. Maybe from the beginning, when I huddled under my covers as a child.

“Someone actually...killed her. It wasn’t a drunk driving accident. That’s what Dad didn’t want me to find. That’s what you didn’t want me to find either. Everyone’s trying to keep me in the dark. Why? Why can’t I know that she was murdered? Who are you protecting?”

“The only person I’m trying to protect is you.”

The words ring with truth, but I don’t know if I can believe him. This might be part of his elaborate plan. To make me turn away from my father. To break the final bond of the Park family.

“It hurts me more to keep secrets. That’s the legacy of my family more than anything. Lies. Half-truths. Smiles that hide more than they share. I’m sick of it. Tell me, Yoongi. If you care about me at all, tell me.”

He looks away. “If I tell you, you’ll have no reason to stay.”

“Then love me enough to let me leave.”

A rough laugh. “And you still think love isn’t a game.” He stands, the glint in his eye threatening to prove his point. And God help me, but I want him to try. If this is all he can offer me, then I want him to play.

With a sweep of his arm he moves the chess pieces. He pulls me down on the rug, the pile like velvet against my palms. He presses a kiss to my forehead, almost innocent except for the hard length I feel against my thigh.

One kiss on each of my eyelids. I suck in a breath at the tenderness in his lips. His mouth moves down my jaw, warm presses that leave a trail of fire. He reaches my neck, and I arch my body to give him access to me.

“Wait,” I gasp.

My legs press together, but his knee is already between them. He moves inexorably lower, pushing up my dress shirt up, pressing open-mouthed kisses across my stomach, the flick of his tongue a promise of what’s to come.

His hands pull my pants down in one quick motion and move aside the placket of my thongs. A long lick through my cock makes me cry out. “Wait, wait, wait.”

He lifts his head to send me a half smile, pure alpha revenge. “Wait for what?”

“It’s just so much, and I need to catch my breath.” I’m rambling, but I can’t seem to stop. “And I don’t know if this is the right place to do—”

His finger stroking the tip of my hardened cock. Only a strangled sound emerges.

His lids lower.

“Time’s up, beautiful.”

The rug that had felt soft a moment ago now feels like a bed of nails, my skin impossibly sensitive. And the flicker of his tongue to the slit is pure torture, a sharp ache that runs the length of my body.

I writhe on the floor, unsure if I want to get away or seek more. Something brushes my fingers, and I clasp it.

Small.

Cool.

A pawn.

The same one he once used on my body?

Maybe.

It’s anonymous now, as smooth and shiny as every other pawn.

Indistinguishable.

He sees what I’m holding, his eyes flickering with brutal amusement. A queen on the floor catches his eye. He picks it up, considering.

“No,” I say, not wanting the sharp curves of her crown anywhere near my sensitive places.

He laughs and sets it on my stomach instead, just above my belly button. I breathe nice and slow, moving the piece in a gentle wave.

He adds a bishop.

A rook.

“They’re going to fall,” I warn him, holding in a breathless laugh. My stomach is flat enough to hold the pieces, but not if I move around, not if I breathe too hard.

Definitely not if I 0rgasm.

“Then you’d better be careful,” he warns, adding another pawn. “If they fall down, I’m going to stop.”

“I—I can’t,” I breathe, more panicked now than when I told him to wait. His mouth descends on me, and any tenderness is gone.

He’s relentless with mouth and teeth and tongue, moving bobbing to the base till tip, sucking lolling my cock, until my whole body feels taut as a wire. “Please, please, please.”

No answer. He doesn’t even pause, his mouth working at a merciless game. The chess pieces tremble along with my body, wobbling from side to side on my stomach even as I struggle to control my breathing.

I’m too close, and the panting knocks the queen to the ground. He pulls away, his lips glistening with saliva and my pre-cum.

“Too bad.”

“Don’t stop,” I say, and like dominoes the other pieces topple to the ground.

A low chuckle. “You should have stayed still, Virgin lily.” He can’t leave me like this.

“I need you,” I whimper.

“Fcuk,” he breathes. “I can’t say no to you.”

I spread my legs and nudge him on the chest with tip of my toe, my hole in full display for him, legs hanging mid-air, my hands parting my ass cheeks, and my face silently begging, beyond words now.

He answers by opening his pants. I never saw a man unfastening pants that fast.

I don’t see him from here, only feel him in blind need, the blunt press of him, the hot stretch. And then his body covers mine, a full thrust that has me crying out into the tall library, the sound captured by the hundreds of books, thousands, their leather spines and old pages, holding my pleasure and pain for eternity.

The silk of my nightgown chafes, driving my arousal even higher. His mouth touches mine, tongue nudging my lips apart. In his kiss I taste myself, salt and my slick.

I taste the need and pent-up fury that he’s been hiding.

He can put the chess pieces up like a wall between us, but when it comes down, I see him clearly, feel every hungry thrust inside me, hear every rough grunt he makes on entry, live in every heartbeat that he looks into my eyes, walls torn down for a few priceless moments as the climax hits us both.

Only after he pulls out, after we’ve had sex, does he undress me and himself completely. It’s a new kind of intimacy to be naked when we’re both sated, bare in every sense of the word.

“You’re beautiful,” he murmurs, running his hand over my hip. Our bodies are a study in contrasts, mine pale and smooth, his made of scars.

I copy the motion over him, feeling something small and puckered at his back. I sit up, peeking over his body.

“What happened here?”

“Bullet,” he says casually.

“You were shot? With a gun?”

“That’s typically where bullets come from.”

“Don’t make jokes. That’s horrible. What happened?”

“A customer didn’t want to pay. Or didn’t I mention that? I worked as an enforcer for my father. When a bastard wanted to fcuk a beta and then leave without paying.”

“The Darkmoons.”

A loud laughter echoes through the room, “Jimin no one calls them darkmoons anymore. Its bagnio or brothel.”

“Bagnio?” I repeat.

“The bagnio,” he says, voice carefree, but I feel the tension in his body. Muscles hard, pulse beating faster. “That’s a nice word for the dirty old building where those voracious Alphas hurt omegas and betas.”

I swallow hard.

What kind of initiation into sex did he have? Mine was unconventional, no doubt. The auction itself had been humiliating. But Yoongi had always been gentle with my body. He showed me pleasure from the very first time.

“How did you lose your virginity?”

A cruel smile. “How do you think? With one of the omegas, of course.”

“You paid him?”

“Her.” He corrects me.

“So, your first time was with a female omega.”

He smirks, “Why? Jealous.”

I shoot my previous question back to not stray from the topic, “You paid her?”

“No, that was a gift from dear old dad. I only found that out after the fact. A fourteen-year-old boy doesn’t ask many question when a beautiful omega comes displaying her nudity. Which is a fcuking shame.”

“Did anyone…” I force the words out quickly. “Did anyone hurt you?”

He’s silent a moment. “Not like you mean. My father insisted I work for him, but not with sex. With fists. Knives. Guns. If someone didn’t want to pay, it was my job to convince them.”

“That’s horrible.”

“I was damn good at it. Business was never better.”

“Oh, Yoongi.”

“Don’t look at me with pity,” he says with a harsh laugh. “It was my job to keep them all in line, too. If one of them mouthed off to a customer or wouldn’t do what they wanted, I had to show them the light.”

I’m afraid to ask, but I have to know. It comes as a whisper, hesitant. “How?”

Our gazes meet. “I hurt them.”

Something in my heart cracks. “No.”

“Yes,” he says forcefully. “I held their wrists too hard, looked into their eyes, and promised to bury their bodies if they didn’t do what they were told.”

Tears stream down my cheeks. I don’t want to think I had illusions about Min Yoongi, Min Yoongi who would protect everyone...but I know that I must have. Because they’re broken, shattered. Laying in shards around me, glittering reminders that he’s every bit as dangerous as he warned me.

“How could you?” There’s less anger in my voice than I want. More pain.

“Because it was true,” he snaps. “My father would have broken their neck without a thought. And I would have known that I could’ve prevented it. If only I was a bit harder with them.”

It was his way of protecting them. No wonder he was so harsh with me. “Why did you leave?”

“I left to make my own money, my own fcuking way. And no one can tell me who to threaten. Maybe a good man would have stopped hurting people completely, but not me.”

“You did it on your own terms,” I say sadly, understanding him with futile sorrow. That’s why he had to go after my father. It’s why he had to come after me. The one thing he wants more than anything in the world—not money, not things. The ability to choose who he hurts.

I pick up a pawn from the rug.

Offer it to him.

He accepts with a solemn expression. “The person who bought your house? Kim Yongdae. That was when I realized the connection. I confronted him, and he admitted the truth.”

“He bought it in memory of her?”

“Or to prove something.”

“To prove what?”

“That she was right all along, that something sinister was happening in that house.”

I move to the carpet, picking up the chess piece. Placing them in haphazard groups on the side table, needing to do something with my hands. The wood is smooth and cool, emotionless. That’s how I wish I could be right now.

Instead, I’m a wildfire of fear and hope. Then all the pieces are back on the table. Except the dark wood king, rolled far away.

“How can he prove it?” I ask.

Yoongi looks reluctant to answer. He puts his elbow on his knee, staring at the king. “If I tell you, you have to promise not to go to the house.”

My eyes widen. The same thing that Jiwoo told me.

Why do they think I’ll go there? Something must be happening—there. At the house.

I stand and cross the room, hand-scraped wood cold against my feet, and pick up the last piece. I stand in front of Yoongi, offering. “Don’t protect me, shield me...as if I can’t handle it. As if I can’t fight too. Lead me into battle, and I’ll follow you.”

Fighting beside him—that’s the ultimate victory for me.

Not helplessness.

After a moment he takes the king from me. “He’s holding a ball. Everyone in Daegu high society is involved. He believes the person responsible for her death will come too.”

“My father can’t even get out of bed.”

Yoongi meets my eyes. “Then...he won’t be there.”

But I can hear from his voice that he doesn’t believe that. “Even if he could get up, why would he attend a ball? When it would prove his guilt to Kim Yongdae?”

A grim smile. “To face your mother’s lover? In the house he built for her?”

“Pride,” I say, bitter and resigned.

“No, bluebell. Love. It makes men do terrible things.”

“Like taking me to the ball?” I ask softly.

“Terrible things,” he murmurs his agreement. “Like risk his own queen.”

!~~~~~!!!!~~~~!