Oath Of The Crimson Moon

Chapter 3

Gu Serin had been alive for two hundred and thirty-seven years and he had learned, through painful trial and repeated error, how to be still.

Stillness was not the absence of feeling. It was architecture a structure built around feeling to keep it contained, to keep it from burning through the careful human life he maintained in this century: the holdings company, the penthouse in Hannam-dong, the Audi that his PA scheduled for maintenance every six months, the biannual meetings with the pack council where he reported, calmly and thoroughly, on the state of the territory.

He had been still for a very long time.

He had been still through seventeen years of knowing she was somewhere the soul he had bound himself to in a pine forest in the Joseon period, the woman whose reincarnation he had spent decades locating, preparing for, steeling himself against. He had been still through the private investigator's report, through the photograph taken outside the Baekhwa Architecture offices, through the first time he had seen her face again and felt his wolf surge against every carefully constructed wall he'd built.

He had not been still on the subway.

He had been on Line 5 specifically because her usual route took Line 5. He had been in Car 3 because she always boarded at Car 3 when she left the office late. He had told himself he was simply confirming the report simply making sure, with his own senses, that it was really her.

The moment she had looked up at him with those dark eyes and gone pale with that bewildered, shaken recognition as if her body remembered what her mind did not he had understood, with the absolute clarity of a man who has made a catastrophic miscalculation, that he had made a catastrophic miscalculation.

He was not ready.

Two hundred and thirty-seven years and he was not ready.

He stood now at the floor-to-ceiling windows of his Hannam-dong penthouse and watched the Han River do its slow silver business in the dark and tried to be still about the fact that in approximately twelve hours he would see Shin Ara again, because GS Holdings was moving forward with the Jungrang Cultural Complex project and Baekhwa Architecture had been awarded the contract and the lead associate was of course her.

The universe had a sense of humor. He had noted this before.

"You're doing the face," said a voice from the kitchen.

Serin did not turn around. "What face."

"The one where you look like a statue someone carved specifically to represent the concept of suffering." Park Taewon his Beta, his oldest companion, the only person alive who had known him longer than a century appeared in his peripheral vision, carrying two glasses of Scotch. He was in his early forties in appearance, sandy-haired, comfortable in a way that Serin rarely managed. He set a glass on the window ledge. "She starts tomorrow?"

"The project meeting is at ten."

"And you're taking the meeting personally."

"I'm the client representative."

"Serin." Taewon's voice was gentle in the way of someone who had long since given up on gentleness accomplishing anything but was still trying. "You could recuse yourself. Let Jihoon handle the account."

"No."

"It's been four reincarnations."

"I know how many it's been."

"The last time, in 1943"

"I know what happened in 1943." The words came out quieter than intended and considerably sharper. Serin picked up the Scotch and drank. The city sprawled below him, all that human light twelve million people living their ordinary mortal lives, loving and losing and moving on, unburdened by the particular grief of remembering everything.

He remembered everything.

Every iteration of her. The court lady in the Joseon dynasty who had been his first, who had been burned from him by circumstances he still cataloged in his worst moments. The merchant's daughter in the 1800s who had died of typhoid before he'd found her. The seamstress in Busan in the forties that one, that one he did not think about if he could help it, the war and the fire and his own failure.

And now this one. Shin Ara, born in Jeonju, twenty-three years old, junior architect, who took the last train home and caught it by seconds and didn't let herself cry.

"She doesn't remember," Taewon said.

"She will." The certainty of it was bone-deep. "She always does, eventually."

"And when she does?"

Serin set down his glass. "Then I'll ask her to choose."

Taewon was quiet for a moment. Then: "She's never chosen to stay."

"No," Serin agreed. He stared at his own reflection in the dark glass amber eyes, the stillness that was really architecture, the face of a man who had not aged in two centuries. "She hasn't."

He turned from the window.

"She might, this time."

He did not say the other thing the thing the council had been circling for twenty years, the reason this reincarnation was different from the others. The Crimson Moon was coming: the rare lunar conjunction that occurred once every two centuries, that had the power to either complete the bond forged in that Joseon forest or dissolve it forever.

This was the last chance.

For both of them.