jungkook.

The silence in the penthouse wasn't cozy, but oppressive, like a museum after closing time. As soon as Jungkook returned home, Taehyung retreated to another part of the mansion to avoid any further contact with his fictitious husband. In any case, it didn't particularly bother the older man.

Jeong needed to find a document he'd likely left in his office on the second floor. Jungkook climbed the stairs, his footsteps silently absorbed by the thick pile of the cream-colored carpet. The door to Taehyung's room, which he passed, was ajar. The man never went in there, believing that neither of them should intrude on his husband's privacy.

But today, something was different. The room was sterilely empty. Jungkook glanced inside—everything was perfectly tidy, except for a low table by the panoramic window. There, in the still light of the sunset, lay an open leather sketchbook with several pages missing.

Frowning, Jungkook stepped inside. He had no idea what his husband's hobbies were, so he allowed himself to lift the veil just a little.

The first sheet showed a corner of their own living room, drawn in charcoal but rendered as if it were a prison cell. The powerful lines of the bars, which Jungkook recognized as the pattern on their balcony, cast sharp, distorted shadows on the floor. A lone, barely discernible figure stood in the center, his back to the viewer.

He slowly picked up the album. Page after page greeted him with the ghosts of their life together: his own profile, glimpsed furtively—cold, distant, almost inhuman in its severity; the view from Taehyung's bedroom window of the city at night—a sea of ​​lights that looked like a cosmos of lonely, unreachable stars.

Jungkook ran his finger over the rough paper. He'd always thought of Taehyung as the passive, almost emotionless element of this deal. Handsome, but lifeless. Smart, but submissive.

The album screamed the opposite. There was no resignation here, but a quiet, desperate rage. Not callousness, but a profound desperation.