KING's BELOVED (TK)

His iron heart & her healing hands

He did not bleed.
Kings don't bleed.
That is what they say about Jeon Jeongguk - the youngest king Goryeo has ever seen. The boy who slit a foreign king's throat before his twenty fifth year and laid the body at his father's feet like it was nothing. Like war was nothing. Like death was nothing.
He built his throne on fear and kept it there with iron.
No softness. No weakness. No mercy.
He had traveled his kingdom in disguise for six months - walking among his own people like a ghost wearing common clothes, a giant among men, watching, learning, ruling in silence. No one knew the broad-shouldered stranger with the cold dark eyes was the most powerful man in the country.
No one found him interesting enough to look twice.
Until the night the lake ran red with his blood.

Kim Tae does not belong to the world of politics and thrones and men who eat power for breakfast.
She belongs to the woods.
To the herbs. To the animals that eat from her palm. To the people she heals with hands that have never known cruelty. The most beautiful woman in all of Goryeo - hidden from the world by a father who knew what hungry men do to precious things.
She never asked for a king.
She never asked for him.
But fate does not ask.
It just delivers a half-dead man to your lake at midnight and dares you to walk away.

She saved his life.
He will turn hers upside down.
And neither of them will ever be the same.

KING'S BELOVED - because even iron melts, if the fire is right.

(Tae is a Girl in this story. Read it at your own comfort.)