Chapter Text
She was on the road, driving from Cologne back to Poland, to Poznań. She’d left an hour earlier than planned, but somewhere along the way, the weight in her chest became too much. She had to pull over. Had to breathe. Had to stop pretending she was fine.
Maria had never visited her mother-in-law in Germany before. Not once in all those years. The woman had emigrated to Cologne the same year Maria had given birth.
But this time, Maria needed to visit her.
It happened on a quiet afternoon, when the house was so still it felt like grief was seeping from the walls. She’d been going through old boxes, sorting the remnants of a life that no longer existed. Her husband’s desk drawer, long untouched, had coughed up a film canister. Inside was a tiny plasticine dog, a dachshund. Clumsy, sweet, unmistakably made by a child’s hands.
Her husband had sculpted it when he was just a small kid in school, his mother had once told her. She’d kept it as a keepsake for decades, tucked among her things like a charm. But when she moved abroad, she couldn’t take everything. And now it had surfaced again, small and ridiculous and devastating.
A week after discovering the figurine, Maria packed a bag. The plasticine dog, some old photos and other things she knew the woman would want back stuffed into a box. Feeling she couldn’t quite name swirled in her chest. Not closure. Not yet. But maybe… a gesture toward it.
It had been a year. One year since a mephedrone-fueled idiot in a BMW slammed into her husband’s car on the highway, killing him and their child instantly. One year of silence, not working, not eating, not crying, not breathing right. Just existing in grayscale, trapped in a loop of Netflix autoplay and sleepless nights. Her therapist had called it "complicated grief." Maria called it hell.
She handed over the keepsakes without ceremony. The visit was short, polite. The goodbye, final. She knew she would never come back.
And now, she was on the road again. Driving east, back toward Poznań. Her chest was tight, but not in the usual way. Not grief, something else. Her hands began to shake. She pulled into a massive gas station—one of those bustling junction hubs leading toward Frankfurt, all glaring lights, rumbling engines, and rows of food chains fighting for attention. She parked and turned off the engine, then sat in silence, just breathing until she was ready to leave the car.
Eventually, she forced herself out into the chaos. The café was packed, the air thick with clatter, chatter, and the bitter scent of burnt espresso. She made a beeline for the restroom first. In the mirror, her reflection looked tired, stretched thin. She splashed her face with cold water, watching the droplets trail down skin that no longer felt like hers. Her eyes were rimmed red, even though she hadn’t cried. She hadn’t cried in months.
When she stepped back into the café, it was even more crowded. A large group had gathered, chatting, filming, laughing too loudly. She barely glanced at them. All she wanted was to grab her coffee and get the hell out of the suffocating space.
She moved toward the counter. The crowd jostled around her. She had to slip between bodies, squeezing past a guy in a cap and mask. Just as she passed, someone bumped her from behind, and her hand brushed his arm.
And everything inside her lit up. As if the universe flipped a hidden switch inside her chest.
A pulse. A warmth. A low hum spreading across her skin like sunlight under snow.
She froze, air stuck in her lungs.
He turned.
Their eyes met. Wide. Stunned.
The soulmate mark, a bond every person in this world carried like a dormant fuse, had just ignited.
Maria couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t move. Couldn’t think .
Not now. Not here. Not this .
But fate didn’t ask.
And in the span of a heartbeat, her life already split by grief, fractured again.
This time, toward something terrifyingly alive.
She couldn’t have this. Not now. Not when she was still patching the holes left by the death of her baby girl and her husband.
The boy standing before her looked so young. He appeared to be Asian, with black hair mostly hidden beneath a bucket hat, and a face mask pushed down to his chin. His wide eyes mirrored the same shock crashing through her, but there was something else in them, something that rooted her in place when every instinct told her to run.
Her knees felt weak.
She backed away instinctively, clutching her bag like it might anchor her. The boy—man, probably—stood still, eyes wide and searching. He hadn’t said a word, but he didn’t need to. His expression carried the echo of the same realization.
Soulmates.
Fucking cosmic joke.
Guilt struck her instantly. Every part of her wanted to run, to pretend the bond had never happened, but soulmate bonds were sacred to most people. She couldn’t just walk away and leave him with nothing. Not after that look in his eyes.
She dug into the slip pocket in her bag with trembling fingers, and pulled out a business card. It was creased at the corner, smudged from too many forgotten days. She held it out with a hand that wouldn’t stop shaking.
"I'm sorry," she said in English, voice low but clear. “I’m not ready right now.”
And then she turned and walked out with the kind of steadiness you fake when your whole insides are caving in.
Minho stood motionless, hand closing around the card.
The world snapped back into focus, noisy, chaotic, uncaring. Someone bumped into him. Someone else shouted in Korean. A phone camera flashed somewhere in the crowd.
His mind reeled. JYP had trained them for this. Protocols. Emergency contacts. Legal fallout.
But his feet wouldn’t move.
She walked out.
Didn’t cry. Didn’t beg. Didn’t make a scene.
Just handed him a business card and left like she hadn’t just turned his world inside out with a brush of her hand.
He looked down at the business card. Maria Krzyżanowska. He didn’t know how to read her last name.
He slowly stretched the collar of his t-shirt, needing to confirm what he already felt burning beneath his skin.
The soulmark was there, abstract, organic, almost delicate in shape. It shimmered faintly, as if alive.
Clear. Undeniable.
He exhaled slowly through his nose. Kept his face blank. A trained reaction developed through years of practice.
People around him were filming. Always filming. A soulmate mark was the kind of thing that made headlines. But no one had noticed yet. No one had seen.
Good.
Because if this got out, it wouldn’t be a love story. It would be a scandal.
The K-pop industry didn’t care about soulmates. Not really. Not when idols were supposed to belong to the fans. The entire system was built on fantasy, access, availability, the illusion of intimacy. A confirmed bond? That shattered the illusion. It broke the parasocial contract. It turned fan devotion into betrayal.
He could already see the headlines.
LEE KNOW’S SOULMATE REVEALED.
WHO IS SHE?
FANS DIVIDED OVER UNCONFIRMED BOND.
Agencies had lost entire groups over less.
A confirmed soulmate could tank endorsements, dissolve contracts, strip years of effort down to nothing. And even if he survived the PR storm—if the company spun it, sanitized it, sold it—it would never be the same.
He looked down at the card in his hand.
Clean typography and design, but he couldn’t read her job description. She hadn’t recognized him, or if she had, she’d said nothing. That helped.
But it didn’t matter who she was.
It mattered what she was: his soulmate.
He pressed the card flat between his fingers, then slid it into his pocket. His pulse was steady now. Focused. He was already calculating the next steps.
Damage control first.
And her?
He didn’t know yet.
There was a part of him—deep, buried, quiet—that wanted to know more. Who she was. What had put that look in her eyes. Why the bond felt less like magic and more like a burden.
But that part didn’t make decisions.
“Chan,” he called out and walked towards the leader of the group.
Life didn’t stop just because Maria had met her soulmate.
It didn’t slow down. It didn’t offer her clarity.
And in the days that followed, she found herself relieved that he didn’t reach out.
Maybe he didn’t want this bond either. Maybe he had walked out of that gas station and told himself it didn’t happen, just as she had tried to.
But then, a week later, her phone rang.
The number was foreign, unfamiliar. Korean.
She let it go to voicemail the first time, but curiosity got the better of her. She listened. The message was polite, formal, and very clearly rehearsed.
The woman on the other end introduced herself as a legal representative based in Seoul. She said she worked for the entertainment company that employed the man Maria had met. She didn’t use the word soulmate , didn’t refer to the bond, didn’t even hint at the emotional weight of what had happened. She only asked that Maria come to Korea to discuss a matter of legal significance. All expenses, lodging and flights would be covered.
Maria sat with the phone in her hand for a long time after the message ended.
Her first instinct was to say no. This wasn’t her world. She didn’t want to be dragged into something complicated and messy and entirely foreign. She had just started piecing herself together again, why rip herself open now?
But there was a flicker of something else too. Responsibility. Maybe even guilt.
Whoever he was, whoever she had bonded with, he had looked at her with that wide-eyed recognition that most people waited their whole lives for. And she had walked away.
She wanted to believe she’d done the right thing by walking away. That she was protecting herself, and maybe even him. But deep down, she knew the bond wasn’t something you could ignore. Not entirely. You don’t collide with fate and expect silence to follow.
So she called the woman back.
They spoke in crisp, careful English. The lawyer was professional, efficient, and deliberately vague. She explained that before they could disclose any specifics, Maria would need to review and sign a set of legal documents. One of them was a non-disclosure agreement issued by a company called JYP Entertainment .
The name meant nothing to Maria.
It sounded corporate. Maybe fashion? Media? She wasn’t sure. The lawyer didn’t elaborate, only promised that further details would follow once the paperwork was returned.
That alone was enough to raise red flags. Maria didn’t like signing anything blindly, especially not something this serious. She asked for time to look over the documents. The lawyer agreed and sent them that same afternoon.
Before opening them, Maria opened her laptop.
If they were expecting her to sign a binding NDA, she needed to know who she was dealing with.
She typed the company name into the search bar.
The results flooded in instantly, flashy photos, news articles, fan compilations, performance clips. JYP was a South Korean entertainment conglomerate. And apparently, one of their most prominent acts was a group called Stray Kids .
She clicked on a link, skimmed a few names, and froze.
Because one of those faces, lit up by strobes and sweat, was unmistakably the boy from the café.
She read about idol contracts, fan culture, and the terrifyingly intense world of K-pop. The more she read, the clearer it became that this wasn’t just a private affair. This bond— her bond —was a liability. A threat to someone else’s career.
It was too much for her to deal with on her own. She contacted a lawyer in Poznań who specialized in soulmate bonds. She needed someone in her corner. Someone who wouldn’t treat her like a footnote in someone else’s PR crisis.
The office was tucked discreetly behind a row of sleek boutiques in central Poznań—nothing flashy, nothing loud. Just frosted glass, clean lines, and a single engraved plaque by the door that read:
Adwokat Marta Rogowska
Licencjonowany Prawnik | Prawo cywilne i międzynarodowe
Inside, the air smelled faintly of bergamot and old paper. The décor was minimalist: matte shelving, neutral walls, long windows with quiet light filtering through. It was the kind of place where people came to make decisions they couldn’t afford to get wrong.
Marta Rogowska looked like she belonged in a Scandinavian architecture magazine, sleek black trousers, buttoned-up blouse, no jewelry except for a slim wedding band. She greeted Maria with a professional nod and motioned to the chair across from her desk.
“Good to meet you in person,” Marta said, motioning for her to sit. “I’ve reviewed the documents they sent. Standard for their sector, but heavily one-sided.”
She opened a folder and laid out the NDA Maria had received, already annotated with sticky flags and notes in the margins.
Marta flipped to a marked section. “Let me be clear: soulmate bonds are normal. Expected. Most people have one. But who you bond with—and when —matters. Especially when it interferes with image, contracts, and millions in marketing. A confirmed soulmate bond is legally recognized in most countries. Depending on the jurisdiction, it could impact everything from estate inheritance to residency rights. In extreme cases, it had even overruled custody disputes.”
“In some countries, denying or severing a bond, especially if it results in reputational damage, can be grounds for a civil lawsuit,” Marta said. “If he or his team could prove emotional or financial harm? You're liable. Doesn’t matter if you never asked for it.”
She flipped the page to a highlighted clause and tapped it with her pen. “You’ve been identified as the soulmate of someone under exclusive contract with a Korean entertainment company. Which means you're a variable in a highly controlled system. They’ve scrubbed any reference to the soulmate bond. That’s intentional. The language is vague for plausible deniability, they want to control the terms of this relationship, without confirming anything in writing. They’re treating you like a liability. Which isn’t surprising, given who you bonded with.”
Maria blinked. “So if I ignore it… I could ruin his career?”
“You could ruin yours,” Marta replied calmly. “Or both. Depends who gets ahead of the story and how vindictive they are. There’s legal precedent for idol agencies threatening civil action in cases where unconfirmed bonds damaged their client’s reputation or revenue.”
Maria stared at the polished edge of the desk. “Jesus.”
“You need to be smart.” Marta’s voice sharpened. “You’re about to walk into a foreign country, into an industry where image is currency, and into a company that’s known for controlling narratives. They’re not flying you in because they’re feeling generous. They’re containing a variable. You.”
Maria sat back, exhaling slowly. She hadn't even signed anything yet, and already the pressure felt suffocating.
“What do I do?” she asked.
“I’ll draft a secondary NDA that protects your rights and outlines limitations on their use of your identity,” Marta said, already typing. “You’ll have it by tomorrow. Do not sign a single additional document unless I’ve seen it first. And when you’re in Seoul—because you will go—don’t let yourself believe you’re being welcomed. This isn’t hospitality. It’s optics.”
Maria gave a weak nod.
Walking back out into the crisp Poznań air, Maria felt like the pavement had tilted slightly under her feet. The bond wasn’t just a private moment in a gas station anymore, it was a legal construct, a career liability, a goddamn PR grenade waiting to go off.
She knew she wasn’t going to love again. That question had stopped mattering the moment she identified disfigured bodies of her family. But apparently she couldn’t ignore this, either. Not when lawyers were involved. Not when companies were flying her across continents.
She didn’t know the boy. Not really. But part of her, stubborn and tired and bitter, secretly hoped he would turn out to be awful. Vain, rude, selfish. Anything that would justify cutting contact cleanly and never looking back.
No guilt. No more obligations.
Just a cosmic fluke she could finally file away and forget.