Chapter Text
Listen to - Angel by Massive Attack - while reading chapter 1
It was of no significance when you arrived at the palace. You barely spoke.
You kept your eyes down. And with each passing day, you never argued. Never fought back.
No one was entirely certain where you had come from—a woman of no nobility, with perfect manners, an eloquent tongue and above-average intelligence.
Where you worked to maintain dignity, the older concubines saw weakness. They saw an opening. You were a threat, and they were set on eliminating it before it ever got too close.
It started small. Simple whispers when you passed. Their eyes would linger on you for a second too long, but it was enough time for you to understand who they were whispering about.
Then it escalated to missing belongings. A hairpin gone from your vanity. Incense spilt in your chambers.
Then it was the dresses. And that…that’s what got to you. Torn silk, stained sheets and frayed cotton. You had a taste for the finer things in life, especially the cloths that came with being a concubine for the King Of Curses.
They were simple in nature—little cruelties designed to make you cry. But you never reacted. You knew it was only trouble they wished to stir.
Then, week after week, strange things started happening.
One concubine’s favourite jewellery disappeared. Family heirlooms. The only memory she had from a home she was beginning to forget. She stormed the palace and screamed from room to room, eyes wild and hair dishevelled.
You continued reading your book.
Another found out that a servant she’d been bribing was suddenly reporting everything to the palace officials.
She lacked any tact. No forethought for how easy it would be to pass the right shadowed corner where servants loved to gossip amongst themselves.
A third discovered private letters had somehow found their way into the hands of people who shouldn’t have seen them.
It was foolish, really. Leaving such intimate letters between herself and a palace guard in plain sight. Albeit the vanity was locked, still. The fire surely would’ve been a more suitable place for such treason.
No accusations could ever be made. You were too clean, and no proof was ever found. Just consequences for such insolent indiscretions.
You remained the same, even in the face of the chaos. Polite, silent, sweet.
Ryomen Sukuna only took notice when one of the women who’d tormented you threw herself at his feet, sobbing and begging for protection.
Protection from you.
You? The concubine who barely spoke? A nobody from nowhere.
Weeks passed. The concubines tried to retaliate, of course they did. They assumed it was you, they could feel it in how calm you were. How soft your smile was when they were screaming at you with accusations.
“I apologise, but I cannot say I know what you’re asking me.” Those were the words that sent another concubine spiralling.
Ryomen Sukuna visited her that night. She begged for him to stop you.
To rid the palace of you. And that began to grate on him. To agitate him to no end.
She was the seventh woman to throw herself sobbing at his feet, and it made something inside him snap.
Sukuna stared down at her tear-streaked face, her trembling hands clutching at the hem of his robes, and felt nothing but cold irritation crawling its way up his spine.
Another one.
Another pathetic, whimpering fool begging him to save her from you.
From his quiet, soft-spoken wife who supposedly couldn’t even look anyone in the eye.
“Enough,”he said, voice flat and final.
The woman flinched but didn’t move, still babbling about stolen letters and ruined reputations and how you must be stopped before—
He didn’t wait for her to finish.
One sharp motion and she was hauled backwards by a servant, her protests fading into the distance as the doors slammed shut behind her.
Silence settled heavily in the room.
Sukuna remained perfectly still, his crimson eyes fixed on nothing in particular. His jaw was tight with something that might have been mistaken for amusement had the annoyance on his face not been so apparent.
Seven women.
And every single one of them ended the same way—someone who'd wronged you suddenly finding themselves destroyed by their own mistakes and their own stupidity.
He turned on his heel and began to walk.
The palace corridors were a blur around him, servants scattered out of his path without a word, and he did not stop until he reached your chambers.
Sukuna didn’t knock. He just pushed the door open and stepped inside.
His eyes found you sat by the window, sunlight pooled across your lap, a book rested in your hands.
You glanced up when he entered, and your expression was so calm and so unreadable, for a moment he had to just stand there. Studying you.
He saw it all. The way your fingers rested lightly against the pages.
The way your posture stayed relaxed even with him looming in the doorway.
The way you met his gaze without flinching.
"Tell me something,” Sukuna said slowly, moving closer. "Do you believe I am stupid?”
“That depends, My Lord,” you replied, your gaze had already flickered back to the book in hand. Sukuna's jaw ticked. The power in his veins wanted to end you right there. Burn you to a crisp. But something deep inside him, something he had no name for, had reared its head with curiosity.
“On what?” He asked, too calmly.
“On who is asking me.” You couldn’t hide the twitch of the corner of your mouth.
His fingers curled at his side.
The sheer audacity of that answer hung between you both like smoke, thick and deliberate, and for a long stretch he said nothing at all.
Just watched you turn a page as though the King of Curses standing three feet away was somehow less interesting than whatever you were reading.
"Look at me when I'm speaking to you.”
His voice came out low. Controlled. The kind of calm that made palace walls tremble.
Sukuna crossed the remaining distance in two strides, stopping close enough that his shadow swallowed the light from your lap. He leaned down, one hand braced against the window frame beside your head, his face dropping near enough that you could see the faint pulse of cursed energy beneath his skin.
“Seven women.” He said, tilting his head. “Seven women have come crawling to me, weeping, ruined. Each one begging for the same thing.” His eyes did one slow drag down your figure, then returned to your eyes.
“Can you take a guess, what it was they were begging for?” He drawled.
“I imagine your concubines beg you for a great many things, My Lord. But I find it impossible to bring myself to speak of such…intimate matters between a King and his property.”
His crimson gaze dragged across your expression, searching for the crack. A flinch, even. But what he found was something else entirely. Something that made his cursed energy flare bright under his skin.
Because while everyone else saw a frightened little dove…Ryomen Sukuna had somehow acquired a snake.
One just clever enough to hide its fangs.