Vol 3 Ch 20

When I opened my eyes again, the sun was already setting. The heavy rain had stopped, leaving a stillness in its wake. The room was filled with the warm glow of dusk.

My head felt foggy, and my throat was dry and scratchy. It reminded me of the final stages of a cold, just as it begins to wane. The only difference was the searing pain in my lower body—a sharp, dreadful ache, as if a knife had been lodged there.

Dazed eyes wandered the room, searching for someone.

CEO Jang was seated casually in a single-seater sofa next to the study. He was looking down at the book in his large hands, one long leg crossed over the other.

“……”

“……”

Crumpled tissues were scattered around the bed. He must have deliberately left them there to show me. Memories from the early morning flashed before my eyes like a kaleidoscope. Pleading to put it in and shake it, pressing my hips tightly against his thighs, rubbing my stiffened nipples against his firm chest. Heat rushed back to my face. I clenched my fists, gathering the sheets with blunt fingertips. I wanted to die from embarrassment.

Now that I looked closely, my fingers were wrapped in fresh bandages, almost like silk cocoons. …Did he do this? I moved my fingers for no reason.

Forcing my overused throat, I croaked out some words.

“No more.”

“……”

 “I thought… you wouldn’t come anymore.”

It wasn’t reproach. It was just a calm statement of what I had assumed. At my voice, broken and chaotic, he closed the book in his hands.

“I spent three months running around like a fool trying to catch a runaway rat, only for this to happen in two weeks?”

“That was when I ran away. This time… I was neglected, neglected.”

He treated me like a trophy, so I assumed he’d been satisfied just having me in the house. Neglected—he repeated the word I had uttered. CEO Jang smiled as though he liked how it sounded.

“Did you think you’d been abandoned? Carrying such foolish hopes.”

He placed the book down and approached the bed. The sound of his slippers brushing against the floor made a soft scuffing noise.

“I had to handle some debt collections and got a little busy.”

He sat down on the edge of the bed. The mattress dipped under his weight. The fact that someone owed him money filled me with sympathy for that unseen person.

“Do you know how many times I changed the sheets in just two days?”

“……”

“You’re an adult, and yet you end up having wet dreams?”

“It was a nightmare.”

At my impudent correction, CEO Jang’s cheek seemed to hollow for a moment. His otherwise calm expression almost cracked.

Then, suddenly, he let out a deep sneer.

“Doesn’t matter. The fact is, you came all over yourself.”

“……”

“Did you ever have dreams like that when you were running away from me?”

I pressed my lips tightly together. I had no desire to give him the answer he wanted. Yet CEO Jang, quick-witted as ever, easily deduced it from my silence.

“Then it wasn’t really running away, was it?”

I lowered my gaze. I wanted to refute him, but my lips wouldn’t move. A brief silence stretched between us.

The smile disappeared from his sharply defined face. Wearing his usual calm expression, CEO Jang asked in a low voice,

“Then what about that monster?”

My eyes were involuntarily drawn to the corner of the room. There, where the monster with hollowed-out eyes had been glaring at me all night, stood nothing but a wooden coat rack. The monster’s menacing, billowing arms had merely been the sleeves of his black jacket. A sense of crushing futility washed over me. …The monster that had tormented me all night had been nothing but that.

“…Just sometimes.”

My voice trailed off weakly. How much of me did this man want to see before he would be satisfied? I clutched the edge of the pillow.

“Seems like that left quite the scar. You were so high on the drugs, you were seeing things.”

“……”

“What scared you so much? That you’d be found out?”

He wasn’t wrong; I had been terrified of being exposed. So much so that if anyone even showed me the slightest interest, I would curl up and hide somewhere like a snail under attack. That was one of the reasons I had run away from CEO Jang. His growing, irrational obsession with me had been too much to bear.

But it wasn’t just fear of being exposed. This tangled mess of emotions couldn’t be summed up so simply. Slowly, I shook my head.

“…No.”

“Then what?”

Silence hung between us for a while, creating a void in the space we shared. CEO Jang didn’t seem to tolerate the gap and pressed me again.

“What could Mr. Seo Yeowon have done so wrong to be tormented like this?”

…Something?

From his tone and expression, he seemed to be talking about trampling on a stray weed on the street. Something surged within me, threatening to break out. My entire body felt like it had been plunged into ice water.

The thing this man brushed off so lightly—my father’s death—had torn my life apart.

“…Something like that?”

CEO Jang slowly closed his eyes and reopened them. He seemed unshaken, his meaning unchanged. To him, stealing the life of a mere weed wasn’t something to be condemned.

“…I can still feel it. The sensation of my father’s blood running over my hands.”

I murmured, looking down at my hands. Over the white bandages wrapped around my fingertips, I could almost see bright red, tomato-juice-like blood dripping, sticky as paint. My stomach churned.

“I never knew human blood could be so hot. While the skin it touched turned cold, the blood gushing out like a fountain was searing. Thinking that the same blood flows within me….”

I couldn’t finish. I closed my lips, my chest swirling with noise. I felt nauseous. I wanted to push him away and vomit everything out, but he showed no intention of backing off.

He looked at me with a face that said he couldn’t understand and asked,

“Didn’t you say he was the worst bastard in the world?”

CEO Jang narrowed his eyes.

“Yes, he was a bastard….”

As he said, my father was a bastard. Both objectively and subjectively, he deserved to die. Even knowing that, the sticky, unpleasant sensation left in a corner of my chest refused to fade.

…It was a pitiful sense of guilt. The guilt of having taken the life of the one who had made my flesh and bones.

Suddenly, CEO Jang stroked my eyelashes. The clear liquid hanging from the tips, like droplets of fruit ready to fall, dropped. Without realizing it, I had been crying again—pathetically so. Dry, soundless tears that I hadn’t even been aware of. Quickly, I rubbed my eyes with the back of my hand. My hand came away damp.

The man took his hand off my face and lit a cigarette. In a low voice, he called my name.

“Mr. Yeowon.”

“…Yes.”

 “What do you think it took for me to get this far?”

At his words, I shut my mouth as if it had been stitched closed.

“What do you think it took for someone like me, with no backing or connections, to claim a spot for myself like this?”

“…I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

CEO Jang laughed softly, as if he had taken a hit of some drug. The uneasy air of his laughter brushed past my chest. His lips stretched into a smirk that reached across his cheek, but his eyes remained cold and expressionless, exuding a sense of foreboding. It was an unsettling kind of smile.

“Then what do you think happened to the bastards who cut off my fingers?”

Though his tone was calm, the ripples his words caused were large. I shook my head heavily.

“They were real bastards. Even after that, they’d slap me around whenever they could. One day, they made me kneel and bow, then crushed my freshly injured hand underfoot. Said my gaze annoyed them.”

Even though it happened when he was younger, I couldn’t picture CEO Jang being crushed beneath anyone. He seemed like someone who had only ever ruled over others his whole life.

“When I came to, it was quiet. Everyone around me was staring at me, terrified. When I looked down, one of them was unconscious, their face turned to mush. Of course, it wasn’t from s*x but violence.”

As he recounted his past in an indifferent tone, a slow grin spread across his face, as if he had just told a funny joke.

“Since that day, they started avoiding me, skirting around with fear-filled eyes. Thanks to that, I had a few peaceful days. At the end of the month, I got my paycheck, and the amount was better than usual.”

“…….”

“When the clients paid the boss who managed us, he would skim off a portion and distribute the rest in order of rank. It wasn’t based on seniority but on one’s standing within the group. That’s how a portion of his share ended up with me. It was only enough to buy two extra packs of cigarettes, but still…”

With a hiss, he stubbed out his cigarette, then placed a new one between his lips.

“Anyway, that’s when I first got a taste of it—the fruits of stepping on others to climb higher.”

His triangular eyes gleamed with interest. They were like a snake’s, seeing straight through to the core of a person beneath their skin. Perhaps the people from CEO Jang’s past had feared those snake-like eyes as well.

Unable to bear meeting his gaze, I subtly looked away. My eyes landed on the shadow of the man cast on the wall.

“That’s when I started building strength. The higher I climbed, the more enticing the rewards became. Eventually, word about me must have reached those above, because I started receiving personal requests. I took on every job that came my way, without exception. The earnings were quite lucrative.”

“…….”

“I committed vile acts that someone like you, Seo Yeowon, wouldn’t dare imagine. Yet, I didn’t feel the slightest bit of hesitation. And even now, I don’t know guilt.”

CEO Jang’s shadow exhaled a puff of black smoke into the air. As I absently watched the drifting smoke, I suddenly realized that even smoke could cast a shadow.

“Someone like me exists, so why should you, Seo Yeowon, be tormented by such trivial emotions?”

A stale odor wafted from somewhere. It was the smell of his past—a life lived without sunlight.

“All you did was carry out punishment in place of a god, punishing that bastard in a rather kind way.”

His shadow reached out toward my cheek. From his fingertips wafted the sharp scent of tobacco. The fragrance of cologne from earlier had faded, leaving only the faint scent of shower cologne that lingered from when he had been in the bathroom.

“Smashing his head in with a brick and killing him outright—that was far too kind, wasn’t it?”

“…….”

“Of course, it was an act that violated the law.”

This time, both of his hands grazed the corners of my eyes.

“But the laws weren’t something we agreed upon, were they? So, Seo Yeowon, you’ve done nothing wrong.”

His touch, which had been coaxing and soothing me like one would a young beast, withdrew.

For some reason, I felt a sense of loss. My gaze naturally followed his retreating hand, and my head turned toward him.

His eyes, now fixed on me, held nothing but my reflection.

In essence, he was saying that as long as I followed his sense of justice, the law was irrelevant. It was a thought so absurd that it was neither conceivable nor comprehensible by conventional logic. It was preposterous. Yet, despite uttering such nonsense, his gaze on me was piercing and unwavering.

“…….”

“…….”

For a moment, silence filled the space.

He swallowed, the movement of his Adam’s apple sending ripples down the muscles connecting his neck and shoulders. If I pressed my nose against that hollow spot, I’d feel the steady pulse of his heartbeat reverberating through his thin skin.

“…….”

“…….”

Was it the thick, languid atmosphere in the room? For a fleeting moment, it felt as though we’d been like this for quite a while.

I saw a glimpse of a younger man in him. Though much taller and broader than most his age, his eyes were still smeared with youthful insolence. His cold, stiff eyes and lips made it hard to guess his age, but the lingering traces of boyishness couldn’t be entirely hidden.

When I slowly closed and reopened my eyes, he was back to his usual self.

Suddenly, I felt a strange urge to grab CEO Jang by the nape and pull him close. But that thought remained a fleeting fantasy, never manifesting into reality. Instead, we were locked in a silent, intense exchange of gazes.

Surprisingly, it was he who broke eye contact first. Letting out a soft exclamation, he shattered the strange stillness in the room.

“…Ah.”

His voice was oddly devoid of intonation, leaving an awkward impression. He stubbed out the last cigarette and continued speaking.

“That middle-aged man I asked if you’d seen in the hospital.”

The sudden mention caught me off guard, and it took a moment for his words to sink in. It wasn’t until a familiar name was mentioned that I snapped back to my senses.

“Your uncle, you said. Im Suncheol.”

“…Yes, Im Suncheol.”

Im Suncheol—my uncle’s name. In an instant, the horrific scream I’d heard over the phone tore through my mind. Why does he know my uncle’s name?

I threw him a questioning look, and he tapped his forehead with his index finger before replying.

“I found him in an unexpected place.”

“An unexpected place?”

Instead of answering, he responded with a cryptic smile. Judging by his demeanor, it was clear that it was anything but a coincidence.