Translated by Springlila
The noisy chirping of birds made Il-hyun open his eyes involuntarily. The morning sun rose with a reddish hue. It was the first time in his life that he sat outside to welcome the morning. As he stood up, his entire body felt stiff. Damn it. He cursed quietly, glancing around inside the fenced area.
The lights had been on until dawn, but now it was quiet. He patted off his pants and decided to try to get inside. However, the front door was firmly locked. He didn’t want to break in and cause a commotion, so he climbed up the fence instead. He had done everything under the sun during his life.
He jumped down and crossed the yard. A crumpled beer can rolled around on the ground. Standing in front of the door, he called out, “Babe?” but there was no response. Was he still sleeping? He took off his shoes and climbed up to the wooden floor, knocking gently.
There was no response. Even when he knocked harder, there was no difference. If it were enough to wake him up, it was certainly suspicious that he was still quiet. A cold aura passed by his neck.
“Damn it.”
He took a step back and kicked the door open. The top of the hinge fell off. He pushed the door open and went inside. He saw Lee Ja-kyung lying down with a blanket wrapped around her. Haa, you’re sleeping. Il-hyun let out a sigh of relief and lifted the blanket.
“Babe.”
His face was completely hardened. He found two pillows laid in place of Ja-kyung. He stood up and search the small room across the street and the kitchen, but he can’t find a single hair. In this tiny house, Ja-kyung had disappeared like a ghost. He took out his mobile phone and called, but it said that the number was not available.
As he walked around the house with a stern expression, he suddenly stopped when he noticed a low wall at the back. He stood still, contemplating if his eyes were deceiving him. Inside the fence, there was a mountaineering rope connected to the outside. Could it be? With a sense of disbelief, he approached to confirm. The back of the house was almost like a cliff, with the rope extending down below.
He couldn’t believe it when he saw it, so he pulled up the rope, but there was nothing attached to it. He was dumbfounded, letting out a hollow laugh. He had spent the night guarding the front door without realizing that he had escaped. He tried to hold back his anger and contacted Park Tae-soo.
“Tae-soo. Check Lee Ja-kyung’s location.”
***
Ugh. Moaning in pain, Jang Tae-ho rolled off the bed and fell to the floor. He barely got up and stumbled along the wall to find the bathroom. As he entered the bathroom and grabbed the toilet, nausea welled up.
After vomiting for a while, he washed himself with cold water. As he came out, he looked at his own face in the mirror, his eyes were bloodshot. To regain some clarity, he grabbed a bottle of cold water from the fridge and gulped it down. It seemed to help a little.
What time did I come back? Even when he checked his watch and tried to remember, his memory was cut off as if it had been cut with a knife. Yesterday afternoon, he went to Yang Seon-woo’s house, but there was no significant outcome. It only made him wonder why such a person would stay here.
Afterward, as he was heading back, he received unexpected news. The victim from a case he had handled a few years ago had committed suicide. So, after work, he went to the funeral home to meet Secretary Park and the bereaved family with a complicated mind.
The victim was a 13-year-old girl at the time of the incident. The perpetrator was a man in his thirties hailing from a powerful family with three generations of politicians. They had hired top-notch lawyers from well-known law firms in the country and argued that the crime was committed while he was mentally impaired and suffering from depression, ultimately receiving a suspended sentence.
The expression on the child’s face that day remained vivid in his memory. He regretted choosing this profession for the first time in his life. And yesterday, at the funeral home, the girl’s father grabbed him and cried, asking why people like him were not punishing the wrongdoers, why his daughter was dead while that man was shamelessly living, questioning if this was the justice they spoke of.
Jang Tae-ho led his tired body to the sofa and lay down for a long time. He blinked slowly and looked up at the ceiling. His head was throbbing as if it would burst from the hangover. He still had some time before he had to go to work. As he tried to close his eyes again, a voice echoed in his mind.
“Still, you’re lucky. You saw that your little brother is alive with your own eyes.”
Startled, he opened his eyes. It was almost dark in the room, and the fluorescent light overhead was dim. He sat up, frowning from the oncoming headache. He covered his head with both arms. Then the voice comes out more clearly.
“Still don’t get it? Yang Seon-woo. That’s your little brother.”
Jang Tae-ho slowly lifted his buried head l and stared straight ahead. The house was so quiet that even he could hear his own breath. He got up and moved into the bedroom, took out a piece of paper he had piled on the drawer, and looked at it.
He compared the face of Yang Seon-woo with the montage that was estimated to be a recent appearance of his little brother. The throbbing in his temple intensified as fragments of memories from the previous night came back like pieces of a fragmented film: the warehouse, the gunshot, Kang Il-hyun, and the man pointing a gun at him. The face in the flyer overlapped with the man’s face, becoming one person.
Confused, Jang Tae-ho paced back and forth around the room. It can’t be. Absolutely not. If Yang Seon-woo was his little brother, there was no way he wouldn’t have recognized him. He saw his face in person. He had been to the place where he lived.
In the end, he wrapped his head in his hands.
I don’t know. I just don’t know.
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***
While having breakfast, Wang Han and Wang Lun stopped moving when they saw Kang Il-hyun entering the house. His suit was covered in dirt, his hair was disheveled, and there were red marks on his cheek, probably from mosquito bites. Even if he had lost the country, he wouldn’t have such an expression.
As he entered the house, he headed towards the bedroom without saying a word, then abruptly turned around. Wang Han and Wang Lun, who were watching with their heads lifted, flinched and straightened their postures. They heard from Park Tae-soo early in the morning that Ja-kyung had disappeared. They didn’t know how Kang Il-hyun was feeling right now, but the look in his eyes shows that he won’t let him go easily if he gets caught.
He returned from his path to the bedroom and stood in front of Wang Han and Wang Lun, tilting his head awkwardly.
“Tell me honestly. Do you two know where he is?”
Lunn replied with an unfair expression.
“We’ve already told Secretary Park that we don’t know. Isn’t that right, hyung?”
Wang Han also nodded in agreement. But even though they didn’t know where Ja-kyung was, they knew this fact.
“Just leave him be. He’s a terrifying guy when he’s angry. There was a time when he didn’t speak with Lun and me for three months after we fought.”
At the mention of three months, Kang Il-hyun’s expression darkened. Wang Lun also made an expression of being scared as he recalled that time.
“It wasn’t three months. It was exactly four months. I apologized and did everything, but he didn’t accept it. Why was Wei so angry back then?”
“You kept doing things he told you not to do and played around.”
“Ah. Right. It really wasn’t a big deal.”
Wang Lun tore off the bread and put it in his mouth, looking at Kang Il-hyun with a sympathetic gaze.
“CEO Kang may take longer.”
Sensing that Kang Il-hyun’s expression was becoming more and more hostile, the two of them took the remaining bread and went upstairs as if they were running away. The house chef nearby asked if he would eat breakfast, but Il-hyun had lost his appetite for breakfast.
He went into the bedroom and threw off his dusty jacket. His fatigued appearance reflected from the mirror. Il-hyun had a location tracker attached to Lee Ja-kyung’s watch and sneakers, but even that signal had been cut off. Ja-kyung turned off his phone and even removed the chip that was secretly planted in the back of the phone. It’s not that he wasn’t aware of it, but despite being aware, he chose to ignore it.
Feeling restless, he put a cigarette in his mouth. He looked out through the window. The swimming pool where Ja-kyung used to rest was completely empty. “Where did you go, meow?” He exhaled smoke and sighed. Then his phone rang.
It was an unknown number.
He answered with some hesitation, but it was someone he wasn’t particularly pleased to hear from.
[This is Prosecutor Jang Tae-ho. I contacted you because I wanted to meet you.]
The voice was as cold as ice. Although he didn’t want to admit it, there was an eerie resemblance to Ja-kyung’s voice. He didn’t respond and just stared out of the window, smoking his cigarette.
[Are you listening?]
As he exhaled smoke, the window became hazy. Damn it. He should’ve killed him back then. Il-hyun forced a smile to form on his lips as he struggled to control his rising irritation. He toned down his voice and added a touch of kindness.
“I see. Prosecutor Jang. Where shall we meet?”
***
Strange. Ja-kyung looked at the fishing line, then looked at it again. It should have worked well like this before. However, to his disappointment, he had been sitting here for hours without any catch. Ah, whatever. He lay down on a large stone next to him and looked at the sky. It looked like it was going to rain, so there were a lot of dark clouds.
He rummaged through his pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. Searching for missing children. He read it again and again. The smiling face of the child in the photo seemed unfamiliar. What was he so excited about? Is this really me?
[I shouldn’t have given birth to something like you. I should have killed you when you were in my womb.]
Those were the words of Ja-kyung’s dead mother. A child that should never have been born. Is she really not his birth mother? But why did she claim to have given birth to him?
He folded the paper and put it back in his pocket. Il-hyun probably noticed by now that he had run away. It was predictable what expression he would have. The voice that apologized under the wall until dawn came to mind. Ja-kyung wondered if he was really sorry. He resented the fact that he couldn’t hate him even though he had done something he hated. Why did he like such a crazy person?
As he sighed, the fishing line was pulled taut. He quickly reeled it in, but the bait disappeared, leaving only an empty hook. He threw the fishing rod away with a disappointed expression.
Ah, I should have just gone to the land and enjoyed some raw fish.
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