Chapter 4
Translator: RaidenTL
Chapter 4
Shit…
I’m scared. Fucking scared.
The moment his eyes met hers, his vision obscured by the curtain of her long, disheveled hair, Dokyun felt a terror so profound his heart seemed to stop.
If you’re going to grow it out, at least fucking tie it up!
She looked like a ghost out of some horror movie; what was with that hair? After calming his startled heart, Dokyun forced a smile and greeted her.
“Haha… You’re back?”
Couldn’t you have come back just a little later…
He hadn’t found a single clue for his escape yet.
Eun-ah, who had left the room, had returned before he could even try to do anything. Dokyun could only feel a sense of utter despair.
Whether she knew what was going through his mind or not, Eun-ah approached him with a shy, faint smile and spoke.
“Hehe… H-here…”
Rustle.
Eun-ah extended her arm, holding out a stack of papers in front of Dokyun’s eyes.
“I-it’s the manuscript…!”
It was a thick stack, even at a glance.
Dokyun did his best to hide his tension as he looked at Eun-ah and spoke.
“Th-the chapters from 47 onward?”
“Y-yes…!!! From… from chapter 47 to… to 86…!”
An unmistakable look of pride settled on Eun-ah’s face.
“S-since… Since you can’t use your a-arms right now, Honeybee… I… I printed it all out… for you…!”
As she spoke, her eyes sparkled, and she began to stare intently at Dokyun, as if expecting something.
Seeing this, Dokyun thought…
You’re the one who tied me up, you fucking bitch!
…screaming the curse in his mind, one he could never say out loud. He gritted his teeth.
He wanted to curse her out until his anger subsided, but the memory of her ghastly expression as she clawed at her own cheek sent a fresh wave of fear through him, rendering him speechless.
All Dokyun could do was curse her internally while trying his best not to get on her bad side.
Dokyun calmed himself. He had to play along. For now, he had to humor her as much as possible. He settled his mind with that thought.
As Dokyun closed his eyes, silence fell over the space they shared.
“Uuu…”
Seeing Dokyun’s lack of response, Eun-ah’s eyebrows knitted together slightly. She frowned, her tone a little more subdued than before as she spoke.
“I… I did a good job, right…?”
Her eyes began to gleam with a dangerous light. When he heard her words again and looked at her, Dokyun was so startled by her gaze that he practically shouted his reply.
“Thank you!!”
The words came out in a rush, his voice cracking, but it seemed the danger had passed. The frown disappeared from Eun-ah’s face.
“Hehe…”
Pleased by Dokyun’s spirited reply, Eun-ah let out a light laugh and climbed onto the bed. She began to squeeze herself into the narrow space between where Dokyun lay and the wall, letting out a small groan.
“Nngh…”
Dokyun felt his body tremble and shrink away in reaction to the weight pressing against him, the touch of her skin, and the rustling sounds.
Dokyun squeezed his eyes shut.
In the short time he had faced this woman, Dokyun had learned one thing: she was terrifyingly unwilling to be separated from him.
From the beginning until this moment, only a few hours had passed.
No, considering she was already on top of him when he woke up, she must have been clinging to him for far longer than he’d thought.
The fact that she was trying to stick to him again the moment she returned after being gone for only a short while gave him a rough idea of the extent of her obsession.
Was it such a crime to shower her with praise!
He was scared to death. What if she suddenly snapped and dug her nails into him? Or beat him with the manuscript in her hand? All sorts of scenarios ran through Dokyun’s mind, inflating his fear.
“…There we go!”
While Dokyun was trembling in fear, lost in all sorts of negative fantasies, Eun-ah finally settled in. Lying comfortably beside him, she wiggled a bit and pushed the manuscript in front of his face.
“I… I’ll t-turn the pages for you, one by one!”
Shit…
She’d completely blocked him. From the moment Eun-ah had walked in with the manuscript, Dokyun had been looking for the right time to ask if she could untie his hands so he could turn the pages. But as if she had anticipated it, Eun-ah had shut down that possibility before he could even speak.
Cunning bitch.
There was no other choice. For now, he had to dance to her tune. With that in mind, Dokyun spoke up to create the minimum conditions necessary.
“Um… It’s too dark to see the words.”
“Ah… Ahh…!”
Lurch—.
The bed they were lying on shook. It was the vibration from Eun-ah’s flustered movement.
Through their touching skin, he could feel a wave of heat radiating from her body.
“J-jeez… Look at me, I’m so out of it…”
Eun-ah muttered to herself. Then, she stealthily moved, reaching her arm over Dokyun’s head and waving it around as if searching for something.
Click—.
The sound of a switch being pressed followed immediately.
Right after the sound, a small patch of light appeared in the gloomy, dark space.
“I… I guess I can be… a little clumsy…?”
As if trying to be witty, Eun-ah spoke in an awkward, playful tone that didn’t suit her at all. It was a situation that might have drawn a dry laugh, but Dokyun’s mind was focused on something other than her playful tone.
There was space behind the bed?
No wonder he hadn’t known. The area behind his head was hidden by the bed frame, and in his bound state, he couldn’t check that direction.
Next. The next time she leaves the room, I’ll check it, no matter what.
A small sliver of hope, one that could very well be a mirage, began to bloom. There was still something in this room he hadn’t checked.
The probability that she had left an escape route for him in this room was extremely low, but without clinging to even that tiny possibility, he didn’t think he could endure the current situation.
That fist-sized glimmer of hope that settled in Dokyun’s heart gave him a shred of courage to endure.
I can do this! It hasn’t even been a full day since I was kidnapped! I can do this!
He filled himself with confidence and steeled his resolve. Having composed himself, Dokyun cautiously lifted his head. The light illuminating one corner of the dim space painted Eun-ah’s face in greater detail.
Unlike when he’d tried to trace her features in the dark, her face, now clearly visible under the light, was so elegant that he thought he might have stared blankly at it were it not for the circumstances.
However, a deep gloom settled over her face as if it belonged there, and her skin was so deathly pale that blue veins were visible. It gave off a chilling impression, less like fair skin and more like the hide of a corpse.
She was gloomy, but depending on how you looked at it, you could definitely call her a beauty. With a face like that, she should have been able to make a good impression on people in most situations.
Doesn’t everyone say a pretty face is its own justification? No matter how crazy she was, there had to be someone out there willing to embrace even that.
Surely, the people around her wouldn’t have neglected her to the point where she ended up like this.
As he thought this, Dokyun found it even harder to understand why she had imprisoned him.
Lost in such thoughts, Dokyun soon shook his head slightly, clearing away the stray ideas.
No, what does any of that matter? The important thing is that she’s a crazy bitch.
Whether she was beautiful, or whether there were people out there who would like her—it was all useless speculation. What mattered was that he was currently kidnapped and imprisoned by this woman, and that from now on, he had to read the manuscript she brought, page by page, and give her his thoughts.
Dokyun’s gaze shifted toward the manuscript.
That’s a hell of a lot of pages.
Chapters 47 to 86. In terms of a published volume, that was enough for a book and a half. And now, he had to read that entire long text with her watching him.
Shit… What kind of fucked-up critique session is this…
While Dokyun was lost in such doubts, Eun-ah, who had returned to her spot, smiled, her eyes crinkling at the corners, and moved her lips.
“S-so… shall we begin…? Th-this is… this is the good stuff, right…?”
Hehe.
The same shallow, trembling, stuttering words as before. As if she was trying to crack a joke, her tone was playful and exaggerated. The unfitting accent once again dug into his ears.
From those two consecutive phrases, Dokyun felt something was strange.
Huh?
He felt a sense of déjà vu from her tone.
Where? Where from?
A tone he’d heard somewhere before. A tone familiar to him.
My way of speaking?
His own speech pattern. The intonation he used when he was spouting nonsense.
Words he had used recently, just yesterday. A scene, still faint, replayed in a corner of Dokyun’s mind.
It was definitely…
What he’d said the previous evening after coming home from work and seeing his front door open.
—Guess I can be a little clumsy?
And what he’d said while sitting at the dinner table.
—Fuuuck! This is the shit!
Huh?
Oso-so—.
A chill ran down his spine, spreading throughout his entire body.
The door. He knew why his front door had been open.
It wasn’t that I’d left it open.
Dokyun’s pupils contracted into tight points, betraying his shock.
His breathing grew ragged. An uncontrollable tremor shot through his fingertips.
A cold sweat broke out, seeming to suck all the warmth from his body.
His thoughts converged on a single point, forming a single hypothesis.
Deol-deol-deol…
Dokyun’s gaze moved toward Eun-ah. At the end of his line of sight, he saw a pair of gleaming eyes looking at him, her lips curved into a smile.
Last night, when he was abducted. She had been there before he even got home.
She had been there, waiting for him.
Kkwak—.
His bound fists clenched tightly behind his back. He could no longer meet her gaze. Dokyun’s eyes slowly fell.
He had been wrong. So, so wrong.
He had assumed she’d come in through the unlocked door after he got home.
Think about it. It was a one-room apartment. The only place to hide was under the bed. Sure, a woman as gaunt as her could probably fit. But how would she know when he’d be home to wait for him there? Did it make any sense for her to wait for hours in that narrow space for him to arrive?
Besides, after getting home, he had received the chicken delivery, set up his meal, and plugged in his phone—during all that, he hadn’t sensed a single sign of another person. That’s why he hadn’t considered, not even for a second, that she might have already been inside.
But now, that entire assumption had been shattered by her two sentences.
She was watching… she was watching the whole time…
The fear, the dread that had deepened with her every action, now swelled to its absolute limit, swallowing his thoughts whole. The hope he’d harbored until now revealed its black, sneering face and seemed to mock him.
This woman was far, far crazier than he had ever imagined.
In that moment, Dokyun prayed to a god he had never once sought in his entire life.
In this moment, he couldn’t help but pray.
Please, please… God, Buddha, Jade Emperor, please…
Desperation. The most primal desire, the most powerful instinct a living creature is born with, formed a single sentence in Dokyun’s mind.
Please, let me live…