Chapter 42
Translator: RaidenTL
Chapter 42
Scrape—.
A rhythmic noise echoed in my ears.
Scrape—.
My thoughts slowly began to surface.
Scrape—.
A throbbing pain radiated from the back of my head.
Scrape—.
I forced my eyelids open, trying desperately to cling to consciousness.
“Nnghh…”
A pained groan escaped through my clenched teeth.
Slowly, reason began to stir within the fog of my mind, and I started to assess my condition.
My head was spinning.
I tried to open my eyes, but my eyelids were so heavy it felt nearly impossible.
How…
I must have collapsed. Everything felt numb and achy, and a sense of suffocation pressed down on me.
Why?
Once more, I strained to lift my eyelids. My blurry, wavering vision gradually sharpened, revealing the inside of a dark room.
Slowly, my vision settled, and in the center of my now-focused sight, a small figure came into view.
It was a figure Dokyun knew well.
“Eun-ah…ssi?”
“Ah.”
A slender frame, long, flowing hair, pale skin.
The figure looking down at me, a faint smile playing on her lips, was the woman I had spent the last two weeks with.
When I called her name, her lips parted and she spoke.
“You’re awake?”
“What is this…”
Dokyun looked down at his own body.
Handcuffs on his wrists and ankles, a strap around his waist, and her, straddling him while he was bound.
The setup was identical to the first day he’d been abducted.
Dokyun felt a surge of bewilderment at the familiar scene and spoke to her.
“Eun-ah-ssi?”
“Yes.”
“Um… what is…”
As I was speaking.
“Tell me.”
A sense of wrongness washed over me.
Her voice was completely flat, devoid of any inflection. It was a starkly different tone from the woman whose voice always seemed to overflow with emotion.
And on top of that.
She’s not…
Stuttering.
My head creaked as I tilted it upward.
“Hm?”
I saw her looking down at me, letting out a small sound of curiosity. And I saw the eyes set above it.
…Fuck.
The curse erupted from within me before I could stop it.
Vacant pupils. So chillingly empty they seemed to bleach the color from the world just by looking at them. Those hollow eyes were staring right at me.
Dokyun knew those eyes.
To be precise, he had seen them before.
They were the same eyes he’d seen on the first day of his kidnapping, when he’d taken advantage of her absence to search the shelf behind the bed, the same eyes she’d had when she realized he had moved.
They were eyes he never wanted to see again, eyes he hated even thinking about.
Seeing them now, Dokyun finally remembered what had happened before he passed out.
The study…
He had been in the study. Overwhelmed by a sense of unease, he had been flipping through the diary again when he heard a voice, followed by a sharp impact to the back of his head.
From the looks of it, this woman must have tied him up here again.
The worst…
This was the worst-case scenario. I had well and truly hit a trigger.
As tension flooded my body, her voice came again.
“I told you to tell me.”
When Dokyun looked up, he saw her staring down at him, her lips curved into a smile while her eyes remained empty.
I had to think of an excuse.
Just as I began to frantically search for one…
Smack—!
My vision tilted sideways in an instant.
Huh…?
I felt the shock of my head snapping to the side, and a stinging pain spread from my cheek throughout my body.
The bitter, coppery scent of blood filled the air.
The pain shattered my train of thought. In the corner of my eye, I saw the hand that had just struck my cheek.
“Tell me,” her voice said.
I lifted my head again, only to meet those empty eyes, staring as if they would chew me up and swallow me whole.
A deep chill ran down my spine. My heart began to pound like a drum, and with every beat, a wave of terror washed over me, consuming my body. Crushed by fear, my reason managed to force words through my teeth.
“I’m, I’m sorr—”
Smack—!
“Ugh!”
The other side this time. Again, my head whipped to the side, a dizzying pain rocking through me.
As I struggled to clear my head from the jarring impacts, her voice reached me again.
“Why did you do it?”
Her tone was mechanical. A flat inflection that held no feeling whatsoever.
“Why… Why do you keep acting like a bad boy?”
Though delivered mechanically, the meaning of her words was one of rebuke and anger.
The dissonance was palpable. Her tone was utterly devoid of emotion, yet I could feel it all the same.
As my mind froze from the stinging pain and that jarring disconnect, she reached out and placed a hand on my neck.
A moment later, the hand tightened, and she began to choke me.
“You should have waited quietly like a good boy.”
“Gack…!”
Her grip tightened, cutting off my airway. As the oxygen deprivation set in, my brain screamed, flooding me with pain.
My consciousness began to sink into a daze as my windpipe was crushed, but even as my thoughts faded, my body faithfully transmitted the terror I felt.
My fingertips trembled. My body twitched and bucked, crying out in agony. I wanted to struggle with all my might, but the restraints binding me made even that impossible.
Moisture welled in my eyes. A drop of saliva escaped my lips and trickled down my chin.
My body, unable to even thrash about freely, trembled pathetically.
“Gack…! Kkhh…!”
Choked, sputtering gasps forced their way out of my throat.
In the center of my vision, which was once again blurring, I saw her lean in until the tip of her nose was almost touching mine. Above it, I saw those empty eyes.
Her eyes were swallowing me whole. Her constricted pupils were squeezing the life out of me. A small voice whispered in my ear.
“You have to answer.”
“Kkhh… I was… wrong…”
I just spat out words of apology. My mind was so clouded I couldn't think straight. I could feel hot tears scalding my skin as they streamed down my face.
“I… was…!”
The apology I managed to force out echoed in the space.
“Hmm…”
After a short hum, the hand on my throat loosened.
Finally able to breathe, Dokyun felt oxygen rush into his constricted throat and began to gulp it down greedily.
The air filled his lungs and spread through his body. He could feel his dazed consciousness slowly crawling back into place.
“Hah… Heok…”
My whole body heaved, announcing its survival.
Just then, her voice came again.
“Good.”
Still the same flat tone. As Dokyun looked at her, he saw a hand reaching toward him.
“But that’s not enough.”
I felt her hand touch my cheek. Her cold skin met mine, cooling my flushed face.
“Hnngh…”
A sound close to a sob escaped me. Her deathly cold touch sent a horrifying chill through me.
As I trembled, the corners of her mouth lifted again. Then, she smoothly lowered her body, pressing her face against my cheek and rubbing it as she continued to speak.
“Not this time. Honeybee, you have to be punished.”
Her words were completely devoid of emotion, not even a speck of it.
“But… it hurts a lot to be punished…”
Even as she spoke, the lack of inflection in her voice made it difficult to understand the meaning of her sentences.
“I don’t want you to be in pain, Honeybee…”
Her cheek pulled away slightly, and then I felt her hot breath tickling my earlobe.
“So… I’ll be in pain for you instead.”
A familiar sentence surfaced in my mind.
[Today, I was in pain instead of my mother.]
Ah.
A wave of anxiety washed over me.
With a feeling of No, surely not, I looked at her and saw tears welling in her eyes.
She continued.
“So, Honeybee, you have to reflect on what you’ve done.”
She straightened up again. A breath tangled with viscous terror escaped my lips. I could see the corners of her mouth slowly rising beneath her flowing tears.
It was grotesque. An unreadable expression.
Her eyes were still fixed in that empty, vacant light, yet what flowed from them were tears. Her lips rose into the shape of a smile, but the expression, combined with those eyes, could not be called a smile.
I don’t know if it’s the right way to describe it, but it felt like an imitation.
The woman before me was clumsily mimicking human emotion.
Click—.
A sound echoed.
I turned my gaze toward the source of the noise and saw a menacingly sharp blade.
A box cutter…
Only then did I fully understand what she was about to do.
The extended blade gleamed coldly.
The blade, and her wrist, were thrust before my eyes. Startled, Dokyun frantically tried to stop her.
“Wait a min—”
“Watch closely.”
Scrrrape—.
I thought I heard a sound like that.
Drip.
I felt something fall onto my cheek. My vision was stained completely red.
On the wrist shoved in front of my nose, a crimson flower had bloomed.
“Hah!”
I sucked in a sharp breath. It was all so sudden. As my vision started to turn away in shock…
“LOOK PROPERLY!!!”
A scream-like roar echoed loudly.
Her wrist was shoved in my face again. The sight of blood gushing from the gash on her pale wrist was a horrifying spectacle.
Then, a long, broken mumble reached my ears.
“You have to repent… I told you to repent…”
“I’m hurting because of you.”
“I’m taking the pain for you.”
“I’m doing all this for you, so you have to repent.”
“But…”
A moment of silence. What followed was a tone laced with emotion for the first time.
“WHY AREN’T YOU LOOKING?!!”
The emotion that bled through was clearly the shape of rage.
That first eruption of feeling spread through my entire body. Our eyes met for a fleeting moment, and hers were once again pressing down on me, pinning me in place.
Suddenly, even though she wasn't choking me, my breath caught in my throat. A thick layer of terror began to settle over my body.
“I’m, I’m sorr—”
My eyes grew hot again. A tearful apology spilled out.
No matter where I moved my gaze, her wrist followed, relentlessly shoving itself in front of me, fueling my terror.
The fear that had risen up inside me wasn't satisfied with just gnawing away at my reason; it was constantly crying out in hunger, trying to devour me whole.
My lips parted again, spitting out another apology.
“Please stop… I’m sorry…”
When I lifted my head to look at her, I saw her face was slightly contorted, wrinkled. It was a bizarrely twisted expression.
Even though she was clearly making a face, creasing her features this way and that, I couldn't tell what it was, didn't want to know what it was. I just cried, praying for it to stop.
Silence followed. Then, I heard her voice.
“No.”
As she finished speaking, the blade and the wrist were once again brought together right in front of my nose.
Scrrrape—.
Deeper this time. The blade, sticking with a thick viscosity, tore through her wrist, mangling it.
“Heh…!”
I heard a laugh. The second emotion to emerge from her tone was elation.
The blood that stained her wrist dripped down, flowing over my face. The searing heat, the coppery scent, the crimson fluid—it all began to crush my sanity.
My breath stopped. My pupils constricted, betraying my shock.
For a moment, the shock was so great that it froze the fear that had dominated my thoughts. My body went rigid. Then, her movements stopped.
“Fuck.”
A curse.
Flinch.
My body gave a small jerk.
My trembling gaze shifted at the sudden profanity, and her face came into view.
Her eyes seemed to have a faint light in them again, but it was dim. Annoyance filled her face, and beneath it, a faint layer of boredom created an indescribable atmosphere.
Staring at her bleeding wrist, she wore an expression Dokyun had never seen before.
Then, her face still full of irritation, she opened her lips and spat out another curse.
“This crazy bitch…”
On top of the fear that still pressed down on my body, another emotion settled.
Bewilderment. That feeling began to swirl through me. My mind couldn't keep up with the sudden shift in atmosphere, with these words.
My reason, already battered and bruised by fear, was confronted with yet another incomprehensible situation and was completely lost.
Her gaze slid smoothly over and met mine.
Eyes heavy with annoyance and boredom stared at me, and she spat out a single sentence.
“What are you looking at, you motherfucker.”