Translator: Nox

Chapter 68

The room beyond the door was beautiful even at a passing glance, but none of it registered. Breathing shallowly, Seo-ah looked for Oscar. The presence of the man, who initially seemed absent, was felt from behind the thick curtains.

Almost the moment Seo-ah sensed him and looked toward the curtains, the heavy fabric was pulled back and Oscar revealed himself. He walked out, roughly wiping his face with a towel as if he had just washed up, then tossed the towel onto the sofa and walked toward the desk. He perched on the edge of the desk and stared at Seo-ah.

“Are you just going to stand there?”

Seo-ah, who had been standing still, paralyzed by uncertainty, reflexively took a step forward at his words. It had been quite a while since the sound of the rain had faded, and even the sound of her heart—which felt as if it might burst—seemed to have fallen silent.

Her every nerve was strained to a sickening degree, tracing the man who seemed to have seized control over both space and time.

She stopped walking when she thought she was close enough, and he asked, “How was your day?”

“It was fine, Your Excellency.”

When she answered reflexively to the probing question, he murmured languidly with a hint of a laugh in his voice.

“You don’t look particularly fine.”

“Oh… No…”

“Don’t deny it.”

Seo-ah found him so incredibly difficult.

“Why didn’t you leave?”

His testing questions and his intense gaze, which seemed capable of piercing through her every inner thought, were suffocatingly frightening and difficult to bear.

Just as her thoughts were becoming a tangled mess of how to answer—

“Don’t tell me you still want to stay here?”

His low, dry voice, stripped of all laughter, felt like it was carving straight into her heart.

It was a question loaded with meaning. In this entire world, there were likely only two people who fully understood the intent behind his words.

That night of confusion.

That night when things difficult to describe had coalesced and poured down upon them.

That night she had endured and survived.

Oscar was speaking of that night.

The eyes of the two people who shared that night locked in the air.

“Han Seo-ah.”

Oscar trapped her with those chilling blue eyes of his.

“Do you realize that without you, I cannot open the vault?”

“…….”

“Do you also realize you had no reason to listen to talk of being a courtesan?”

“…….”

She could only part her lips, unable to offer any answer, which seemed to provoke Oscar’s anger.

Watching Seo-ah, Oscar gave a thin laugh before running a hand through his damp hair and standing up. He then approached the woman standing several paces away.

Despite his command to come closer, she stood so far away; despite the fact that her pale face turned even whiter the closer he got, why on earth was she holding out like this?

A cruel suspicion clawed at his throat.

Just one step.

Stopping just a single step away from her, Oscar tilted his head, his tongue sharp as a blade.

“Or….”

Last night, beyond the brown eyes he had faced at such close range, things had been crumbling.

He intended to grind those ruins into dust until nothing remained.

“Did you enjoy it?”

He felt her breath, which carried the scent of greenery, come to a dead stop.

The woman, who didn’t even blink, bit her lip again as if it were a habit.

Even while he had clung to her all night, tearing through her insides, she had endured exactly like this. She had held on and on, biting her lip with all her strength until blood finally pooled.

But this time, he intended to make it impossible for her to endure. Oscar smiled with a devastating handsomeness.

“Or should I pay you each time we do it?”

Oscar was certain of his victory.

“If you want the same for last night, just say the word. I’ll pay you handsomely.”

It was impossible not to know that he had completely shattered the last remaining piece of this suspicious, naive woman. He could see her transparent brown eyes turning dark and hollow.

Oscar straightened his tilted head with a cruel smile.

The abyss they had tumbled into together had been quite a sight, but that was all.

Yes. That was it.

“What kind of place do you like? The forest? The sea? Or… a valley?”

“Just choose. I have estates everywhere.”

After whispering affectionately, he turned away from the woman who could only stare with wide eyes, unable to stop the rising tears. Or rather, he tried to turn away.

“…If it wasn’t…”

The voice that escaped from between her gritted lips was as thin as the breath she exhaled. A voice as fine as a single thread of silk pierced Oscar’s ears, shattering his certainty of victory.

The tedious sound of rain grew distant to Oscar.

“…What?”

The woman’s injured lips moved, and then she bit down on them once more.

And then, what?

The mask of affection dropped from Oscar’s face. In an instant, he grabbed the stranger’s pale cheek. He pressed his thumb against the lips that had been gnawed into a mess throughout the night and spat out his words.

“Don’t make me laugh.”

Large, round tears hung precariously on the edge of her lower lids before finally falling. Unable to form a path, the droplets fell directly onto the back of Oscar’s hand.

“When you looked like you didn’t know what to do with yourself out of sheer hatred all night.”

Blood finally seeped from the lips crushed under his thumb.

The deep red blood spreading beneath his thumb touched the demon etched somewhere deep within Oscar.

Having had to climb the tower with ruins on his back, he had no mercy. Aside from the fact that he didn’t know what mercy was because he had never received it, his circumstances were too harsh for him to carry mercy while ascending the tower clutching those ruins.

A path that had been wretched and filthy.

On that path, he had never left behind even a grain-sized sprout of anxiety; if he absolutely had to leave one, he always prepared two or three layers of safety measures. He was thorough to the point of obsession.

And yet, a sprout of anxiety that he would have normally crushed without a shred of mercy was now beneath his hand.

Crush it.

So it can never climb up again. So it can never shake him again.

Completely, this time.

It was the moment Oscar applied strength to his fingertips.

His blue eyes, boiling with all sorts of foul emotions, shifted to the side.

“…….”

A hand with no stiffness or curve rose up. With those rounded, pink fingertips, surely she would try to crush a flower or something.

But those fingertips, as if catching a firefly, gently took hold of the hand that was trying to crush her bloodied lips. Those pink fingertips that looked as though they should only touch flowers wrapped around the back of his thick, scar-covered hand.

“If….”

Then, a very small voice was heard, and Oscar’s gaze, which had been fixed on her slender fingers, was drawn up.

Even the inner voice telling him to crush the sprout of anxiety so it could never rise again faded away along with the sound of the rain.

“If it wasn’t unpleasant….”

Seo-ah slowly raised her eyes.

Deep blue eyes, clear enough to see the bottom.

In those blue eyes, she found herself looking as disheveled as she had last night, and she found him shaking just as much as she was.

Her voice trembled.

She loathed herself for this.

“If you didn’t hate it….”

Because she couldn’t bear to see her own face reflected in his sea-blue eyes, she eventually dropped her gaze.

“May I… stay by Your Excellency’s side?”

Clinging to the hand that would one day seize her throat, she begged him to let her stay beside him.

She whispered it in nonsensical words—that she would use up this wretched life for him when the time came, so please, do not send her away.

Seo-ah, who had to stay here no matter what she had to do, felt an unbearable disgust for herself.

A silence followed, as if filled with sharp thorns. With every short second that passed, the thorny silence seemed to pierce her skin.

Seo-ah didn’t even realize she wasn’t breathing. She merely endured the pricking thorns while waiting for his answer, when a dry laugh leaked from the lips of the man who loomed over her.

Letting out a laugh that sounded like both a sigh and a sneer, he shook his hand free from Seo-ah’s grasp. The very idea that he had been ‘held’ was absurd to begin with.

He turned his back on Seo-ah.

Running a hand through his hair, he walked to the desk and picked up a cigarette. The sound of the lighter was unusually loud, and he simply smoked in silence.

Acrid smoke drifted into the space where the thorny silence had lingered.

Seo-ah stared with a precarious gaze at the back of the man who did nothing but smoke. Her hands, which had tried to enclose his, had grown colder than when she first entered the room, and her mind felt empty, as if every function except for perceiving the man before her had ceased.

It was then that Oscar, his back still turned to her, spoke.