“Ah…”
“I’m on my way now, so tell him to run. Far away. Out of Seoul.”
Fear surged through her.
Hyungnam clutched the receiver in both hands and looked around wildly, but the call had already gone dead.
The police are coming? To our house?
Her heart pounded. For a second she thought she could hear a siren somewhere, like an auditory hallucination.
Hyungnam rushed to the floor-to-ceiling window and looked out past the garden. The instant she saw the flashing emergency lights far down the slope, her breath caught.
Fuck. It wasn’t my imagination.
If Park Shineok was telling the truth, the police had to be coming for Choi Eunhyung.
She remembered something he had said jokingly while they were drinking.
That’s what lackeys do. They get arrested in your place, go to the police station in your place, go to prison in your place.
Then was he about to get arrested and take the fall for something Park Shineok had ordered him to do—negligent homicide, murder, whatever it was—even if Eunhyung had been the one who actually carried it out?
The old man and Choi Eunhyung might both be equally bad men, but to Hyungnam they were entirely different.
If the old man had destroyed even the purity of her past, Choi Eunhyung was someone who made her look forward, however vaguely, to a future.
So if anyone was going to be arrested, it should be Park Shineok.
Choi Eunhyung could not be taken.
She could not lose the promise made by the man who had carried her on his back, taught her the flower-card game, stopped her from dying, and linked his little finger with hers.
“…”
But unlike her father, who had spent his life drifting from gambling table to gambling table before finally croaking, Hyungnam considered herself a fairly law-abiding citizen.
She had never even jaywalked. She might have become a maid in a gangster’s house for money, but she did not make a living by breaking the law.
And that was why the little finger that had reached into her life so abruptly, damaging her sense of right and wrong, frightened her.
The last shriveled grain of conscience she had left was violently resisting.
Her mouth went dry.
If someone killed a person, of course they should be arrested.
But isn’t the promise I’m looking forward to murder too?
Eunhyung came out of the room after changing into comfortable clothes. He glanced at Hyungnam standing stiffly by the living-room window, then approached with the light-footed ease of a cat.
“What’re you doing?”
Stopping a couple of steps away, Eunhyung swept his bangs back. He even rose onto his toes to peer into the garden, as though wondering whether there was something worth seeing outside.
The fresh scent of his cologne rushed over her, mixed with the warmth of his body.
To keep herself from going blank over the smell, Hyungnam briefly held her breath. She focused on the throbbing at her temples and steeled herself.
Right. If you did something wrong, you should pay for it. Even if you’re Choi Eunhyung.
Blink. Blink.
The bulb above her head continued flickering.
Like the approaching police car.
Police car. Police…
Hyungnam’s tightly closed lips parted slightly, and a hot breath escaped.
At the same instant, there was a sharp pop overhead, like a final cry, and the bulb went out.
“Run.”
What the hell am I saying?
A belated gasp slipped through Hyungnam’s lips, as startled by her own words as anyone.
Eunhyung merely stood there at an angle, blinking slowly, without any particular reaction.
Hyungnam realized she had grabbed both his arms desperately.
“The police are coming.”
“…”
“Run. Hurry.”
Trembling with tension, Hyungnam repeated Park Shineok’s message almost word for word.
Eunhyung looked down at her as though observing her fear, then let out a breathy laugh.
“And here I thought it was something serious.”
“Manager.”
His calm reaction only made Hyungnam more frantic, and her voice rose.
Unlike Park Shineok, who had sounded utterly flustered, Choi Eunhyung acted as though something long expected had finally arrived.
Hyungnam swallowed painfully against her dry throat and shoved at his shoulder with both palms.
He was heavy, yet he yielded surprisingly easily to her pushing.
“They’re already down there, coming up from the alley. There’s a back door in the storage room, so…”
“Maid.”
“Yes?”
“You that worried about your brother?”
At the laughter in his voice, Hyungnam’s face crumpled like paper.
He’s joking again.
Every minute, every second, felt like an eternity when he should have been using every one of them to get farther away, and he was really going to treat even being arrested like a joke?
You don’t even know what I’m destroying inside myself just to hope you get away safely!
The siren suddenly grew louder, as though the police car had entered the mouth of the alley.
And the man they were coming for remained utterly detached.
He almost looked as though he had been waiting to be arrested.
Or perhaps as though he were waiting for her answer.
There was no more time to expect anything from a man whose thoughts she could never read.
So Hyungnam decided to do what she could.
“Yes, brother.”
“…”
“I don’t want you to get arrested.”
Because he was the sort of man who would not move until he had wrung that word out of her.
I don’t want you arrested.
I want you to run.
At least until Park Shineok comes back.
That bastard I want dead this very second has connections high up in the police. He’ll find some way to get you out before you have to take the full punishment.
You held on to me while I was sinking and practically threatened me into staying alive.
If I have to watch you get hauled off by the police like some common criminal…
Then I won’t be able to believe in that promise at all.
“Ah.”
Just then, a piercing squeal rang out from the direction of the mansion’s front gate, as though someone had switched on a loudspeaker incorrectly.
Both of them turned their heads toward the garden.
The ground sloped too low for them to see clearly, but plainclothes officers had surrounded the house like a fence.
“Uh, attention. As of eighteen hundred hours, 473-X Pyeongchangdong is surrounded.”
“…”
“Suspect Choi Eunhyung, surrender immediately.”
The color drained from Hyungnam’s face.
It was already too late even to escape through the back door.
One of the officers was hammering the bell like a madman.
Screech. Screech.
The doorbell sounded less like a bell than an alarm about to cross some invisible threshold—which was to say it was meaningless as communication and merely unbearable to the ears.
“What do we… where…”
“Maid.”
“Ah—ah! Come with me!”
The realization struck Hyungnam a beat late, like lightning.
She grabbed Eunhyung by the wrist and started running.
Fortunately, he followed without resistance.
They ended up in Hyungnam’s low-ceilinged room.
She planted Eunhyung in the middle of it, then grunted as she dragged the wardrobe away from the wall.
It was so old and battered, practically dust itself, that she had barely registered its existence.
“There’s an attic behind it.”
Once the wardrobe was moved aside, a section of wallpaper faded at a different rate appeared, along with a concealed door.
A rusty handle hung almost decoratively from the door where it met the ceiling.
It was just large enough for a small woman to pass through without much trouble.
Hyungnam opened it without hesitation.
Stale, dust-heavy air drifted out, and beyond it appeared a crudely built staircase pieced together from planks and scraps of wood.
The steps led up into the space between the ceiling and roof, used to store old belongings.
“There’s tons of old junk up there. Suitcases, boxes of documents, all kinds of things.”
“…”
“Hide between them.”
Bang bang bang.
Someone was pounding on the front door now.
Hyungnam barely swallowed the scream threatening to burst out and hurriedly pushed Eunhyung toward the opening.
“Just until the chairman comes back. The chairman favors you. He won’t just let them take you away.”
“Hyungnam.”
“You killed people at Taereung. More than one.”
Her voice broke badly.
She had heard enough from Chilgu to have a vague idea of how much damage had been done there.
And Choi Eunhyung, she had been told, had practically flown through the place.
There was no way he would be questioned and casually released.
Bang bang bang.
The front door shook under another round of pounding.
Hyungnam struggled to steady her convulsively trembling body and pushed Eunhyung toward the attic again.
This time he offered no resistance and put one foot on the threshold.
“When the police leave, come right back down. Then run.”
“…”
“When we meet again… I’ll make you hand-torn dumplings again.”
She felt ridiculous offering something so trivial as though it were a reward.
But stranger still was Choi Eunhyung’s reaction.
He looked at Hyungnam more seriously than ever before.
His black eyes trembled as though he were a knight receiving treasure from a queen.
Crash.
Glass shattered somewhere outside.
There was no time left for even one more sentence.
Eunhyung put strength into his legs and started climbing the stairs.
Just as Hyungnam grabbed the handle to close the attic door, his low voice came from above.
“…Don’t call me brother anymore.”
Hyungnam shut the attic door without answering.
First he tells me to call him that, then he tells me not to. What the hell am I supposed to do when our lives are on the line? Is he sulking because I shoved him into a dusty attic or something?
Then again, that was very much like Choi Eunhyung, the man who ate snacks with chopsticks.
It was better that he complain.
If he had climbed up there looking dejected while being chased, her heart would only have felt heavier.
Hyungnam braced her back against the heavy wardrobe and, grunting, shoved it back into place.
The instant it was restored to its original position, the commotion outside grew louder.
“Search the place!”
“Where the hell is Choi Eunhyung!”
Hyungnam was so frightened she felt as though she might burst into tears at any second.
She drew a deep breath and rapidly began taking off her clothes.
Pants.
Top.
Bra.
Panties.
Gooseflesh rose over her skin as the cold air hit her all at once, but she gritted her teeth and endured it.
She also steeled herself for the humiliation that would follow.
If it buys time, who cares if they see me naked? This body’s worth shit anyway. The old man’s seen it dozens of times.
Hyungnam took another deep breath.
“Choi Eunhyung!”
“Aaaah!”
“What the hell?”
The door flew open.
What the police officer found on the other side was a naked white body.
Hyungnam screamed at the top of her lungs as though she had planned it all along and hurled her discarded clothes wildly toward the doorway.
Startled by her outburst, the officer slammed the door shut again.
Hyungnam immediately began sobbing loudly for effect.
How dare someone come in while she was changing, she wailed. Her life as an unmarried girl was ruined.
She cried at the top of her lungs.
Until Choi Eunhyung had found a place in the attic and hidden himself.
Until the rustling he made, like a rat in the walls, disappeared beneath the sound of her crying.