CH 99

I buried my face in my hands then coldly replied, “Take your hands off of me. I’ll never go with you.”

“Hah!” Hyehyun scoffed then sighed, “Snap out of it, Haeseo.”

At that moment, there was a frigid glint in his eyes. The hand that was on my back yanked the hair on the back of my head.

“Urgh!” I grimaced at the sensation of hairs being ripped out of my scalp.

Hyehyun shoved his face close to mine and gritted his teeth. “I don’t think you understand your situation, but there’s nobody left besides us.”

Then, he grabbed the back of my neck. His grip was quite strong. Obviously, he was doing this as a warning. If he had been any more agitated, he would have gone for my collar, not my nape—just like the time he punched my stomach without hesitation when I acted against him.

“Shouldn’t you be thankful that someone else is looking out for you when it’s hard to take care of yourself here? How much longer do you think I’ll keep watching over you? You should know to behave when I’m being nice—”

“You ask if it’s nice to grovel on the ground?” I interrupted him mid-sentence and laughed. Seogeung was busy doubting others while he also did a bunch of suspect things. Hyehyun must have felt something from the way I stared at him as he swallowed. The bobbing of his Adam’s apple was disgusting. I whispered, “…Is that what you felt like when you killed Yeonseon?”

“Uh, what did you just say?” Hyehyun tilted his head.

I whipped out the knife from my pocket and jabbed it into Hyehyun’s arm. I stabbed him deeply, retracted the blade, and red blood poured out. Specks of blood rained on my face, my clothes, and the sofa.

“Argh!” Hyehyun screamed and stumbled backward, holding onto his arm. The disdain in his face, the way he was looking down on me, was long gone and replaced by fear. He stuttered out my name. He looked between his arm and the knife in my hands.

“S-stop with the bad joke. What do you think you’re doing?” Hyehyun’s face was contorted in pain, yet he tried to smile at me. “D-don’t tell me that the person who was going around killing everyone was… you? It wasn’t you, right? I trusted you so much. Why are you doing this to me?”

I shook off the blood on the back of my hand and got up from the sofa. Hyehyun backstepped. I followed his movements with my eyes. Then, I reiterated words that I had said before, yet Hyehyun had never pointed out.

He had blatantly ignored them, to be specific.

“Don’t try to change the subject. Why did you do it? What wrong did Yeonseon do to you? Why did you kill Yeonseon?” I asked.

“Y-Yeonseon was… Why would I kill him?!” Hyehyun spat out, and then the thing clinging onto his back twitched grossly. His headache must have worsened because he yelped and grabbed his head. His eyes were glued to the bloodied knife as he pleaded, “I was as saddened as you were after Yeonseon died. Do you know how much I suffered back then? Yet how could you accuse me of killing him? You didn’t even show up to his funeral—don’t you think you’re speaking thoughtlessly?”

As his rambling continued, the lump of meat on his back started to expand like leavening dough before bursting, in cycles. The putrid fumes of the decomposing corpse seeped out of the broken skin, spreading in all directions and polluting the room with an acrid and iron-tinged odor.

In my eyes, that lump looked furious. “He” ground the few teeth left in “his” gums, and “his” deformed and yellow eyes glared at Hyehyun.

Oh, Yeonseon.

As I watched the lump of meat, I pictured the scene of Yeonseon’s accident that I was unable to witness.

A large truck crashed into a car in the opposite lane. There was a stark difference in weight in this fight. The small sedan had no possibility of withstanding that force. The car was crumpled under the wheels of the truck; it was crushed into such a thin foil that it was horrendous to think that it once held two passengers. That was why there was so much talk about how the passengers’ identities were extremely difficult to figure out.

I also remembered when Yeonseon talked to Hyehyun coldly for the first time.

“You didn’t do it on purpose, right?” It was when Hyehyun left me alone with Yeonseon in the car.

“No. God, no. The bathroom just happened to be full when I went,” Hyehyun had said.

I foolishly believed that the bathroom had a lot of people. I didn’t know why Yeonseon asked that back then. That was back when I could pass off the situation as Yeonseon overreacting to Hyehyun’s mistake.

Yeonseon, oh, Yeonseon.