“Sorry, I just saw the missed call now… I just have the ashtrays left to wipe down and I’m done.”
Yi-won sniffled and listened to the noise filtering through the speaker. It was fairly loud on the other end. Low voices seemed to be spitting out rough words.
Guests arriving at the island this late at night were rare, so Yi-won readjusted his grip on his phone and asked.
“Is something going on? Should I come inside?”
— No. Yi-won, don’t come here — go straight to Unsol-chae. You know where it is, right? Get moving.
“Yeah, I know where it is, but—”
— There’ll be someone there when you arrive. They’ll tell you what to do, just follow their lead. Understood? Be careful. Okay?
“……Ah, yeah. I will.”
— Okay, hurry up. I’m hanging up.
Unsol-chae……
Yi-won murmured softly after the call ended.
“So it wasn’t just an abandoned villa after all……?”
He only knew what little he’d heard secondhand — Yi-won didn’t actually know much about Unsol-chae. He’d never seen Choi Seong-jae in person, and he couldn’t remember ever hearing, as he got older, that the lights had ever been on there.
The message was simple: make his way to a place that had sat empty for quite a long time. That could only mean the owner was coming.
“There’s no time for this. Ha…… it’s cold.”
Yi-won gave his shoulders a brief shudder and quickly gathered up the ashtrays. Forgetting sleep entirely, he scrubbed them clean with a soapy sponge. He gripped a dry towel tightly in his reddened, half-frozen hands. The motion of wiping each ashtray dry — not leaving a single drop of water — was neat and practiced. Only after enough time had passed that his shoulders and bent back had gone stiff did he let himself breathe.
“Ugh…… almost done.”
The ashtrays, now clean without a trace of grime or spit, were going back up onto the trolley one by one. He figured if he put them away in the guest room storage quickly and ran at full speed, it would take roughly twenty minutes to reach Unsol-chae. In slippers, shaving time off that estimate wouldn’t be easy.
Maybe I’d be better off running barefoot. But what if they tear on the way? If I had to choose between my feet and the slippers, it’d be the slippers, right? I can just wash my feet.
Yi-won was moving the last ashtray and reaching into his pocket for his phone to check the time when it happened.
“Kk.”
“Wah!”
CRASH—!!
Startled by the sudden presence, the ashtray slipped from Yi-won’s hand. It hit the cement floor with a sharp crack and shattered, sending fragments flying in every direction.
“……!”
He couldn’t even manage a proper scream — Yi-won froze rigid, swallowing down a strangled sound. The drops of blood running down his foot felt less real than the figure standing before him. His gaze traveled upward, and upward, until it landed on the face of a man he’d never seen before.
“Ah…….”
Yi-won forgot that he needed to drop his eyes quickly. Meeting a guest’s gaze so freely wasn’t proper. He’d been told until he was sick of hearing it that he had to be careful with every move he made — there was no telling what might go wrong.
He stared at the man, completely transfixed. Even as the faint smirk faded from his lips, Yi-won kept watching, without even a trace of fear.
Wow……
His mouth fell open on its own. The man, who said nothing about startling him and simply went on smoking in silence, was letting Yi-won’s gaze rest on him without resistance.
Neatly swept-back hair, strong-lined features, dark pupils that seemed to catch the light even more with each slow blink. This person was different from the alphas who usually came to Cheongun Island. He could feel it instinctively. Something that couldn’t quite be put into words.
The coat that fell to his knees — if Yi-won had worn it, it would have dragged along the floor. He looks good. Like the breath that left Yi-won’s own mouth, the man exhaled a thicker, hazier stream of cigarette smoke.
“Why’d you stop talking.”
The low, unhurried voice snapped him back to his senses.
“Huh? Oh, that…….”
“I wasn’t trying to listen.”
Because of this. The man ground the burnt-down cigarette stub out against the floor. Whether it was the guest rooms or any other space indoors, smoking inside was allowed anywhere — so why had he come all the way out here……. Yi-won tilted his head.
“You’re bleeding.”
“…….”
“Must hurt.”
What the man indicated with a slight tip of his chin was Yi-won’s foot, close to the ground. Following his indifferent gaze downward, Yi-won found red blood soaking all of his toes. Only then did the pain hit.
But it wasn’t treatment that came to mind first when the man spoke — it was something else entirely.
Yi-won, don’t come here — go straight to Unsol-chae. You know where it is, right? Get moving.
Right. He’d completely forgotten. I don’t have time for this……!
“Um…… I’m kind of in a hurry right now. I’m sorry! I’ll be heading out!”
The slap of his slippers against the ground was loud as he bolted. A long gaze trailed after him, and a red flame caught the end of a cigarette once more.
Choi Woo-hyuk let out a short laugh at the fading sound of slippers.
He hadn’t meant to, but he’d overheard the boy chattering away to himself like a sleepless sparrow. He should have pretended he hadn’t noticed and turned back the way he came. But he couldn’t let it go.
He’d made himself known in the end — and now the image of himself, having startled a small pair of wings into frantic flight, struck him as faintly ridiculous.
For whatever reason, a smile had crossed his face — a face that was indifferent to everything and everyone — and that was genuinely rare. Over something as small as this. And because of a young boy he’d never laid eyes on before, in a place he’d never been.
“Just a kid…….”
Although he had inherited Cheongun Island, Choi Woo-hyuk had had absolutely no involvement with the island from the time of Choi Seong-jae’s death — after years of suffering from a chronic illness — up until now.
Which meant his knowledge of how the island was run and what purpose it served was only slightly more than what the people who visited the island would know.
The boy he’d just seen was on this island too, so he was likely in the same position as those who’d been sold here to cover debts. Choi Woo-hyuk estimated that Jeong Yi-won, whom he’d caught only a brief glimpse of, was at most around eighteen years old.
It was a reasonable misread — Yi-won’s face and build were small and slight enough that he didn’t look like an adult who had finished growing. It could be a cruel reality, and a pitiful fate. Choi Woo-hyuk wrapped up his misreading of and sympathy for Jeong Yi-won at that.
“…….”
That brief flicker of interest disappeared without leaving a trace, like cigarette smoke. Choi Woo-hyuk smoked on, unmoved.
“So you’d come all the way out here.”
Hearing a familiar voice, Choi Woo-hyuk turned around. The river wind blowing in from all directions scattered even the other man’s breath into wisps in every direction.
“Why.”
His earlobes were bright red from the cold — he must have been searching for him for a while. Getting that cold over something like this. Choi Woo-hyuk let out a short, humorless exhale.
“I’ve been looking for you quite a while, sir.”
“I’d have found my way back in on my own.”
“Everyone’s waiting with their food untouched, Executive Director.”
Polite in tone, but there was a hint of something almost like a grumble underneath it. The subordinate who stood beside him seemed to be wordlessly asking why he’d made them go through all this trouble by not coming inside.
“Did you really come all the way out here just to smoke, sir. I kept hoping it wasn’t that as I walked over.”
“My feet just carried me here.”
The subordinate narrowed his eyes and looked around, then turned to Choi Woo-hyuk with an expression that said he genuinely didn’t understand. No matter how his feet might have wandered, there was no reason to end up at the waste collection point where every manner of filth and garbage accumulated.
“To have a look around.”
“Here, sir?”
“Yeah. Did I ever have time to air myself out?”
“…….”
“Clear the smell out too, while I’m at it.”
The stench of Manila’s humid air — as heavy as the accumulated exhaustion — still seemed to linger at the edges of his nose.
Over the past two years, the total time he’d spent in Korea barely added up to a few months — he’d been living abroad for the rest of it. He’d come straight from Manila to Cheongun Island without a moment to rest, and right up until he boarded the plane, he had killed two men, put them in drums, and burned them.
