“I don’t usually let dirty things into my home.”
Dohui gripped the hem of his shirt — long enough to cover his backside and then some — tight in his fist.
“I, I wasn’t dirty.”
“You?”
“Because of you…… I became dirty.”
“Because of you.”
Gong Haejin scoffed for the second time. This one had spent the whole time with fear written all over his face — crying, begging, clinging and pleading to be let go — and then at some point, the look in his eyes had changed.
Was it from the moment he picked up the knife? When he swung it at him, clumsy but burning with blind hatred. It started then. The instant he grabbed a weapon, he looked like a man who had found his purpose.
Gong Haejin found that very much to his liking.
There was no shortage of people who bowed their heads the moment they stood before him, falling over themselves to offer whatever he wanted. But this one — not only did he try to kill him, he made his hatred known with every inch of his body.
“You’re interesting. When I look at you.”
“…….”
“The things you say. Your reactions. The way your eyes blaze with the will to kill even when you’re shaking with fear.”
“…….”
“Did you want to run away?”
“…….”
“Did you think the world would welcome you with open arms if you walked out that door? Is that why you were trying to slip away like a little rat?”
Gong Haejin tilted Dohui’s chin up. When their eyes met without intention, he exhaled a quiet breath over Dohui’s face. The lingering scent of the cigarette he’d just smoked washed over both his cheeks.
“Did you really think I wouldn’t find you?”
Dohui swallowed dryly. Having been caught with every intention laid bare, he felt like anything he said would only provoke the man’s anger. Even so, Dohui no longer wanted to grovel and beg for forgiveness — that pathetic act was behind him.
“I will find you wherever you go. No matter how far you run, you will end up in front of me — right back in this spot.”
“…….”
“There is no way out. Im Dohui.”
I haven’t done anything wrong. This man is the one who’s wrong about everything.
“There it is. Those sharp, defiant eyes again — like a moody little brat.”
“…….”
“Dohui.”
When Gong Haejin’s hand fell away, his chin dropped under its own weight, drained of resistance. A droplet fell from the still-damp ends of his hair.
It looked just like a tear. Thanks to that, he didn’t have to cry. I will survive until the very end. I will make it through. I will go home. He repeated those thoughts without stop. They were his only hope — the one thing keeping him standing in a situation like this.
This man, who has never been put in a position like this, will never understand what I hold onto to endure every single moment.
“You really want to kill me that badly?”
“……You said you’d let me go if you died.”
“That’s right.”
Smart. Gong Haejin laughed low.
If I die, there’ll be no one who gives a damn about a kid like you. No one who’ll bother wondering who killed you. They’ll be too busy tearing into whatever business I leave behind. Interest will die down naturally after that, and you’ll get to live comfortably enough, right? Gong Haejin elaborated.
Dohui bit at the dry skin on his lip with flat teeth. If he just stood here doing nothing, listening to the man talk — he felt the urge to surrender to a kind of fear he had never known before in his life.
“Keep trying. Keep going. Do it until it works. I’m rather looking forward to it.”
“Hk.”
Without warning, his throat was seized. A neck that had been strangled more times than he could count was caught once again in the man’s grip. Whatever brute force this was — Dohui’s heels left the ground. He was gripped by the terror that his head might actually separate from his body.
This man is a disaster. A devil of a bastard. Even as he choked, Dohui stared straight at the man’s throat.
To kill a person in one move——
The throat. Then the solar plexus.
He recited it to himself.
“Ngh…… grk…… hk……”
Before he knew it, only the tips of his big toes were barely grazing the floor. Dohui wrapped both hands around the man’s wrists.
“Good look on your face.”
Refusing to give up deserves some credit.
“That’s enough for today.”
And just like that, the hand released him. The strength drained from his legs instantly and he dropped straight to the floor. One hand clutched at his strangled throat, the other pressed against the ground.
He scrambled away on all fours like an animal, desperate to put distance between himself and the man. His breath hadn’t come back yet — each forced inhale felt like it was tearing his throat open.
“Dohui, shouldn’t you be going to sleep?”
“Don’t——”
He resisted in a voice completely broken — but the man paid no mind and grabbed him by the ankle. Dragged along by that unyielding strength.
***
Perhaps that night had been the last stroke of luck to fall Dohui’s way.
After that, Gong Haejin stopped leaving. Wherever Dohui turned, he was there. Even while sleeping, he could sense the man’s scent. Every now and then, when a breath fell on the top of his head, the chill that ran through him would jolt him awake.
He was home so constantly that it was hard to imagine how he got any work done. Is this what running a business looks like — just coasting along this easily? Something that involved illegal dealings on top of that should mean he’d be moving around constantly. And yet Gong Haejin lived at home with complete ease.
From what Dohui had observed over the past few days, Gong Haejin occasionally took calls — that was the extent of it. And even those were so brief and one-sided that it was nearly impossible to guess what they were about.
Dohui pulled the thick blanket over himself and burrowed underneath. The damp winter chill made him want to stay buried and never come out. More precisely — he had no will to move.
His appetite — the most basic drive for a person to keep living — was nearly gone, and the quality of his sleep had plummeted. The nightmares kept coming. Images of himself, drug-hazed, spreading his legs for strangers and panting like a dog. He could no longer tell whether the memories were distorted or real.
The world had twisted out of shape. Like an endless staircase — no matter how desperately he tried to escape, nothing changed. It was just exhaustion, over and over.
He woke up crying often, or screaming. And every time, Gong Haejin’s sigh would follow. He would roll over, glance at the clock, and sigh again.
When am I supposed to sleep with this going on.
As if he hadn’t been the one to prevent it. Dohui — drenched in cold sweat from the nightmares — would yank the blanket off that mass of muscle and wrap it around himself. He doesn’t even get cold. Why does he even use a blanket.
Balled up like that, a little warmth would build, and exhaustion would finally creep in. The heavy, pressing weight wasn’t unpleasant either. Pathetic — finding comfort in something like that.
Today, thankfully, he woke without incident. He opened his eyes and stepped out to find the table set with food. Gong Haejin had his phone pressed to his ear — mid-call, it seemed — and was already seated. But in front of him, there was no rice, no soup, no utensils — none of the things that should have been there.
He gestured with his eyes toward the seat across from him. Sit down and eat. That was what it meant. Dohui shook his head in refusal. He didn’t want to eat anything given to him by this man.
He took one step and his body shuddered violently from a cold he couldn’t explain. It had been happening often lately. He knew well enough that it was withdrawal. Which was exactly why he rejected everything Gong Haejin offered.
Hold on. Don’t break down. There were times it was so unbearably hard that he couldn’t regulate his emotions at all. He would crash into despair and then surface from it in the span of moments. Cycling through it over and over made him feel like he was losing his mind.
In those stretches, there were moments he wanted nothing more than to go back to how he’d been just days ago. Back to the moment the drugs erased the pain and the rage. But that was the fastest way to destroy himself. And so, every time he felt like he was going to die, the will to survive grew in equal measure.
“Again.”
He couldn’t tell whether it was directed at the person on the other end of the call or at Dohui. Gong Haejin pulled the phone briefly from his ear and leaned back in his chair.
“You’re not going to eat?”
Dohui ignored the saliva pooling in his mouth and shook his head.
“Eat even if you don’t want to.”
Gong Haejin said it plainly, with finality. The man’s voice drifted over intermittently from the other end of the call. Not clear enough to make out the full content. Dohui found himself wondering — Jinho’s whereabouts, the driver he’d said he was going to catch, how all of that was going.
He would burn with rage, pounding at his own chest in frustration — and then the thought would creep in that no matter how unforgivable the crime, no one had the right to judge it that way.
After being tormented by that long enough, when his resolve would crumble, a weak and cowardly thought would surface: maybe it would be better if Jinho never came back to Korea at all. Those formless thoughts rose and drifted without shape.
He put himself through the pointless self-torment of measuring who he hated more. He placed Jinho and Gong Haejin on the same scale and tried to weigh them. And then — how quickly he gave up on even that. He would fist his own hair and tense every muscle in his body, then cry, and when the strength ran out completely, he would fall asleep. If Gong Haejin found him in the middle of it, he’d slap his cheek or grab his shoulder and shake him — forcing that fractured mind back into place by brute intervention.
“Not eating one meal won’t kill me.”
“I’d like it if you obsessed over food the way you obsess over staring at my throat. That’s the only way you’ll outlive me.”
“……I will outlive you, so don’t worry.”
“Hard not to worry, looking at you. My debtor looks like she’s about to fall apart — not an ounce of fight left.”
Out of nowhere, an enormous debt had materialized in both hands. An unimaginable sum — whether it carried interest, how it was meant to be repaid, all the things that should naturally come with any financial arrangement — none of it had been laid out. And yet the man went on invoking this debt arbitrarily, and Dohui found it inefficient to even argue.
But whenever the memory surfaced — of watching life leave someone at those very hands — his legs went weak beneath him. When those hands closed around his throat, he felt the threat to his life in every nerve. Without realizing it, Dohui’s fingers had drifted to his neck, tracing over the deep bruises blooming there. Whether he should be grateful that these thin bones of his bent but didn’t break — he wasn’t sure.
