“But back then he was at least cute.”

Now he was a head taller than me......

If I looked closely, it was the same eyes, nose, and mouth, but the atmosphere was completely different overall.

For one thing, the childlike side was gone, and the pressure from his long, lean build played a part. If the pheromone that resembled fresh trees and leather had once felt absurdly overblown, it now fit perfectly, as if custom-made.

He didn’t seem like the kid I had known. It was unfamiliar and strange.

Still, if I had no intention of ever seeing him again, it was better for him to feel unfamiliar.

I tossed the emptied takeaway cup into the park trash can. Sitting around outside aimlessly for too long was not something I could keep doing.

Under the warm midday sun, I left the park and went home at my own pace.

I solved a simple late lunch by making a sandwich with bread, a fried egg, and a slice of ham, then thoroughly cleaned the house I had neglected for days. I had thought I had done nothing at home but breathe, but a whole pile of trash for sorting had come out.

It happened to be garbage collection time, so I went down with both hands full of trash bags, put them out in front of the shop, exchanged a greeting with Aunt Saetbyeol as she came out at the same time, and then went into the alley beside the building to check it.

If I left it alone too long, shameless people would sneakily dump their trash there, so I had to look over it periodically.

After I went fairly deep inside, I found a couple of skewers and paper cups thrown away by neighborhood kids.

Tsk, tsk. I clicked my tongue and picked up the trash, and at that moment a dull pain struck the back of my neck, where I had let my guard down.

“Ugh......!”

Through the shadowed, flickering field of vision, a vague human shape loomed. Before I knew it, my body was crumpled into a black, narrow place.

Feeling the floor sway beneath me, I lost consciousness without even a chance to resist. It was a kidnapping.

* * *

“Ugh......”

The back of my neck where I had been hit throbbed. The wheels carrying me kept rubbing endlessly against the rough stone floor. Every time the vibration rolled through, my brain seemed to slosh around, making me nauseous.

Rubbing my dizzy head, I groped around the place I was trapped in. It felt like a large carrier. Seeing a little light seep through the gap in the zipper, not much time seemed to have passed.

Soon, the carrier carrying my body came to a stop somewhere.

“Madam, we have arrived.”

“Come in.”

The moment I heard that voice, I knew exactly where I had been kidnapped to.

The familiar floral scent that brushed my nose, the sensation of incense candles, and that voice that had been branded into my ears for years. Beomyeong’s mother, Madam Yi Heeyoung.

The carrier was lifted left and right and carried across the space. The men, careless as they were, laid the carrier on its side and pulled the zipper wide open.

The instant I raised my head, the light from a sparkling chandelier poured down on me. The brightness made me groan, and when I wriggled, the men lifted my arms and forcibly sat me up.

Madam Yi folded the magazine she had been reading and put it down on the table with a thud. I raised my head at the sound and met her eyes.

Madam Yi glared at me with a smiling face. The corners of her mouth held a faint smile, but the look in her eyes was extremely savage, as if she would devour me.

Madam Yi soon opened her mouth in a flat tone.

“I called you because I wanted to talk.”

“......Hah.”

She sat elegantly on an antique sofa that looked well over a hundred years old, while I, my arms held by strangers, had been dumped carelessly onto the carrier and was now sitting down badly. It was not a setup suited to a peaceful word like “talk.”

“Do you talk like this?”

“You’re saying something new.”

It was definitely not the first time I had experienced this. I had been through it a few times, so I wasn’t especially surprised. But being used to it did not mean it wasn’t scary. Every time I was kidnapped, I was frightened in a new and fresh way.

Still, this was better. I had questions I wanted to ask her too.

When I showed discomfort toward the men holding my arms, they immediately let go and stepped back. I had thought they were handling me roughly on purpose to intimidate me, but it seemed they had just been holding me to help me up.

“If you had just called me, I would have come.”

At my words, she snorted and pointed to the sofa beside her.

“Of course. Do you think I don’t know you? Still, I thought you’d run away with your tail between your legs, but you didn’t. That did surprise me a little.”

“How was I supposed to run away?”

I crawled over, almost on my hands and knees, and sat in the diagonally indicated seat she had told me to take.

Once our eye levels were similar, the pressure was a little less overwhelming than when I had been sprawled on the floor. When I had been kneeling, I had been so frightened that I could barely breathe, but now I could at least get a little air.

But since I hadn’t experienced something like this in so long, it was hard to judge how angry Madam Yi was right now. After gauging her mood, I carefully opened my mouth.

“Madam, please give me some water.”

Madam Yi’s carefully drawn eyebrows twitched unpleasantly.

“You don’t even call me Mother anymore?”

“If I did, you’d hate it.”

Madam Yi, snorting through her nose, gestured to the servant standing by the doorway. The summoned servant placed a large water jug and a glass on the table and stepped back.

Madam Yi picked up the jug and poured the water herself. And just as it seemed she would hand it to me, the water flew straight into my face.

Splash!

I froze with my hand out, ready to receive the cup. I blinked, and Madam Yi gave a “Hmph!” through her nose, set the glass down with a clack, and wiped her wet hands.

“......No.”

Water dripped heavily from my face, soaked by the water slap.

“If you didn’t want to give it to me, you could have just said so, why......”

Madam Yi had always been difficult to deal with, but while she was scary, she had never been childish or cheap. She was the kind of person who would order bodyguards to throw punches, but would gladly offer a glass of water to the person she had kidnapped herself.

I never thought I’d be subjected to such a childish thing by Madam Yi.

Seeing her snatch someone up and kidnap them outright, she didn’t seem to have changed much at all...... So where in the world had everyone I knew gone in the past five years?

“No, seriously, why are you doing this to me?”

She was the kind of person who would be satisfied and step back if you curled up and held your breath under pressure, so back then I had ignored most of what Beomyeong said, but I had always listened to Madam Yi. No matter how I thought about it, I couldn’t think of a reason she would be burning with enough hostility toward me to refuse me even a glass of water.

“Was it also you who egged Joo Gwansik on? Those thug-like bastards too, you sent them, right? And the knife attack a few days ago was all your order too?”

“Yes. I did it.”

“So why! Don’t tell me you really tried to wipe me out?”

At the moment we faced each other, fierce sparks flew in her eyes. Madam Yi narrowed her eyes sharply as if she were about to claw at me.

“You’re asking because you don’t know?”

“I’m asking because I don’t know!”

I felt like I was going crazy.

“No, when you were sending me off, smiling and even adding extra money for my trouble, when did you change and start doing this! I’ve been living quietly without doing anything stupid!”

With my voice rising, Madam Yi’s voice rose too.

“Because I didn’t know back then!”

“What on earth didn’t you know?”

“Because of you!”

Madam Yi could not hold back her anger and clenched the magazine with a crackle. The thick cover was crushed under her sharp fingernails, wrinkled, and then torn.

Madam Yi shouted with bloodshot eyes.

“Because of you, my son......!”

Bang!

Her words were cut off as the door opened with force. The sound of the doors hitting each other made me flinch and my shoulders tremble. When I turned my gaze, I saw Beomyeong.

He appeared wearing comfortable homewear and pushed aside the bodyguard standing at the door as he entered the reception room.

Beomyeong glanced back and forth between Madam Yi, her face flushed like a demon, and me, who was miserably soaked, and awkwardly scratched the back of his neck.

“Mm...... So this is how it turned out.”

Madam Yi caught her breath and calmly tidied her disheveled hair.

“Beomyeong, why are you here? You haven’t even set foot in the main house.”

“I came to see my honey.”

Beomyeong, with no sense of timing at all, made a shy expression like a groom who had just gotten married yesterday.

The anger Madam Yi had barely forced down shot up to the sky again.

“Who is your honey?”

Madam Yi could not hold back her anger and threw the magazine. The thick magazine brushed past Beomyeong’s shoulder, hit the wall, and fell.

This time, I agreed with Madam Yi too. Who is your honey?

“Mom.”