Chapter 13

Winter arrived on Hwaryeong-do with teeth. Just as I had done every afternoon since our first study session on the supermarket bench, I hopped off the evening bus with the boy and walked him down the dark lane toward his villa, our footsteps crunching in tandem across the frost-stiffened dirt.

A twenty-minute nap against my shoulder on the bus ride back seemed to have recharged Ji Gyu-hwa’s batteries. When a razor-sharp gust of midwinter wind whipped across the open fields, however, my eyes dropped automatically to what he was wearing. It was the dead of winter, yet the boy was still walking around in a thin late-autumn windbreaker thrown over his school hoodie. When I had nagged him about his layers two days ago, he had merely shot back, “Is this supposed to be cold?” and stubbornly showed up in the exact same outfit the next afternoon. Sure, unlike me—a battered twenty-something veteran whose knees and shoulders already ached whenever the barometer dropped—he had youth on his side.

Even so, the gale howling off the sea tonight was another beast entirely, and the boy’s thin shoulders hunched inward on reflex against the chill. Without a word, I unzipped the heavy padded work jacket I wore to my dispatch shifts, peeled it off, and draped it over his back. Swallowed up in the residual heat trapped in the lining, Ji Gyu-hwa blinked and craned his neck to look up at me.

“You’ll freeze, hyung,” he protested, reaching up to pull it off.

“Not as fast as you will. Don’t you own a proper winter parka?”

“I’m fine. Put it back on, hyung.”

“You know what pisses me off more than anything in this world? When a kid talks back to his elders.”

Catching both of his wrists as he tried to shrug out of the sleeves, I effortlessly overpowered his resistance, stuffed his arms through the cuffs, and yanked the front zipper all the way up to his chin. As I straightened up from my crouch, the round crown of his head caught the yellow glow of the streetlamp right below my chin. When I reached out and ruffled his soft, cropped black hair, he didn’t swat my hand away or grumble the way he usually did.

“Come on, let’s jog before we both turn into icicles.”

Shoving my hands deep into my trouser pockets, I broke into a brisk trot down the lane, and the boy’s sneakers pattered nimbly right at my heels.

Icy sleet began spitting from the clouds just as the villa’s concrete wall came into view. Ducking together into the shelter of the ground-floor stairwell, we stamped the slush from our shoes and brushed the half-frozen droplets off our shoulders. Carefully wiping the dampness from the nylon shell of my work jacket with his sleeve, Gyu-hwa unzipped it and held it out to me. Slipping my arms back into the warm lining made me feel like a living human being again.

As I tugged the zipper up my chest, however, the boy didn’t head up the stairs. Keeping his eyes fixed on my fingers, he called out softly, “Hyung.”

“Yeah?”

“…You’re going to keep living here, right?”

I paused, then let out a teasing snort and leaned in to crowd him. “Where’s this coming from all of a sudden? What, you don’t want me going anywhere? Do you like your hyung that much?”

Normally, crowding his space and teasing him like that was guaranteed to make him scowl and shove me away, yet tonight Ji Gyu-hwa didn’t budge an inch. Something about his stillness made my chest tighten.

“Before you showed up, hyung…” he murmured, staring at the concrete between our shoes, “I wasn’t like this.”

“Like what?”

“My days, my head… none of it was like this before.”

“How was it before, then?”

Right up until his next quiet words echoed off the narrow stairwell walls, a playful smile was still lingering on my mouth.

“Before… everything was quiet,” the boy said. “Every day felt just like night.”

Days that felt like night.

I repeated the phrase silently inside my head. The words carried a suffocating weight—not the peaceful hush of a bedroom at midnight, but the dead, airless silence at the bottom of a well, or the held breath of a wounded animal hiding in the dark waiting for the end.

“Did you hate the quiet?” I asked, keeping my voice light.

“No. I liked it. Because when it’s quiet, the only thing I have to listen to is my own heartbeat.”

“Sounds like you were living just the way you wanted, then.”

Pfft. A tiny, humorless breath of a laugh escaped the boy. Even though I understood the grim, aching abyss beneath those days that felt like night, I played dumb, thanking God for the mask hiding the way my mouth had twisted.

“When I’m with you, hyung,” Ji Gyu-hwa said softly, “even the middle of the night feels like broad daylight.”

I wanted to tell him to stop talking right there, but my throat locked up.

“Even after I come home and lie down in the dark, my head won’t go quiet anymore,” he confessed, his voice dropping to a low, halting murmur. “Everything rings with noise—things you said, things we did. I can’t fall asleep. Nothing in my life is the same as it was before you came.”

“Stop,” I breathed under my mask, so faintly it barely stirred the cloth.

“I don’t want you to leave, hyung,” the boy pressed on, his ears burning red in the dim stairwell as he forced the clumsy, desperate words past his pride. “I know there aren’t many good jobs in a backwater like this, but even so, if you could just stay—”

“Stop.”

This time my voice cut clean through the entryway, severing his sentence.

Startled, the boy lifted his head from the cracked concrete floor and met my eyes. In his light brown pupils, washed amber by the overhead bulb, I saw my own reflection staring back—wide eyes above a black mask, the skin around them drained as white as bone.

Young Ji Gyu-hwa’s halting confession hit me with the force of a physical blow. In his own quiet way, the kid was telling me that my barging into his life had shattered the numb shell that kept him safe—and that he had fallen hopelessly in love with the warmth of the ruins.

This is wrong. The realization that this thirteen-year-old boy had anchored his entire emotional weight to me—far deeper than I had ever allowed myself to imagine—made my stomach drop into an abyss. To him, I wasn’t just a friendly neighborhood hyung who bought him pork and taught him how to shoot, nor a passing stranger who would fade into a fond childhood memory in a year or two.

This was a seismic rupture I could no longer ignore by squeezing my eyes shut and whistling past the graveyard. This was the exact temporal interference that dead scientist had warned me about—and I had waded in so deep I could no longer lie to myself. It was a merciless sentence handed down to a coward who had spent months playing house in the past while telling himself everything would work out fine in the end.

“Get upstairs,” I said, my voice cold and flat. “I’m leaving.”

The cement floor of the entryway was webbed with old cracks. Nudging a loose chip of concrete with the toe of his wet sneaker, the boy asked quietly, “Hyung, what’s your phone number?”

“I don’t have a phone. And even if I did, I wouldn’t give it to you.”

His head snapped up, hurt flashing raw across his face. “Why are you acting like this all of a sudden?”

God help me, every instinct in my body screamed to reach out, ruffle his damp hair, and tell him the truth—that in my world, he was the man who had taught me duty, resilience, and what it meant to survive the impossible; that he must never think of himself as a burden; and that being alone right now didn’t mean he was unlovable.

And if I said all that? Then thirteen-year-old Ji Gyu-hwa would pour every last drop of his starved heart into my hands—into the hands of a ghost who was going to evaporate from his world in less than twenty months.

Even if it was cruelly late, I had to sever the knot right now. The Lieutenant Ji Gyu-hwa of my future didn’t trust a living soul. Being betrayed, cast aside, and ultimately abandoned by one more hypocritical adult like me fit seamlessly into the history that forged the cold-blooded Jaguar. Therefore…

“Tomorrow after school,” the boy began, his voice wavering, “at the shooting range, are we—”

“Hey,” I cut in.

He flinched. Looking straight down into his wide, trembling eyes, I spat the words out like iron nails.

“Cut the crap, kid. If you’re that starved for affection, go whine and wag your tail at someone else’s door.”

For a full second, Ji Gyu-hwa stared at me blankly, as if his brain couldn’t parse the Korean.

Thud!

The instant the meaning registered, the boy lunged forward and shoved my chest with both hands.

“Why are you doing this all of a sudden?!” His voice cracked, raw with panic and humiliation. “I… I won’t say stupid, embarrassing things like that anymore, okay?! Is that what you want?!”

“Too late. Go inside.”

“Then what about you, hyung?!”

The face of the boy who had just swallowed every shred of his pride to confess that my presence turned his nights into day twisted with scorching shame and betrayal.

“How are you any different from me?!” he shouted, his chest heaving. “If you didn’t care, why did you look after me, feed me, and teach me every day for months?! You’re the one who’s starved for affection! Or do you just get off on toying with little kids?!”

Throwing his weight forward, Ji Gyu-hwa shoved me a second time. I could have rooted my boots to the floor without budging a millimeter, but instead I let the push carry me backward until my shoulder blades slammed against the concrete wall. Panting raggedly in the freezing entryway, the boy glared up at me with blazing, bloodshot eyes. Even now, bruised and shaking, he was holding the door open a crack—silently begging me to take it back, to tell him it was just another one of my bad jokes.

When I stared back down at him in stone-cold silence, the fragile, wavering plea in his eyes shattered—and hardened into ice.

“…Fucking prick,” he whispered, spitting the curse like venom.

Spinning on his heel, the boy marched up the dark stairwell without looking back.

That was the end of our tutoring sessions.

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