Chapter 17

Still… as long as I don’t let his instincts go dull, as long as living with me doesn’t turn him into some fragile greenhouse flower who weeps over autumn leaves—then keeping him warm for a year or two shouldn’t kill him, right?

“Forget it,” I said, rising to my feet and snatching the plastic pharmacy bag from his hand. “Go pack your things.”

His family’s crumbling villa sat less than a five-minute walk back up the slope. I pointed my chin toward the top of the alley.

“I said go pack your bag. You’ve got fifteen minutes on the clock.”

Startled, Gyu-hwa blinked up at me, frozen in the middle of the lane as if trying to decipher a foreign language.

“Fourteen minutes, fifty-eight seconds,” I announced, tapping the face of my wristwatch. “Fifty-seven. Fifty-six…”

Before I reached fifty-four, the boy spun on his heel and bolted up the hill, his worn sneakers sending sheets of puddle water flying.

Even at a grown man’s brisk march, the round trip alone took nearly ten minutes, yet in less than eight, Gyu-hwa came sprinting back down the alley clutching his worldly possessions: a single faded, non-woven promotional tote bag smudged with grime.

Panting hard, he stopped in front of me. “Why did you tell me to pack…?”

“Come live at my place.”

His dark eyes flew wide, and the tote bag slipped from his slack fingers, hitting the wet asphalt with a soft thud. Caught off guard by the sheer scale of his shock, I rubbed the back of my neck.

“Look, if you’d rather have your own space, I can scrape together a deposit for a room somewhere nearby and you can stay—”

“Can we go right now?” he blurted out, snatching the bag off the ground before I could finish the sentence.

“Ahem.” Clearing my throat to hide a grin, I nodded and crouched under the streetlamp, unzipping the top of his tote bag to check what he had brought.

“My father was passed out on the dirt in the yard,” Gyu-hwa noted quietly from above me. “He couldn’t even move.”

Naturally—that was the only reason I had let the kid run back there unescorted. With a shattered hand and cracked ribs, that bastard couldn’t have swatted a cockroach tonight, let alone raised a fist to his son.

“He was still breathing, though, right?”

“I didn’t check.”

“That’s my boy.”

“…And earlier, I wasn’t barking at you because I was lonely, hyung.”

Pausing with my hand inside the tote bag, I tilted my head back to look at him. “Yes, you were. You were yapping your head off, practically begging me to look at you and take care of you.”

To a proud kid like him, having his rawest need laid bare under a streetlamp probably felt like a mortifying defeat. I refused to let him believe that.

“There’s nothing shameful about it,” I said firmly. “At your age, you’re supposed to want someone in your corner. You didn’t do a damn thing wrong, Gyu-hwa. The adults who left you alone until you had to bare your teeth just to say you were lonely are the ones who ought to be ashamed.”

Turning back to the bag, I dug all the way to the bottom. Not that I had expected much, but there wasn’t a single textbook, notebook, or pencil case inside. Lifting a brow, I gave the hem of his damp trousers a light tug.

“Hey. What kind of middle schooler doesn’t own a single pencil?”

“Don’t you have pens at your house, hyung?”

“Why would a bachelor pad have school supplies?”

“What about books?”

“Left them in my locker at school,” he replied in a low, gravelly murmur.

Figures. His talent for rendering a grown man speechless was already fully formed at thirteen. Fishing a crumpled pack of cigarettes and a plastic lighter from my pocket, I thumbed a flame to the tip of a cigarette and motioned toward the tote bag with my chin.

“What about your wardrobe? Is this seriously everything you own?”

“Yes.”

Two threadbare T-shirts, a couple of pairs of faded underwear, three pairs of thin socks, and the battered canvas backpack he wore to school—that was the sum total of thirteen-year-old Ji Gyu-hwa’s life. Even the windbreaker clinging to his shoulders right now was an autumn shell thin as paper. Winter was already biting at our noses, and while I had nagged him about dressing warmer for weeks, that bastard of a father hadn’t bought the boy a single padded coat. I really should have broken his other hand while I was at it.

Sighing, I swept my fingers across the bottom seam of the tote bag one last time and felt a stiff rectangle of glossy paper. Pulling it into the light, I found a faded studio photograph: a family portrait taken when Gyu-hwa was five or six years old. In the frame, his father looked clean-shaven, warm, and whole, smiling down at a bright-eyed little boy who bore no trace of the guarded stray standing beside me tonight.

“Keep the photo,” I said, holding it out to him. “The rest of these rags are going in the trash. I’ll buy you a whole new wardrobe tomorrow.”

When he didn’t take the picture right away, I glanced up—and realized he wasn’t looking at the photograph at all. His dark eyes were fixed intently on my bare jawline, where I had hitched the bottom hem of my wet balaclava up to my cheekbones to keep my cigarette dry.

“You told me you had a burn scar,” Gyu-hwa said slowly.

“I do.”

“The skin on your jaw is completely clean.”

Should I just rip the damn thing off and be done with it? Now that I was moving him into my apartment, what was the point of clinging to this scrap of black cloth? Hadn’t I already blown the timeline to smithereens the moment I crushed his father’s hand?

“You meant it when you said I’m living with you starting tonight, right?” he asked.

“Every word.”

“Are you seriously planning to wear that mask inside your own house the entire time we live together?”

“…Yeah.”

Shit. That one-in-a-million sliver of a chance still had me by the throat. Even if pulling Ji Gyu-hwa out of that house rewrote his entire adolescence—even if I turned him into the happiest kid on Hwaryeong-do—part of my brain still clung to the delusion that as long as he never saw my bare face, the future timeline might somehow stitch itself back together without a paradox.

If Lieutenant Ji Gyu-hwa were standing here right now, he would have laughed in my face and pointed out that since he had lived under his father’s roof until his eighteenth birthday in the original history, the timeline was already shattered beyond repair. Trying to prevent a time paradox with a half-face balaclava at this point was like trying to blot out the noon sun with the palm of my hand. Still, as long as the kid never saw my features, I could at least lie to myself that the sky was dark because my hand was in the way.

I wished the universe came with a heads-up display—a neat little gauge in the corner of my vision showing whether my timeline-paradox meter was sitting at thirty-eight percent, ninety-nine percent, or already flashing GAME OVER in neon red.

“You’re really committed to the bit, aren’t you?” Gyu-hwa clicked his tongue, looking thoroughly exasperated.

Honestly, I couldn’t even argue with him. Sleeping and eating with a cloth over my mouth in my own home was going to be a royal pain in the ass; winter was one thing, but by next July I’d be suffocating in my own sweat. Still, six hundred and sixteen days amounted to less than two years, and a few months had already ticked off the clock. Whatever happened later, I wasn’t leaving this kid in that hellhole for another night.

Turning my head aside before exhaling a plume of smoke, I tapped the family photograph against his chest until he slipped it into his jacket pocket. He glanced down at the tote bag in my hand, then over at the green metal clothing-donation bin sitting beside the alley wall.

“Are we really throwing my clothes away?”

“Every last thread.”

“…”

Given how naturally suspicious he was, he probably half-expected a neighborhood loafer like me to dump his only shirts in the bin and stiff him when morning came. Yet after a beat, Gyu-hwa scoffed at my hesitation, took the tote bag from my grip, and shoved the entire bundle of worn clothes through the metal chute of the donation bin without looking back.

Watching him dust off his palms and step back toward me, I realized the wind was carrying my cigarette smoke straight into his face. Growing boys didn’t need secondhand nicotine.

“Take two steps back,” I said, waving him off. “This stuff stinks.”

Gyu-hwa’s brow twitched. “Does it smell worse than you usually do?”

“…”

Wait—do I smell? Stubbing the cigarette out against the sole of my boot, I lifted my arm and buried my nose in the crook of my jacket sleeve. Nothing but crisp mountain laundry detergent. The little brat had played me with a completely straight face.

“Let’s go home,” I muttered, dropping a heavy hand onto the crown of his head and ruffling his bristly hair. “We’ll hit the stores first thing in the morning.”

Though his mouth remained set in a sullen pout, he didn’t duck away from my palm, leaning almost imperceptibly into the warmth like a feral alley cat that had finally decided not to scratch.

“Let’s grab ice cream at the corner mart on the way back,” I added.

“…Chocolate,” he murmured after a moment.

“Too bad. I’m getting chocolate.”

“Why can’t we both get chocolate?”

“Because two civilized men order different flavors and trade bites so they can enjoy a balanced nutritional profile.”

“Then you get strawberry, hyung. I’ll take chocolate.”

“Nope. I’m the adult paying, so I get chocolate and you get strawberry.”

Gyu-hwa let out a dry breath. “Fine. I’ll eat strawberry.”

“Changed my mind. I’m taking strawberry.”

He shot me the deadpan, narrow-eyed stare of a Tibetan sand fox—clearly deciding I wasn’t worth the oxygen required to reply—and marched ahead down the slick pavement. Watching the back of his neck, I couldn’t help grinning beneath my mask. In my timeline, if I had pulled a routine that childish on Lieutenant Ji Gyu-hwa, he would have stared through me like a pane of glass or asked if I had suffered a head injury. Seeing annoyance flicker so plainly across his young face felt like a small miracle.

What a cute little punk. Even if the future version of him was a six-foot-five reaper who walked through blood without blinking, the boy walking beside me tonight was just a thirteen-year-old kid.

“When the men at the agency said you’d gone out on a dangerous expedition…” Gyu-hwa’s quiet voice drifted back over the sound of our footsteps. “I was worried. I’m glad you came home safe, hyung.”

Just as I had thrown away my non-interference vows over a paper target at the shooting range, the boy had forgiven weeks of silence the instant I walked back through the rain alive. The game was already over, and we had both lost. I couldn’t keep my hands off his life anymore, and this kid wasn’t Jaguar yet—just a boy who deserved to know what a warm bed, a full stomach, and ordinary happiness felt like before the world tried to turn him into a weapon.

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