Chapter 18

At the crack of dawn the next morning, I marched him down to the largest household goods emporium in the district. My original plan had been to pick up two or three sets of thermal underwear, a padded winter coat, and a toothbrush just to tide him over until the weekend, but the moment I saw the discount tags—five thousand won for a fleece shirt, ten thousand for lined trousers—something broke loose in my brain and I started sweeping shelves like a third-generation chaebol heir buying out a boutique.

By the time the cashier finished ringing up the mountain of socks, hoodies, sweatpants, towels, bath supplies, and fleece-lined slippers piled on the counter, the receipt looked long enough to paper a wall. Handing over a wad of bills with a dazed blink, I loaded Gyu-hwa’s arms with bulging paper shopping bags and promised we would order higher-end brands online or take a bus into the city proper over the weekend.

He gave me only a brief, polite nod of thanks, yet for the entire walk down the street, he couldn’t stop dipping his chin to peek inside the bags, his fingers rustling through the crisp new fabric tags every ten paces. Watching the tips of his ears turn pink gave me ten times more satisfaction than any speech of gratitude ever could.

“You realize you’re in deep trouble now, right?” I said, slinging my arm lazily around his shoulders.

He glanced up at me with a silent question in his eyes.

“You’ve officially been sold into indentured servitude, kid. Starting today, you’re on the hook for laundry, sweeping, mopping, and dish duty at my apartment.”

I half-expected him to crack one of those rare, crooked smirks of his, but instead he simply narrowed his eyes as if to ask why I was stating the obvious. Clearly, he didn’t realize I was joking.

“You also have to take out the food-waste bin every night,” I pressed on, “and walk on my back whenever my shoulders get stiff from slaving away to support us.”

“Okay.”

“And you know I have a sweet tooth. Whenever the fridge runs low on chocolate milk, it’s your job to keep it fully stocked.”

“Do you need me to hold the carton and feed it to you while I’m at it?”

“No, just poke the straw through the foil for me.”

That finally broke his solemnity. Pressing his lips tightly together until they puckered like a dried jujube to keep a laugh from escaping, Gyu-hwa looked every inch the ordinary thirteen-year-old schoolboy he was meant to be. So he really does know how to smile like this.

“I’ll earn money as soon as I’m older,” he said earnestly, clutching the paper bags to his chest. “I’ll pay you back for every won.”

“With six hundred percent compound interest.”

“Fine. Take my whole paycheck.”

“Man, teasing you is like punching a sandbag—zero bounce.” Ruffling his stiff hair, I glanced down the street at the morning restaurant signs lighting up for the lunch crowd. If I wanted to collect six hundred percent interest on my investment, I needed to pack some meat onto his ribs first.

Spotting a butcher-style barbecue restaurant with a giant white banner proclaiming:

I steered him inside by the shoulder and claimed a corner booth.

As the server lowered a blazing charcoal brazier into the center of our table, Gyu-hwa flinched slightly from the wave of heat, then fixed his gaze on the black cloth still covering the bottom half of my face.

“Did you seriously sleep with that mask on last night?” he asked. “And are you planning to keep doing it?”

Up until yesterday, I had stripped the balaclava off the second I stepped inside my front door, but starting last night, I had locked my bedroom door from the inside before turning in.

“Slept in it like a baby,” I lied smoothly, picking up the heavy brass tongs. “And I’ll be wearing it to bed every night from here on out. A burglar could carry me out feet-first and I wouldn’t even wake up.”

“…”

Giving up on me entirely, Gyu-hwa slumped back against the booth seat and stared down at the raw marbled beef with the resigned expression of an overfed goldfish. Even before I said a word, he had already pulled open the utensil drawer and neatly laid out my spoon and chopsticks on a folded paper napkin—a small, automatic courtesy that made me feel like a remarkably successful guardian.

“Ji Gyu-hwa, listen—”

“Hyung.”

We spoke on the exact same beat. When he paused and looked across the grill at me, I motioned with the tongs. “Go ahead.”

“I know it sounds rich coming from me,” he said seriously, “but going forward, you shouldn’t just follow strangers or invite them into your life the way you did yesterday.”

I blinked at him, wondering if our scripts had gotten swapped, before he closed his eyes for a long, pained beat and opened them again. I knew that look intimately. Growing up, I had possessed a rare talent for causing the kind of spectacular trouble that drove both my staunchly atheist father and my drill instructors to clasp their hands in prayer; that slow, deliberate blink was the exact expression every commanding officer I’d ever had wore three seconds before their blood pressure ruptured a vessel.

“Wait—weren’t you the one who blindly followed a stranger home last night?” I protested. “What if I’d been a human trafficker or some lunatic looking for free child labor, huh? Who packs a bag in eight minutes and moves in with a guy whose face they haven’t even seen?”

Gyu-hwa’s lips curved into the serene, pitying smile of a veteran monk counseling a hopeless fool.

“Hyung, you’re the one who needs to be careful,” he said evenly. “Just because I happen to be a decent kid doesn’t mean the next stray delinquent you pick up off the street won’t rob you blind, stab you in the back, and leave you with a criminal record. If you have zero eye for judging character, at least practice basic self-preservation.”

“Hey—I’d honestly prefer it if you just yelled at me.”

Where the hell did a seventh grader learn to flay a grown man alive without raising his voice? Had the adult Jaguar been keeping a tongue this venomous locked behind his teeth the whole time? What a terrifying little sociopath.

“…Last night, you went to bed leaving an entire envelope of cash wages sitting right on top of the living room dresser,” Gyu-hwa added quietly. “Please stop trusting people so easily, hyung.”

“Who says I trust people?” I countered, flipping a sizzling strip of sirloin across the grate. “I trust you.”

Had I really left my pay envelope lying out in the open? Well, probably. It wasn’t like Ji Gyu-hwa would ever steal a coin that wasn’t his—and even if he had emptied the whole envelope and run off to buy snacks, I wouldn’t have cared anyway. I didn’t trust humanity; I trusted the man I knew he would become.

“Look out, the fat’s catching fire,” I said quickly, clacking the tongs to change the subject. “Beef turns into shoe leather if you overcook it. Here—eat while it’s hot.”

Dropping three juicy, medium-rare slices straight onto his rice bowl, I braced for another lecture, but the boy mercifully let the topic drop and picked up his chopsticks. He chewed a piece slowly, his eyes widening by a fraction.

“…It’s really good.”

“Told you. Hanwoo doesn’t miss.”

“It must be expensive, though.”

At thirteen, he had no way of knowing how the mercenary economy worked, of course, but licensed creature hunters pulled in small fortunes. Even working off the books at a bottom-rung dispatch agency on a backwater island, a Special Operations Task Force operator trained to hunt both aberrant monsters and armed fanatics could clear in a single subterranean sweep what an ordinary office worker made in half a year. Guys who retired from our battalion regularly got poached by tier-one private military corporations for astronomical retainers—though not a single man in my unit stayed in uniform for the paycheck. No amount of money balanced the scales when the price of admission was your own casket.

“Quit worrying about my wallet and keep chewing,” I said, signaling the server for another bowl of steamed rice. “You’ll ruin your rhythm if the meat gets cold.”

Taking a long gulp of ice water, Gyu-hwa nodded and polished off the second bowl of rice down to the last grain. Watching his hollow cheeks fill out over the grill, I felt a warm, ridiculous surge of paternal pride. See? I knew it. Whether at thirteen or twenty-nine, Ji Gyu-hwa had the appetite of an apex predator.

* * *

Starting in middle school, mandatory defense classes ran even through the winter break, and the final assessment drill before the spring semester was scheduled for Monday morning.

At six-thirty on the dot, before the shrill chime of his alarm could ring a second time, Gyu-hwa’s eyes snapped open. At his age, a hundred alarms couldn’t have pried me out of my comforter on a winter morning, yet true to the soldier in his bones, the boy killed the alarm in a split second, padded silently into the hallway so he wouldn’t wake me, and shut the bathroom door without a click.

Unbeknownst to him, I had already been awake for an hour doing push-ups and core sets on my bedroom floor. Dragging a towel across my sweat-slick chest and forehead, I pulled a fresh half-mask over my nose and mouth and stepped out into the kitchen just as Gyu-hwa emerged from the bathroom in his clean fleece loungewear.

“Sit down and eat before you head out,” I said, turning on the gas stove.

He hesitated by the refrigerator. “I don’t usually eat breakfast.”

Plenty of people claimed they weren’t breakfast eaters simply because no one had ever stood at a stove at dawn to cook a hot meal for them; very few kids actually hated waking up to warm food.

“Then you can start building the habit today,” I said over my shoulder.

Within fifteen minutes, I set a steaming bowl of fluffy egg-drop soup and a porcelain bowl of rice topped with seasoned tuna and mayonnaise in front of him, flanked by store-bought kimchi and two side dishes the soup-restaurant auntie had packed for us over the weekend. Pulling out a chair without a sound, Gyu-hwa sat with his knees together and bowed his head slightly over the table.

“…Thank you for the meal.”

Yet after murmuring the grace, he didn’t reach for his spoon, sitting motionless with his hands in his lap as if keeping vigil before an ancestral altar. Turning from the counter with a stainless-steel mixing basin heaped with my own triple portion of tuna-mayo rice, I realized he was waiting for me to take the first bite.

“Dig in,” I said, gesturing with my spoon. “Why are you staring at it?”

“I can’t.”

Did this little punk just refuse a direct order?

“It’s bad manners to lift your spoon before the elder at the table starts eating,” he explained earnestly.

Seeing not a trace of sarcasm on his freshly scrubbed face, I let out a quiet laugh, sat down across from him, and shoveled a massive bite into my mouth under the lifted hem of my mask. “Relax, kid—I’m not some old-school patriarch who’s going to flip the table over chopstick etiquette. Eat.”

Only then did he pick up his spoon. Chewing every mouthful methodically with his lips neatly closed, he kept stealing bewildered glances at the mixing basin in front of me, which was roughly the size of his own skull.

“When’s your next live-fire evaluation?” I asked between bites.

“We don’t have marksmanship today—the next graded shoot is right at the start of the spring term in March.”

“What’s on the schedule this morning, then?”

“Just the physical fitness evaluation.”

“You’ve always aced the physicals, haven’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Go wipe the floor with the whole grade.”

“Yes.”

Polishing off every drop of egg soup and setting his gleaming bowls neatly together, Gyu-hwa stood from the table and bowed slightly. “Thank you for breakfast.”

“Have a good day at school,” I said automatically.

From the morning I started seventh grade right up until the day I boarded the enlistment train at eighteen, my father had stood in our kitchen every dawn without fail to make sure I left the house with a hot meal in my stomach, sending me out the gate with those exact words once I slung my backpack over my shoulders. I wasn’t Ji Gyu-hwa’s father, nor even his legal guardian—at best, I was a strange cousin playing older brother—yet people inevitably echo the love they were raised on, and the phrase had slipped off my tongue before I even thought about it.

Halfway into lacing his worn sneakers by the front door, Gyu-hwa froze. His right hand hovered stiffly over the brass doorknob for two full seconds before turning the latch.

“…Yes,” he murmured, his voice muffled as he slipped out into the corridor without looking back.

Left alone in the quiet entryway, I rubbed the back of my neck, my ears burning slightly. Knowing Ji Gyu-hwa’s stoic temperament, domestic send-offs like that probably struck him as intolerably sappy. Still, watching the door click shut behind him, the warmth lingering in the kitchen didn’t feel half bad.

* * *