Chapter 20

Two weeks later, I stood at rigid parade rest in front of Lieutenant Ji Gyu-hwa’s desk.

“You heard Noh Seong-yeop tested positive for an incurable infection, didn’t you?” Ji Gyu-hwa asked, not looking up from the medical discharge transfer order on his blotter.

It was the first time I had ever been summoned alone into his office. Dropping my chin toward my collarbone, I arranged my features into a mask of profound patriotic grief.

“As an operator of the Special Operations Task Force sworn to serve the Republic with unwavering loyalty and moral rectitude—”

“Cut the crap.”

My opening statement hadn’t survived four seconds.

“He’s screaming up and down the infirmary ward that you set him up,” Ji Gyu-hwa said, lifting his dark, bottomless gaze to my face.

What a shameless bastard. Noh Seong-yeop crawled through so many back-alley brothels every weekend that he had zero actual proof which establishment had rotted his groin; after his initial excuses about contaminated toilet seats and lab errors failed to halt his mandatory medical discharge under special-forces readiness regulations, he had simply thrown a dart at my name on his way out the gate. And frankly, was it my fault if my memory had slipped and left out a tiny health advisory when mentioning the place? Nobody forced him to drop his trousers for cash.

“Me, sir?” I widened my eyes into the pure, unblemished innocence of a choirboy who had slipped on a stray banana peel—a look that had fooled every human being on earth except my mother. “I don’t even know what street that place is on, sir.”

“Did you tip him off or not?”

To my quiet astonishment, Lieutenant Ji Gyu-hwa didn’t buy my choirboy face for a fraction of a second. Over the next thirty seconds of dead silence, I cycled through my entire repertoire—from solemn military denial (“I truly have no knowledge of the matter, sir”) to wide-eyed country simpleton (“Dunno nothin’ about that, sir”) to breezy amnesia—and every single act bounced right off his granite stare.

Finally, Ji Gyu-hwa’s brow furrowed with genuine annoyance. “…Did you go in there with him?”

That stripped the playfulness right out of my expression. “I wouldn’t set foot in a sewer like that if you held a gun to my head, sir. You saw my blood panel this morning, didn’t you?”

Thanks to Noh Seong-yeop’s outbreak, the entire battalion had been hauled into the infirmary for mandatory screening at dawn, and my chart had come back spotless.

“Get tested again in thirty days and put the lab slip on my desk,” Ji Gyu-hwa ordered flatly.

Gladly, you ungrateful bastard. Here I had sacrificed my pride playing sycophant to a piece of trash for two weeks just to scrub a slanderer out of his battalion, and my beloved team leader was treating me like a suspected John. Truly, a subordinate’s devotion to his commanding officer was a tragic, one-way street.

Saluting sharply, I pivoted toward the door—only to pause when his low voice caught me at the threshold.

“Seon Na-won.”

“Sir.”

“Don’t push your luck.”

Turning my head over my shoulder, I blinked. There was no anger in his dark eyes—and unless the fluorescent office light was playing tricks on me, one corner of Jaguar’s stone-carved mouth was tilted upward by a millimeter, as if he knew the exact conversation outside the armory that had signed Noh Seong-yeop’s discharge papers.

A heavy jolt of the van’s suspension snapped me back to the present. Outside the window, the rusted gates of the dispatch agency fell behind as the other contractors climbed into the bench seats, chuckling at my silence.

“Look at the kid sulking over the window!” the burly veteran teased, nudging my boot. “Still sore we ragged on your little brother?”

“Hmph.”

“Haha, what a prickly little hedgehog!”

Resting my temple against the cold vibrating glass, I let their laughter wash past me. Back in the battalion, no matter what vile rumors small men whispered behind his back, Ji Gyu-hwa had walked straight ahead without sparing them a glance, ready to burn his own flesh, his teammates, and his soul to ash if it meant ending the cult’s war. Perhaps that relentless, solitary gravity was the very reason I couldn’t stomach hearing anyone—then or now—drag his name through the dirt.

By the time the subjugation sweep wrapped up that afternoon and I dragged my boots back up the stairs to our apartment, every muscle in my frame felt like wet lead. On paper, we had finished an hour early, yet months of juggling construction sites, night watches, and live-combat dispatches without a day off had finally cashed the check on my nervous system. Even a special-forces constitution had a ceiling.

Stumbling through the empty apartment without bothering to strip off my dusty field clothes or my balaclava, I locked my bedroom door from the inside and collapsed face-down onto the bare linoleum floor. I was too fastidious to crawl under clean bedding in work clothes reeking of cordite and mire, and too bone-tired to unroll a spare mat. Already, a deep, violent chill was rattling through my marrow, warning me that the adrenaline crash was bringing a fever on its heels.

Just twenty minutes, I told myself, watching the brass lock pin on the bedroom doorknob blur before my heavy eyelids. Just a quick nap before the kid gets home from school…

I dropped into sleep like a stone into a well.

In my line of work, a sixth sense isn’t superstition—it’s the autonomic alarm bell of a nervous system honed by years of sleeping with a rifle against your ribs. Normally, the faintest creak of a floorboard three rooms away was enough to bring me upright with a blade in my hand. That my perimeter sensors failed to fire that evening meant one of two things: either I had never truly reached Jaguar’s tier as an operator, or the quiet domestic peace of this little apartment had softened my instincts to mush.

“…Ugh.”

A cool, damp weight pressing against my burning forehead dragged me up from the dark. Instinctively reaching up to yank the foreign object away, my fingers closed around a folded wet washcloth—and my knuckles brushed the bare, fever-hot skin of my own cheek.

“You’re burning up,” a quiet voice said right beside my ear. “You were groaning in your sleep.”

“Hey.”

Adrenaline blasted through the fog in my skull, hauling me upright so fast my vision spun black. My limbs weighed a ton and sweat plastered my shirt to my ribs, but none of that mattered.

“What did you just do?” I rasped, my hands flying frantically to my mouth, my jaw, my throat. Bare skin. All of it bare. Looking down in horror, I spotted my black half-balaclava lying neatly folded on the floor beside Ji Gyu-hwa’s knee.

Dammit. All those months of suffocating in that cloth—gone in five seconds.

Snatching up the mask, I crushed the damp fabric in my fist as a wave of hollow vertigo washed over me. “Did you pull this off my face?”

“Your fever was spiking,” Gyu-hwa answered calmly, wringing out a second washcloth over a plastic basin.

“Don’t give me excuses!”

The half-mask only covered me from the bridge of the nose down; my forehead had been completely exposed from the start. Wiping my brow with a cold towel didn’t require touching the balaclava at all.

“You sounded like you couldn’t breathe through the cloth,” he said.

“I told you never to touch it!” My voice cracked raw across the small room. “I locked the door and told you I was keeping my face covered! Did you think I was wearing a mask under my own roof just to play games with you?!”

What do I do now? Shit—what the hell do I do now?

Scrubbing both palms roughly down my cheeks as if the black fabric might magically materialize under my fingers, I stared at the brass doorknob. I had definitely locked it before passing out—which meant the kid had picked the privacy lock with a coin or a chopstick after hearing me groan and peeled the mask right off my face.

Through the fever pounding behind my temples, my very first meeting with Lieutenant Ji Gyu-hwa flashed before my eyes in razor-sharp detail.

It had been six months after I passed selection into the Special Operations Task Force. One of Charlie-2’s veteran operators had been abruptly reassigned to headquarters, and I was pulled from another team to fill the slot as their newest—and youngest—member. Having heard every terrifying legend about Jaguar since basic training, I stood at attention on the tarmac with my hands clasped behind my back, my spine rigid as an iron rod as heavy combat boots crunched across the gravel behind me.

Don’t give him a single excuse to write you off, I had repeated to myself, swallowing against a dry throat.

When the footsteps halted directly behind my shoulder and a low voice called my name, I executed a textbook pivot and raised my eyes. Standing an arm’s length away, Ji Gyu-hwa towered over me so tall that my line of sight landed squarely on his collarbone and the stern cut of his jaw. Yet in the split second my eyes flicked up to meet his—had I imagined it? Before his features settled into their famed, icy stillness, the faintest shadow of a smile seemed to have indented the corner of his mouth.

Whether that fleeting phantom of warmth had thrown me off balance or the sheer predatory presence of the man had overwhelmed my senses, my pulse had stumbled. Tall, broad-shouldered, and lethal as the big cat whose callsign he bore, he looked at me with dark eyes that seemed to glow amber in the dusk.

“How old are you?” he had asked, every trace of expression gone.

“Twenty-three, sir!”

Studying my face with a slight, skeptical furrow of his brow, Lieutenant Ji Gyu-hwa had delivered his very first assessment of me:

“You’ve still got peach fuzz on your chin.”

To a twenty-three-year-old who had bled through fast-track promotions and hellish selection trials just to earn the same patch as men ten years his senior, my age was both my fiercest pride and my rawest nerve. Make a single mistake on an op, and people blamed my youth; pull off a miracle, and they shrugged it off as the bare minimum expected of a prodigy. And in that first meeting, Lieutenant Ji Gyu-hwa had looked straight into my uncovered face and seen nothing more than an overly young rookie.

Which means he didn’t know me.

Unless the Ji Gyu-hwa of the future had gone blind before my transfer, there was zero chance a man with his photographic memory could have lived under the same roof with me for nearly two years in middle school, stared directly at my bare face, and greeted me twelve years later with a remark about peach fuzz.

The mad physicist’s warning had come true. The timeline had officially fractured into a paradox.

“You were burning up and groaning inside,” Gyu-hwa’s voice trembled slightly, pulling me back into the dim bedroom. “I knocked and called your name over and over, and when you didn’t answer… I was scared you were suffocating, hyung.”

Dragging in a ragged breath, I shoved myself off the floor and wrenched the bedroom door open. My head was spinning too hard to think inside these four walls; I needed cold air before I said something I couldn’t take back. Yet the instant my hand touched the front door latch in the entryway, footsteps scrambled frantically behind me and a lean body wedged itself forcibly between my hip and the doorframe.

“What are you doing?” I asked.