Chapter 26

The visceral disgust Jaguar harbored toward separatist terrorists was an open secret not just within Charlie-2, but across the entire Special Operations Task Force. What chilled me to the bone the first time I assisted him in the sub-basement, however, wasn’t the ferocity of his hatred—it was the terrifying, clockwork detachment with which Lieutenant Ji Gyu-hwa switched it on and off.

He took zero sadistic pleasure in tearing human beings apart. Even when the subject strapped to the steel chair was a cult fanatic who had abducted elementary school children to feed them alive to an aberrant nest, the exact second the woman’s broken mouth spilled the grid coordinates he needed, Ji Gyu-hwa set his pliers down on the surgical tray.

Wheezing through shattered teeth, the woman forced her swollen eyelids open a crack. “…Divine Father, Divine Mother, Divine Son… My two suns… forgive this sinner…”

Without bothering to shove the gag back into her mouth to silence her delirious prayer, Ji Gyu-hwa methodically wiped his instruments and aligned them by size. Even through heavy black nitrile gloves, dark clots of blood and shreds of tissue clung to his knuckles.

“I’ll pack up the tray, sir,” I said quickly.

Through the eye-slits of his black balaclava, his dark gaze pivoted toward me, lingered on my face for a single beat, and slid away. Once he pushed through the heavy soundproof door into the outer scrub room, I hastily gathered the steel tray and followed at his heels.

Click-thud. The pneumatic seal locked behind us, slicing off the woman’s rasping chant like a guillotine.

Ripping my damp balaclava over my head, I sucked a lungful of freezing basement air straight into my windpipe. Across the tiled scrub room, having already peeled off his disposable rubber apron and bloody gloves, Ji Gyu-hwa turned the brass faucet handle all the way open. Shhhhhhh. Ice water hammered into the deep stainless-steel basin. Though an identical sink sat open right beside him, my limbs felt too leaden to move; stripping off my own waterproof smock, I dropped onto a folding metal chair against the wall and tipped my head back against the cold concrete. In the foggy mirror above the faucets, my eyes met Ji Gyu-hwa’s.

“I believe I told you there was no need for you to sit in today,” he said, his low baritone cutting cleanly through the rush of the tap.

“Putting it off was only going to make the first time harder, sir.”

No sane operator volunteered for the interrogation block. According to Park Chan, rookies were normally dragged in to hold down subjects during their very first month on the team, which meant the older sergeants had quietly shielded me from rotation for nearly half a year because I was the baby of the unit. This morning, I had been the one to put my foot down and insist on going in. Enjoying the perks of being the youngest around the mess table was one thing, but letting my teammates shoulder the dirtiest work alone while I kept my hands clean felt less like a privilege and more like cowardice.

At least I hadn’t bolted out the door and puked my guts into the corridor drain the way Park Chan reportedly had on his first day—that was my solitary scrap of pride.

“If you need to throw up, use the basin,” Ji Gyu-hwa said, jerking his chin toward the second sink.

“I’m fine, sir.”

Judging by the chalk-white face staring back at me from the mirror, though, I probably looked every bit as green as Park Chan had. After three hours of breathing aerosolized blood and listening to fingernails tear, a cold, nauseating question kept circling my skull: Is this really the only way? Are we any different from the monsters we hunt?

Yet I bit my tongue before a single word could escape. Lieutenant Ji Gyu-hwa had been walking into this concrete box for years before I ever arrived, staining his hands with ten times more blood than the rest of us combined. Asking the man who carried the heaviest cross in the battalion to absolve my rookie conscience would have been unforgivable. I’d just follow Hong Kwon-jin’s advice tonight: buy three green bottles of soju on the way back to the barracks and pour them straight down my throat until the room stopped spinning.

“You’d better be fine,” Ji Gyu-hwa said flatly, pulling a brown paper towel from the dispenser. “Seeing as I did all the actual work.”

A dry, helpless huff escaped my lips. He wasn’t wrong. All I had done for three hours was brace my knees against a thrashing shoulder and hold a strap tight; he was the one who had wielded the iron and extracted the coordinates. Sitting here like some tragic martyr when my hands were barely dirty was laughable.

“I was the one who put blood on my hands, and I was the one who got the intel,” he continued, crumpling the damp paper towel and dropping it into the pedal bin. “I could have handled the whole session alone. You were zero help in there, Seon Na-won.”

Such blatant self-aggrandizement was so wildly out of character for Jaguar that my trembling eyelids snapped wide. Stepping directly in front of my chair, he looked down at me with eyes like black glass.

“On your feet.”

“Yes, sir!”

Muscle memory hauled me upright to rigid attention before my brain even caught up. In the dead, soundproofed silence of the sub-basement corridor, I stared straight ahead at his collarbone, waiting for the reprimand to fall.

Instead, a faint, almost imperceptible sigh brushed the air between us.

“Wash your face and go get some sleep.”

“Yes, sir.”

Without another word, Ji Gyu-hwa pivoted on his heel and walked out the heavy steel door. Left alone in the scrub room, I stepped over to the basin, twisted the cold tap wide open, and plunged both hands and my face into water frigid enough to make my teeth ache. Only as the icy stream ran down my collar and shocked my sluggish brain awake did the true meaning of his parting insult hit me like a fist to the sternum.

—You were zero help in there. I did all the work.

He hadn’t been bragging. He had been handing me an indulgence—a blanket absolution I hadn’t dared grant myself.

—You didn’t torture anyone today, kid. Your commanding officer gave the order and held the tools; you just stood by the chair.

How had a man who never spoke a superfluous word heard the cowardly, self-serving whisper hiding at the very bottom of my subconscious? Bypassing every noble standard my father had raised me on, Ji Gyu-hwa had reached straight into the dark and handed the terrified twenty-three-year-old inside me the exact excuse he was starving to hear—while quietly shoveling my share of the sin onto his own back.

Bracing both hands on the rim of the sink, I hung my head as my stomach pitched violently.

What a cheap, cowardly sleight of hand. And what excuse was I going to tell myself the day my turn came to pick up the pliers? Oh, I pulled the nails cleaner than the last guy, so my soul’s still clean?

“Hoo…” Wiping my dripping jaw with my sleeve, I straightened my spine in the mirror. Never again would I walk out of this room looking like a kicked dog and force that man to carry my conscience on top of his own.

When I pushed through the heavy steel door into the squad ready room upstairs, several pairs of eyes flicked cautiously toward my face before pretending to busy themselves with rifle maintenance—everyone except Park Chan, who strolled straight over with an obnoxious grin plastered from ear to ear.

“You puked, didn’t you?”

“Did not.”

“Look at your face—you totally puked!”

“I told you, I didn’t.”

Narrowing his eyes in suspicion, Park Chan leaned in and sniffed loudly at my collar like a bloodhound. “Huh. Really is just copper and bleach. What gives? Jaguar just walked through and told the first sergeant to take your name off the basement rotation permanently—said you were dead weight in the room.”

“Look at our lieutenant playing favorites again,” Choi Ho-gyeong chuckled from the sofa, tossing a foil-wrapped chocolate square into his mouth.

Park Chan bristled instantly. “Getting benched for being useless is favoritism? If the lieutenant favors him any harder, he’ll shoot him in the leg!”

“And that zero-EQ brain of yours is the exact reason you’re still a dateless virgin at twenty-seven, you blind bastard,” Choi Ho-gyeong shot back, lobbing a spare chocolate wrapper at Park Chan’s forehead.

“Who’s a virgin?! I’ve had plenty of experience!”

“Notice how the punk doesn’t deny never having a girlfriend, though,” Hong Kwon-jin snickered, reaching over to ruffle my damp hair with a meaty palm. “Can’t blame the boss for going soft on our youngest. Kid’s easy on the eyes and easy to have around.”

“It’s not going soft, it’s blatant nepotism!” Choi Ho-gyeong groaned, rolling over on the couch in disgust. “God, when are you illiterate apes gonna learn basic vocabulary?”

“Rather than favoritism…” Shoving Park Chan’s elbow off my shoulder, I forced a crooked grin onto my face. “Pretty sure I just got benched for whining too much.”

“Aha! So you really were dead weight!” Choi Ho-gyeong sat right back up, pointing an accusing finger at me. “Don’t tell me you pulled the classic rookie breakdown in the box? Sniffle, Lieutenant, am I doing a good job? Waaah!”

“Wait a minute, Sergeant Choi—that’s literally word-for-word what Park Chan did on his first day!” Hong Kwon-jin roared.

Park Chan’s ears turned beet red. “…I never said that.”

“Bullshit you didn’t! First you decorated the lieutenant’s boots with your lunch, and then you sat on the curb bawling—Hic, is this why I passed selection, hic, what if their faces haunt my dreams, mommy—!”

As the ready room exploded with howling laughter and flying cushions, I stretched the corners of my mouth into a practiced smile and laughed along—until the raucous voices of my squadmates began to echo hollowly, receding into a long, dark tunnel.

Why couldn’t I have laughed like this downstairs in the scrub room? Why did I have to sit there with a ghost’s face and remind a man who lived in hell every day that what he was doing wasn’t normal?

“Hyung.”

A warm, trembling breath brushed against my ear, followed by a quiet voice calling my title. Like a diver yanked upward by an iron hook, I tore free from the dream and bolted upright on the mattress.