Chapter 43

Looking into her bloodshot, tear-rimmed eyes, Seo Mu-yeong rummaged through his backpack and pulled out an envelope—the cash left over from his stakeout at the shaman academy.

“Please go see a doctor about your eyes, just in case.”

Setting the envelope on the sink, Seo Mu-yeong stepped out of the house. In front of the villa, Choi Yook stood smoking a cigarette. He wore his customary blank expression, yet his mood seemed distinctly foul.

Seo Mu-yeong walked over to him. He had no intention of reporting the tangled drama between the old shaman and her disciples just yet; that could easily wait for later. Still, he needed to clear up a nagging suspicion at once.

“Is it true that Yeongchwi Moneylending paid off the police to falsify the report?”

Catching sight of Seo Mu-yeong, Choi Yook flicked away the lengthening ash of his cigarette.

“It is,” Choi Yook replied. “There’s a guy we keep on the hook—Inspector Kim Jae-cheol.”

Inspector Kim Jae-cheol. Seo Mu-yeong silently committed the name and rank to memory.

“Why didn’t you mention him? That cop could have been useful in searching for the kid.”

“He has to actually produce something to be of any help,” Choi Yook muttered, clicking his tongue with blatant irritation. “When I contacted him six years ago, he started whining right off the bat. Asked if I seriously expected them to keep useful records on a case that was meant to be buried from the start. Then he put on a show of being broke, acting like he’d lived such a fucking upright, impoverished life.”

Seo Mu-yeong leaned in slightly. “And then? Did you give him money?”

“Greed that flares up past forty is an incurable disease; the least I could do was slip him some taxi fare. After that, he cooperated whenever I needed records pulled, but there hasn’t been a single useful lead.”

Given how uncharacteristically talkative he was being, he must have genuinely loathed Kim Jae-cheol. Did they clash because both were men who loved money? Seo Mu-yeong’s eyes brightened with keen interest.

“Did he pocket a lot of cash?”

“All told, probably several tens of millions,” Choi Yook remarked.

Choi Yook tossed out the halfhearted estimate. Tens of millions. For a police officer’s under-the-table income, that was an extraordinary sum.

Yet as the price to bury a human life, it was absurdly meager. Nor would it have been a steep price for Choi Hak-gyun.

“Having heaps of money really is great. I figured Yeongchwi Moneylending must have solved it with cash since you have so much of it.”

Seo Mu-yeong shared his impression with genuine admiration. Inhaling from his cigarette, Choi Yook let out a dry smirk.

“Right. There’s nothing money can’t buy.”

Blinking, Seo Mu-yeong frowned. “What? Of course there are things money can’t buy.”

Seo Mu-yeong started to argue from personal experience, only to clamp his mouth shut. The reason Choi Yook had stormed out of the villa before him suddenly flashed through his mind.

Ah, I really shouldn’t have said that right now… Before his lips could seal completely, Choi Yook closed the distance between them with slow, measured steps.

“Why?”

The answer was a resounding fuck yes. But that hardly mattered at the moment. He had just shoved Choi Yook’s mood—which had barely begun to soften—straight back into the mud with his own two hands. Seo Mu-yeong frantically scrambled for an excuse that would keep him from being branded by the glowing cigarette.

“Th-that…” Seo Mu-yeong stammered, flustered. “Sijin’s love, too?” When Choi Yook offered no reply, Mu-yeong added quietly, “Because you can’t buy that with money. It’d be wonderful if you could. If whatever you saved up fell short, you could just take out a loan.”

“Right,” Choi Yook agreed dryly.

Just as he seemed to readily agree, Choi Yook seized Seo Mu-yeong’s arm and yanked him flush against his chest. The sudden collapse of distance brought a heavy rush of cologne mixed with bitter tobacco. Dizziness washed over Seo Mu-yeong, and just as he attempted to avert his face—

“If you need money, just say so.”

Choi Yook planted both hands firmly against the middle of Seo Mu-yeong’s back and pressed down. A callous voice followed, as detached as a clerk counting banknotes.

“You’ve got two decent pieces of collateral right here.”

Seo Mu-yeong could not move an inch. Partly because a glowing cigarette remained pinched between Choi Yook’s fingers, and partly because the thin layers of his clothing transmitted the man’s body heat without a shred of dilution.

The sensation of each individual finger pressing into bone and muscle came through vividly against the cotton of his T-shirt. He became acutely aware of every curve of his own frame. His hyper-sensitized touch registered even the prickling heat coursing along his spine.

Seo Mu-yeong was trapped beneath his gaze, held fast within his grasp. This perilous state was, paradoxically, the exact state in which he felt most vividly alive. A human being did not truly exist merely by drawing breath; one only came into existence when perceived by another.

Narrowly edging out the sense of danger, a surge of satisfaction threatened to break through. Seo Mu-yeong hesitated before lifting his head. Choi Yook was looking down at him with an impassive expression, observing him with calm detachment. That look—suggesting none of this amounted to anything—stirred terror and ecstasy, raw desire and fierce defiance all at once.

Just as he had sucked on the man’s finger before, Seo Mu-yeong boldly flung his arms around Choi Yook’s waist. He felt the sheer volume of a rib cage incomparably broader than his own, padded with dense muscle. Beneath the sleek black jacket lay a black shirt dark as mourning cloth, and beneath that, a pitch-black serpent would be writhing.

Choi Yook made no move to stop him, merely granting a fleeting glance to the path of Seo Mu-yeong’s hands. Seo Mu-yeong pressed the exact spot Choi Yook had touched, deliberately brightening his expression with a brilliant smile.

“Are you talking about my spine?”

“There are thirty-three vertebrae in a human spine, Seo Mu-yeong-ssi,” Choi Yook said flatly.

The man’s expression remained entirely devoid of emotion. Tracing the curve of Seo Mu-yeong’s spine, his hand swept smoothly up his back. While Seo Mu-yeong hitched his breath at the serpentine glide, Choi Yook’s fingers clamped securely around the vertebra supporting the nape of his neck.

“Common sense should have naturally told you there’d be more than two. You never studied during your school days, did you? Do you even know what methanol is?”

Seo Mu-yeong blinked up at him. “What is it?”

Merely hearing the number of bones made it feel as though a dull fissure was splitting down his back. The moment Seo Mu-yeong stiffened his posture, Choi Yook withdrew his hand without the slightest hesitation and brought the cigarette back to his lips.

“Search it up yourself. That’s the only way it’ll stick in your head.”

Look it up in the dictionary yourself. That’s the only way it stays in your memory.

Startled violently by the sudden memory, Seo Mu-yeong unclasped his arms and stumbled backward. To think Choi Yook’s words would overlap so perfectly with what his hyung had written. His heart pounded with an unsettling, sickening violence.

Though both were rapid heartbeats, this bore no resemblance to the flutter of anticipation or joy. His mood sank like lead, and cold sweat gathered in his palms. It felt as though he had been caught in some disgraceful wrongdoing.

Remembering his hyung ought to bring nothing but happiness, so why feel like this? It was likely because he had committed the sacrilege of comparing a man like Choi Yook to his hyung. To shake off the disturbing sensation, Seo Mu-yeong hurriedly typed ‘methanol’ into a search engine.

An alcohol compound. Due to the difference in boiling points with ethanol, significant amounts can mix into liquor during the initial stages of distillation. Distinguishing whether alcohol contains methanol by taste and smell alone is difficult…

Well, diving into technical descriptions was a headache, so he skipped ahead. What mattered far more were methanol’s properties.

Volatile, flammable, toxic. A poison whose ingestion began with deteriorating eyesight, leading to total blindness or even death.

The idea that drinking it could cause blindness struck him as remarkably fascinating. Out of all the body’s countless organs, it specifically ruined the eyes. Had this been before he realized Choi Yook had nothing to do with his revenge, he likely would have slipped it straight into the man’s coffee.

“In any case, it’s dangerous stuff. But why would Hong Soon-ja-ssi hoard something like that?”

Seo Mu-yeong looked up at Choi Yook. The man hurled the burnt-out cigarette butt to the ground and ground it beneath his heel.

“Guess suicide by poison was her style.”

Choi Yook offered the sneer before finally stepping away, having shredded the cigarette butt to tatters underfoot. Seo Mu-yeong scrambled after him as he descended the narrow alley, hitching up his backpack, which felt slightly heavier than when they had first entered the villa.

“Then again, it might have been painful enough to make her want to die. Wanting so desperately to believe in her spirit mother, yet finding it impossible.”

Choi Yook kept his steady stride down the alley. “Kang Shim-soo was the only person she had to believe in. She has no family. Her parents are dead, her siblings cut her off, and she has no children.”

In that respect, Hong Soon-ja’s predicament mirrored his own. Was that why he, too, clung so fiercely to the belief in his last remaining hyung? A quiet sigh of marvel slipped from Seo Mu-yeong.

“You have an extraordinary capacity for empathy, Section Chief. Even with a family of your own, you understand what it feels like to have none.”

“The fewer people you have around you, the easier it is to go completely insane,” Choi Yook countered with a caustic bite, casting a mocking sidelong glance at Seo Mu-yeong. “Just like how you claim to be head over heels for Sijin, Seo Mu-yeong-ssi, even while knowing full well what kind of brat he is.”

Still doubting his sincerity, the man hurled the crude provocation. Naturally, Seo Mu-yeong was well-prepared to counter the attack. He countered smoothly, “Of course. Sijin is resilient, clear in his self-expression, yet delicate underneath.”

“He’s stubborn, finicky, and a total pain in the ass.”

Seo Mu-yeong was not deterred. “He has wonderful taste and a sophisticated aesthetic.”

“He can’t even pick out a gift with his own two hands, and when he listens to classical music, he can’t tell Bach from Chopin.”

“He’s exceptionally devoted to his father,” Seo Mu-yeong insisted.

“Because every cent in our household comes from the old man.”

Seo Mu-yeong pressed on stubbornly. “He loves his work, too.”

Choi Yook snorted in disbelief. “He’s thrilled to death by the prestige of being an actor—finally able to ditch the puppy ears and stop acting cute on stage. Yet listening to him whine about what a chore it is to memorize scripts is utterly laughable.”

The more he heard, the more absurd the spectacle became. It felt like an all-out brawl between a devoted fan and a dedicated anti-fan, but since he was playing the fan, the debate grew increasingly unfair and exhausting the longer it dragged on. Rendered utterly speechless, Seo Mu-yeong turned to Choi Yook in disbelief.

“Section Chief, are you quite sure you actually love Sijin?”

“Knowing this much and still caring for him—that’s what’s genuine,” Choi Yook replied without batting an eye, looking down at Seo Mu-yeong with a completely unfazed expression. “Whereas you, Seo Mu-yeong-ssi, are living under the delusion that you know him.”

When Seo Mu-yeong offered no answer, a cold, mocking sneer parted Choi Yook’s lips. “Just because you listened to a few recordings and filmed some clips, how much could you possibly know about him? Licking up a handful of scraps, twisting them into whatever fantasy you want to believe. And you call that love? Stop spouting such nonsense, Seo Mu-yeong-ssi. Keep your delusions within reason.”

Seo Mu-yeong was rapidly running out of counterarguments. Had he encountered a stalker obsessing over Choi Sijin, he would have delivered the exact same lecture.

Even setting vengeance aside, Choi Sijin was a petty, despicable, and insufferably arrogant creature. The deeper one looked, the more astounding his narcissism became, his selfishness an inexhaustible pit. Naturally, the ‘love’ touted by some pathetic stalker would be nothing more than a shallow infatuation born of never witnessing Choi Sijin at his absolute worst.