Chapter 14
“Just go to the villa, why suffer here?”
Yuri looked at Owen with an unreadable expression. It was the same as always. Owen, leaning against the window sill, sitting on the floor, did not change his expression. But Yuri keenly noticed the pale, sickly look on his face and the indifferent gaze.
“Did you bring it?”
“If you’re here because of that woman….”
“Hand it over.”
With one knee raised and his hand resting on it, Owen reached out to Yuri. As soon as he placed the documents on his hand, the top part was torn off.
Owen quickly scanned the contents with indifferent eyes. Yuri stared at the few fallen photos under his thigh with a sigh.
“Owen.”
“Interesting. I told you she was pretending to be ordinary.”
His mouth lifted with a joyful expression. With those eyes, there’s no way she’s ordinary. After reading all the documents, Owen finally raised a photo that had fallen and looked down at it with half-closed eyes.
As Yuri had feared, she was not here to harm herself. If she had planned to harm herself, she couldn’t hide it. She wouldn’t have missed it. It would have been easy to twist her small neck.
It wasn’t the first time she had seen her.
A few days of standing quietly in front of the hotel. Not to gamble, not to wait for someone.
No, looking at this, was she waiting for him?
Owen smiled without hiding his willingness. Yuri swallowed his saliva as his sharp gaze seemed to tear someone apart at any moment.
It was clear where that arrow was heading. Locking the door didn’t seem to help much. If Owen set his mind to it, he would blast through that door.
“So, what do you want to do?”
Yuri asked, half giving up.
The expression revealed at the corner of the photo was wicked. Despite having preyed, it was the face of someone who enjoyed catching and killing helpless animals for fun. Yuri sincerely mourned for the woman in the opposite room.
“We should catch and finish her off.”
“Huh… What about the woman…?”
“What are you talking about? I mean, Pavle. Where is this guy these days?”
Yuri was secretly surprised when the name she had thought had been forgotten for years came out of Owen’s mouth.
“Find and bring him here. In person. Sometimes I feel like killing him because of the stench that always emanates from his body.”
No matter how many times Owen dismissed it as the constant smell of marijuana, Yuri cleaned up the scattered photos on the floor as she waited, bending down and straightening her waist.
“What about the woman?”
“Well, what should we do? I still find that kind woman interesting. I also want to give her a lot of money if needed.”
It wasn’t a good sign. Owen doesn’t share what’s his with anyone. The woman has already received plenty from him. Wanting to give her more is nothing short of a declaration of war.
From the beginning, he was a fundamentally flawed person.
That’s what Yuri thought of Owen. He was as stubborn as he was ruthless, with a tendency to abuse himself. He had no interest in people. He liked things that were irreparably broken, so he chose Eden City. It was a place where things would remain this way forever.
“Shall we thoroughly entangle that woman? There are still things I’m curious about.”
The root of human nature is evil.
Once Owen sinks his teeth into someone, he chews them up and swallows them, leading them into the abyss. He built Eden City on the graves of countless others. He gathered and completed the broken things that were dirty and untouched by others, according to his taste.
A lawless zone filled with filth, stench, murder, and violence. The outer facade hides the deeply festering inner self, a city with a golden opportunity where anyone can dream. Owen built Eden City.
“Easy. She seemed scared when I saw her earlier.”
“Well then, I handled her so delicately. I didn’t even lay a finger on her.”
That’s why she seems more terrified.
Yuri swallowed and shrugged his shoulders. Seeing him speak in a strange state of excitement, he realized it was time for him to leave.
Sarin got up from her seat in the late night.
Clang. Bang. Squawk.
I was reminded of what my mom used to warn me about when we lived in the countryside. We were forbidden to go outside at night because wild animals sometimes came down from the mountains. When a wild boar came down to the yard in the early morning and cried out close by, my sister and I used to hold each other tightly and shiver.
Now, without anyone to hold onto, Sarin tightly gripped her legs with both hands, her eyes fixed on the closed door. Her curiosity about what was happening made her heart sink deep into her chest.
And when the noise gradually subsided, she confirmed that dawn was breaking and opened the door.
The sofa was turned upside down as if it had been attacked by a wild animal, and the glass on the table was cracked. The kitchen was in a mess too. Pieces of broken dishes were scattered everywhere. If she hadn’t been wearing indoor slippers, her feet would have surely been cut to shreds.
The destination of the red footprints dotted all over the white marble was the room opposite her closed door.
“I caused a riot.”
There was no way she wasn’t hurt. Seeing the clear red footprints, a warning from Yuri came to mind, saying that the people who clean here wouldn’t be coming for a while.
As if determined, Sarin clapped her hands together. Cleaning was in her bones. She had been responsible for field work since she was young, and the housework she took over for her mother, who went out to earn money, was not going anywhere.
She couldn’t lift the sofa on her own, so she left it as it was and started by clearing the visible glass. She carefully picked up the big pieces to avoid cutting her hands and rolled them up in yesterday’s newspaper that hadn’t been cleared yet. She wiped the small pieces with a wet tissue. She knew that once glass breaks, it takes days to clean up all the pieces, so she didn’t think she could finish it all with this.
Thunk.
Startled by the sound of the door opening, she fell backward. Three dogs came out through the open door.
“…Yeah. You must be hungry too.”
The owner who didn’t even look after her own feet was now hesitant to feed them. Sarin tiptoed over, holding her breath, and quietly closed the door again. She couldn’t even bring herself to look inside. She quickly closed the door soundlessly and turned back to the window.
It was still raining heavily outside.
“Stay on the sofa. Don’t get hurt by the glass.”
She said, tapping the overturned sofa with the palm of her hand, assuming the smart dogs would roughly understand her intention.
“You’re clever. Wait here then.”
It was too much of a hassle to take them for a walk in the rain.
She took out the dogs’ food bowls from the kitchen and found their food under the sink. After checking a few more times that there were no glass shards around the sofa, she poured food and water into the bowls and the three dogs looked at her calmly.
“You can eat.”
That’s a no-no! They aggressively attack the food bowl and stick their faces in it.
Looking at them, they were definitely shameless dogs. After watching the dogs eat for a moment, she got annoyed and walked to the refrigerator. Among the ready-to-eat salad, sandwiches, and cold pasta, Sarin picked out a sandwich.
Then she went to the place where the dogs were eating, which must have been a place to lean on the armrests, and sat on the overturned sofa, eating the bread.
“Does your owner usually come out at night?”
Does he sleep like the dead during the day?
There was no way she’d get an answer. The dogs, having finished their food, were only looking at my sandwich.
“This won’t do. It’s for humans.”
I had no intention of giving up, but it seemed like they were boasting as they ate. With no place to escape, Sarin eventually finished eating the sandwich in front of them and brushed off her hands before getting up.
While finishing the rest of the cleaning, the dogs waited quietly in the place designated by Sarin. Occasionally checking on the dogs and finishing the cleaning, the afternoon quickly passed.
When she found a first aid kit in a corner of the house, she thought of Owen.
Tap, tap.
Sarin tapped the top of the box with her finger. There was no one who seemed to know where Owen’s first aid kit was.
“What’s so pretty about it?”
Her eyelids trembled. Her mother had been sick since she was young. Even her sister died in a hospital after a car accident. When you nurse sick people in a hospital, everyone around you is in the same situation. She was sick of seeing sick people.
“If you leave it where it’s visible, they’ll take care of it.”
She’s just leaving the first aid kit where it’s visible.
She had to wipe the blood off the floor so tightly that the tissue turned red. She didn’t want to see any more blood. Rationalizing it like that, she picked up the first aid kit and lifted her heel again. Whether it was because of Yu-ri’s words or not, it always happened strangely in front of Owen’s room.
After placing the first aid kit right in front of the door, Sarin looked at the three dogs who still couldn’t get off the narrow sofa and asked.
“Do you want to go to my room? It’ll be better than here. The living room is off-limits for a while.”
