Chapter 42
As he thought about it, his mouth went dry for some reason. He felt strangely hungry, even though he had fulfilled his needs.
He wondered if waking her up and pushing her to her limits once more would satisfy his appetite.
But contrary to his expectations, Owen’s hand never stopped stroking down Sarin’s lean back. The sound of his light, colorful breathing rang in her ears. For the first time in the blood-stained warehouse, he exhaled a relaxed breath. His sharp senses were dulled by the sound of Sarin’s sleep.
He liked broken things.
It was obvious when he saw her standing before him, lifeless. Sometimes, whenever he stared at himself, the tiny face reflected back at him like a mirror. Sarin was like a tiny square window, the entirety of his narrow-minded world.
…And that was why it was unpleasant.
***
The flame burned for a long time.
Even without any special lighting, the flames of the burning logs alone made the parlor look cozy. Owen, lazily reclining cross-legged on the couch, made eye contact with Kirill as he descended from the second floor, but shrugged it off.
He, too, seemed to have come downstairs to watch Gaeyon sleep, and they were alone in the parlor in the dark night.
Owen came here every time to escape the cursed day.
He’d spent countless sleepless nights alone, hunting when he felt like it, and otherwise huddled in dingy, unlit corners.
“Tell Nikolai. I have no intention of returning.”
Kirill said grimly. He sits down at the head of the stove, away from Owen, and puts more wood in the fireplace.
The last time Owen had seen Kirill, he was a beast. Raw, more like a beast than the beast he was raised to be, and that was Owen’s first impression of Kirill.
“Why don’t you do it yourself?”
Owen’s mouth curved into a smirk.
It’s a smile that’s clearly meant to mock his opponent, but Kirill isn’t provoked.
“I don’t even want to meet him.”
“You can’t blame me for being unpleasant to meet.”
“Because you like Nikolai.”
Kirill flicks out the last of the firewood and looks at Owen with numb eyes.
“Aah….”
Owen smiled, as if he knew what he was talking about. Kirill’s face turned even more unreadable than it had when he’d first taunted him. There was a loud squeak of leather as Owen straightened up on the couch.
“Because Nikolai likes healthy kids?”
The question hit the nail on the head, and Kirill made a face. Kirill had a congenitally bad liver. All the children with Nikolai’s blood in their veins had one, maybe two, maybe three.
And Nikolai only liked and cherished his healthy grandchildren.
He vaguely recalled hearing that Kirill, who had been sickly from an early age, was not one of them, so Belov transplanted him with a liver from a child his wife had had an affair with.
He was his son, after all, and it was the best he could do to earn the approval of Nikolai, the future spiritual patriarch of the Russian mafia on his father’s side of the family. From that day forward, Kirill took the complete opposite path from his father.
“If you weren’t healthy, you never would have come from Ireland.”
Kirill took Owen’s words in stride. This is what happens when you know each other’s every move, even when you don’t think of it as a move anymore, it just gets on your nerves.
Owen folded his hands in his lap and looked at Kirill.
The gray eyes stared back at him. They were a different color than Sarin’s cloudy ones. The one upstairs, sleeping, was more Owen’s color.
“What’s with the eyes, offended.”
When Owen stares at him wordlessly, Kirill rolls his eyes and lets out a small swear under his breath.
“Mine are prettier, after all.”
Kirill’s face completely contorts at the shocking words that follow.
He realized that it was no longer his father, President Belov, who was after him, but Nikolai. After all, Kirill had also received a liver transplant and was now one of his healthy grandsons.
Now that Belov is president for a third and fourth term, there’s no way Nikolai would give up a century of power so easily.
It was their grandfather, their maternal grandfather, Nikolai, who thought all healthy grandchildren had a use.
“Don’t bullshit me. I only came back because you asked me to, Owen.”
He wanted to settle down.
He’d been asking for it for so long, and he wanted to make it happen. He liked having her around, but he could see she was getting tired.
Might as well get rid of her, since she wouldn’t listen to him anyway. He knew she’d freak out if she found out, but the thought kept running through his head.
“I’m not. I thought he was here to eat every scrap of meat that fell, like my dogs.”
The beast had a way of getting on people’s nerves.
Kirill was no match for Owen in the first place. The man who holds the City of Eden in his hands and rolls it, and the man who has been away from this world for so long, are no match from the start. Kirill was being overly honest with my feelings.
“…Does she know?”
“What?”
When he came downstairs to offer Owen a hunt, Kirill unintentionally overheard a conversation in the kitchen.
It was about a sick child. Kirill frowned, knowing that Nikolai was not a man tolerant of sick children.
“I thought you said I was sick.”
“It’s none of your business. Watch your mouth.”
Half-truths told to Sarin. Nikolai was equal to seeing children, whether they came from outside the family or from his duly wedded wife. That is, as long as they were healthy. It wasn’t a complete lie, though, because it was Owen, himself, who was protecting the child, not Nikolai.
Kirill looked at Owen with deep eyes, then looked away.
Outside, he heard the sound of a car pulling into the mansion. Kirill was the first to rise from his seat and go to the window to see if it was someone he needed to deal with.
“It’s probably Yuri.”
“Still sweeping under you, huh?”
Owen chuckled at Kirill’s sharp comment. With a look on his face that said he needed to get out of here as soon as possible, Kirill ducked upstairs.
Kirilli beneath Owen’s feet finally realized where he belonged to. His presence here would be reported to Nikolai soon enough, and it was better to get out of here as quickly as possible with Gayeon.
As soon as Kirill was upstairs, Yuri opened the front door and walked in. A cold breeze swept through the room.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
A tired-looking Yuri took off his coat and held it in one hand as he came to stand in front of Owen. He’d been in a chi fight with Pavel, and then called out by Nikolai, and now he was sitting here, and he seemed to be in a very good mood. Something good had happened, and his grizzled face was relaxed.
“How’s the kid?”
“She was braver than I thought. I told her, her dad sent me, and she listened.”
Yuri added that the tests were done and they were just waiting for the results. Even so, he’d just seen the child fall asleep.
“Yeah.”
“Pavel’s been trying to find out about the kid. He didn’t even know he had one, so he’s going crazy.”
Not just because of Owen’s warning, but because Pavel himself was sick of flesh and blood. If the girls he fucked got pregnant, he’d pay them to have an abortion, or if they insisted on keeping the baby, he’d have someone else do it before it got within Nikolai’s earshot.
“I should have crushed his jaw.”
“Stop talking. The elders scolded me for making Pavel’s face like that. They even insulted me, asking why you didn’t bring that granddaughter immediately.”
After coming from Moscow to Eden City, Yuri quickly left, saying he would bring Owen, amidst the uproar of not seeing his granddaughter’s face once. He was annoyed after all the trouble, only to find Owen leisurely at the villa.
“What should we do?”
“We should go. And what about that woman?”
“She’s sleeping.”
Completely exhausted, Yuri recalled Sarin’s face, who didn’t even flinch when he took her to the second floor. Owen’s mouth curled up.
“So, are you happy confirming she’s an addict?”
“It means she’s good at everything, good at getting drunk, and good at getting out of it.”
Owen, who answered like that, smiled innocently. Yuri looked at Owen with confusion as he found the most vulnerable part of a person. His gaze was as affectionate as looking at his own dogs. They were the descendants of the dogs he brought with him when he left Ireland, and he treated them more like brothers than Pavel.
What did he like so much about her?
She was just an ordinary and small woman. Her actions were ridiculous, and although they caught his attention, that was it. Yuri couldn’t understand how she appealed to Owen.
Was it because she was so innocent and naive that lies showed on her face?
Yuri shook his head. It was closer to disgust than liking for Owen. He always thought that human nature was despicable and close to corruption.
“Let’s wrap it up here. It’s inevitable with the bloodline of the child, but the woman…”
“We need to speak frankly. We’ll take her because she’s carrying the child.”
“Owen.”
Thinking of the furious Nikolai, Yuri’s head was already spinning. It was okay to just play around. After all, Owen’s biological father, one of Nikolai’s children, was also a great womanizer. But this was different.
Seeing Owen’s reaction, she didn’t seem like a woman who could just be toyed with.
Even though he spoke of tidying up, Yuri felt uncertain somehow. Owen clinging to a woman wasn’t the Owen he knew. The Owen he knew was a man who even had a vasectomy to avoid any mistakes in the first place.
His birth mother’s influence must have been significant there.
