"It was you... The one I fell in love with. This entire time, it was you."
***
It all started with the end.
Han Jisung─an orphan whose only goal for the future is to build a better life for himself and his sister─and Lee Minho─also known as...
Listen to "Parasite Eve" by Bring Me The Horizon for this chapter.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Sinister chatter.
Restricted limbs.
Stinging pain and a bloody taste in the mouth, like iron.
He knew what was happening.
Han Jisung, whose favorite genre of comics had always been anything involving gays and gangsters, had finally got to experience the main character moment he'd previously experienced only through someone else's words on thin paper.
Someone had officially kidnapped him.
He could vividly remember the moment some rando showed up at this doorstep on his seventeenth birthday, handed him an unlabeled box, and left. Jisung opened it expecting it to be a birthday gift, but the package was not for him.
Inside there was about two kilos of cocaine and a note which said: 'Ship all of it accordingly. CB.'
An entire meltdown followed.
At first, Jisung was determined to be a model citizen and give it to the police, but then he changed his mind, got drunk, and buried it. After a couple of weeks, he forgot it ever happened. Until, well... someone knocked him out with a shovel on a dark street at night.
He was unconscious for a while, but when he woke up, he knew it would have been better if he died on that alley.
"Is he awake?"
"I think so, yep."
"Let's take the blindfold off, then."
"Yes, sir."
Whispers circulated in the air ─ louder and louder ─ as someone struggled to untie his blindfold. Then finally, it fell.
His stinging eyes could tell they were in a garage. Or worse, a basement. And by 'they' I mean Jisung and other twenty people, of all ages, all scary-looking and dressed in black leather.
Jisung swallowed twice and shifted uncomfortably.
The blond guy sitting on a steel chair across from him was young and handsome, but scary. Tattoos stretched from his neck to his arms and webbed across the back of his ringed fingers. Tattoos of skulls. Ghosts. A huge snake?
And it was so not helping that he was holding a gun.
"Hello there!" the man said with a big, friendly smile on his face, which caught Jisung off guard. "Do you know where you are and why you're here?"
The boy couldn't summon enough stamina to reply. He frowned and shook his head.
"Oh, you don't? Do you not happen to know who you stole from?"
Jisung remained quiet, but his breath sped up as if to match the racing of his heart. He knew it was about the drugs. It had to be about the drugs.
"Did your mommy not teach you how to speak?" the blond guy spoke again, reaching out to lift Jisung's chin with his gun. "I want to know what happened to my stuff, and a little birdie told me you may be able to enlighten me."
