1.2 | The Night and Its Stars ⌜ yeosang ⌟

FIFTEEN | DICHOTOMY

Fear rose in her so fast that she clapped a hand over her mouth. It clogged her throat. She had to force herself to sit still.

The stranger dragged the head of the bat across the brick and with each echoing thump over mortar, Minni imagined how much damage getting bludgeoned with it could do. She hated Yeosang, despised him and everything he stood for with every inch of her being.

Not for the first time, she was scared for him too. That dichotomy left her dizzy.

In a rare stroke of luck, the stranger let the weapon drop back to his side. "We're not fucking around with you. Is that clear?"

Internally, Minni was begging Yeosang to shut the hell up, to go along with it so she would not have to witness more bloodshed.

For once, he obliged. "Crystal."

The three men backed away, but the tension did not ebb. It lurked between every ounce of air, like a timebomb slowly ticking down to zero.

"Your dad can't protect you out here," one of the men said, a short, murky shadow on the edge of her vision. Laughter followed.

Something about the dig made her throat close up. It wasn't aimed at her, but it hit too close to home anyway.

"Maybe he wouldn't want to though. With your mom dead and his campaign going the way it is..." The tall one drew in a breath, air whistling through his teeth. "You might be one less problem on his hands."

She swallowed thickly. That had to be public information, but she never thought to look for it. She missed Yeosang's reaction to that, but she could guess it wasn't pretty.

One of the men chortled. "I think you're pissing him off. Look at 'im."

"What? You gonna swing or something?" taunted another.

She tensed, wholeheartedly expecting Yeosang to act on that obvious provocation. He again defied her expectations.

"Are you done yet?" he asked instead. His blasé attitude was just as puzzling as the entire situation to begin with. She didn't know where he got the gall, but god, she wished she had even an ounce of that stupid sort of courage for herself.

The men, predictably, laughed at him again.

She caught the one thing everyone else was missing. Yeosang was slowly slipping his way toward the mouth of the alley. One slow step at a time, in the gaps between sentences where they were too distracted to notice.

The tall shadow tossed his bat over a shoulder. "We're done when we say we're done."

Yeosang hardly reacted at all to that. "What do you want?"

"Ah, this smartass-" one of the men grumbled. Minni couldn't see which. Their forms were all muddled, the three gathering in a more organized formation of looming shadows. The hair on the back of her neck stood up.

The air itself seemed to shift with their mood. Their patience had clearly run out, almost down to the exact second he'd started asking questions. Imagine that.

They'd started to walk toward him, speaking in lower tones that she couldn't quite hear from where she was hidden. A bad, bad feeling settled in her stomach.

She could have chosen that moment to up and leave, to be done with it all. Not for the first time, she stayed. The image of Somin plummeting like a star was seared permanently behind her eyelids. She didn't want a repeat of that night to happen ever again. Not if she could help it.

Her body moved before her mind did. Her hands fumbled about in her clutch. She scurried forward, heart thudding in her ears, each step enough to make her knees wobble.