By Zephyria 
A car, clinging flat to the ground like a spider, sharply cuts through the air. As the wheels slide on the rainy road, it gains even more acceleration.
Bang, bang, bang.
A series of silent sounds erupts like explosives. He naturally assumed it was the exhaust noise bursting from the rear of the car.
…He was wrong.
It was a pain that felt as if it were bursting through his chest. He gripped the buttons of his vest as if to rip them off.
Tang, tang, tang, tang! The buttons poured onto the floor all at once.
“Fuck…!”
The man bit his glove with his teeth and tore it off violently. The hand revealed beneath had a middle finger with hideously bulging, uneven flesh.
His life had been one where everything was under his control.
He didn’t know where it had first gone wrong, but bit by bit, things had twisted until they were now completely beyond his grasp.
Suddenly, a chill washed over his entire body, and he trembled violently.
Ah.
What if that thing dies?
If I lose that…
If I lose it forever.
The man recalled the deep blue corpse he had seen at the beach.
Over that corpse, dressed in forsythia-colored clothes, the image of Eun-myeong fleeing in a yellow raincoat had overlapped.
The fear the man felt then—it was a fear so intense that even now, it felt as if all the blood circulating in his body had turned ice cold.
Haa, haaa, haaa…!
The room mirror reflected the man’s face, drenched in terror. It was the face of the very man who had claimed he was merely acting out love.
If he was going to play such a fake game, shouldn’t he have been the one to truly taxidermy him?
Just as Chairman Kang had taxidermied the wild boar, he could have cut off Eun-myeong’s limbs and hung them on the wall.
Why was he trembling with such anxiety, feeling a sense of urgency that even a single scratch might mar that fragile body?
Has he finally gone mad? How could there be a disease in this world so utterly useless…?
“…Ugh.”
He let out a groan and clutched his lower abdomen. This tedious pain had begun the moment he lost Eun-myeong.
A long, grueling agony with no form and no reason.
The man chose instead to bite down hard on his middle finger. He pressed down painfully, as if he might tear it off and eat it right then and there.
It was then.
Zzz, vrrr, his cell phone began to ring. The man quickly slid his hand inside his jacket and pulled out the phone.
An unknown number appeared on the screen. However, a sharp intuition kicked in.
He quickly pressed the call button. Then, what flowed through the speaker was….
—He, hello….
It was a voice trembling with terror. The man’s heart sank with a heavy thud. It was a voice so fragile that it sounded as if the speaker might bite their tongue at any moment.
For a second, he almost closed his eyes tight, forgetting that he was holding the steering wheel. His temples felt as if they were throbbing and racing wildly.
—Boss, I, I’m Eun-myeong. I have something to say.
Behind the thin, trembling voice, the loud noise of the outdoors rushed in.
He was the one who had kept Eun-myeong behind iron bars like a cherished bird. Any other ordinary person would ask how one could leave a cherished and adored lover in such a detention center, but…
The man was stepping through the stages of a plan. Now, just a little more, and he could bring Eun-myeong perfectly into his arms.
He was truly just moments away from the goal.
Who dared to take Eun-myeong out of that cage without permission? He ground his teeth with a harsh grit.
“Where are you? I’m coming now. Tell me while looking at my face.”
—Uh….
He heard a hesitant sound. Somehow, it seemed mixed with sobbing.
Because of that, the man had to fight against an anxiety that kept trying to rear its head. His heart felt as if it were flopping like a fish whose belly had been sliced open by a sashimi knife.
—No, I don’t think I can see the Boss anymore.
At the firm yet utterly unstable tone, the man felt as if his throat were tightening. Had he ever feared anything this much in his life?
Because of this young thing who barely reached his chest, he suffered the illusion that his vision was fading into white.
“Why? What do you mean you can’t? What did Mister tell you? Didn’t I say it’s okay to kill people?”
He tried his best to sound smiling, but the corners of his mouth kept drooping. His jaw trembled. Veins repeatedly bulged in his thick neck.
—No, Boss, I, I can’t… the Boss… I mean, please just listen to me….
“I’m coming now, so you can just tell me when you see my face, right? Eun-myeong-ah.”
When he called out desperately, a thudding sound was heard from the other end. It sounded like something was collapsing. An urgent voice followed from beyond.
Excuse me, I’m telling you someone is falling off the cliff here, you need to come quickly…! Ah, he’s drifting away, he’s drifting away….
Voices filled with nothing but anxiety flooded the man’s eardrums. What on earth was the situation Eun-myeong was in?
The man spoke as if carving the words into his own mind.
“I’ll be there soon, okay? I’ll find you anywhere.”
—No, don’t come, Boss, you mustn’t come here.
No matter where it was, even if he had to find and enter the pits of hell, the man intended to say so.
“It won’t take long, really, I’ll be there soon…!”
However, his words were cut short by the voice flowing out like dark clouds.
—You have to listen to me. Boss, listen to me this time!
The sound of panting could be heard from the other side. He couldn’t even guess what the situation was. Faced with that formless terror, the man felt as if he were being consumed by madness.
—You always only said what you wanted to say, Boss. Like a piece of human trash, you never listened to me.
Hic, sob, he wept sorrowfully, as if the situation were too overwhelming. The man slammed his hand against the steering wheel. He had to hold that sobbing body and keep it by his side right now.
—Can’t… can’t you just not pay back my Noona’s debt?
At the sobbing voice, the man’s jaw trembled. Because of a mere 200 million won, just to gain a petty sense of superiority, did he have to roll Eun-myeong around so miserably?
As Eun-myeong acted like someone who would suddenly leave his Noona behind and vanish, the man was suddenly terrified that this time, he might truly fly away like a butterfly.
To a place where he could not find him.
—I, I actually missed you a lot, that’s why I cried alone every day. Even when I said I was going out to love someone else, I was just pretending to be strong….
The sobbing breaths were maddeningly pitiful. The man didn’t know if he was stomping on the accelerator or stomping on his own heart. It felt as if his flopping organs were pleading for him to save them.
—Boss, if I hadn’t been such a piece of garbage….
The man’s lower jaw trembled. Beyond pain, it felt as if his heart were being ripped out of his chest.
—I would have loved the Boss.
If he could, he felt like shoving his hand right through the phone.
He wanted to pull Eun-myeong out of there, put him in his arms, and soothe him. To tell him that everything had been a terrible nightmare, that a flower-strewn path with a favorable wind and all the delicacies of the world would be laid out before him.
That debts were nothing more than phantoms….
“Eun-myeong-ah.”
But before all that.
The man had something to say. He was about to take the emotion that had been writhing and boiling deep in his lower abdomen and show it to Eun-myeong.
But.
—Love….
With Eun-myeong’s faintly fading voice, a mechanical tone rang in the man’s ear.
Beep, beep, beeep….
Because it sounded like the ringing of a death sentence, the man stared into the void like a dead man.
Through a vision as hollow as an empty cave, the sea rushed in. There was a detour road that curved widely around the cliff.
Before long, a large truck appeared. It had come to a stop, its front crashed into the steep mountain. Thick smoke was billowing out.
The man stopped his car, approaching precariously as if he might be hit by the truck.
Screeeech, sharp skid marks scratched the road like a whip. The asphalt was haphazardly scarred, as if a rough ‘X’ had been drawn across it.
He slowly stepped out of the car.
Beside the truck, in the middle of the guardrail following the cliff, a wide section had been snapped off as if an explosion had occurred, and the sharp end dangled toward the void.
A high-pitched ringing filled his head. The man rushed toward the cliff, searching for Eun-myeong like a madman.
Then, a hand suddenly gripped the edge of the precipice where the trail ended. In an instant, the man’s heart dropped to his toes. Thinking it might be Eun-myeong, he rushed forward, but his footsteps abruptly stopped.
They were police officers, their heads bleeding.
“The child….”
The man gripped the arm of a police officer who looked as if he had just crawled out of the sea, completely drenched.
“Where is the child!”
The screaming voice pierced through the eerie road. The desperate and miserable cry echoed through the sound of the rain.
“Well, we managed to get out, but the person we were transporting was handcuffed by the wrist….”
Beeeep, the tinnitus devoured his eardrums.
An emotion like lightning, splitting the sky and shaking the immediate surroundings, struck the man.
Something that split his skull, flashed so white it blinded his eyes, and shook him beyond belief.
It was the very thing Eun-myeong had searched for so desperately.
Yes, it was that long-desired talk of love.