The morning when everything truly shifted… there was no scream, no sign, no message to warn of the coming storm.
Just silence.
A silence so heavy, so deep, so unusual that Nari felt it before even opening her eyes, like a frozen shadow sitting on her chest, like a bad omen crawling slowly up her spine.
She reached for her phone automatically — a gesture that had become almost instinctive — but the screen stayed black with notifications, like a page that had been ripped out of her life.
No calls.
No messages.
Not even that little beep she pretended to hate but waited for like a drug.
Sion had vanished.
A clean, brutal, surgical disappearance, as if he had cut their bond with a cold knife.
Nothing left.
As if the nights she'd spent feeling him breathe against her skin had never existed.
As if his deep voice, his words whispered against her mouth, his threats disguised as caresses… had been nothing more than a fever dream.
Nari sat on the bed, the sheet slipped to her waist, her heart beating slowly, painfully, as if each beat required immense effort.
She stared at the dark, lifeless screen, as though by looking long enough she could force it to vibrate, to light up, to return to her.
But nothing.
She inhaled.
Exhaled.
But everything felt wrong.
Even her own body felt foreign.
— What if something happened to him? she thought, absurdly.
Then, immediately, like an inner slap:
— No. He owes you nothing. He doesn't belong to you.
Lie.
She knew.
His absence was eating her alive because he wasn't nothing.
Because he had left something inside her — something dangerous, burning, alive — an invisible imprint she hated as much as she needed.
And that was the beginning of the fall.
A slow, visceral, irreversible fall.
Each hour without him became another weight crushing her ribs, each breath a little harder, each thought a little more intrusive.
As if her heart were slipping through her fingers and she couldn't hold it.
While Nari slowly drowned in anxiety, on the other side of Seoul, Sion's life erupted into chaos he hadn't chosen — chaos he knew too well — chaos that wore the face of the only woman he had ever loved and hated: his mother.
As he was on his way to see Nari, his phone rang, displaying the clinic's name like an ominous warning.
— Mr. Jeon, your mother is in crisis. She's screaming that you're dead.
Everything in him froze instantly, as if his heart had skipped a beat, as if an old wound had violently reopened somewhere beneath his ribs.
Without thinking, he turned the car around, ignoring honking horns, angry drivers, distant sirens — nothing existed anymore, nothing except that sentence.
"Your mother is in crisis."
Those words had rocked his childhood.
They were his mornings, his nights, his routine.
They were carved into his flesh like an old burn.
When he entered the room, chaos swallowed him whole.
His mother was screaming, hair wild, her gown twisted, her gaze frantic, lost, doubled, too intense, too wide — those eyes, he knew them: eyes that saw a world no one else saw, eyes that had mistaken him for a monster, a demon, a corpse haunting her nights.
— OH MY SON HAS COME TO SEE ME FROM AMONG THE DEAD! she screamed, arms stretched toward him as if reaching for a ghost.
— Mom… mom, it's me, I'm here, look at me, I'm alive… he murmured in a surprisingly soft voice, a voice he never used with anyone, a voice that belonged only to her.
He approached slowly, like one approaches a wounded animal, and took her cold, fragile hand — the same hand that had hit him sometimes, caressed him other times, gripped him too tightly in panic, pushed him away like a stranger.
She was trembling.
The room vibrated with screams, alarms, agitation.
Then suddenly, she grabbed her water glass and smashed it on the floor, so violently the nurses jumped.
The shards scattered like pieces of night — sharp, glittering.
— I TOLD YOU MY SON IS DEAD! she screamed again, her voice shredded by terror. I CAN'T LIVE ANYMORE! I CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT MY SON!
And before anyone could move, she seized a shard of glass — long, bright, almost beautiful — and plunged it into her chest with such determination that the blood burst instantly.
— NO! MOM!
He lunged toward her.
The shard fell, stained red.
Blood poured, hot, too hot, slipping between Sion's fingers as he pressed, held, fought.
— Stay with me… stay with me, he whispered, his voice shaking despite himself.
She lifted her eyes, a mad smile stretching across her lips.
— My son… you came to get me…
Then she collapsed.
Nurses rushed in. Machines beeped.
Someone gently pushed him aside.
— Sir, let us handle this.
— Mr. Jeon, it's not deep, breathe.
— We're stabilizing her.
— She will stay under observation.
He stood there, hands covered in blood, breath short, heart lodged too high in his throat.
A metallic smell rose — familiar — belonging to his childhood, to those nights he slept against the door to keep her from leaving, to those mornings he found her dazed, cold, lost, to those days when she said she would die and wanted to take him with her.
He had never had any family but her.
No softness.
No refuge.
Just this broken woman who loved him too much, too badly, too dangerously.
And deep inside him, a sentence resurfaced — one he had repeated to himself his whole life:
Emotions are for the weak.
Love destroys.
Attachment kills.
So he stayed.
At the clinic.
At her bedside.
Without moving.
Without thinking of Nari.
Or rather: burying her so deep she disappeared beneath the panic, the duty, the guilt, the old fear of losing the only person he'd ever had.
And despite himself, something cracked.
A part of him wanted to call her.
A part of him wanted her voice.
A part of him needed her calm, her warmth, her dark eyes looking at him as if she could see through everything.
But that part — he suffocated it.
Crushed it.
Killed it.
Because loving meant dying.
And he didn't have the right to die.