Chapter 10
. . .
"No... Sumi... I'm sorry..."
"Please, wake up... look at me..."
I fell to my knees. The floor beneath me was slick, drenched in a warm, expanding pool of deep red. In the center of the crimson sea lay a small, broken body. My little sister. My only sister. Father's sacred, favorite jewel.
Father will kill me. I am dead. I am already dead.
A stained kitchen knife trembled violently in my tiny grasp, the hilt sticky with her blood. No... this is wrong. It wasn't me.
It wasn't me.
The man. The shadow. He did it. He’s right there.
He stood at the precipice of the hallway, a towering, absolute void. The darkness around him was different—it was thick, velvet, and suffocating, carrying an otherworldly heat that made the air shimmer. He didn't walk; he was simply there, omnipresent and inescapable.
He was the silent architect of my ruin, lurking in every corner of my vision, bleeding through the wallpaper. He was everywhere, watching me break from a dimension just beyond my reach.
. . .
"No, Father! I'm sorry! Please forgive Sunha!"
"Mother! Please, look at me! Save me!"
"No!"
I was dragged violently across the floor like a sack of meat, the coarse wood grain burning and scraping the skin off my knees and chest. Father knew. He knew his precious daughter had been slaughtered by the hands of a nine-year-old monster who couldn't even comprehend his own sins.
"You absolute, parasitic bastard child!"
"Get the fuck away!"
He violently hoisted me up and threw me into a cramped, box-like iron cage. It was bristling with hundreds of rusted, razor-sharp iron spikes pointing inward. It was a space mathematically impossible for a human child to occupy without being ruined.
*CRACK*
He forcefully slammed the heavy iron door, forcing my limbs to bend, breaking and folding my joints into a tight, pathetic ball to make me fit the dimensions. The iron thorns immediately bit deep into my flesh—driving into my thighs, tearing into my back, puncturing my shoulders, drinking my blood until it pooled at the bottom of the box. My breath caught in a choked, shallow gasp; every expansion of my lungs drove the spikes deeper into my chest.
When my eyes adjusted, the mansion was gone. I was in a sterile, blindingly white room—an isolation cell meant for the criminally insane, where the light reflected off the walls to scorch my eyes.
"Mother... please... I'll be a good boy..." I wept, spotting the faint silhouette of her elegant high heels through the narrow gap in the iron bars. I prayed to whatever dark god existed that the vile woman would show a shred of human mercy.
*THUD*
Mercy didn't live here.
Her heel kicked the cage with vicious, transactional force. The box spun and rolled across the sterile floor, sending the rusted spikes carving through my muscles, tearing the flesh from my bones with every rotation. I could only let out a mangled, animalistic whimper as the iron grated against my ribs.
Through the blinding white noise of pain, her parting words burned themselves into my soul:
"An illegitimate mistake like you doesn't deserve to occupy space in my sight."
. . .
The world went dead silent.
Those words.
It was the very first time she had ever spoken to me in a calm, quiet whisper, completely free of rage. It was colder than the winter outside.
The agonizing cage suddenly lost its heat, turning into a freezing tomb. My nerve endings began to die from the trauma; I couldn't feel the spikes anymore.
My eyelids drifted shut.
Ah... it feels just like Mother's embrace…
The agonizing bite of the iron spikes suddenly softened, shifting into the phantom touch of thick, heavy velvet blankets. The sterile white room didn't dissolve; it warped, the harsh light bleeding out until the walls smelled of expensive French perfume and copper.
I wasn't bleeding in a box. I was being held.
Her breast was warm against my cheek, and the rhythmic, steady thud of her heartbeat echoed through my skull, drowning out the distant static. It felt so cozy... so safe. The thin, delicate pressure of her fingers dragged slowly through my hair, smoothing the tangles with a tenderness that made my throat tighten. The reality of her touch was absolute, grounding me so deeply that the metallic tang on my tongue felt like a distant, irrelevant memory.
But then her fingers tightened.
They dug into my scalp, nails sinking through skin until they hit bone, pulling my head back with a violent, sickening jerk. The velvet blankets hardened, snapping back into place as cold, rusted iron.
There was no embrace. There was only the white room, the cage, and my own mind violently eating itself alive just to endure the vacuum of the present.
A broken, hysterical laugh bubbled up from my torn throat, completely detached from my own volition.
—ha.. ha.. haha.. —
Through the narrow slits of the iron bars, my eyes caught a glimpse of a small plastic object resting on the pristine floor. A walkie-talkie. Sumi’s. It was just sitting there, within arm's reach, reflecting the sterile overhead light.
Slowly, agonizingly, I pushed my arm through the gap between the spikes. The rusted iron acted like a dull blade, anchoring into my forearm and peeling the flesh back in thick, ragged strips as I forced the limb forward. The pain was a distant, secondary noise; I only needed to touch the plastic. I needed to hear her voice through the speaker.
My shredded, bloody fingertips finally grazed the casing.
The plastic didn't break. It dissolved. It melted into a cold, weightless plume of gray mist that drifted through my fingers, leaving nothing but empty air.
My hand slammed against the bare floor.
—AAAAAAAAA!!!!!.. —
The scream tore from my lungs as I dragged my arm back through the teeth of the cage. The illusion stripped away completely, leaving only the physical truth: my entire forearm had been systematically flayed, a mangled ruin of exposed white bone and hanging tendons dripping dark pools onto the floor.
"Pathetic."
The low, mocking whisper vibrated from the ceiling.
I dragged my gaze upward through a veil of sweat and blood. The faceless girl was there again, crouching directly above the cage, her shadow casting long, distorted lines over my face. She didn't have eyes, yet I could feel her looking down at me, branding my soul with the quiet satisfaction of a parasite that had successfully found its home.
I didn't kill Sumi.
The shadow at the end of the hall, the girl by the television—they were the ones moving my hands.
They had to be.
—Hahahaha!. . . —
"Stupid, broken Sunha."
"Monster. Murderer."
. . .
The months blurred into a sickening symphony of torment. Jolt after jolt. Laceration upon laceration.
The rusted spikes kept drinking. I remember the blurred shapes of my three older brothers treating my iron cage like a soccer ball, laughing hysterically as they kicked the box across the sterile floors, letting the interior spikes recreate my agony with every single rotation, carving new lines into my ruined body.
They didn't do it out of anger. They did it out of boredom. To them, I wasn't a brother; I was a broken mechanism, a noisy toy kept in the basement that made funny sounds when kicked.
After that... only fever dreams of black birds and tearing flesh kept me company. They kept me buried in that white purgatory for six agonizing months. I was fed meager scraps directly on the floor, like a rabid dog.
In the end, I escaped that cage by using my own teeth, gnawing and grinding against the iron bars for weeks until my gums turned to a bloody mush and my teeth shattered into useless fragments. I didn't chew the iron to get out. I chewed it because the taste of iron was the only thing left that proved I was still awake.
And even when the iron doors finally opened, they didn't free me. They fastened a heavy leather dog collar around my neck.
To see the sun, I had to beg. To move, I had to crawl on all fours like a mongrel, dragging my scarred limbs across the floor.
The worst part wasn't the collar. The worst part was that after six months in the dark, my hands forgot how to hold things like a human. When I looked down at my fingers, I didn't see a boy anymore. I just saw the architecture of something completely hollow.
Bastards.
Complete and utter bastards.
