Flowers Are Bait Novel - Chapter 128

The hand stroking her belly stopped abruptly, and Yiyeon’s face was tinged with surprise. She sat up and looked at him warily. Her lips, which had fallen silent, barely opened.

“…What do you mean?”

“I heard you were badgering the cafeteria auntie.”

“Ah…”

A sigh of relief escaped her. Perhaps her body had been more rigid than she thought, as her posture collapsed the moment the tension left her shoulders. Yiyeon buried her face in the blanket and endured her pounding heart.

The life that came at the end of despair was hers alone to embrace, and naturally, the child was planned to take its mother’s surname, ‘So’.

That resolve grew even stronger after experiencing the sex party. She wanted to raise her child in nature, surrounded by beautiful oceans and plants, not in this place where guns and drugs were used so casually.

“I don’t think that’s something to discuss with you.”

Yiyeon calmed her startled heart and breathed slowly. She absolutely could not tolerate the Kwon family’s interference. To do that, she had to draw a clear line without any leeway. But Kwon Chaewoo kept…

“If there’s anything uncomfortable, I’ll go directly to my employer and tell him.”

“That damn employer.”

He irritably pulled down the mask that had reached his chin.

“If you have nothing to do or say, leave. No, even if you do, please leave.”

“……”

“You know it’s a crime to suddenly enter a woman’s room, right?”

“Everything changed after that bitch was brought in…!”

At that moment, Kwon Chaewoo covered one ear and winced.

Traumatic tympanic membrane perforation.

A hole had been torn in his eardrum due to a sudden explosion of pressure. The man, who had never suffered hearing damage before, had spent several uncomfortable days due to intermittent tinnitus and hearing loss, and it was now naturally regenerating. In the midst of this, his perforated eardrum was filled with the screaming voice of his birth mother.

With no one knowing about Kwon Giseok and Yoon Jooha, he eventually went to visit his birth mother, who was recuperating.

To call them mother and son was a stretch; Kwon Chaewoo had been raised by others in his childhood and had immediately left for overseas, so the time they spent together was extremely short.

If they had taken back a child who was living well just because of blood ties, that bloodline should have held great value. But he had felt no emotion for anyone in this family from the very beginning.

“Our trustworthy Giseok… Giseok…”

She kept touching her white hair. But her trembling, wrinkled hands made her hair look more and more like a ghost’s disheveled mess. His birth mother suddenly looked around the ceiling with terrified eyes.

“Honey, Giseok, Giseok is strange.”

She lowered her voice as if telling a secret and trembled all over.

“…I shouldn’t have left the basement to the eldest.”

His birth mother suddenly hit her head and began to convulse.

“Ah…! Aaaah…!”

As she continuously slapped her eyes and screamed, Kwon Chaewoo calmly got up and injected the sedative he had already prepared into her neck. His birth mother scratched his forearm wildly and glared at him.

“You, you… how could you, how could you do that! How could my son…! How could you screw around like a dog with the bitch who stole your brother—! She still babbles about wanting to see Chaewoo whenever she sees my face…! Was it a lie that you would punish her for us? I told you to tear her limbs apart, but what on earth did you…! Giseok, Giseok—! Don’t go to the basement anymore! Aaaah…! Aaaah—!”

Kwon Chaewoo frowned and pressed harder on the syringe. As the convulsions gradually subsided, her eyes, which had flared like fire, also cooled.

His birth mother was just idly wiggling her fingers, but it was as if he himself had collapsed. He felt dirty, as if he had been covered in filth. Did he laugh out loud, or did he curse?

When he came to his senses, he was already in So Yiyeon’s room. It felt like blood was pooling somewhere in his head again.

“Just—”

Kwon Chaewoo, swaying slightly, swept his hand across his forehead. His low voice was trembling.

“Just for a moment, I’ll sit here and then leave.”

“……”

“Just for a very short moment.”

Suddenly, Kwon Chaewoo’s gaze fixed on the rocking chair. Yiyeon looked over suspiciously, but there was no one, nothing there.

Soon, the man leaned his head against the rocking chair and sank to the floor. He looked as if he was resting, or like an animal exhausted by fatigue.

Only then did she understand why Kwon Chaewoo had yelled so much, telling her not to show him a pitiful sight. Because pity was like poison, and she had to give up a corner of her heart without being able to do anything about it.

Why did you so readily endure humiliation in front of me, and why did I protect you like that? Everything was so tedious that Yiyeon pushed him away even more coldly.

“I don’t know what you want from me.”

He raised his hazy eyes and looked at Yiyeon. Ah, he’s moving. He muttered nonsense like that.

Yiyeon stared at him silently, then brought up a story she had been too pained to ever look into again.

“Do you think we can clear up any misunderstandings?”

Kwon Chaewoo just stared at her dryly.

“I’m sorry, but there are no misunderstandings between us. The matter concerning my mother is not a misunderstanding. Whether you believe a liar’s words or not is up to you, but I… told the truth.”

“……”

“She wanted to see her young son, and I wanted to help. But I know now that was just my perspective. If, as a result, my actions led to her death, then your abandoning me was right.”

Yiyeon’s throat was sore, and she had to swallow several times.

“Please, don’t become like my aunt.”

“……”

“Mr. Kwon Chaewoo… you can live differently.”

Her aunt would grimace as if she couldn’t stand to see Yiyeon’s fallen hair on the floor. A relationship where a smiling face was never recalled gnawed at a person that much. Yiyeon huddled herself, suddenly feeling a chill.

“Don’t live your whole life seeing things you don’t want to remember. We broke up well, and it’s a hundred times right for us to go our separate ways. So keep hating me. Even if you despise me, that fact no longer hurts or saddens me.”

“……”

“Instead, don’t waver for me.”

Yiyeon looked him in the eyes and firmly stated. She meant for him to hate her steadfastly, not to act confusingly like this, but Kwon Chaewoo suddenly spoke with a face full of indignation.

“Why can’t I waver?”

Red sparks flew from his eyes.

“Some bastard locked up his enemy for years, so why the hell can’t I—”

He pressed his trembling eyelids with the edge of his hand.

He had been sitting quietly on the floor, as if all his strength had been drained, but suddenly he crawled towards her on all fours and clutched her blanket. The bones on the back of his hand protruded white as he twisted the fabric, his grip so fierce. Yiyeon was unable to budge under his chilling force.

“Why is it so hard only for me, and you look so relieved?”

He groaned as if in pain.

“I’m still stuck in a pile of garbage.”

Kwon Chaewoo pulled her along with the blanket and leaned his head against her. Yiyeon, unable to escape the bed due to his unyielding strength, had to receive his raw emotions directly. Kneeling on the floor, he gasped for breath.

“Can’t you hate me enough to want to kill me…?”

“……!”

“Do you really not need me? Not even as a target for your anger?”

“…I don’t like such wasteful things.”

“Why do you only think a hundred times, and not the hundred and first?”

“……”

“Why don’t you hate me anymore?”

His eyes, mixed with all sorts of emotions, swirled stickily and eerily. It resembled the countless nights Yiyeon had to endure, withering away, and conversely, it contained the pit of destruction she had not chosen.

Yiyeon noticed his gradually becoming wilder and more unstable state but never backed down.

“Because I’m only going to laugh hard from now on.”

At her unhesitating answer, Kwon Chaewoo’s face contorted even more.

“…Like Kwon Giseok said, date normally, marry, and have a child?”

“That’s none of your business.”

“Then why did you help me at the sex party?”

“……”

“You neither love nor hate me, so why did you unbuckle my belt there, and why did you divert Kwon Giseok’s gaze?”

His sharp voice burst out hoarsely. Yiyeon, who had kept her lips tightly shut, met his gaze with transparent eyes that showed no emotion.

“Because I was secretly comfortable that you stepped up to help me leave the garden. So I didn’t want to owe you.”

“……”

“That’s all.”

The sticky residue clinging to the man’s face suddenly washed away. Kwon Chaewoo burst into laughter. An incomprehensible sense of deprivation and defeat deeply pierced his blackened pupils.

At that moment, the man quickly threw off the blanket and climbed onto the bed, lowering his arms as if to trap Yiyeon. Their legs tangled, and their bellies touched. As he lowered his head, Yiyeon held her breath at the intensified smell of blood.

“Ms. Yiyeon, do you know?”

Kwon Chaewoo tightly closed and opened his sensitive eyelids, sleepless. In his reopened eyes, there was a patience filled to the very brink of its limit. Yiyeon hoped it wouldn’t spill over to her, but his coldly hardened face somehow seemed ominous.

“You can have sex even if you hate someone.”

“……!”

“You can live with someone your whole life even if you hate them—”

For some reason, he licked his lips like a beast unleashed from chains.

“You can love even if you hate.”

He also looked like a lost child left alone in a snowfield.

“Ms. Yiyeon, do you really not need me?”

“…No.”

No sooner had she finished speaking than Kwon Chaewoo seized Yiyeon’s arms and pressed his lips against hers.

“……!”

She stiffened a beat late, but her hands were already forcibly pressed onto the mattress.

Yiyeon instinctively clenched her molars, but a hot, skillful tongue was forcibly making its way between her closed lips. The tip of his tongue violently invaded through the slightly parted gap, licking her mucous membrane and then biting her lower lip. He moved his jaw like someone who had starved for years, pressing and sucking her plump lips.

Just as Yiyeon’s body began to lose strength, he pulled away his lips. The man muttered with a pale face.

“Do you really not need me?”

“……”

Yiyeon stubbornly didn’t answer, and Kwon Chaewoo just stared intently at her lips.

“Ms. Yiyeon, you still can’t handle a dog for shit.”