Flowers Are Bait Novel - Chapter 129

One of his hands lifted Yiyeon’s T-shirt and went inside. When he grabbed her chest, encased in her bra, she flinched and twisted her body.

“What on earth is this…!”

He watched her brazenly, as if observing her reaction. It was a strange gaze, as if he was gauging the limit of how much she could endure.

“Get away from me!”

Yiyeon hit and pushed his shoulder with her unbound hand, but it had no effect on him whatsoever.

His thumb, pressing the peak of her breast, slowly rubbed until she looked up, and then her pajama bottoms were pulled down.

“You crazy bastard!”

Unable to bear it any longer, Yiyeon slapped his cheek—!

“Ouch.”

Kwon Chaewoo feigned pain, but the corners of his lips were pulled up to his cheekbones.

“Ms. Yiyeon, your eyes are incredibly beautiful right now.”

“……!”

The man smiled brightly, looking at Yiyeon’s angry eyes. How beautiful his eye corners, which had always been sharp, suddenly curved, and his lips, which opened coolly, were. Yiyeon couldn’t react at all, as if she had been drenched in longing.

Kwon Chaewoo kissed her eyelids. At his twisted intention, Yiyeon turned her head sharply in disgust, and the man’s face hardened. But as if nothing had happened, he skillfully forced a smile again and whispered with great earnestness.

“Ms. Yiyeon, hate me more each day.”

—Woof, woof woof! Woof woof!

She heard a dog barking somewhere, and suddenly two black dogs appeared.

Yiyeon, who was walking side by side with Gyubaek, flinched and stepped back. Slightly rounded head, long snout, triangular erect ears.

“Ohh… that’s a German Shepherd.”

Gyubaek, holding Yiyeon’s hand, exclaimed. As the dogs barked loudly and bared their teeth, a staff member immediately tightened their leashes and controlled them. Yiyeon, startled by their fierce snapping, took a few steps back.

“Hey, no!”

The staff member sternly and firmly blocked the dogs. Yiyeon watched as their dark brown, almond-shaped eyes slowly calmed down.

The staff member apologized and introduced himself as the person who trains the Kwon family’s guard dogs. At that moment, Gyubaek quickly hid behind Yiyeon’s back, only peeking his head out.

“Sometimes dogs confuse playing with biting.”

“Oh, that’s right. Dogs bite for various reasons.”

“They also bite when they are scared or in pain.”

“Oh, that’s right, sometimes they do it to establish dominance.”

The staff member pulled the leash tighter again and muttered, “He’s a smart one.”

Yiyeon listened to their natural conversation and then focused on a certain word.

“…Dominance?”

Yiyeon scratched her eyelids and looked at the German Shepherd’s handsome face.

“Ah, yes. These guys have an instinct to constantly establish dominance over people. Especially when they lie down and climb onto your face to bite your eyes or ears, you must firmly stop them. There are ways to hold their lower jaw and warn them, or to push them away with your hand.”

Suddenly, Yiyeon’s expression began to change. As she listened to the staff member with a serious face, the man laughed as if he had a headache and moved his mouth like a motor.

“If the owner is lower in rank than the dog, they get alpha dog syndrome. They become highly vigilant, sensitive, and their aggression also increases. They have no social skills whatsoever, but they overprotect their territory, barking fiercely and biting as if to kill. Sometimes they even threaten their owner and become excessively possessive, so establishing dominance is truly essential.”

…What was this? This trainer was talking about German Shepherds, famous as Germany’s national dog and military dog, but Yiyeon couldn’t understand why Kwon Chaewoo from last night came to mind.

It was so ambiguous whether she was having a casual chat with a Kwon family resident she met by chance in front of the elevator, or if she was receiving counseling.

And dominance, of all things. To Yiyeon, who had always pursued coexistence, concepts like dominance and power were far, far away.

“But do you raise dogs?”

“What?”

“I talk a lot when it comes to dogs, but you listen so well.”

“Ah…”

Last night, Kwon Chaewoo, who had briefly messed up Yiyeon’s clothes and then stumbled away again, had kept her awake.

While she awkwardly scratched the back of her head, the staff member asked again.

“If you have similar problems, you must train them in obedience, understand?”

“……”

Yiyeon couldn’t answer and just bit her lip inwards.

“—The youngest master?”

As soon as she entered the office after her walk, a stiff voice greeted her.

The management team was enveloped in a strange atmosphere of tension. Yiyeon, sensing the mood early, walked around and carefully observed the faces of the managers.

They were all equipped with safety helmets, safety glasses, safety gloves, and earplugs, and were busy preparing to leave with chainsaws and various tools.

What was today’s schedule again? But Yiyeon, recalling her schedule immediately, tilted her head. She spoke to a staff member who was putting water on the coffee pot.

“We didn’t have any schedule today besides simple maintenance, did we?”

“Ah, well…”

The staff member tore open a packet of instant coffee mix and poured it into a paper cup.

“The youngest master suddenly said he would tear down the annex garden…”

At the troubled voice, Yiyeon’s brows quietly furrowed.

“He asked us to cut down all the trees.”

The place she arrived at, asking about Kwon Chaewoo’s whereabouts, was an indoor swimming pool 50 meters long.

Her stomach had been boiling all the way here. It was obvious whose feelings the man’s arbitrary demand was trying to provoke. Her face flushed red, and she fumed. He’s trying to pick a fight with me, isn’t he?

Yiyeon, who had also entered barefoot, walked boldly, looking around the quiet swimming pool.

A static place where the shimmering water reflected like crystal on the ceiling. But instead of the familiar wax smell, there was a strange fishy smell, and perhaps because of the black tiles, the water was dark.

It was when she stopped walking due to the somewhat unfamiliar atmosphere and looked into the water. As she curiously put her finger in and stirred the water, her hand was suddenly seized by someone who shot up from below the surface.

“……!”

Yiyeon shrieked and fell back, startled by the figure that cut through the water without a sound.

The man, shaking off the water clinging to his body, took off his swimming cap and glared at her fiercely.

“Are you crazy? What do you think this place is…!”

His wet, slippery body heaved with short breaths. The moment her gaze was drawn to one ear, which had an earplug and tape, a suction-cup-like mouth opened wide, and something shot out of the water.

“Kyaaak!”

The round holes were densely filled with disgusting, sharp teeth.

Without time to grasp the situation, Yiyeon’s bottom was suddenly pulled towards the pool. A school of fish had attached themselves to her ankles, which had fallen below the surface as she sat down on the floor.

“Hwaaaak…!”

She scratched wildly at the tiled floor, but it was useless. With a powerful suction that clung like leeches, her knees were soon submerged.

The thin, elongated fish had truncated snouts, as if they had been cut off, and their mouths were filled with teeth as dense as grains of rice. And there weren’t just one or two of them.

At that moment, Kwon Chaewoo, who cursed, “Shit!”, immediately pulled Yiyeon out. Yet, the suction was so strong that even the ones clinging to Yiyeon’s feet came out with her.

Kwon Chaewoo grimaced fiercely and caught the parasitic lampreys with his bare hands. Normally, he would have had to cut off their heads with a knife, but now, in a hurry, he could only crush them with his fists. They were tenacious creatures that only came off if he squeezed their heads as if to burst them.

“What, what is this? Why are there things like that in the pool?”

“It’s not a swimming pool, it’s an aquarium.”

He said, gnashing his teeth as he violently tore off a lamprey.

“Ugh, ugh…!”

Tears welled up automatically in a situation she had never experienced before. When she looked at the aquarium again, not only were the tiles black, but eel-like creatures were teeming inside.

“Lampreys especially like wounded flesh.”

“……!”

Suddenly, the encyclopedia she had read with Gyubaek came to mind. The picture that particularly stuck in her memory because of its disgusting, jawless mouth was that of a lamprey.

The ocean’s corpse cleaner. The most primitive form of fish that attaches its suction cup to the bodies of dead fish and sucks their blood and nutrients.

No, why would they raise something like this at home? If it’s an aquarium, why swim in it? What on earth are they raising these for? She completely forgot about the tree issue she wanted to argue about and was simply dumbfounded.

“I hadn’t fed them for days anyway. If Ms. Yiyeon came out of there—”

He, having dealt with every last one, ran a hand through his wet hair. Kwon Chaewoo, also quite startled, slumped to the floor and rested his forehead on his half-bent knees. His eyelids were intermittently trembling.

“See? I told you so. Whenever it concerns Ms. Yiyeon, I want to kill everything.”

Yiyeon bit her lip, her face pale.

She hadn’t come here to be thoroughly humiliated like this; she had come to somehow make him withdraw his decision. But now her mind was completely blank.

The dozens of mouth-holes, like a cross-section of a pomegranate, kept lingering as afterimages. She was just enduring her shivering body.

“They’re used to eating only dead flesh, so they react to blood. It seems Ms. Yiyeon had a scraped part on her foot.”

Kwon Chaewoo put his arms under her knees and armpits and lifted her up.

“Sorry for startling you.”

“…Then cancel it. The order to cut down all the trees in the annex.”

Yiyeon, who had reached her limit in many ways, angrily grabbed the man’s chin.

“Well, it wasn’t that in the first place—”

Their eyes met directly at a similar height. Kwon Chaewoo placed Yiyeon on the sunbed and examined her feet and calves.

Damn it, it bothered him like a bite mark from another bastard. He looked up, touching the teeth marks.

“I should have bitten you instead.”