Flowers Are Bait Novel - Chapter 141

“What bastard, put her in a white dress.”

Kwon Chaewoo threw the tablet at Jang Beomhee’s chest, his eyes flashing.

“Do you know what kind of thoughts I’ve been having lately?”

“Pardon?”

“I often think about doing things I hated enough to die. Because there’s no time.”

Jang Beomhee waited for clarification on his incomprehensible words, but Kwon Chaewoo only moved his Adam’s apple, as if swallowing his words.

In the future, the conflict between the Kwon family and opposing forces would intensify even more beneath the surface, and even if Yiyeon were in a safe place, would he be able to return to her?

He couldn’t even begin to calculate how much time would be needed until the Kwon family was dismantled.

If he couldn’t be by her side while the child was born and grew up. If he made her endure all that hardship alone. Kwon Chaewoo stubbornly clenched and unclenched his fists, which lacked strength.

“Lead the way.”

“Young Master. You can barely move right now—!”

“If my leg was cut off, I would have crawled.”

In his words, dripping with obsession, Jang Beomhee finally had to give up completely.

The banquet hall doors were as secure as a restricted area, but Kwon Chaewoo entered without hesitation.

Perhaps because the lighting was dim, he thought the atmosphere was strange, but his eyes were bloodshot from searching for Yiyeon like a thirsty man.

The sight of neatly dressed people with dilated pupils stumbling around annoyed him. But the moment he spotted Kwon Giseok and Yiyeon, arm-in-arm, his mind went completely blank.

For some reason, the two of them seemed special, as if a hazy veil had been cast over them.

“Ha…”

Kwon Chaewoo irritably gulped down the drink a server was holding. It felt worse than being shot. He cursed at the malicious intent of his brother, who had scraped his nerves by calling her sister-in-law, and then finally put her in a white dress.

Kwon Chaewoo, suppressing his anger alone, frowned and emptied another glass. He walked, leaning on his crutches, even as he sweated coldly.

And, as if to pierce the narrow gap where their faces were intimately close at a strange angle, he thrust his crutch in.

“Why don’t you two separate a bit?”

At that moment, a feeling of overturning swept over him, as if the floor was rising and the ceiling was collapsing. Kwon Chaewoo paused, pressing his eyeballs, at the extremely bizarre sensation of his body tilting and then flipping over. But as a headache, as if his skull was splitting, surged, the banquet hall suddenly washed away, and a new vision unfolded.

Back to that time when he was poor, but he had his mother and music.

Kwon Chaewoo cupped and uncupped his small hands, looking around from his now lowered eye level. Suddenly, fresh air rushed into his nostrils.

At the same time, the girl who used to hide under the tree and sob every afternoon slowly began to overlap with Yiyeon. Just like that, Kwon Chaewoo was instantly sucked back into his thirteen-year-old past.

“What about your school uniform today?”

He slowly blinked and asked, quite innocently. He didn’t know what he was saying, just surrendering himself to the nostalgic and hazy sensation.

“Didn’t you want to hear me play?”

“What are you saying? What—”

“Hmm, so this is what your voice sounds like. Say more.”

Yiyeon, inwardly flustered, looked up at him with a blank face. Kwon Chaewoo looked at the girl’s eyes, stained with worry and bewilderment, as if she were a curious sight.

“I think this is the first time I’ve seen you this close.”

“…”

“How old exactly are you?”

“Uh…”

“I know you’re older than me, but how much older?”

“—…are you? Something’s wrong…—”

The girl’s voice broke off intermittently.

Even though he played the cello for her every day, the girl didn’t seem to recognize him. Kwon Chaewoo pouted like a child.

I really wanted to meet you. If it weren’t for my mother’s earnest pleas not to talk to anyone in the neighborhood and not to wander alone, I would have revealed myself and boasted long ago.

The girl, who always seemed lonely and melancholic, would often leave yellow sticky notes on the tree with a regretful look. Then, Kwon Chaewoo would secretly go into the forest at night, when everyone was asleep, and pick them like flowers.

“Are you disappointed because I’m too young and small?”

“—…not normal…—”

The girl still seemed flustered.

“It’s just that there’s not enough food at home, but I’m going to grow really tall. My mom said so. She said genetically, I’ll be very tall.”

Sometimes, with hazy eyes, his mother would tell him stories he didn’t know. How tall he would grow when he got older, how his features would change, how deep his voice would become. His mother’s eyes weren’t bright, but her tone was somehow confident.

“But you’re not crying today?”

Kwon Chaewoo intently scanned the girl’s dazed face. His heart pounded as if it would burst, and his cheeks stung as if on fire. It hurt far more than all the time he spent practicing the cello, which had hardened his calluses. His whole body ached, but he didn’t feel like stopping.

“Seeing you up close… you’re even prettier.”

“—…completely lost it…—”

“But why aren’t you looking at me, why are you always looking somewhere else?”

It was the moment Kwon Chaewoo stood on tiptoes and pulled the girl, who was taller than him.

“Chaewoo!”

At the piercing shout, his head instinctively turned. His mother, who had rushed in, was pale as if she would collapse at any moment. Her hand, gripping the child’s shoulder, trembled terribly. Kwon Chaewoo instinctively realized that their abnormal daily life, which he had secretly noticed, was on the verge of shattering.

“…Do we have to run away now?”

“Just go anywhere, this isn’t the place for this!”

Yiyeon, her face hardened, pulled him along. Kwon Chaewoo was dragged along as his mother led him. He ran frantically through the mountains, his legs aching and his breath short. Men with grim faces kept chasing them from unexpected directions, saying things like “Youngest Master, Master Chaewoo—!” and never taking their eyes off him, not his mother.

Yoon Jooha roughly pulled the child’s arm, as if tearing his shoulder blade out. Her nose bridge, contorted with terror, was like that of a beast. He still didn’t know whether it was instinct or reason that made Kwon Chaewoo let go of the woman’s hand first.

This time, the boy earnestly pleaded with his mother.

“Mom, Mom, you ran away first…!”

“Kwon Chaewoo, come to your senses—!”

“Those men know my name, they’re looking at me, not you, Mom!”

Mom, why can’t I go to school? Why can’t I make friends? Why are we living in hiding? Mom… what did you do wrong?

“The house right below the mountain is that noona’s house. Go to that house, not anywhere else. If noona pretends not to know me, tell her to pay for all the music she’s heard from me…!”

“Kwon Chae—”

“I buried my favorite CD under the tree. I’m a singing tree, that’s the proof! Go quickly, I’ll see you again in a bit…!”

At that moment, everything became jumbled. The thirteen-year-old child was gone, and the grown-up Kwon Chaewoo was holding Yoon Jooha’s hand tightly.

If they separated like this, they would never meet again. Kwon Chaewoo, who had already experienced that future, paused with a dark expression. He had his long-missed mother in front of him, but the man could only breathe, unable to say a word.

The sobbing Yoon Jooha was only a year or two older than the current So Yiyeon. Perhaps because of that, he momentarily fell into a strange sentimentality. Yoon Jooha looked much younger, more helpless, and more naive than the mother in his memories.

After meeting their biological family, they were relentlessly pressured to break free from the kidnapper’s brainwashing as soon as possible. With the ridiculous phrase “brainwashing解除 (de-brainwashing),” Kwon Chaewoo was constantly tormented by psychiatrists. The doctors took turns stripping away and disparaging Yoon Jooha’s love, layer by layer.

“Chaewoo, a mother who truly loves her child doesn’t hide in the mountains and neglect her child like that. You said you never even attended elementary school, right? Furthermore, Chaewoo, you’re malnourished, and your height and weight are below average. It seems you haven’t experienced proper human relationships outside of Yoon Jooha. You bit your siblings yesterday, didn’t you? Is this truly the behavior of someone who received healthy love? Yoon Jooha is not your mother, she’s just a kidnapper.”

Each time, Kwon Chaewoo felt strong resistance and resentment, but at the same time, the inside of his heart became darkly polluted.

All he did during his time growing up was doubt love and nurture a formless hatred.

He thought he had lived like a recluse, only longing for his mother, but he realized after meeting So Yiyeon that he had, in fact, resented her more than anyone.

The thought of being ‘deceived again.’

The intense dislike and fear of being ‘swayed by someone again.’ The emotions he had tried to suppress and ignore raged violently and erratically.

Even though he knew he was instinctively drawn to Yiyeon, and even though he was driven crazy by how every single action of hers bothered him, he deliberately denied it. Until he learned that she had entered the Kwon family, pregnant with his child, for Gyubaek’s safety.

“…Mother.”

Although they had to live on the run, his life with his mother was rich. Their clothes might have been old, but they were clean, and Kwon Chaewoo always ate warmer, more abundant meals than Yoon Jooha.

From trimming his tiny son’s fingernails and toenails while holding him close, to falling asleep singing, laughter never ceased in their humble home.

But when his fever soared all night and they couldn’t knock on a hospital door, Yoon Jooha would pick up and put down the phone repeatedly, saying she was sorry. Kwon Chaewoo, even at a young age, was anxious and scared to see his mother’s face contorted with guilt and pain, so he just tugged on her clothes. Then Yoon Jooha would burst into tears and hug the child, whose face was flushed with fever, with all her might.

Kissing the child’s mouth, which had turned sour from spitting out bitter medicine, pressing her feverish chest against his, and pressing their foreheads together, Yoon Jooha would soothe him all night, saying, “My son, take all of Mom’s energy, take it all.” The child would forget his pain and smile sweetly at the comforting scent.

“I’ll let myself be kidnapped again.”

He embraced the mother he had longed for his entire life and finally bowed his head in surrender. Because this wretched moment was their true last. Kwon Chaewoo wiped his crying mother’s tears and said,

“Steal me away in a cello case as many times as you want. But in return…”

He painfully contorted his face, then put on an expressionless mask again.

“I’m sorry, Mother. I really wanted to destroy the Kwon family.”

He squeezed his eyes shut and muttered.

“I, damn it, I think I’ll inherit that fucked-up family.”

It was something Kwon Chaewoo hated more than death. But now, he was declaring that he would abandon the very foundation of his being without regret.

“I… I’m going to give up on Mother.”

“…”

“I lost music when I lost Mother, but if that woman isn’t there…”

His son, now fully grown, was kneeling and apologizing.

“…I’m sorry.”

This time, for sure. Because he wanted to stay by his beloved’s side for a long time.

“Thank you for stealing me. Thank you for raising me as a person, and for teaching me love.”

“…”

“I will live as a sinner for the rest of my life.”

Mother, now that woman is my childhood, and my new music.

The moment he finally shed the most painful leaf and moved forward, Kwon Chaewoo’s vision spun once more.

Meanwhile, Yiyeon, who had taken the man who had drunk Summer up to the hotel room, was witnessing all of this in confusion.