Jo Jinho's POV

I wasn't sure if it was ten minutes or ten hours later when my eyes snapped open in the dark.

I was on my back. I lay there, blinking and breathing rapidly, as my weak, disoriented mind struggled to remain conscious.

My face felt like someone had used it as a hammer. My stomach was one large, acidic sour knot. The taste in my dry mouth was vaguely medical. My entire body felt strange and puffy, as if I were wrapped in a cotton ball cocoon.

Accident? Was my first coherent thought.

Then I felt something tilt and creak, and my eyes went wide as I remembered everything. An aha moment straight from Hell.

I'm on a boat! But...going where? Why? Who?

I remembered Go Shinwon falling down, his legs simply giving out on him and then he was lying facedown on the varnished teak deck beside me. His cell phone by his hand, his business cards fluttering like leaves.

The champagne had been doctored, I realized. See, Jo Jinho? I thought to myself, this is exactly why you shouldn't drink alcohol!

"No," I said weakly. I tried to move my right arm. I turned my wrist maybe a centimeter before it rolled back like a heavy log.

Great. I was still drugged. Was it anesthesia?

I was trying to move my other arm when I heard something in the distance: a hollow thump followed by a tremendous splash.

I closed my eyes as panic bloomed in the pit of my stomach. It began to rise into my throat like the numbers on a thermometer in a blast oven when I heard the close sound of heavy footsteps above.

Think! I urged myself. I tried to. But there was nothing except the dark. Nothing but the accelerating beat of my heart. Finally, a wave of temptingly sweet exhaustion passed through me like a last hope.

Of course, I thought. I needed to go back to sleep. Figure it out later, much later.

I heard the opening of a door, someone coming down the stairs.

Stop it! Wake up! Some other part of me thought.

Stand up! I frantically began to beg myself.

The other lazy part was having none of it. I free-fell back toward the safe oblivion of sleep with a sigh, as if that would save me.

A moment later, my eyes bolted open as the reek of ammonia scoured my nostrils like a serrated knife.

"Haven't I seen you someplace before?" someone said as he lifted me into his arms.

I couldn't help it. I screamed.

The dark stranger, my vision too blurry to make out a clear visual of who it was, produced a large black semiautomatic pistol and waved it at me with a smile. He put it back into his pocket as he placed a shushing finger to his lips.

I shook my head slowly at first but then faster and faster. I still couldn't move the rest of my body, but my head seemed fully capable of movement. Odd. This couldn't be happening. Nightmares couldn't come true.

My vision finally cleared enough that I could make out a man in a dark mask with a pair of familiar colored eyes. I knew that I wasn't in some kind of music video for Pentagon. I wasn't even in Cerberus (Pentagon's Maknae Line song).

"Please," I said to him, finally finding myself able to place my hands together in a begging gesture. "I have nothing to do with this. I didn't know."

His smile never wavered.

He suddenly grabbed me by the back of my head and rammed his face into a cloth that he took out of his other pocket.

"No!" I screamed into the cloth. "Please..."

"Yes!" the wicked man screamed back as he slapped me hard, square in the stomach. Breath whooshed out of me as I was back to feeling immobile and helpless to this attacker. "You cannot fight with me, Jo Jinho."

I helplessly struggled against his strong, muscular arms. There was nothing I could do as he glared at me in pure hatred. "Rinoh, let me go!" I tried once more to beg and reason with him behind the cloth.

"Do you ever just...shut up?" Rinoh said, taking a roll of duct tape from his jacket pocket. "I never knew how annoying you'd be. God, Pentagon will be ten times better without you there, won't they?"

He duct-taped my hands behind my back, before he dragged me into the living room and handcuffed my ankles together, sitting me onto a black leather couch. Then he wrapped the adhesive around my head a few times.

"Nice place, isn't it?" Rinoh said, sitting down on the couch across from me. He removed the dun from his jacket and placed it, along with the duct tape, on the cushion beside him before he put his feet up on the coffee table.

I can't speak, dumbass. I, of course, couldn't say this, so I instead rolled my eyes at him.

"I love all the hardwood. 'Should have done that picture frame molding in our dining room, don't you think? What's this couch? Pottery Barn? I like a man or lady who treats themself right. What about the modern painting over the fireplace? Let me guess. Crate and Barrel? I mean...?"

I stared down at the floor.

He leaned back and put his arms over the back of the couch and let out a breath. "How did you ever think that I wouldn't want some kind of revenge for what you did?" My eyes went wide as he suddenly lifted the gun off the couch. I couldn't help it, I let out a pitiful little noise. He turned over and pressed it to my forehead, dug it right between my eyes.

"This is how you pay me back? Remember the survival show you and I did? I saved you, gave you everything. You moved on to the next round and the next and the next, but what did I get? Lies. You're fucked up, you know that?"

I shook my head.

Just then, the door burst open. I screamed as light flooded the scene. A breathless, exhausted Go Shinwon stood, his hand pressed against the frame of the door. His eyes were wide and furious.

"YOU!"

Rinoh snapped his head to look at Shinwon, keeping the gun trained on me.

"That wasn't too nice what you did, Rinoh!"

"Well, it wasn't too nice what Jinho-ah did to me."

Shinwon stepped into the room and closed the door behind him. "Look, doesn't matter, we can be civilized people here and not killers. You wouldn't actually kill Jinho-hyung over some stupid survival show competition, right?"

I glared at Shinwon. He was NOT helping out.

Shinwon chuckled nervously and raised his hands up into the air. "We're all friends here."

"Not..." Rinoh snarled. "Anymore..."

I rolled his eyes again. I desperately wanted to mouth off to this prick.

"It's because of me," Shinwon suddenly blurted out. "There. Your fight is with me, not him. I told him to go on the show. I told him to tell you all that, to help you out and then to betray you. It was all my doing."

Rinoh cocked his head to one side. "Why?"

"Because I wanted hyung to do well. He really wants to sing and improve. He love theatrical singing. I just...I wanted him to do well and we had to step on a few toes. I never thought one of the contestants would be mad."

Rinoh whirled his head around to me. "Is this true?"

Before I could respond with a muffled word or with a gesture, Shinwon quickly said, "I don't care what you do to me. I'll do anything you want as a consequence. Just please let Jinho-hyung go."

Rinoh paused to consider Shinwon's words, but after a second he shook his head. "That's the best you can do? You'll do anything I want anyway. Request denied. Jinho-ya stays with me. You should have thought about things before you BOTH set my whole entire world on fire."

I groaned.

"Shut up!" He racked the slide of the automatic. CLICK!

Shinwon threw his arms out before him, a choked gasp coming out of his mouth.

"I knew I should have killed you with more poison on the deck," he said, grumbling to himself out loud. "And now for my next act, ladies and germs. I'm going to kill a rival contestant and his cute, dorky sidekick as slowly and painfully as possible."

I closed my eyes. This was it. This was the end.