XLII.

B U T C H E R ' S  B O Y

—aka, made of, made in, made by.

INT— THE PARK ESTATE.

JEJU-DO, SOUTH KOREA— MORNING.

SCENE IV.

IT HAS BEEN a long, long while since I've genuinely sobbed.

I've cried. For a job that needed a show. A con that needed a way out. My tears aren't a rare commodity. It's nothing but a common tool in my arsenal; well abused ink on worn and rusted pages. It can gain sympathy, a chance, even a lever. If I could rate my tears, I would call the two percent chance of losing honesty.

The two are either sides of the same coin; for those who sadistically enjoy the pain of others and those who don't care for the pain of others. Freaks of a kind, sadism of the worst degrees.

Real tears, one deep within my own, mirroring a part of me I never pull— and a few times wonder if I truly have — upheave from inside me and onto Kristoff's shirt.

I don't even remember how we got where we are. All I know was that I was getting choked out by a maniac, and then there was Kristoff with the right hook, I was in his arms, and now we were in a cinched, dark room where I could barely see past him.

To be fair, I could barely see past my throbbing eyes and tears, so it was useless either way.

I was half slumped on the edge of what I can only assume was furniture but wasn't seated correctly on, half of me was on Kristoff himself. His lap and torso. His neck and chest. I was leaning on him as much as I was melting into him, our bodies blended in shadowed comfort.

My only anchor. The point of light amidst darkness.

How ironic it is to be the man who got me here. The reason I was in a circle of Dante's Inferno.

And he was gentle. Maybe he always was. Maybe today was an exception. But his hands were soft in their caress, the roughly hewned sinew and bone of them a point of safety.

Safety.

This was insanity. Maybe that was the point. I was too exhausted for reason.

He was patient for my sobs to turn to cries, to turn to sniffles. My hands clenched against his shirt when I looked up at his face. In the darkness and the closeness, he was the devil as he was my saviour. His eyes were dark, his face the same chiselled lines. The shadows haunt him. He haunts the shadows. But with my chin tilted like a piety, the answering prayer was a sweet hold of his palms. He was always so cold but I had never felt warmer.

"If I ask you to kill him, would you?"

He didn't blink. He was bared. "Yes. Yes, if you wanted to I would."

Who was he? I could ask, but I already know, don't I?

A number of ways to hide oneself, to shift and change like a new human bending and moulding to have a new person. Once where you stood is no more but another. One who walks different, talks different, laughs different.

I know all about that.

And Kristoff's eyes were his and his alone. Warm and dark and called to mine like a siren's call to a passing ship.

Not like his sister's. Or his mother's. Not like his grandfather's. Or his cousins'.

Maybe his father's. But certainly not like anyone in this family.

But that man... his skin was so stretched it hid his most defining features. Hid the curve of his nose, the form of his lips. But it didn't hide his eyes. His rage. His want. His madness.

It is a mirror in this family, a sickness.

The age matches. The gait too.

Who was he? I could ask.

"Who are you?" I asked instead.

Because Kristoff— this Kristoff, my Kristoff — cannot lie to me.

His mouth opened. Words didn't come. They stutter and swallow and retreat. He blinked, surprised. "It's been a while since I've said my name. My mouth has forgotten the sound of it."

I sat up properly, his hands moved but didn't go too far. Almost as if he was afraid of where I would go. I brought myself closer, close enough that I could breathe more of him— that cologne, his skin, the expensive fabric of his clothes; everything familiar is mine, everything he was- is, is mine.

I pressed my fingers to his lips with one hand and the other on his throat. A vulnerable place. It's a knee jerk reaction to tense up when someone has a hold of your throat, but he stared at me, read me, and relaxed. We both know that trust is earned, but between us, our threads are so far tangled with each other, our edges break apart and merge.

"Enunciate. Slowly. I want to know."

His mouth and throat moved beneath my hands. I mirrored each movement with my own. He soundlessly spoke his name over and over until I had each curve of his lips memorised, each move of his throat etched beneath my skin. Until I can copy each movement, know each consonant.

His true name. His true self.

"Who are you?" I asked again, softly this time.

He took a deep breath. Something inside of him was warring, a turmoil and a truth. His head slumped forward, settling on the crook of my neck. He breathed deep, inhaling and exhaling against my skin. His breath, his lips, contract with each movement.

"She took me in," he said. "Because she had no other offspring. Yuna couldn't. She was a girl. Adored by extension but couldn't be an heir. She needed a son. Aurelius, her husband, fathered a bastard. A boy.

"How odd, that the son she needs from him would come from someone else's womb. It didn't matter. This boy had no brothers, had no twins. He wasn't cursed. He was perfect. Almost. He had to be refined, you see. He grew up from rough waters, from a woman of no significant origin. Her earliest ancestors had been nothing but farmers, some of the girls married off to second and third sons of good families, but not enough. It mattered little. He was going to be hers. She will make him important."

He breathed the word. Brought it life in a hush and an exhale.

"He had his pick. There were three sons that he could be, all dead they were. Triplets. Bad omens they were, they were erased. Anthony, Mikhail, and Kristoff. Though they looked alike, they had differences. The most the boy looked like was the second son. But they needed the eldest. In some beliefs, triplets happen when gods are angry. When curses are started. It's said that the true son of the family is the eldest. The other two are demons.

"It's an old belief. A very, very old belief. But this is a very old family. Especially when after the triplets were born, Nana's life had broken down from getting pregnant out of wedlock and being saddled with an unhappy marriage with a husband that had nothing to his name. She had became a disappointment in her father's eyes, and the company lost the one competent blood."

"They couldn't do anything in the end," he continued. "The boy looked like the second son, and the second son was the kindest. Smartest. Had the smarts to become the heir. The grandfather was happy with Mikhail, but with their beliefs, not even he could stop the traditions. Maybe it was jealousy, maybe it was anger. That not even in her jealousy could stop the child from not being enough. There was a plan. And the plan was done.

She killed Mikhail first."

The only emotion that I could see, hear, feel— is his hands on my sides, grasping at the edges of my clothes until he could find skin between my shirt and skirt. I shivered at the press of his cold hands, the fidgeting, the kneading. There was no tonal change to his words, almost as if he was recollecting passages from a book.

"Then Anthony. Then Kristoff. They weren't good enough to be her sons, so she made a new one. If she couldn't bear one, she would make one. So the boy grew up with two skins. He would be perfect. Though he wore the youngest's name to his chest, branded into his skin..."

He took my hands, stared straight into my eyes, and pressed them against the top of his knee, right above the bone. There were small, almost imperceptible indents on his skin.

My gasp was small. A brand. A literal branding on his skin.

"The boy claimed the skin of the second son, to appease her father. Everyone else thinks he is the firstborn. The three boys were so alike, and no one knew what they looked like old enough." He took my hand and pressed it against his other knee. Another name, indented on his skin so he never forgets. It was small caricatures of letters, easily unseen and unnoticed.

The masks he had to don. The people he had to be.

I had donned on masks for weeks. Months. At most, a year. But I had never known anybody to become someone else for the remainder of their life and never find reprieve. From an age that was still developing. To be broken anew and sundered into a shell that was not your own.

And not just one, but two. Maybe three.

A sewn doll of the perfect heir. Made not birthed. The scraps of the boy beneath are hidden from the stitches.

"I learned everything I had to." He released my hands and cupped my face, his thumb gliding against my cheek as I looked at him in nothing short of horror. "I became. I am them. So if you ask me who I am, I can only give you this."

And this... this was a patchwork make of a man where the boy beneath stopped struggling to get through.

He smiled. That odd, stretch of a smile. "You pity me."

"I..." Hesitation bears down honesty in the end. "I'm horrified."

"Hm." His thumb was gentle against my bottom lip. "It's perfectly fine to be horrified of a monster."

"I'm not horrified of you." I shook my head, holding his wrists. "You're not a monster, you're a victim."

His eye twitched, that false amusement in his lips falling with it. He tried to pull away but I tightened my grip. There was a claw on my neck and dread crawling on my back.

"I know what you're planning and it won't end well. You have to see that. We can leave. Out of this hell, never look back."

"Nina..."

It's my name, as false as everything else, held breath as if it was gospel.

Does it make sense to pity a monster? Did the gods, in the end, every time they think about Theseus and the minotaur felt regret for their condemnation? Did his mother?

I could see it. Not even a wisp of indecision. I understood that. But couldn't I try? Wasn't I allowed a way out of this, and subsequent to that, offer a hand to a man whose own wants aren't his own? Whose body, mind, being isn't his? Couldn't I get out of here without raising a sword? To bring him with me? To safety?

But I know a made mind when I see it. The inaction, the hesitancy to reply. It pulled apart my stomach, breaking fresh tears from my tear ducts that he was quick to wipe away. All evidence of my fragility was gone, seeped back into skin.

My fight was futile. This was his.

They made him, and only he can unmake himself.

"I will get you out of here alive, Antonina La Verne," he said in earnest, a vow so plainly said it must be the truth. "I made this promise to you. You will get out of this unscathed. But I need you to do this for me. On my word."

I stared at him for a good, long while. I pushed myself up and he was waiting for me. And then I was kissing him. Our breaths mingled, our thoughts stoppered. There was desperation in tenderness; at the way his hands moved to pull my head close, to keep me there, contained well within his grasps while I held him like he was mine to keep, breathing him in like I wanted a piece of him for myself. All of it. The patchwork and the ruin.

He kissed me back in equal vigour. That was more our fate. To be eaten alive, each end of the snake, as a form of salvation.

I wasn't too upset about that.

When I pulled away, I was on his lap, forcing his chin to meet my stern gaze until the haze of lust dissipated from his eyes.

Does it make sense that I wanted him alive? Is sympathy a shameful act to monstrous men?

Every shadowed corner of Kristoff's Park being was sharpened to mortal eye. Like when your eyes adjust in the dark long enough to see how truly vast the rest of the world is.

From the finality of his eyes, the uncumbersome truth of who he is— his plan is crystal clear to me, and so is his end. There was only one way to make it out of here alive, and that spells first the scene of his death.

This was the price of knowing.

"I don't believe in a martyr's death."

"You're not going to die."

"Not me." I smiled. It was factual. It was bitter. "I will not mourn you when you do. Not here. Not in this place."

There was a pause. A blink.

"I'm not asking that of you," he said quietly. A confession of a child to a parent. A sin in the lips of a sinner facing the wooden box of God's priest and open judgement.

"Good, because I want you to live."

He didn't deny it.

"It doesn't work like that. I don't know how else this ends."

A contort in his brow, a downturn of his lips. The flash of confusion made him look like a child. So many things about his expressions now, his reactions, could be brought back to how he was made.

Gone was the lurked shadow that followed his straight lines and edges, the fear that came from his presence alone. He was more human in this light, able to see where the skin was patched up together in nails and clenched teeth.

There was a person there. I was determined to pull him out.

A knock dragged me back to hell. He was expecting it, like a checkmark to be done in a list so old, it's yellowed pages have claw marks for creases.

"Everyone's gathered," Archie said, muffled from the other side of the door. Neither of us turn. "We should go."

When I smiled again, I was untangling myself to stand, away from his hands and his warmth. The cold pressed in, the terror coming back like frost on glass, but it doesn't sink like it did. The power it held over me not so long ago seemed like a dream, a joke; it made me feel silly, even with the bruises on my neck I could feel were becoming purple to prove how real the nightmare was.

But I knew him. By God, did I know him.

Between us, I was the liar.

And I was a good, goddamned liar.

"You're cleverer than that. You hired me on the spot despite the circumstances of our meeting. Your sister wanted to throw me in the middle of your plans, and you made it work for you. If you could re-work your plan to include me in it, surely you could do it again?"

I offered him a hand. I could see his mind whirl and move, contorted between so many people he had to be.

A flicker of hesitancy was all I needed.

When he stood tall in front of me, in all his glory and his hand in mine, I smiled and intertwined our fingers.

"You can't die in a name that isn't yours," I said. Then I said his name, the only way I could say it. Maybe I butchered it. Maybe a vowel was too long or used one for another, but the way his face broke with wonder, not unlike a child's—

I keep it for me.

Maybe when I have enough, I can put them back together again like a puzzle.

He swallowed, watching me so intensely I felt like a performer on a stage. I basked in it. I've never cowered against adoration.

I smiled. "I think I have just the plan."

He stayed quiet, watching me.

"Your plan is a suicide mission, plain and simple, and I don't particularly enjoy those."

Another knock, heavier. More insistent.

"Get Archie in here. I'm assuming KC is somewhere else?"

He gave one nod and said a word. Breathed it. Biǎo dì.

There was a pause before the door swung and abruptly closed, Archie's eyes wide and enraged.

"Nǐ fēngle ma?" he accused. 

Kristoff squeezed my hand before letting it go, approaching him. He said something quietly. Archie listened. So many emotions pooled out of his face, before he exhaled a laugh, bitter and a bark, and stood straight.

Kristoff turned to me. "KC is on standby."

"With backup?"

"With a small army." Archie shook his head with a disgruntled sigh. "It's just so you to change a plan set in motion for years. I hope you know what you're doing, La Verne. It isn't just his life that hangs in the balance here."

I smirked. "I have a one hundred percent success rate, Noh. Let me show you a true con. I need you to get word to KC, tell him to pick up a man called Joseph Evans. I know he's in the estate."

Archie's eyebrows furrowed. "Sooyoung's lover?"

Kristoff tilted his head. "The therapist?"

Archie snorted. "He came here guised as her therapist but reports say otherwise."

"Yes, well, all those are lies. He's a cherry-picker and he's essential to this plan."

I know the cast of this performance. I know the audience and they're hungry.

"How many men is an army exactly?" 

TRANSLATIONS.

Biǎo dì. 表弟 [cousin(/)brother].

Nǐ fēngle ma? 你疯了吗? [are you crazy?].

I know we've got some silent readers, but I would appreciate feedback! We've got less than three chapters left, and I would appreciate some thoughts and theories.