But what good was any of that?
The target did not stop. It was not even nine in the morning, and this labyrinthine market was only just beginning to wake.
Abel wanted to die.
But the target did not stop—and he could neither die nor kill her.
Abel forced himself to breathe and tried to regain control.
This is a department store.
The floor is marble. Luxury boutiques line both sides. The woman walking ahead is a patron. I am wearing a suit. A suit needs perfume—Hamilton, with a cedarwood base. No, winter is coming. Winter—
“Move! Move!”
The smell of fish.
“Move, move!”
“There’s nowhere to move!”
Abel Sting snapped his glare toward the merchant pushing the cart and shouted. Both the merchant and Seo-ah flinched.
Then Abel froze as well.
The cart was decrepit—easily over a century old—and radiated an oppressive presence. If it brushed even the edge of his collar, not even a god of cleaning could save the suit.
“Let people pass, please?”
The seasoned merchant did not yield.
“Stick close to the side!”
“Where?”
“Is this young man blind? There are places to avoid everywhere!”
“When you’re old, can you even see the path here?” Abel snapped. “Where exactly am I supposed to avoid on a road this narrow?”
The mention of age—an unforgivable insult—ignited not only Abel’s frayed patience, but the merchant’s temper as well.
“Darn it! You’ve made some money despite having no respect, and now you come here wearing clothes like that?”
As Abel’s glare sharpened to something murderous, the argument teetered on the brink of violence.
Seo-ah’s chest tightened.
She saw the veins standing out along the back of Abel’s neck.
The problem was that he was right—the path was narrow, with nowhere to move. Just as she was about to step forward to separate them, someone suddenly pulled her arm.
“Come here, miss.”
A woman tugged her inside a shop so cramped that only one person could pass between the piles of goods.
“Is that man with you?” the shop owner whispered urgently. “Tell him to come here quickly. He has a bad temper—if he starts a fight, he’ll pull out a knife later.”
“Thank you.”
After bowing hurriedly, Seo-ah gestured toward Abel.
“Um… Mr. Sting. …Mr. Sting!”
She had to call several times before he finally turned.
If disillusionment and contempt could be molded into a shape, it would look like Abel’s eyes.
He glanced once at the sky, then at the merchant they were confronting, and then—his face abruptly empty of expression—strode forward.
As Abel, who had been standing like a stone dam blocking the flow, moved aside, the merchant who had been shouting moments earlier resumed on his way as if nothing had happened.
The blocked street began to move again.
Only Seo-ah remained still.
Abel stood in front of the shop entrance, his broad back casting the already dim space into deeper shadow. She could see his dirty shoes and the hems of his trousers.
Having disrupted the fragile peace of his daily life, she could do nothing but endure the silence.
The weight of it pressed heavily on her shoulders.
Carts passed behind Abel, one after another.
Rumble, rumble, thud.Rumble, rumble, thud.
Without a word, he turned away.
Then he walked off in long strides, as if determined to force his way through the market as quickly as possible.
“Thank you.”
Seo-ah thanked the shop owner quickly and tried to follow him, but the woman caught her shoulder.
“Miss, you’re not from around here, are you?”
Seo-ah paused and turned back.
The shop owner smiled.
Only then did Seo-ah notice it—unlike the people here, the woman had chocolate-colored skin and golden eyes. She, too, was a foreigner.
“That ribbon in your hair is pretty.”
“……”
The hand on Seo-ah’s shoulder slid down her arm and closed briefly over the back of her hand, where she clutched her bag.
“Hang in there.”
“……”
Ahead of her, Abel had stopped and was looking back, his expression clearly asking what she was doing.
Seo-ah stepped out of the shop and hurried after him. When she glanced back once more, the shop owner was already gone.
The market twisted like a maze.
The farther they walked, the wider the paths became—
and the more people filled them.
After following behind Abel for a while, a space appeared without warning—too small to be called a plaza, yet wider than the surrounding paths.
From experience, such places usually held a cathedral. Seo-ah was about to look around when a small voice reached her.
“Excuse me.”
She looked down instinctively.
A child with dark skin and golden eyes stood there, swaying as the crowd brushed past without care. Reflex took over—Seo-ah caught the child before they stumbled.
As she lifted her head, worried she might lose sight of Abel, something was suddenly pressed into her hand.
A single dark red flower.
Unsure of its meaning, she froze. Beyond the flower, the child grinned.
“Thank you.”
“Huh?”
“A thousand Kertes.”
“What?”
“Just give me a thousand Kertes!”
“I—I don’t need the flower.”
She tried to return it, but the child clung stubbornly.
“Just give me a thousand Kertes!”
Abel was already drifting farther away. The child would not let go.
In the end, hurriedly pulling a thousand Kertes from her bag was a mistake.
“!”
In an instant, children swarmed in.
Not only children—a young woman holding a baby,an old man,an older child carrying another infant—
Strangers poured in, each thrusting dark red flowers toward her. And, pleaded.
“Please buy mine too.”“Miss, mine too.”
She needed to get out. Quickly.
But those golden eyes—that face—
They were too similar to the woman who had pulled her into the shop earlier.
A face that looked as though it had been dropped alone into the world. An expression that suggested pleading was the only option left.
“Miss, please… can’t you buy just one?”
Seo-ah could not bring herself to shove away those outstretched hands.
—
Around that time, Abel Sting—who had been walking ahead, determined not to look back even once—frowned as a sudden signal came from the backup team.
What now? Again?
“…Seriously. What is wrong with her?”
There she was buying flowers.
Surrounded.
Nomads clustered around her like iron filings drawn to a magnet. Backup agents hovered in disarray, unable to intervene without making things worse.
Move, Abel Sting. Go! Move! Move, you bastard.
Abel flipped off the agent gesturing most aggressively at him, then slowly approached the stranger who seemed utterly oblivious to the world.
By now, the woman had bought so many flowers she was holding an armful, unable to grip them properly with her hands.
Pretty.
So pretty.
Like a single white lily buried among dark red roses.
Strangely, he wasn’t even angry.
“Hey.”
His voice—heavy with restrained fury—cut through the air like arrows.
“…….”“…….”
Isn’t survival, for strangers, a lifelong exercise in reading the room?
The wandering nomads scattered as if by prior agreement, the moment they saw Abel. It happened so fast it was almost imperceptible, like the blink of an eye.
Only the woman remained. She could go nowhere.
And the heap of flowers.
They stood alone on the filthy road.
The sight was so absurd that Abel nearly laughed.
Someone is actually buying these with money.
And I’m the one being tormented for it.
“You bought those with money?”
To hell with seduction. Or whatever.
“Why. For me?”
The clueless lily blinked.
“But what am I supposed to do with them? I detest these things. Do you know what kind of bad luck you’d bring on yourself accepting them?”
“…Bad luck?”
“You didn’t know?”
Of course you didn’t.
Even if you didn’t know—couldn’t you feel it? Isn’t there a reason no one buys them?
“They were all stolen from a cemetery.”
“What?”
“Do you know what a cemetery is? Graves. I mean graves.”
The eyes that had been draining Abel Sting for the past week widened as if they might burst. The color drained from her pale face, turning it deathly blue.
Watching her, the boulder lodged in Abel’s chest finally seemed to slide free.
“They were stolen. All of them. Flowers offered to the dead.”
And you bought them—every last one—without knowing a thing.
If we’d only gone to proper places from the start, would it have ended like this?
Of all the miserable, nightmarish days of the past week, this moment was—unbelievably—the most entertaining.
The snake charmer smiled sinisterly.
The woman clutching the flowers looked as though she were about to cry.
—