At that very time, Winter Castle had begun searching for a housemaid who could speak Korean—at the request of the Prime Minister’s wife.

Ju Seolheon didn’t want Damon to know about this. Without warning, she cut off all contact and entered the sprawling estate alone.

Quietly, she began observing Winter Castle. Every single day, she kept detailed records. The habit of writing daily reports—never missing a day for sixteen years—hadn’t left her.

Before long, and without meaning to, she found herself regularly serving the Solzhenitsyn couple up close. The Prime Minister, now in his mid-seventies, and his young East Asian wife, just past sixty, never exchanged a single word—yet always drank tea together at dawn and dusk.

The atmosphere between them was frigid, like a frozen sheet of ice. Just looking at them made one feel suffocated. She’d heard they had become irreparably estranged after losing their only son and daughter-in-law.

“Ivan and Yani...”

Ligai had once lowered his voice and spoken those names with a familiarity that made her pause. They were the Solzhenitsyns’ son and daughter-in-law.

“Some Russian elites treat the Korean children as entertainment. Occasionally, they even demand them from the cult leader. Ivan and Yani once summoned several Sakhalin children too...”

“......”

“There were horrible rumors... That the Solzhenitsyns’ hands were heavy—that they beat the children to death. None of the children ever came back alive.”

“......!”

“But Ivan and Yani... They weren’t killing them. They were smuggling Sakhalin children off to their private mines and islands. Then they got caught. I think... they were purged.”

That couple... had died trying to smuggle the children out?

“They had a young son, didn’t they...”

Ligai trailed off, staring up at the grand and resplendent Winter Castle.

Ju Seolheon had grown close with the lady of the house—but no matter what, the annex remained strictly off-limits.

The days grew more desperate. Then one day, the entire household fell into chaos: the Prime Minister’s only grandson had suddenly disappeared.

Ju Seolheon seized the moment, slipping away amid the confusion and making her way to the annex where the children were said to be kept.

It looked fancy—red plush carpets, tastefully arranged—but the whole place was covered in dust, like an artificial set. It didn’t feel like children actually lived there.

Beyond the annex, she entered a half-collapsed shack. Even a stable wouldn’t have been this shabby.

Inside that musty, crumbling place, she saw them—children crammed together like mushrooms. Their faces drooped beneath tight-fitting masks. The way they hung limp, she could practically smell mold coming off them.

Just then, someone grabbed her by the arm and turned her around.

“The date is set, Zoya.”

Ligai, in a white lab coat, stood before her.

“On the Solzhenitsyn grandson’s fourteenth birthday. We’re going to blow up Winter Castle.”

“...What?”

But Ligai wasn’t the kind of person who could pull off something like that. He had never been able to stand up to his own father. He didn’t have the courage to kill anyone. He was someone who always waited for someone else to act.

To destroy a place like Winter Castle—it didn’t sound like something a timid, spineless man like him could ever have planned on his own.

And besides... the entire estate spanned over fifty thousand pyeong. How could he sneak explosives past the obsessive surveillance of Solzhenitsyn?

Was that even possible?

Ju Seolheon narrowed her eyes at him suspiciously. Sure enough—he looked away.

“Ligai. Whose puppet are you this time?”

“......”

He pressed his lips tightly shut and turned his back on her. After that dinner... the two of them had never gone back to the way they were. Whatever tenderness they’d shared over the years vanished the moment the lies were exposed. All that remained was a shared sense of guilt.

“Zoya, I can’t trust you anymore... but I’m asking you one thing. If you find the child—don’t let them take her. Whoever it is, if they find out who she is, they’ll open her head first.”

Ju Seolheon stared at her husband’s back as he walked away—pretending she wasn’t even there. And in the next breath, her eyes met a child’s.

Through the hollowed-out holes in the mask, a cold gaze stabbed into her.

Countless burst capillaries bloomed like spiderwebs around the child’s eyes—a record of how many near-deaths they must have survived. The child looked like not a single part of their body was intact. But even so, they forced themselves to stand. The way they staggered was so precarious that Ju Seolheon instinctively reached out.

“You’re Zoya?”

The child scratched her forearm and giggled.

“You’re a rat too, huh. A rat that snuck into Winter Castle.”

That was her first encounter with Kiya.

***

The final report of Winter Castle.

She had, at some point, filled the thick notebook and reached the last page.

Ju Seolheon, having learned in advance about the coming attack on Winter Castle, eventually decided—after long deliberation—to contact Damon.

“A terror attack at the Solzhenitsyn estate...”

Damon flipped through the report she handed him, visibly pleased. She’d handed over the full record of Winter Castle, soon to vanish in a puff of ash—in exchange for a failed assassination being swept under the rug.

Information had to be traded for information. She still had one thing left to uncover from Damon: the name of her child.

“Then that means all the siloviki and oligarchs gathered for the Solzhenitsyn birthday party are going to die. Russia’s losses will be immense.”

“I helped draft the invitations.”

Ju Seolheon had gone through every single name on the guest list as she designed the layout.

“Every major Russian power figure will be there.”

“Ha. If those factions are all wiped out, I’ll have to submit a report to my higher-ups on who’s going to fill the void. So this is how the reign of the old power elite ends.”

“......”

“It’s a shame the Korean children will be caught in the crossfire. But... wiping out every last sprout might not be a bad outcome. It’ll go down as a win for stopping Russia’s ambitions.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t contact you sooner.”

“At first, I thought you’d run away for love...”

Damon scratched his chin and let out an odd snort.

“To think you’d end up under Maxim Solzhenitsyn’s roof. That’s a bold play. What made you decide to infiltrate Winter Castle? Did Ligai finally spill everything?”

That hadn’t been a confession. It had been a scream. A bottomless scream—something almost too painful to hear.

A parent abandoning their child. A parent cutting open their child’s skull.

Ju Seolheon swallowed dryly, remembering that moment of despair. Then she brought up what she had been holding back.

“We need to extract the child. The one we planted.”

An unreadable expression crossed his face. She pressed forward, her tone rigid as steel.

“If we take her out now, she’ll be the only surviving Korean child. No one knows how or when Sakhalin might resurface. But we need to keep our asset in place, Damon.”

“......”

“That way, we can reinsert her later if needed.”

Damon finally nodded, as if impressed.

“The child’s name is Sonia.”

A foreign name—learned after ten long years. It caught in her throat like thorns.

“Get her out early. Send her to the States. Do a medical assessment—”

“I’ll do it myself.”

Ju Seolheon cut in. Damon snorted.

“You want to take CIA evidence back to Korea? Zoya?”

“......”

“I think you’re confused. Yes, we had to request Korean support—but this was, in every sense, a CIA-led operation. That means we’re entitled to recover all the evidence.”

“She’ll carry too much American influence.”

Ju Seolheon pushed back, refusing to yield.

“Even if she’s placed with a Korean family, she’ll stand out if she’s ever redeployed as a Korean agent. Let me handle her.”

“You can’t raise something like that normally, Zoya. Sorry, but she’s a piece of evidence. Are you... growing maternal now?”

“Isn’t that a ridiculous thing to say, Damon?”

A choking silence followed. Then—for the first time—Ju Seolheon’s face twisted into contempt. Maternal instinct? How dare he use those words with her.

Sonia was a component of Operation Red Veil. An unethical badge of honor. A personal shame that had to be buried.

Ju Seolheon dug [N O V E L I G H T] in.

“I’ll oversee her. Monitor everything. Report monthly.”

***

Ligai, upon hearing the name Sonia, sat in a daze for a long time. But as the date approached, he began moving like a man preparing for the end.

He burned all his remaining research and stockpiled as much of the injectable compound as he could. He erased every electrical signal capable of activating the chips. He threw away his old Bible.

The Solzhenitsyn birthday party would include a circus—so many third-generation Korean children had been brought in. In a way, it was perfect.

Russia had prepared brainwashing slogans to enforce the children’s obedience. But Ligai... had only ever wanted one thing. It was something he’d repeated to himself. 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝐰𝚎𝕓𝐧𝚘𝘃𝗲𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝕞

“Forget the misery of your childhood.”

Childhood misery left irreversible scars on the brain. And no one knew better than Ligai how deep those wounds could run.

You couldn’t be born again. But maybe... just maybe, you could live like you had been.

That’s why he had dreamed—so absurdly—of brain recycling.

From today onward, he wished for every Sakhalin child to be reborn.

From somewhere nearby, the sound of string instruments filtered in—celebrating a child’s birthday. Flower petals rained from the sky for Russia’s precious heir.

And then—the children, unconscious from injections, were piled into carts.

“Go. Go now, Zoya!”

Today, every secret would be buried beneath the snow.

Ligai would be branded a terrorist for blowing up the Solzhenitsyn estate—doomed to a solitary cell for life. Zoya would abandon her name and return to Korea.

And the Sakhalin children... they would leave Russia and begin a new life.

“Ligai, wait...!”

They locked eyes at the threshold of the underground passage. And in that moment, all the memories came rushing back—from their first meeting, to the despair, to the scattered fragments of joy that glinted like grains of sand even in their fake life.

“Give me the injection too.”

“...What?”

“Tell me... never to abandon that child.”

Her gaze burned with intensity. Ligai stammered.

“T-That injection is... most effective on underdeveloped brains. It won’t really do anything to us...”

“Even so. Even if it’s useless.”

Ju Seolheon gripped his arm fiercely.

“You know what kind of woman I am.”

She pushed him against the wall and reached for the syringe at his waistband.

“I don’t know how to protect anything.”

She popped the cap off with her teeth.

The drug surged through her veins, up her shoulder, into the base of her skull. Ligai touched the back of her neck gently and whispered:

“I’ll protect the children, from my position. You... don’t take your eyes off Sonia.”

Could she really do that?

“She’s proof we ever loved, Zoya...”

“......!”

Her face went rigid. She’d thought of the child as nothing more than proof of the operation. Could it really be something more?

The ground shook violently beneath them.

Ju Seolheon wrapped her arms around him, sensing it was the end.

Yeah... I know. I know...

No other parting words came.