Where was this again?

Seoryeong stood somewhere, blinking blankly. It looked like she was seeing it for the first time, yet the thought that it was somehow familiar brushed through her mind.

A figure—neither tall nor short—moved like the wind along a frozen lakeshore.

Hair rustled and swayed, a playful laugh warmed her cheek. Who is that?

Just as an indescribable emotion surged up to her throat, Seoryeong jolted awake.

“—!”

Hah, hah...! Her breath came strangely short, as if she’d just stolen a glimpse of someone’s secret. When she looked around at the chill soaking into her bones, the window stood wide open.

Winter had crept in before she knew it.

Time was closer to a painkiller than a cure. The empty hole could not be filled by anything, yet the pain that had rushed in like an ambush had gradually subsided.

She ate her meals, exercised lightly, and even brushed out the snarled hair she had hated to look at in the mirror.

And like that, two whole seasons passed without her knowing whether Lee Wooshin was alive or dead.

Seoryeong groggily got up and went out to the narrow living room with the fireplace. If she woke before dawn, falling back into sleep was a distant hope anyway. Stretching, she worked the stiffness out of her body.

Pressing down the cold that seeped into her bare feet, she touched the empty sofa; there wasn’t a trace of lingering warmth. Kiya was spending the night out again, it seemed.

Lately, whatever headache he was dealing with, the times they ate together had dwindled sharply. If only it were that he’d found a woman instead...

She now felt she could live on her own, but Kiya was the problem. He still looked at the recovered Seoryeong with a quick temper and a precarious gleam, greed in his eyes. Whenever he did, she threw whatever was in her hand hard or cracked him across the crown.

“Hoo...”

So she needed to make money and move out, fast.

No matter how many times she told herself they were like siblings, an adult man and woman couldn’t live together in this kind of atmosphere that could explode at any moment. Just thinking about the days when forks flew at all hours made her sigh.

“Wherever I go, I can pretend to be ordinary.”

Like a cat pawing at sleep from its eyes, she roughly wiped her own and bundled up—thick socks, a knit sweater, a fur cap, and even a black padded jacket.

When she opened the cabin door, a pure white view leapt to the eye—snow must have fallen overnight. The cold that froze the tip of her nose made her pull on a mask quickly, and she struck out into the mountain with strong strides.

Forget all the unhappy memories.

Sometimes that net-like voice came chasing after her.

If someone asks about your childhood, think only of the best moments.

She shook her head again and kept running. When she ran mindlessly through the deep mountains where no visitors came, the quiet Winter Castle surfaced in her mind.

But the net covering her thoughts was too tangled and old for her to haul up only the good. Memories she had forgotten burst forth like a broken dam, and unwelcome, they were all filthy mud.

Every memory was caked with some awful residue—where were the best moments in that?

The warp and weft had clotted into a lump; teasing them apart, thread by thread, looked nearly impossible. Finding no meaning there, Seoryeong had long since bundled up her past and shut it away.

As the weather turned cold, headaches came now and then, but she couldn’t even tell whether that was from loss or longing.

“Hooo... hooo....”

Her pace picked up. At first the roadwork had felt like death—she couldn’t run even ten minutes. The memory of Instructor Lee Wooshin flopping onto the truck bed and teasing the men glibly made her chest tighten.

But she bit her lip and emptied her mind, again and again. Her thighs had grown firmer than before, and she was less winded.

Even if incomplete, she had to move forward. Keeping her eyes ahead was the only proof that she hadn’t been caught by Lee Wooshin again.

Seoryeong straightened her back and lengthened her stride. Proper posture is the beginning of everything. Her lifted chin did not dip in the slightest, and on the thin-crusted snow of the mountains, she left her footprints as if it were always the first time.

She never looked back once—not until she touched the summit and came back down.

In whatever form, she was forgetting you.

“Kiya, I think I need to find a job.”

Kiya’s eyes went wide, searching her, then briefly crumpled in displeasure.

Home after several days away, Kiya had first tried to hug Sonia and been soundly smacked for it, then recited a string of prayers over the soup she’d made, only to set his face hard again.

“You’re wanted by Interpol.”

“Which is why I’m thinking maybe I should turn myself in.”

“...What?”

Kiya dropped the spoon he was holding. Seoryeong shrugged as if it were nothing.

Ever since Azerbaijan, she had only moved from one of Kiya’s hideouts to another. Like a parasite, she did nothing and just ate bread. She was sick of herself now.

“It’s already been half a year. I can’t live on the run forever.”

“......”

“I want to settle things properly and live properly.”

“Don’t. If you turn yourself in and they lock you up? I’ll blow the place up.”

“Don’t make my blood pressure spike.”

“Sound like a lie?”

He raked his hair back and breathed hard. Then, as if a bad thought had hit him, anxiety flickered over his face. He stood up like he didn’t know what to do and slammed his hand on the table.

“What does it even mean to live properly?”

“Sit still when you’re eating. Don’t wander around.”

“Why does living properly mean you have to leave me?”

“......”

“I’ve been keeping my hands off you. I’m holding back. You’re wearing the face you had in Winter Castle, the one that says you want to die...! I’ve been mad for months, that bastard won’t die, and Solzhenitsyn is even more fucking infuriating!”

She couldn’t understand what button had been pushed to make him blow up on his own. The less sense his words made toward the end, the less it sounded like it was all because of her.

“I want to become one with you—but in this ‘proper life’ you’re talking about, am I even there?”

He ground his teeth and pressed her. Seoryeong somehow found her tongue tied and fingered the rosary she’d worn since Azerbaijan.

It was so light she’d hardly noticed it for a while, but the bracelet Rigai had left her had faded a little.

“Answer me! Am I there or not!”

The glass-clear beads quivered at his rough shout. The desperation in his voice poked at the corner of her heart.

She was grateful he had taken her in when she had nowhere to go, and it was true she had used his affection to hide this long, but that didn’t mean she had to put up with Kiya’s temper. She’d stayed quiet so long he seemed to have forgotten whose temper was worse.

Seoryeong flipped her soup over with a flick.

“Don’t take it out on me.”

The lukewarm soup sloshed over the backs of Kiya’s hands.

“I’m not living with a brat who only knows how to yell.”

His eyes trembled as if in shock. His mouth drooped and he begged close.

“Sonia...”

When Kiya dropped to his knees and tried to clutch her calves, she dodged coldly; even that alone made his eyes brim. Bright, raw hurt spread in them.

“It isn’t taking it out on you. It’s just—you don’t even remember Solzhenitsyn... Why now, why of all times do you want to turn yourself in....”

“Solzhenitsyn?”

She couldn’t stand it anymore and knit her brows. She couldn’t follow Kiya’s rambling, but he had kept bringing up that name.

“If you need something to do, you can help me!”

She stared at him, incredulous—surely not. Red threads of burst capillaries laced through the whites of his eyes.

He looked at the end of his rope. No way. He wasn’t about to tell her to do the same work he did... was he?

She had only just managed to get out and run again. Seoryeong let out a breath of laughter and drew her brows together.

“Sorry, but I can’t kill people anymore.”

“...Not even the master of Winter Castle?”

A strange look lengthened, probing. She tilted her head.

“The master of Winter Castle?”

Her face hardened. She hated hearing about Winter Castle from anyone’s mouth. The corpses of the brothers who had died on that freezing floor rose up; better not to think «N.o.v.e.l.i.g.h.t» of it if she could help it.

Every so often, Kiya would bring it up on purpose—like he was checking something, observing her.

“Did you know the ones living in Winter Castle were from the then–Prime Minister’s family in Russia? Those people are the Solzhenitsyns.”

Prime minister... Russia’s prime minister... Those words snapped her back to the gossip the Blast men had traded, about the prime ministerial couple with a big age gap. The pieces clicked, and her eyes flew wide.

“But Rigai—your father—blew it all up. Killed them.”

Her mouth went dry. Yes, that’s how it was... The ‘accident’ the gossips chattered about had in fact been our story. Her mood sank heavy, but she didn’t waver.

If anything, she felt ready now to learn someone’s truth calmly. But Kiya’s lips stopped there. His inky black eyes stared straight through her, like he was testing her. With the backlight hiding his face, she couldn’t read his expression.

“The grandson who survived came back. So it’s chaos out there.”

Kiya reached a hand to the woman standing frozen. His touch skimmed Seoryeong’s eyelashes without hesitation—oddly petulant and sharp.

“Poor thing, they say he can’t see.”