Chapter 9

As Kiril was thinking that far, he suddenly arrived at a conclusion, and smiled lazily.

“Miss Angelica Willis.”

“……”

She did not answer, but Kiril looked on with satisfaction as Gayeon’s closed eyelids trembled faintly.

“Just trail along after me. And don’t interfere in anything I do.”

It was a chilling warning.

He spoke gently, almost in a whisper, but murderous intent dripped from his tone.

Kiril realized that what he presently felt toward Gayeon was ‘interest.’

For a man made up of fundamental distrust toward humanity and killing intent, it was an extremely rare emotion.

“I have a taste for a very rare sort of k*nk.”

The moment the subject turned to s*xual tastes, Gayeon’s eyes flew open, too embarrassed to keep pretending not to hear any longer.

The man smiling softly before her said something horrifying.

“If I keep finding myself interested in you, I might slit your throat and ram my c*ck between your legs.”

Before she knew it, Gayeon wrapped both hands around her throat.

If she had been a moment slower, his fingers might have touched the back of her neck.

Clicking his tongue as if in regret, Kiril scratched the back of Gayeon’s hand instead of her neck.

“What does that even…….”

“It means I only get aroused by blood-soaked corpses.”

She remembered the man standing there drenched in blood with an *rection.

She had once heard jokes that among mercenaries and soldiers, there were some who got hard from the adrenaline rush when they entered battle.

But that was a little different from getting hard at the sight of blood, and this man truly sounded like someone with a fixation on corpses.

“Our interests are aligned, so wouldn’t it be a problem if you died, Miss Angelica Willis?”

Had this been the wrong choice?

Should she have listened to Elin?

He was even more bizarre and terrifying than Elin had said.

And yet he was warning her kindly, as though he truly did not want to lay a hand on her.

“You have to survive, hmm?”

She could not tell whether he was saying that because he truly wanted her to survive.

“I’ll stay like a shadow. As quiet as a dead mouse.”

Gayeon gave exactly the perfect answer the man wanted.

At once, something in Kiril’s face changed strangely.

As though observing a life-form he had never seen before, he stared at her with such intensity it felt as though he meant to strip bare every last pore on her body.

“That is a very perfect answer.”

His mouth expressed satisfaction, but his eyes did nothing of the sort.

They were empty and lacking, yet hungry, and that craving gaze looked as though it might devour her, so Gayeon could not look away.

Black pupils and ash-gray eyes met.

At first, the woman had shown no sign of vitality at all.

She had moved like a painting hanging on a wall.

The only times this woman had truly moved were when she had jumped in front of the bear and when she had said she would follow him.

Kiril found that gap interesting.

From what he had investigated, Lloyd was obsessed with the woman.

She was excellent bait for drawing out the prey he wanted to catch.

When that role ended, or if he slit the bait’s throat to excite the prey, what kind of face would this woman—what kind of face would Lloyd make?

He imagined blood pouring from the throat of the woman before his eyes.

“……Mr. Belov?”

At some point, Gayeon was calling out to him as he gripped her hands, which had been wrapped around her throat, and roughly pulled them away.

Kiril’s sharp eyes shredded her throat with their gaze, then stopped for an instant.

Usually, the mere thought of blood made his groin throb, but now he felt nothing at all.

Instead, an unpleasant emotion suddenly reared its head.

This was not a good sign.

As if shaking something off, Kiril released Gayeon’s wrist.

◇ ◆ ◇

Russia was cold enough to make curses spill out.

It was a cold so piercing that every cold she had experienced until now felt like child’s play.

Even the slightest passing wind seemed to carry blades, stabbing deep into her skin as it passed.

After more than ten hours of flying, they reached Saint Petersburg.

Without any inspection at all, they came straight out through the VIP passage and got into a car, and during that brief span of time, Gayeon had to battle the terrible cold.

The clothes she had brought were, at best, only thin coats the truly ‘young ladies’ wore.

There was no way to withstand a cold shocking enough to leave her jaw hanging open.

She wished she had at least brought a scarf or a hat, but those were probably buried somewhere in the trunk.

When Gayeon huddled in on herself, a thick coat dropped over her shoulders.

“Why…….”

“It would be troublesome if you died already.”

Kiril answered with a smile.

But that was not what Gayeon was asking.

“You didn’t tell me it was this cold?”

“I thought you might not follow me if I did.”

No, even if he had told her it was cold, she probably still would never have imagined it would be to this degree.

Thinking that, she gave up and, without refusing the man’s coat, drew it closed around herself in front.

Her nose, frozen by the cold, had turned bright red.

It had only been a short walk to the car, but it felt as though she had caught a glimpse of the cold of hell.

It was early evening in the city.

Even so, because the days were short, pitch-black darkness had already settled over it.

But she saw the light cutting through that darkness.

The city visible through the car window was shining everywhere.

The golden glow pouring even into the car dazzled her eyes, as though she had entered the middle of a cluster of lights.

“……A city of light.”

It was a city she had only ever seen in videos.

A place she had thought of as unimaginably far away, something she had only seen in photos or videos, was now sparkling right before her eyes.

Without realizing it, Gayeon raised her fingertips to the glass.

It was a movement as though she were trying to feel in her hand the warmth of even one speck of that light.

To Kiril, it was ordinary, but he watched Gayeon with interest as she kept looking outside in wonder.

Like a child, she reached out toward the clusters of light again and again.

He watched even the way her hand would bump against the window and then withdraw.

“You learned Russian, and yet I guess you never thought to come here yourself?”

Gayeon, who had been tracing the clusters of light with her hand, paused.

It was true that she had briefly learned Russian because she liked its distinctive cadence and pronunciation.

The moment her stepfather learned that she was interested in Russian, he arranged private tutoring for her immediately.

“I never could. If the daughter of the head of an American defense company visited Russia, the Russian intelligence service probably would have kept me under surveillance too.”

It was a realistic answer.

Spellbound, she kept her gaze fixed outside the window.

It felt as though there was nowhere untouched by light.

She had never seen a city this dazzling before.

Not even Las Vegas was like this.

“It’s a beautiful city.”

Gayeon voiced her honest feelings.

She knew what kind of country Russia was.

It was only regrettable that, just as darkness existed within light, this splendor on the surface was not all there was.

She slowly rested her forehead against the car window.

“Kiril.”

The man in the front passenger seat called Kiril’s name.

When Kiril looked at him, the man, meeting his eyes through the rearview mirror, said,

“We should stop by the hotel first and……”

“No. Go straight there.”

Kiril cut him off.

The conversation was in Russian, but Gayeon, who roughly understood what was being said, remained quietly silent.

The man’s gaze through the rearview mirror touched her briefly, then fell away.