Chapter 1. Burning

“Here, did you show this to someone again?”

The man asked in a smooth, honeyed tone. His true nature lived in the savage force of his hips, yet his tongue moved with such pretty ease. It had always been that way with him. A beautiful cannibal monster dangling sugar-coated bait. He would lure someone close and swallow them whole, tear them to shreds, all while putting on a sweeter face than anyone else.

“Hm? I asked who you showed it to. I won’t do anything. Go on, tell me.”

Inside a blue bathroom tiled in vivid patterns, ragged breathing pooled thick in the air of a bathtub that was anything but small. She wanted to answer, but what slipped past her lips were only half-formed sounds.

Fighting through dizzying pleasure, the woman shook her head.

He made her feel things she had never known before. Whether she liked the man himself or simply liked his body, she could not say with any certainty.

“Ah, there’s no one? Or can’t you remember.”

“There’s…… no one.”

“Good. There shouldn’t be.”

‘If there were, I’d have had to dig a hole to bury that b*stard in. Isn’t that right?’

His hand, so much larger than hers, closed around the soft flesh and murmured against her skin. Where the rough pad of his calloused thumb swept downward, there was a round marking. A serpent devouring its own tail. The Ouroboros. It was the brand that marked a permanent resident of Moshre Psychiatric Hospital.

“Ah!”

He straightened up, pulling the woman’s slender waist against him as she surrendered to the weightless drift of her body. The water between them crashed down in a heavy rush. He had risen without warning.

“I’m going to fall, I think…… hnn.”

Her legs had no strength left, but she forced them to wrap around his waist. It was either that or drop.

He liked tormenting her this way. More precisely, he was desperate to see her cry.

What a terrible personality.

The thought had barely crossed her mind when their eyes met. He had been watching her with lazy, half-lidded eyes as she gasped for breath, and then his gaze curved into something wicked.

“When you act that cute, it makes me want to push you even harder.”

A twisted thing to say.

Before she could even protest, a wave of shattering sensation crashed into her and she threw her head back.

He moved like he intended to break her into pieces.

His arrogant bearing and immaculate face concealed his true nature. No one would ever guess he was the kind of beast who wouldn’t bother with a perfectly good bed.

‘This l*st-crazed…… ah……!’

Somehow he always sensed when she was cursing at him, and every time he did, he picked up the pace. He struck so precisely at every peak that she had swelled full to bursting without even noticing.

Driven forward by the heat he poured into her, her mind went hazy and flared white.

Every time their skin met like this, memories came to her in pieces.

“I’m not crazy. I’m perfectly sane!”

“Let go of me! Let go—!”

“Mom…… Mom. I miss you…… Please, someone, save me……”

What followed were images of a locked room. A dark, sealed space where she could barely see her hand in front of her face. Through the small slot in the iron door, they would look down at her.

Oh, how terrifying those cold, lance-sharp gazes had been.

To stop being afraid of them, she’d had no choice but to go mad.

‘What did they look like, exactly.’

Her memory, carved up by years of medication, was a wreck. Even now, rescued by this man, she was not fully healed. How could she forget the ones who had jabbed her with long rods and abused her? And what of the ex-husband who had thrown her into that ward? The man who had become her husband in the blink of an eye, without her ever setting foot in a wedding hall, had called her insane.

But she had been sane.

No, she had definitely been sane back then.

‘Have I ever lived in Korea? Or not. Did I? Who was I.’

She didn’t know.

A chill ran over her skin, and she clung even tighter to the violent savior holding her now. No, she clawed at his back like an animal. He bit down hard on her earlobe in response. A fierce, crashing sensation made her sob and arch her back.

She loved these moments, when there was no room left for thought.

It had started as a contract, but she had quickly learned just how much she enjoyed the act itself. True to his reputation as a libertine, the man’s movements were practiced. He knew exactly how to set a woman’s body alight, and she took every bit of pleasure that fell her way.

This wasn’t a relationship built on feeling, so it didn’t matter to her how many people he had been with before. What mattered was that he was making her feel good right now.

Five years and six months locked inside a psychiatric hospital had made her a cold-eyed realist, or perhaps a hedonist.

“Sweetheart, try crying for me. Don’t you feel sorry for me, working this hard to make you cry?”

“You’re insane…… ah!”

“Calling me a pervert? Thanks for the compliment.”

The man’s eyes curved with amusement as he bit down on her lower lip.

A night of ecstasy.

Her breathing came too fast, and her head went blank.

‘How did I end up tumbling around like this with this man……’

As her vision flooded white, her consciousness drifted back to where all of this had begun.

***

Moshre Psychiatric Hospital.

Lime dust crumbled from its decrepit outer walls on a near-daily basis, and the courtyard, choked with weeds year-round, was swept by a desolate wind that howled like a scream.

The rumor that three or four patients who had died inside the hospital were buried somewhere in that courtyard was probably true, Yul thought.

‘If I die, will I be buried under here too.’

She walked slowly across the uneven ground, which bore the marks of something once dug up. The new medication they had switched her to a few days ago wasn’t sitting right with her. Her heart raced and cold sweat poured off her in sheets.

Asking for a different medication would get her nowhere, and she would have loved a shower, but bathing was only permitted once a week here. If neither option was available, she would have liked to grab one of the orderlies and vomit in their face, but since she had bitten off a chunk of the new groundskeeper’s ear two weeks ago, no one wanted to come anywhere near her.

‘Ahh…… I’m so bored.’

Circling the courtyard over and over like an animal in a cage throughout the brief exercise period, she felt like she was suffocating. She panted in shallow breaths, like a fish pulled from a pond.

“Patient number 8092. Walk properly.”

A sharp voice cut through the air, and Yul’s eyes flashed. No matter how much time passed, the vivid blue venom deep in her gaze never clouded over. It was the kind of look the hospital director called serpentine, but it was also the kind that provoked and stirred something dark in men.

In a split second she registered that the voice was one she had never heard before. She immediately let all the tension drain from her body and crumpled to the ground.

“I think I’m going to die…… ugh, p-please, help me……”

“I said that won’t work. Stop trying to play games.”

“I really, really think I’m dying…… Sir, I’m in pain……”

Even in a state of complete disarray, Yul was beautiful. More precisely, she oozed a raw, sensual energy. So it was not strange at all that someone who didn’t know just how unhinged she was would swallow a dry lump in his throat.

“Please help me. I, I can’t breathe.”

Yul whimpered softly and buried her face in both hands.

This was, of course, a ploy. A scheme to drag the man watching from that high tower down here to the ground, close enough to bite off an ear.

Without little games like this, life here was unbearable.

When she had first been locked up at eighteen, she had believed she would get out quickly. After realizing that wasn’t going to happen, she had raged and screamed like a wild thing, but the only result was stronger medication. Even through the fog of it, in the moments when her mind cleared, Yul would beg, plead, rage, and overturn things.

I’m sane. I’m not crazy.

She had screamed it over and over, but nothing changed.

By now, Yul had nearly given up on escaping. A prisoner could at least count down the days until the emperor died and hope for a pardon, but there was no clever way out of a locked ward. Trust her on that. She had spent over five years exhausting every option.

Moshre Psychiatric Hospital sat in the darkest, most remote corner of the entire Empire. Even if she somehow made it outside, the odds of wandering into the forest and dying were over eighty percent. Stealing or stowing away on the monthly supply wagon was out of the question too.

Patient number 8092. Yulia Vergeus. The most unhinged patient in all of Moshre. She was on special watch, which meant a solitary cell, and as a rule she was not permitted to speak with anyone.