***

“Hey, Knife Board. If there’s someone suspicious… someone we can’t keep around… what should we do?”

The boss asked out of nowhere.

“Just tell me who it is. I’ll take care of it.”

“What if the one under suspicion is you?”

“Then I’ll lay my own neck on the knife board.”

I answered without hesitation.

The boss, who had been smoking leisurely, pushed aside the drifting smoke with his thick hand and looked at me through it.

His pupils were unusually small—eyes like a snake’s, fixed on me. I didn’t look away. I met his gaze, balancing just enough obedience with just enough defiance.

“They say you’re a rat.”

A detective—if you could even call me that. More like a shadow, barely there at all. Aside from the squad leader, no one at the station even knew I existed.

So how did the boss catch my scent?

“Who’s been saying something like that?”

“The second. If my brother says it, I start believing it too.”

The second. That loose-mouthed b*stard—the pimp from Mia Market I had taken lightly.

He should’ve just minded his own business. Instead, he went digging where he shouldn’t have.

He had never liked me, not from the start. I had risen too fast, earned too much of the boss’s trust. It must’ve grated on him.

So he wanted to cut me out at the root?

The intent was painfully obvious. This talk about me being a rat—it had to be something he made up. There was no way someone like him actually knew anything.

There was nothing to fear.

Nothing had been exposed.

“What would it take for you to trust me?”

“I only trust one man. Just one.”

Either him—or me.

Only one of us would walk away alive.

To survive, I had to kill.

There had been countless times I had to abandon being a detective just to keep that identity hidden.

And somehow… this felt like one of those moments. Like once I crossed this line, there would be no going back.

Not to the island.
Not to the Chinese restaurant.
Not even to the police station I had barely set foot in.

***

“Give it back! You bastards! That’s mine!”

‘Poet.’

The girl who had been dragged into Mia Market in nothing but her underwear—

That was what everyone had called her.

“If you throw that poetry book away, you’re all dead! Do you even know what that is? You ignorant bastards!”

Her voice was so loud it made my head throb. In the end, I had the boys shut her up and lock her away.

A girl buried in debt—what could she possibly have brought with her besides her own body? Still, I found myself wondering what that d*mn poetry book was.

It was worn, filthy, smudged with grime.

I looked at it. Just looked.
I didn’t feel any urge to flip through it.

“She wrote it?”

“Why bother with something like that, boss?”

The underlings snickered.
Was it that funny?

“I’ll get rid of it.”

“Leave it.”

“…Yes?”

I pressed down on the book with the hand holding my cigarette. The ash clinging to the tip fell like snow onto its pages.

“Do you think I’d die just because that girl got her hands on me?”

With a soft exhale, I blew the ash away, leaving behind a scorched mark.
A faint, toasty smell followed.

“She said we’d die if we threw it away—but I already burned it.”

I wondered how she’d react if I told her I’d burned it with cigarette ash.

The book was tossed aside, singed, into the storage room. And the girl they called Poet was locked inside Mia Market, dressed in nothing but her underwear.

From that moment on, she became a spectacle, at any cost.

Though she had been sold into prostitution to pay off a debt, she was the only one there who refused to sell her body.

She fought back against thugs with knives, jumped out of inn windows, and ran whenever she saw the slightest opportunity, only to be dragged back and beaten again. Even when her hands were bound and her body was stripped bare, she would run barefoot through the freezing winter night.

A complete lunatic.

And when I saw her hiding in the temple like that, I had no choice but to admit it.

Stubbornness like that… deserved acknowledgment.

Her face—covered in tears, mucus, and blood—had frozen solid in the cold.
Her hands, clenched tightly around her knees, had turned a deep shade of blue.
Her legs were bruised and mottled beneath the knees.
Burn marks from cigarettes scarred her bare back.

And still—she was breathing.

I had come to Mia Temple to meet the squad leader.

To report on the internal situation of the Mia gang and to suggest that if there really was a rat feeding information to the police, we should find them and deal with it.

In other words, it was a secret meeting. The girl called Poet had no idea this quiet temple was being used for something like that.

A miserable fate—and rotten luck to match.

After barely escaping with her life, she had still managed to stumble right into the wrong place.

I never pitied her. Pity is nothing but a nuisance.

And yet… I couldn’t walk away.

I took off the coat I was wearing and dropped it over her—curled up like a corpse.

As I lit my cigarette, the cold cut in—sharp as a blade, clinging like debt. The wind kept piling on, like interest that never stopped growing.

I had never known a cold like that night. Even diving n*ked into the sea in the dead of winter to gather abalone had never felt so cold.

“If you don’t freeze to death in this, then I guess that’s just your fate.”

I had survived being thrown into the sea, smashing against the breakwater.
I had survived eating scraps and vomiting them back up.
I had survived becoming a detective just to live like something worse than garbage among thugs.

Somehow, I had always managed to live.

So there was no reason she couldn’t, either.

But I was curious.

Girls who tried to escape places like that brothel would usually latch onto a thug or a customer if they had to. They didn’t act like her.

Why struggle so desperately to live, even when it made no sense, even when it should have killed you?

On my way out, I pressed my cigarette against the bloodstain she had left on the temple wall. The ash covered it, erasing the mark.

I thought that would be the end of it.
That I would never see her again.

I forgot.

Forgot that someone like her had ever existed.

In the meantime, that pimp b*stard from Mia Market had been tightening the noose around my neck. Like a stubborn ember, he kept flaring back to life just when things seemed to quiet down. Relentless—like a stray dog, tracking me, sniffing at my heels.

I couldn’t let it go on any longer.

There was only one way.

Take everything he was trying to pin on me—being a rat, embezzlement—and throw it back onto him. Then end it.