Chapter 02
Yujuās gaze pierced sharply in the direction the voice had come from.
Instinctively, she lowered her eyes. Reading from the tips of the toes up was a trained habit.
The toe of a shoe was visible beneath the long cassock. Black leather with its gloss muted. Following that line, she slowly raised her gaze.
Beneath the impeccably neat cassock without a single wrinkle, two hands were folded neatly in front of his belly.
Yuju’s gaze lingered on the back of his hand. These were not hands polished by prayer.
The moment the calluses embedded in the knuckles and the faint scars caught her eye, an involuntary scoff caught in her throat.
Found you.
The fake owner of this church, and the dangerous partner with whom she was about to share a joint operation she desperately wanted to avoid.
Antipathy came first. Betrayal always arrived without warning, and the one pulling the trigger was always in a safe place. It was always Yuju who had to embrace the colleagues who took bullets and collapsed into the mud.
On the day she lost her teammates not to failure, but to betrayal, Yuju had made a vow. She would never again be fooled by the cowardly phrase: An unavoidable accident during an operation.
That was why she had to verify. Where that man’s gun barrel would ultimately point.
Yuju caught her breath slightly and raised her head.
“They said you were a priest, but your hands are hardly holy…”
The words she was about to spit out snapped short in mid-air.
And her eyes wavered. Ruthlessly.
It was a face so graceful it bordered on cruel.
Beneath sharply angled eyebrows sat coolly settled eyes, a bridge of the nose straight without a single flaw, and sharp lips that looked like they could cut you with a single word.
A face that seemed impossible for human hands to sculpt fell woefully short of just being called beautiful. If a woman were to see him for the first time, she would likely curse God out of envy.
Yuju didn’t want to admit that her breath had hitched the moment she laid eyes on that face. Her body knew first: the way her heart pounded wildly, the way her fingertips grew coldly numb.
Where she had seen this face before, and what this face meant to her.
āMr. Jung Taeha has passed away.
Dead.
They had definitely said he was dead.
The day the raging inferno swallowed everything whole, a dry, emotionless phone call from the police station shattered the world she had barely been standing in. It was none other than Yuju who had sent him off as a handful of ashes.
She didn’t cry the entire day. She couldn’t cry. For tears to come, reality had to set in first, but the fact that he was truly dead never felt real until the very end. That was why it hurt for so much longer.
She still remembered the agonizingly icy coldness of the urn containing his bone powder.
Yet Jung Taeha, who should have vanished as ashes like that, was standing right in front of her now, wearing the face of God’s proxy.
While the fingertips gripping the armrest of the pew turned white with strain, the man showed not a shred of agitation.
Seeing Yuju’s eyes tremble like an aspen leaf, he tilted his head ever so slightly and asked lazily,
“Were you in the middle of prayer?”
His eyes held not a single point of wavering. That drove Yuju even more out of her mind.
A man with a face that should have remained forever a ghost was smiling softly in the light of the church.
“Or are you searching for something you’ve lost?”
Over that face, the afterimage of Jung Taehaāwhom she had struggled so desperately to forgetāoverlapped cruelly.
“Are you alright, Sister?” “Jung… Taeha…?”
The name slipped out between her dry lips. A name she hadn’t managed to utter even once in nine years. Yet the man didn’t twitch a single eyebrow, maintaining a harmless smile.
“There is no brother with such a name here.”
His low-resounding voice was quite dry.
It wasn’t the hot, rough voice embedded in Yuju’s memories. It was a familiar warmth that could be handed to anyone, which made it all the more unfamiliar.
“Then what are you?”
Yuju stumbled as she rose from her seat. Through her distorted vision, she swept her gaze down his neck.
The Adam’s apple protruding sharply above the clerical collar, the small scar that should have remained like a dot beside it. The trace of possession she had desperately tried to erase with her own lips was clearlyā
Gone.
Yuju’s pulse raced like mad. The absence of it should have brought relief.
Because it meant this man wasn’t Jung Taeha, meaning this whole thing would just end as a harmless misadventure stirred up by a mere resembling face.
Yet that smooth skin, devoid of any stain or memory, stabbed at her heart all the more cruelly.
“It seems you’ve mistaken me for someone else, Sister. I am merely a servant of the Lord.”
Even at her thorn-laced retort, not a single tip of his eyebrow twitched.
“Don’t lie.”
Yuju roughly grabbed the lapels of his cassock.
“…Ugh.”
At the sudden grabbing of his collar, the man’s shoulders flinched and a short groan leaked out.
“It was right here, right hereā” “Sister, your hands are terribly cold. Your body is bound to suffer if your misunderstandings run deep.”
Yet he didn’t push her away. Even though he easily could have, he simply laid his own hand gently over the back of Yuju’s freezing hand.
The fingers she had stubbornly clenched trembled faintly. Whether out of anger or fear, even Yuju herself couldn’t tell.
“Father Michael!”
A clear voice abruptly sliced through the taut tension. Approaching with hurried steps was a youthful-looking man dressed in a white altar server’s robe.
The man’s gaze immediately swept past Yuju’s shoulder. Without a trace of fluster, he quietly laid his hand over the back of her trembling hand.
“The head priest is looking for you.” “Yes, I’ll be right there.”
The man’s gaze, which had slowly released Yuju’s hand, was already directed elsewhere. The smile lingering at the corners of his mouth was no different from the head priest’s.
He neatly straightened the ruffled front of his clerical garments. Without rushing a single fingertip, he slowly buttoned each and every button. He wiped away the traces Yuju had desperately clung to as if they had never existed in the first place.
“……”
She stared blankly at those hands. Did those hands even know? Just how cold and violently trembling her own hands had been just moments ago.
Only then did Yuju let out a breath. It was only at that moment that she realized she had been holding her breath, and that the fingers that had been clawing at his collar were still hanging in empty space, unable to find their place.
The man, about to walk away, paused and looked back at her.
“I will look forward to meeting you again in the Lord’s time.”
The moment their gazes locked, the man slowly scanned Yuju’s tightly closed lips and minutely trembling eyes.
In those cool eyes, there was not a trace of the holiness or benevolence he had been acting out just moments before. They were eyes that pierced straight through everything she had tried to hide.
He leaned his head close to Yuju’s ear. A cool, sweet scent drifted in a sudden rush past his ascetic clerical attire.
“Don’t glare at me like that.”
Watching Yuju’s eyes ripple with bewilderment, he let out a low laugh.
“It’ll be troublesome if you get too attached to this look.”
Lifting the corners of his mouth at an angle, he whispered low enough for only Yuju to hear.
“Because we’re going to be getting quite deeply entangled from here on out.”
The arrogant smile he wore clad in a black cassock felt closer to a demon’s temptation than someone transmitting the will of God.
“May the peace of the Lord be with you, Sister.”
Maintaining flawless, elegant grace until the very end, the man turned his back without a shred of lingering attachment. As she watched his retreating figure fade away with the customary greeting he could afford anyone, she thought:
Only after his footsteps had completely vanished did Yuju sink back down onto the pew.
The church was quiet again, but it was different from before. Earlier it had been peaceful, but now it was simply hollow.
The sunlight passing through the stained glass was still dyeing the floor. Yuju stared blankly at that light before cupping her coldly chilled cheeks with her palms.
Whether he came from hell or heaven, that man was a disaster.
