Prologue
His freedom ended with the same swiftness with which their lives slipped from their bodies.
Silence is his most persistent memory. Those moments when the world seemed to hold its breath along with him, as if waiting for everything to prove itself an illusion. Then came the weight of absence. And finally, the sensation of being wrapped in searing embers that pulled him away from everything that had once been his.
Jun-Woo was the last thing he saw before losing everything, and the first thing he was never able to forget.
Words were unnecessary, and promises never existed. There was only the constant motion of a life torn away by force and the imposition of a new one—one where pain learned to dwell within clean walls, and confinement was mistaken for care. From that moment on, Dae understood that fear does not always scream; sometimes, it whispers with a desperate calm.
Hatred bloomed slowly, like a flower growing in the dark. It became his refuge, his defense, the silent promise that sustained his existence when everything else had turned to ashes. Hating Jun-Woo was a painful memory, but it was also his only way to remain standing.
Yet even something as long-lived as hatred can wear away with time.
The forced closeness began to blur the boundaries he himself had imposed. The constant presence invaded his silence, slipped into gestures that were too intimate, and into the way fear ceased to be the first emotion he felt upon seeing him. And then, without warning, hatred stopped protecting him.
Feeling anything at all was a nameless betrayal.
An error that should never have existed.
Still, the resistance he tried to maintain began to fracture into small acts of surrendermoments so invisible they eventually stopped mattering. Dae did not know when he stopped fighting; he only understood that he had reached a place where giving in hurt less than remaining on his feet.
That was the place where he stopped resisting.
And in that silence, for the first time, he was afraid of having to leave it.
