L*st and Death
Chapter 202
In the end, Siron’s pheromone control had failed the previous night. At first, he endured it reasonably well, but once Isaac—and then Baekgyeong, like beasts with no restraint—threw themselves at him, Siron’s body transformed into a battlefield designed to draw out pleasure.
Baekgyeong forgot his original intention of helping Siron practice restraint. As though testing his will, he gave him no space to breathe, licking and biting every inch of him. From his chest to his sex, the insides of his thighs to his ass—there was no part of Siron left untouched by his hands and mouth, save only penetration.
Isaac, by contrast, sat back and watched with the obsession of a voyeur, recording every reaction Siron gave as though he had truly become an omega. To Baekgyeong, it felt like being forced to share a priceless delicacy with his mortal enemy.
What he wanted was to make up for the four lost years of separation—years in which he had craved Siron’s new body, this new relationship. He wanted nothing more than to shut themselves inside a bedroom, consuming every last moment of the world’s time together. Yet everywhere he turned, he met interference.
Maybe I really am some kind of degenerate.
Baekgyeong laughed under his breath. Even after unlocking his mother’s will, all he could think about was having sex with Yoon Siron. Surely his mother had given birth not to a man, but to a wretched beast.
He drained the last of the wine straight from the bottle. Rising, he carried back a bottle of vodka from the small lounge at the rear of the plane and settled into the seat across from where Siron slept. Siron lay in a fully reclined seat, deeply asleep.
Baekgyeong twisted the cap off the vodka, watching Siron’s sleeping face.
I was wrong.
His dead mother had told him so. Cold as an ice wall, dry as desert air, she had confessed her sins to him before death. Yet the card she had left him spoke differently.
At eight years old, resentful of her discipline—that he should learn patience by sucking on candy rather than biting—it had been then that Baekgyeong shoved his brother into the road. His brother was struck by a car, but by some miracle escaped with only a broken arm. Their mother, enraged beyond reason, had thrown Baekgyeong to the ground as though exacting vengeance on his brother’s behalf. The mild concussion he sustained put him in the hospital, where the tumor in his brain was discovered.
At eleven, in the winter, he slashed apart one of his father’s portraits with a knife and tossed it into the fireplace. The painting had been of his mother at forty and his grandmother, who at the time was dying of stomach cancer. Fleeing from Choi Baekhee’s fury, he had tumbled down the stairs and nearly lost his life. His list of misdeeds went on without end.
His school life in Korea had been a disaster, and it did not miraculously improve in America. Expelled for violence, he remained a volatile, hypersensitive boy. Tutors could not endure his viciousness; they quit within ten days, one after another.
At fourteen, he had taken one of his mother’s collector cars, a gift from his father, and totaled it in a reckless joyride. He destroyed most of the paintings his father had prepared for his first comeback exhibition in a decade, effectively forcing him into retirement.
For such reasons, to his mother, Baekgyeong was a child who never should have been born. But a child already crawling in the world could not be stuffed back into the womb and scraped away. In the end, she salvaged her depressed husband from despair and, to restore peace to the family, banished her still-teenaged son across the ocean to the Holmby Hills mansion in California.
For a time, her world held together—until Yoon Siron appeared, and Baekgyeong’s private life was consumed by the media’s frenzy.
– The Lowercase Card –
PS. The introduction was a piece of cake.
Baekgyeong stared at the wrinkled, crumpled paper card, as if trying to peel apart each character. It was one of two encrypted cards he had never managed to solve. He didn’t know the meaning of the four-character idiom, but he knew that “文” meant writing or letters. And he managed, just barely, to recall who “Juseon” was.
Shin Juseon had been his mother’s junior in high school. She was the wife of the Kyungwon Daily’s president, and publisher of Kyungwon Weekly—a sensational tabloid paper that vomited up entertainment and sports gossip in lurid floods. The reason Baekgyeong had not recognized her name immediately was because he had always, rudely, called the mouse-like woman “the squeak auntie.”
Half a year had passed since Siron’s manager leaked the data from his phone, igniting a nationwide scandal. Now Baekgyeong’s first trial—on charges of drug possession and assault—was opening. The two of them had just begun slipping free of the public’s gaze, only to be thrust back under its spotlight.
The trial dragged the sex scandal back into focus, and both men were mocked and slandered anew. Old controversies about Baekgyeong resurfaced, overlapping with the Nasdaq listing push for Vile Pharmaceuticals, amplifying the fallout.
With the IPO came accusations of capital flight and tax evasion. Layered atop Baekgyeong’s scandal, the company’s very ethics came into question. His mother struggled to anchor the firm in the global market, but the boomerang of the past came back to strike her.
On the eve of Baekgyeong’s first trial, a massive exposé about Yoon Siron’s character broke. The article listed his past, the benefits he had supposedly received from sponsors, and even raised suspicions about former patrons before Baekgyeong. It painted Siron as morally corrupt. Overnight, he became a scapegoat for public outrage.
The press and social media overflowed with malicious, sensational stories, shredding not only Siron’s career but his human dignity. His filmography was dismissed as the product of sponsors. Every work he had appeared in became a target of ridicule. Conservative religious groups joined in, branding him as a celebrity spreading the sin of homosexuality. Books& Literature
On the day of the first trial, Baekgyeong had shouted at the press gathered outside the courthouse:
“Yoon Siron hasn’t done anything wrong! He doesn’t know jack shit! No—I don’t mean he doesn’t know that shit... damn it, that’s not what I—fuck! He’s just... fucking good, okay! So stop writing your shitty articles!”
But even his attempted defense was twisted into memes: “Yoon Siron knows jack shit,” and warped into mockeries like “Moby-Dick’s loyal fool, brainwashed by gaslighting.”
Perhaps this had been his mother’s intention all along. She had asked Shin Juseon to bury Siron, to use him as a scapegoat. And Juseon had surely accepted without hesitation.
And so Siron was dragged down. Even his acting skills were devalued, remembered as nothing more than an actor who shone brightest in bed. While he bore the brunt of all public fury, Baekgyeong’s drugs and violence slipped to the sidelines. He received nothing more than a year of treatment and custody on grounds of mental illness.
The answer to the riddle was Kyungwon Weekly—initial “g.” If the flood of absurd articles about Siron had begun there, then in this quiz, his mother’s confession of guilt was not about Baekgyeong, but about Siron. Unable to allow the company’s honor to be tarnished, she had chosen Siron as the scapegoat, branding him and erasing him from the world.
Baekgyeong gazed at Siron’s face as he slept, worn down with fatigue. Once, before the camera, Yoon Siron had been more beautiful, more confident than anyone. Now he was a man buried in ridicule.
Like sediment disturbed beneath the water, memories once thought settled stirred up, dragging emotions along with them. Baekgyeong felt frozen to his core.
Could he ever be honest with Siron?
No. He could not.
There were already ten thousand reasons for Siron to hate him. He could not heap upon them another sin that could never be forgiven.
Baekgyeong raised the vodka bottle to his lips, downing nearly half in one desperate pull. Something like ice filled his throat, only to melt hot and scorch him inside.
What other vile deeds had he committed in the past? Feeling the fire of rage swell from within, he pulled out the last card he had never yet solved.
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