“Do it in moderation.”

He scolded while gently caressing her belly, where he couldn’t even feel the unborn child yet.

As effective as the shackles were, they were almost too effective. One morning, the woman couldn’t muster the strength to make it to the bathroom, so she sat on the bedroom floor and vomited. When he approached her after waking up, the woman asked him,

“Are you happy?”

He was about to ask if she considered him a happy person now, but instead, she made a face that was neither crying nor smiling and said,

“My suffering is your pleasure, after all.”

No.

He couldn’t speak at that moment. Still, if she asked the same question again, he would say no.

“Sometimes I wish you were weak. It would have been much easier.”

No, not at all. He would give the same answer to his past self.

It had been a few days.

“Um…”

As he was preparing to leave for work, the woman staggered to him and made a careful request.

“I have something I want to eat…”

In the time she had been confined to this annex, the woman had never once asked for anything to eat. It was also the first time she had shown the will to eat by herself since becoming pregnant. So, he postponed going to work and forced a bakery that hadn’t been opened to open so that he could bring her what she wanted to eat.

What was almond cake anyway? The woman genuinely smiled for the first time in a long while and then said something shocking.

“Thank you.”

Then, she took a few bites but ended up vomiting. After vomiting several times, the exhausted woman eventually cursed at him.

However, what pierced his heart wasn’t the foul language but the genuine words of gratitude. Thank you. Thanking the man who had locked her up and even forced her to become pregnant… all for a piece of cake.

The woman who had always been defiant about being a prisoner in his prison had been so broken.

After successfully breaking her as he had wished, Leon realized that he didn’t genuinely want this to happen.

“Come on, cheer up. You should be tearing me apart.”

He continued to caress the sleeping woman before looking down at his own hand. His hand looked strangely empty as her nail marks were gone long ago.

º º º

Leon’s eyes opened with a foreboding premonition.

And his premonition came true tonight as well. Just like every other night, the woman was sitting at the edge of the bed. All that was visible was her shadowy back, so he couldn’t see her expression or what she was looking at. Her weak body looked like it would collapse at any moment.

He quietly swallowed a sigh.

After the morning sickness, this unexpected behavior in the middle of the night also continued for a month.

When it had just started, the woman used to cry every night like a child. She was nothing like the woman he knew. She sobbed alone like that, and when he tried to console her, she clung to him, sobbing.

“Please, let me go.”

“Where are you going with my child? To your fiancée?”

The woman already knew such pleas were futile.

It was evident that she was no longer a sane woman.

He began to refuse her, and soon, she lost the strength to make such requests. Her pleas to let her go in the middle of the night also stopped, along with the crying.

However, it didn’t end there.

One time, he woke up with a disturbing premonition, and the woman was sitting next to him, looking down at him. Her eyes were empty and revealed no emotion.

“Do you want to kill me?”

He asked, but unlike usual, the woman showed no reaction. Then, from then on, she would sit with her back turned like that, and if not stopped, she would sit like that for hours until she started vomiting.

Last night, he suddenly grabbed the woman as if he had made a resolution and put her on the bed. It seemed that he couldn’t sleep at all because he was thinking about this all night.

Did she want to escape?

Did she want to escape through death?

Perhaps, in this way, her determination to escape from him, even if it meant dying, manifested itself physically through the morning sickness.

The pale moonlight seeping through the curtains began to illuminate the woman. The thin woman looked ghostly, as if she might scatter and disappear into the moonlight. His heart started pounding like it did last night when she stood up.

Don’t go.

Unconsciously, he reached out and grabbed the woman’s wrist. Even when he squeezed the bony wrist painfully, the woman didn’t turn around.

Suddenly, he realized he was clinging to this woman.

It was miserable.

To think that he got scared because she wouldn’t even look at him anymore. It was beyond pathetic and foolish.

Leon knew better than anyone that this woman had no strength to leave this place, let alone make a noose to hang herself. Nevertheless, he bought her cake that she would vomit after just one bite and asked every morning.

What should he get tomorrow?

He hoped she would endure one more hellish day just for one moment where she could smile happily. So, he hoped that the woman who wanted to die for him and their child would want to live just for a piece of cake.

As he reached this conclusion, Leon suddenly realized.

The woman had never said she wanted to die in the first place. Her desire to die was nothing more than his delusion.

…A delusion-ridden coward.

That was his current self.

Power, money, threats. Someone who wasn’t frightened by these has been turned into a coward by this insignificant woman.

With this realization, anger surged.

Everything he had been doing lately was far from his former self, and this change was not the first time. He had turned from an innocent child into a bloodthirsty lunatic, all because of this woman. He had lost his confident self and turned into a pathetic idiot, and it was all because of her.

This woman had always been the one to change him.

Who are you to control me as you please? How dare you ruin me so miserably?

For almost a month, he was unable to rest. The unprocessed emotions swirled in his foggy mind. In the end, Leon couldn’t overcome the sudden, boiling impulse.

Bzzzz.

As the sound of cricket reverberated in his head, he pressed his fingertips to his forehead.

Even though the mist clouded his vision like a fog, the figure of the woman standing in front of the tightly closed iron gate was crystal clear. It was because of the spotlights installed at both ends of the stone wall, which poured light onto her like spotlights.

Leon stared at the woman with a gloomy look as if she might collapse at any moment.

He had brought her out wearing only his trench coat over her thin nightgown. Leon’s coat, which reached down to his knees, hung loosely over the woman’s ankles. The ankles that peeked out between the coat’s hem and slippers looked unusually thin and pale.

The insignificant woman had been looking puzzled for a while now. Her eyes seemed to question why she had suddenly been brought to the annex’s garden, of all places, and in front of the only exit from the annex.

Leon avoided the woman’s gaze and instructed the security guard standing behind the iron bars.

“Open it.”

The iron gate slowly opened with an annoying grating noise. As the gate opened, the doubt that had been swirling in the woman’s wide eyes faded away, and a glimmer of life began to return.

Life.

The woman, who had looked like a corpse just a moment ago, began to come to life as the door opened.

Leon stepped back from the woman while swallowing his anger.

“Go.”

As the words that would never have come out of his mouth were spoken, the woman turned to look at him. Leon stared at the bewilderment in her blue-green eyes for a moment before closing his own eyes tightly.

Go away. Never appear before me again.

Please.

The confidence that had been rock-solid just yesterday afternoon began to waver.

He began to question whether the plan he believed was working perfectly was actually his. Was this path that was so unlike Leon Winston really a path of his own choosing, or was it the path of his downfall that he had been forced onto?

Beneath the dim moonlight, as she sat silently in her white nightgown just moments ago, he recalled a legend.

In the dark of night, when a woman in white appeared, misfortune would befall. In the past and even now, whenever his perfect life crumbled, this woman had always been there.

Daisy, Sally, and Grace.

Harbingers of his misfortune.

Please disappear.

…Go?

Grace stood there for a long time, trying to understand the meaning of the word ‘go.’ Was it the same meaning she knew? Perhaps, in the time they had spent trapped here, the meaning had changed.

What kind of trick was this?

She stared at the man standing far away from her. She wanted to ask, what did ‘go’ mean? However, the man had closed his eyes. His tired expression made it seem as if he had given up on her.

Given up.

As strange as it sounded, it made her heart race. Grace turned her gaze directly ahead. Men dressed in uniforms were watching her and the man with bewildered faces. They were all faces she had never seen before.

Was she dreaming?

As she blinked absentmindedly, the wind blew. When the chilly breeze brushed her cold ankles, she suddenly snapped out of her daze.

This wasn’t a dream. The man was really trying to set her free.

Free. I’m free.

With trembling hands, she clutched the collar that let in the cold wind. Her lips were also trembling as she bit down hard to keep the tears of emotion from pouring out.

Forgetting about the shackles planted inside her belly, she took her first step toward freedom.

__