A/N - Um, apologizes for not updating yesterday...but my flight landed at 11pm and i didn't have time to get to a comp and update. Buuut, praise the lord i have computer back and can type hellishly faster than that pitiful excuse of an ipad. ^^ As a result, i shall endeavor to update two chapters tonight! Which should about bring Ji-yun's story to a close~

@HanSang - Yaaa, i think its a pretty rare genetic disease tho. Haha you want her to be Joon? That's a first. I didn't think about that before buuuut i'm afraid it ain't gonna end just like that! And i'm home now, sooo more updates~~~~

@ImaVIPbaby - I think most of these stories are downright depressing, but we shall see! 

@thunbii - >< Sorry for not updating last night, but you'll find out soon enough! In about one or two more chapters? I think. At least for Ji-yun's story to come to a close. 

@cazz_96 - Nopee~~~ You're not cruel, coz i think everyone's thinking along the same line. No one seems to want Sanghyun to end up with Ji-yunnie, but we shall see~~~

@ainnurdoongie - Hey sis, i saw an update from you!!! Will go check it out buuuut haha you suspicious of me?! *innocent bambi eyes* Kekeke, you still doubt me?? Even after all the research i did for it? >< Bleh and you still hate her? I've converted wookielove, next step is YOU! Anyhoo, hope your presentation went well? What was it on? 

@T4kara - happy bday plus two or three or however many days it is~ Haha, did you do anything special for your 18th? And yeeesss please update soon! 

@wookielove - yay, one converter!!! Still, yup, things like that aren't forgiven so easily~

Chapter 49 – Without looking back, she tells him he is the only one

Cheondoong POV

She still loves me?

Give me a moment for me to clear my ears because I sure as hell must have misheard what she just said. She loves me?! Is that possible? After everything that has happened, after everything she has lost, after our reenactment of a Greek tragedy, she still says she wants me back?

But I can’t deny it, not when I look deep into the inky pools of her eyes that bare her soul to me. I can’t ignore the way parts slightly or her fearful expression that is a cross between absolute vulnerability and smoke-stained desire.

“Me?” I whispered, unable to help the word that crept out.

She nodded. “You. Only you.”

“Is that so?” a low drawl interrupts us both. Our heads flew upwards to the source of the voice – low, rough and scratchy. My eyes grew wide as I saw the Syndicate leader leaning against the wall. He appeared causal with his posture, but tense fingers that gripped his cigarette and his dark, brooding eyes told me a different story. “Only him, huh?”

Ji-yun slowly leaned away from me and with one trembled hand, tucked her abundance of hair to one side. “Ji Young…?” she said carefully like a man treading a mine field, expecting at any moment for there to be an explosion and to rocket sky high.

“Yes, jagi?” Go Ji Young hissed mockingly. He put the cigarette to his mouth and drew a long drag. He then removed the cigarette and exhaled a toxic cloud of fumes. “I don’t think explanations are needed. It seems the situation is quite explanatory already.”

Ji-yun got to her feet, legs shoulder-width apart and shoulders squared.

“So what do you have to say for yourself?” The Syndicate leader asked coldly and callously dropped the smoking to the floor. Suddenly he slammed his fist into the doorframe, the earsplitting sound making me jump. “Well?!” he demanded.

Ji-yun met his gaze. “What more do I need to say. I love Sanghyun, not you.”

Go Ji Young crossed the distance in a flash, his leather shoes crushing the cigarette underfoot and snuffing out the last of its smoking embers, as if warning us of what was about to happen to us through this premonition. He reached out with one pale hand and grabbed Ji-yun’s chin, forcing her head upwards.

“You dare say that to me?” he hissed and Ji-yun’s nose wrinkled as she undoubtly tasted smoke and tobacco on his breath. “Me? The man who supported you when you ran away from home, the man who fed and clothed you, the man who welcomed you in when no one wanted you?”

His words grew louder, gaining a kind of destructive fire that you so commonly see on the streets. However, it was his eyes that worried me with their utter lack of compassion. I struggled into a sitting position and stared him down.

“What is your connection to Ji-yun.” I demanded.

Go Ji Young looked at me briefly, his eyes narrowing and I could see the cogs of his brain moving as if to assess whether telling me was worth it.

It seemed though that Ji-yun decided to tell the story instead. “He was my benefactor.” She said shortly. And though she said it without hesitation, her tone told me that this wasn’t the end of that little story.

Ji-yun POV

I wasn’t lying.

Go Ji Young, albeit being a criminal gang leader without any remorse for human life or happiness, had saved me. That was the truth. He had picked me up and off the streets, whisked me to safety and then continued to treat me like his queen. But it was all because he was lonely.

After all, Go Ji Young was human. And all humans crave interaction, affection and a sense of belonging.

It doesn’t have to be anyone in particular. It could’ve equally been a male ragamuffin or an eighty-year-old grandmother or even a pet kitten. It didn’t have to be me.

It was just that I had been there conveniently, a pitifully abandoned puppy in the sewers. And good Samaritan Ji Young had picked me up.

1 year ago – February 2009…

Ji-yun practically ran through the streets, bumping roughly past people but uncaring of their harsh rebukes or annoyed expressions. She couldn’t see them anyway; not through the curtain of tears that blurred her vision. Even though she had known it was coming, the pain of harshly being told that her LOEN contract had just been terminated right in her face, with that much too factual tone, had been too much for the sixteen year old.

Whilst her sister success was taking flight like a seagull spreading wings, hers was crashing to the ground like a clipped creature.

Ji-yun’s anger for LOEN, for her illness and the absolute unfairness of her life consumed her thoughts and she stormed forwards. But, as she turned round the corner she collided full-on with a firm chest.

“Ah!” Ji-yun yelped and fell backwards onto her . She rubbed her back and roughly swept away the tears in her eyes before looking up at the person whom she had bumped into. “S-sorry…”

Ji-yun expected unsympathetic words and a shaking index finger in her face. Instead, she got a warm hand. Blindly, Ji-yun gripped the hand and was pulled to her feet by one strong arm.

She wiped away the last of her tears and then bowed respectfully. “Kansamnida.” She said and then looked up.

The man in front of her was much older than her as she guessed from his mature appearance. He was tall with a sweep of black hair, angular bone-structures and dressed in expensive Armani. He was also looking at her with interest, a wolfish gleam in those dark black pits.

“That’s okay.” He said in a slow, deliberately slow, voice. “But what do we have here? Tears? On such a pretty lady?”

Ji-yun couldn’t help but blush even as she knew he was just playing with her, using cheap pick-up lines as a way to stop the waterworks.

“My name is Lee Ji-yun.” She introduced herself, holding out one hand. “Thank you for helping me.”

He tilted his head like a bird, eyes still focused on her. “I’m Go Ji Young,” but instead of shaking it, he picked up the hand gently and pressed a warm kiss to it. “And it’s a pleasure to meet you.”

Present time…

Our meeting was a complete and utter coincidence. It was also a cruel of fate.

Because if I had never met Go Ji Young the day I thought all my dreams were ending, perhaps then Sanghyun and Ji-eun’s dreams would have never ended this way either.

1 year ago – February 2009…

“Stay with me.” Go Ji Young invited me with a forkful of pasta. I blinked in surprise, the pasta I had poorly swirled around my own fork dropping down onto the plate. It made him laugh.

“Did I surprise you that much?” he chuckled and leaned over to wipe away the sauce that stained my lips with one warm thumb. A shock ran through my system at his touch. “I mean what I said.”

“Why me?” I demanded, pushing his hand away. “Don’t think I don’t know who you are or what you do. I may only be sixteen but I am not a fool.”

That only made him smirk even harder. “But dear, you are just sixteen and therefore you are a fool. I am offering you this because I see myself in you.”

That made Ji-yun stop. “I am similar to you?”

“Why yes.” He swirled his pasta in its bowl, uncaring off the mess or the mash he made. “You remind me of myself when I was just sixteen: a foolish child who believed far too much in the fantasy called love and far too little in the strength of myself.” He raised one ringed thumb towards me and the brilliant gleam of the blood red ruby drew her in.

“You think I don’t believe in myself.” Ji-yun stated, her voice turning hollow.

“I do.”

“And you think I believe in the concept called love too much.”

“I do.”

“And you think you can change the error of my ways?”

“I do.”

Ji-yun tilted her head and stared at the man called Go Ji Young. She looked at his bemused expression that seemed to watch her the way a cat with a twitching tail watches the baby bird taking its first few steps into the green grass. She looked at his dancing eyes that seemed to gleam like a tiger in the darkness, readying itself for the moment when it would pounce. She looked at his crooked expression which said to her, whispered to her in the darkest, most sinful voice: Try – if you dare.

And she dared.

She dared to take that step, that chance. She dared to try something new. She dared to leave this bright world that she had wrecked so irrevocably and step forwards into a shadowy vortex where each step was rugged and each doorway lit by the darkest of candles. Where the future was unknown and perhaps death was inevitable. But it promised her something new and something where even for the barest of moments of her short life, she might find excitement and thrilling adventure.

Go Ji Young might be the devil handing her the fruit of temptation, knowing all the while that she shouldn’t do this but going ahead for the heck of it because she thought she had nothing to lose. Nothing anymore.

“Will you take me up on my offer?” Ji Young finally spoke, the pasta cold on the plates but the warmth between them blazing like an out of control inferno.

Ji-yun paused. This was an opportunity to leave everything behind: her parent’s hesitant steps around her like walking on broken glass, her sister’s mournful mouth every time she saw her scar and compared it to her own milky, untouched complexion and those dark, dark eyes and wet, wet tears of Sanghyun that she remembered so vividly from the night in the hospital and haunted her deepest dreams. This was the chance to leave all of that behind and try a new world, albeit it being a dark and dangerous one.

Ji-yun thought she had lost everything: her chance at being a singer, her relationship with her sibling and her one chance at love. And Go Ji Young was offering her something new. It wasn’t love. No. Both of them were too ruined at the thought of love being a passionate and caring thing. They weren’t blinded by the bright lights and the rose-tinted glass. They had long shattered those lenses that distorted the eyes of two people in love long ago.

Instead, he was offering her the obscure oblivion of reality. Of knowing that none of these mythical legends such as eternity, marriage or happily ever after existed, of knowing that not having those things weren’t an weapon of torture but rather the delusion that they could live happy without. He was offering her the chance at the bittersweet taste of living and Ji-yun hungered for that.

So her answer was as simple and as bleak as the future she lusted for.

“I will.”

Present time…

If God exists, then he is cruel. To write my fate entwined with Ji-eun’s as different as black and white, hell and heaven, devil and angel. Whilst she is as virtuous as a the archangel Michael, I am as selfish as the fallen star Lucifer. Everything I choose to do, every path I decide to take seems to end in skulls and crosses and tears as thick as blood.

All I did was take another path I thought would make me forget the past, erase the errors and leave everyone I had hurt far away from my poisonous touch. But it seems that just like the evil queen of Snow White’s story or the boy who cried wolf, my fate is to be the antagonist, undesirable XXX of story Y who no one wants to be but everyone wants to hurt. I am the evil twin, the blood-drenched wolf, the haunting spirit. I am the creature whose only purpose is to hurt.

And that hurts me more than anything else.

A/N - Sooo a pretty dark and text-length chapter huh. Sorry if it was a little overbearing and dark, but that's kinda how i imagined it. Ji-yun isn't a sweet little girl like her sister. She wants a rip-wreaking, adrenaline-rushing life that she can enjoy because its kinda of the sideeffect of knowing you're about to die and therefore thinking you have nothing to lose. However, no one should ever have that concept because there is always something to lose and that's what Ji-yun discovers in the next chapter. Thus her feelings change radically as does her goals. Until the next chapter (which should be up in about an hour)!!!!

And reccomendation of the day is Anathema by lycheeroses . It's a BRILLIANT story, but short so far. It's about twins Sanghyun and Cheondoong (wink wink already right) in which according to folklore, one is the devil who brings despair and the other is like an angel who blesses the family with fortune. However, the problem is that no one knows which one is which. Not even the twins. Enter Ji-yun, a maid at the house, who discovers it all!!! Sounds exciting right!!! Can't wait to read more~~~ Lycheeroses is also the graphic artist whom i always go to when i want her poster. They are freaking amazing and you guys should check them out as well!!! Lycheeroses' Graphic Shop