“Woah, woah, woah.” Kyungsoo holds up his hand. “So you’re saying the witch was pregnant?”

“There’s no such thing as witches,” Yixing repeats grumpily. “She was just a poor girl used and abused by rich people.”

It’s the following evening, after dinner has been eaten and everything cleaned up, and Baekhyun is sitting in the kitchen with Yixing, Luhan, Kyungsoo, Chanyeol, and Junmyeon. He, Luhan, and Yixing have filled the others in on what they’d discovered from the hidden letters.

“Hello, curse?” Luhan pointed out.

“He must’ve actually cared for her,” Junmyeon said, almost a bit sadly, skimming over one of the letters from the box.

Baekhyun gave him an incredulous look. “He claimed she bewitched him and then he had her burned at the stake. Doesn’t seem like he cared about her too much.”

“Then why did he keep all these letters?” Junmyeon asked. “Why not just burn all the evidence of their affair? Maybe his parents forced him to accuse her. Maybe he didn’t really have a choice at all.”

“There’s always a choice,” Baekhyun said vehemently. “He was a coward and she was a victim. That’s the only explanation for why our family is cursed.”

“So what to do we do?” Kyungsoo asked helplessly.

Chanyeol had been pretty quiet thus far during their meeting, but now he spoke up. “We need to find out what happened to the witch’s child, the one she was pregnant with. I think she would’ve eventually gotten over being rejected by her lover, but I doubt she’d get over it if something happened to her child.”

Baekhyun nodded, blushing a bit and refusing to meet Chanyeol’s gaze. He was still embarrassed by what had happened between them, and excited about what might happen were he to ever break this curse. “So how do we find out what happened to it? It was so long ago and the Kim family probably wanted to keep it secret, so there may not even be any record of it anywhere.”

Kyungsoo hummed thoughtfully. “I think we ought to start with local historians. That’ll be our best bet.”

Even though Baekhyun wanted to spend every waking moment working on finding the truth about the witch and her child, as the head of the Kim family he still had duties to attend to. It was a nightmare to put on his suit and go sit in long, boring meetings while the clock was ticking. He was on edge every second of every day, waiting for news that another family member had been taken by the curse. Every time his phone rang, he was so tense he felt that he was going to throw up. He wasn’t sleeping well and he was barely eating.

He was sitting at his desk at the office one afternoon, slumped over a proposal he was supposed to be going over to approve before implementation. His untouched lunch sat on the edge of the enormous desk, forgotten. He was in a daze, not even pretending to read the proposal.

His cell phone rang, loud in the quiet of the office. He jumped so high he nearly toppled out of his rolling chair, his heart lodging itself somewhere in the vicinity of his throat. He glanced at the caller ID, saw that it was Yixing, and answered immediately.

“Are you okay?” he demanded urgently. “Is everyone okay?”

“God, Baek, you’ve got to stop answering the phone like this,” Yixing sighed. “You’re going to die of a heart attack if you’re not careful, not the curse.”

“At this point, the heart attack would probably be because of the curse,” Baekhyun groaned, running his fingers through his tussled hair. “So what’s up?”

“So Kyungsoo found a historian over at Seoul University who knew about Woo Yewon and her execution,” Yixing said, and Baekhyun felt his hopes soar. “But he didn’t know anything about her being pregnant.” The hopes were dashed yet again. “But,” Yixing went on, and there were those damn hopes again. “He did refer us to someone who might now. She’s just a housewife, not a historian or anything, but apparently she’s something of a local history buff. Junmyeon and I are going to meet her in half an hour. Do you want to come along?”

“Of course I do,” Baekhyun said, on his feet and awake in an instant. “Have your car swing by and pick me up at the office.”

Yifan and Zitao were stationed outside his office, as usual, when he came out, shrugging into his winter coat.

“Mr. Kim, where are you going?” Yifan demanded, the two bodyguards following behind him immediately.

“None of your business,” Baekhyun said curtly. He wasn’t usually this rude, but he was tired and his patience was currently nonexistent.

“Mr. Kim, I insists-” Yifan began, but Baekhyun whirled on him.

“You are not in a position to insist anything, Yifan,” he said coolly. “You work for me, remember? And I do not currently need your services. Take the rest of the day off. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

And when the elevator doors closed behind him, both Yifan and Zitao were still gazing after him in shock.

It didn’t take long for one of the family’s cars to pull up in the building’s drive, and Baekhyun was climbing into the backseat before the driver could even put the car into park. Yixing and Junmyeon were in the back.

“So who is this woman we’re going to see?” he demanded by way of greeting.

“Her name is Hwang Nayeon,” Yixing reported, checking the information on his phone. “She’s just some housewife. Her husband is a dock worker. She was hesitant to meet with us, but the historian Kyungsoo spoke with thought she might know something.”

“God I hope so,” Baekhyun groaned. “This wild goose chase is shortening my already short life.”

“Hopefully it won’t be so short after we talk to Mrs. Hwang,” Junmyeon said grimly.

Hwang Nayeon lived in Incheon, so it was a bit of a drive from the city. Baekhyun could feel his hopes building as they drove. He really wished they would stop doing that; it was harder and harder each time he was let down.

The woman they were meeting lived in a little apartment over an intestines restaurant. The food smelled delicious, but Baekhyun didn’t have the stomach for food at the moment. There was the incessant barking of a small dog when they knocked, as well as the screaming of little children, and it took a moment before the door opened and they were face-to-face with a round-faced middle-aged woman wearing a top stained with gochujang.

“Can I help you?” she asked, taking in their nice clothes and the expensive car out front.

Baekhyun stepped in smoothly. “Hi, Mrs. Hwang? My name is Byun Baekhyun. My associate, Do Kyungsoo, spoke with you earlier about Woo Yewon? We were hoping you had some time to speak with us this afternoon?”

“Oh, right. That.” The woman stepped aside so she was no longer blocking the doorway. “Well, come on in, then.”

She waited until they were all squished together on a little sofa, cups of weak tea in their hands, before she spoke again. “So what exactly is it you wanted to know? Not a lot of people care about Woo Yewon these days.”

“We recently discovered that she was pregnant,” Baekhyun explained. “And we need to know what happened to the child she was carrying.”

The woman let out a low whistle. “Well, now it’s not common knowledge that the Han River Witch was pregnant. Where did you come by that information?”

“We read it in a letter,” Baekhyun admitted. “That she wrote to her lover, Kim Hoik. So you knew that she was pregnant?”

“I’d heard about it before, yes,” the woman said.

Baekhyun waited with bated breath, but she didn’t elaborate. “And…?” he finally prompted.

“The child was born right before she was executed,” Mrs. Hwang said with a sigh.

Baekhyun felt another surge of hope, bigger than ever before. “So she gave birth to the child? It lived?”

But the woman looked a bit sad. “Woo Yewon did give birth to her child, a healthy baby boy. And it lived for a few days. But then it, too, was murdered.”

It was as if someone had dumped a bucket of cold ice water over Baekhyun’s head. “Her baby was killed?”

“By the Kims,” Mrs. Hwang said, nodding.

Baekhyun was a bit too shocked to say anything, so Yixing quickly said, “Do you know where they were buried? Woo Yewon and her son?”

“Woo Yewon was cremated,” Mrs. Hwang explained. “From what I’ve been able to discover, her child was buried in an unmarked grave.”

Baekhyun thanked the woman for her help and the three of them left. It wasn’t until they were back in the car on the way to Seoul that Junmyeon spoke.

“In all the occult books I’ve read, it says that burning the bones of the ghost will end the haunting or curse,” Junmyeon said thoughtfully. “But if Woo Yewon was cremated, she can’t possibly be the cause of the family curse…”

They were all silent for a moment, then Yixing said slowly, “What if Woo Yewon isn’t causing the curse? What if…it’s her child?”

“You think a newborn caused the curse?” Baekhyun said incredulously. “That’s ridiculous.”

“We’re talking about curses and witches,” Junmyeon pointed out. “I don’t think that anything is ridiculous at this point.”

“Maybe I’ve been right all along,” Yixing insisted. “I don’t think Woo Yewon was ever a witch. She was an innocent girl who was murdered at the hands of someone she trusted. If you can believe that Woo Yewon caused the curse, why is it any weirder to think that her murdered baby is the cause?”

“Let’s say the baby is causing the curse,” Baekhyun said slowly. “If what Junmyeon says is right and we have to burn the bones, how do we find an unmarked grave from over a hundred and fifty years ago?”

But none of them had an answer.