Jeonghan often showered while she cleaned his apartment. She heard him sing sometimes.

He had a strangely sweet singing voice, so different from the chaotic thunderous voice he usually spoke to her with.

Once, she heard him chant something. A couplet, she thought.

Incapable of kindness this boy will be,
Doomed to be hated indefinitely...

Arin liked the way it sounded, as it resonated with her in ways she couldn't explain. She Googled it that day, wondering if the poem had more lines, but found nothing. She wondered if he made it up.

-

Of all the feelings on the human emotional spectrum, shame was definitely one of the hardest to bear.

Shame made Arin want nothing more than to disappear, to vanish into thin air, away from the people who witnessed what had just happened to her, from Jeonghan and also from Woozi.

The snide mockery in Jeonghan’s voice still tormented her. She could still hear his cruel laugh and targeted verbal ridicule as she tried to collect herself. She could also still feel the unwelcome traces of his arms pinning her wrists to the floor, his lips on her face, and his body over hers.

The obligation to clean after herself offered her a brief distraction from the shame and darkness that consumed her mind and body. She focused on the washing of herself and her clothes, and then mopping the floor. She tried to think of nothing else, because if she let her thoughts stray, she was afraid she would drown in the bottomless pit of self-destruction.

When she was done, there remained nothing else to distract her from it. All she could do was sit idle on her bed, picking at the skin around her fingernails until she bled. She was so numb, she couldn’t feel any pain.

Her ringing phone startled her. She didn’t want to answer it, but when she saw ~’s name, she felt compelled to answer, desperate for a way out of this building once and for all.

“Arrie…”

“I need to get out of here. Please, please let me go,” Arin’s voice came out in a hoarse whisper, carrying all the terror of what had just happened.

“Oh sweet Ar. Jeonghan told me what happened. I’m so sorry about this…”

“Please let me go,” Arin repeated softly.

“He’s not evil, you know. Sometimes, his curse makes him do things like that...”

That was hardly reassuring for Arin. How was she supposed to differentiate between the “evil” Jeonghan and the not-so-evil one? She didn’t want to be around someone who was volatile enough to become evil, even if it was by no fault of his own…

That thought lingered in her mind for a moment as she drew parallels between her situation and his: she was also volatile enough to ‘become evil’ by bringing about the death of others, even if it was by no fault of her own.

“For what it’s worth, he would apologize to you if he could…” ~ continued.

Arin then had flashbacks to the recent activation of her own curse, when Joshua died. She remembered how she wished she could apologize to him, but she couldn’t.

As this empathy for him started to form, she felt even worse than before. She felt bad for still blaming him for what he did to her, even after knowing this. Blaming him helped her cope by giving her somewhere to direct her anger and hatred. If there was nothing and no one to blame, what happened to her just happened out of thin air, and that was not a comforting thought.

“Why didn’t you tell me about Jeonghan?” Arin finally managed to ask. “I deserved to know…”

“Because I didn’t want you to love him,” ~ answered.

The notion was so ridiculous that Arin couldn’t help but laugh, even as she spiralled.

“Arrie, when you know someone is cursed, you’ll have sympathy for them no matter how badly they treat you. Jeonghan’s awful to me, but Arrie, believe it or not, I love him.”

Hearing those words gave Arin an unpleasant jolt. ~ loved Jeonghan? Arin felt sick. She couldn’t even respond.

“I didn’t tell you, because I knew you’d feel the same way. You’d see through that vulgar facade he’s made for himself, and you’d feel sympathy for him. I know for a fact that he feels like that towards you…”

No. She couldn’t even imagine not hating Jeonghan. Even if she felt some empathy for him, she still loathed him from the bottom of her heart for everything he had done to her in the past.

“It’s my job to protect cursed people, and that includes both you and Jeonghan. I was trying to protect Jeonghan just as much as I was protecting you. I placed you together with him because both of your curses neutralize each other: he’s cursed to be hated, and your curse only affects those you love. But if you knew that he was cursed, I was afraid it would all fall apart because you wouldn’t hate him anymore…”

No matter how much she tried to think about it, she could never un-hate Jeonghan, even after knowing that he was “cursed to be hated.” Jeonghan was Jeonghan, and his curse was part of the package. She could not even begin to picture a Jeonghan independent of that curse, as she had never met him without it. She hated him, plain and simple. And she still wanted to get away from him.

“Please, lift the enchantment,” Arin requested with as much firmness as she could manage. “I need to leave this place.”

“But where would you go? How can you be sure that you’ll be safe?”

“Well I’m not safe here…”

“Listen, he only becomes this bad when he forces himself to be kind, so don’t let him be kind to you. Just don’t interact with him…”

“I want to get away!” Arin resolved. “I don’t care where I go, I can’t stand being here. I have to leave.”

“I can’t let you do that…”

Arin then remembered what Jun had said about ‘Hyojung’... that she was trapping Arin in here. Arin felt that now more than ever before; in that moment, ~ no longer felt the sweet, spirited big sister that Arin had come to know and love. Now, ~ was “Hyojung,” a distant stranger that Arin didn’t trust or know very well.

“You can’t trap me in here!” Arin yelled.

“Please calm down, Ar. We’ll work something out, but I can’t let you leave.”

Arin wasn’t going to stay in that building. She was going to find her way out, away from Jeonghan and Woozi, away from the building that brought only isolation and misery, away from the cage that Hyojung had built for her. Arin was tired of being manipulated and lied to, tired of not being in control of her own life.

In the end, Hyojung’s “protection” seemed to do her no good. She was nearly violated, and she hated the life she had lived. In spite of all of this, Hyojung would not lift the enchantment, and that made her more wary of her intentions than ever before. This was not protection. This was imprisonment.

“I’m leaving one way or the other. If I can’t walk out of here, I’ll just die here and now,” Arin threatened. It was a serious threat.

“Oh dear, please, please, please don’t say such scary things,” Hyojung begged, distraught undertones in her voice. “Let’s talk about this.”

“I’m hanging up now. If the enchantment isn’t lifted in five minutes, I’ll find some other way to free myself.” Arin hung up the phone and turned it off. She sat on the bed and waited to see if Hyojung would feel the enchantment lift, or whether she had to carry through with her ultimatum.

A few minutes passed, and she felt nothing; Hyojung wasn’t lifting the enchantment.

For some reason, Arin was glad: she now had her excuse. She turned to the box that contained her clothes. She didn’t have much, but it was enough for what she wanted to do. The ceiling wasn’t very high after all.

As she tore and tied the pieces together to form a rope, she wondered if it would hurt or if it would take long. She wasn’t very sure; all she knew was that it would work. It didn’t really matter in the end, but she wished it would be quick and painless.

She didn’t have time to finish the job though, because soon enough, Jeonghan came barging in to stop her. Hyojung had probably told him to do that.

The sight of him again made her spine run cold.

He looked annoyed with her as he snatched the rope-in-progress from her hands and threw it to the side, as if she was being a nuisance to him.

“If I have to stay in this damned hell hole of a world, so do you!” he yelled. “Don’t you ing dare try anything.”

He was speaking as if nothing happened, as if he hadn’t nearly violated her less than an hour ago. He was speaking to her as if she was still under his employ. Arin wondered if his curse made him forget, or if he was just choosing to ignore it and had the audacity to show himself to her.

Arin hated him. Cursed or not, she hated him. And now, he looked over her like a prison guard, not allowing her the liberation she was craving with all her heart. That made her hate him even more.

She wasn’t afraid of him though. He had already broken her and shattered her self-esteem and her determination to live. Anything else he could take from her didn’t matter. In the end, he was also a pitiful cursed person, just like she was. He was suffering too, just like she was. The thought of him suffering like that brought her a peculiar kind of pleasure.

She fought to get her rope back, tried to move past him out the door, hit and pushed him, but he blocked her every move. The more she fought, the more he had to touch her, which made her not want to fight anymore, because even his touch sickened her to the stomach. She gave up and collapsed on her bed, frustrated and furious.

He stayed standing at the door, watching her.

“What, are you just going to watch me for the rest of my life?” she asked him through gritted teeth.

“If that’s what it takes, then yes.”

“What if you need to go to the bathroom? Will you pee your pants?” she asked, slightly amused at the irony.

He didn’t answer.

Silence followed. Arin just sat on the bed, trying to come up with some sort of plan, and Jeonghan eventually took a seat on the floor against the door. They didn’t speak for a long time.

Arin just buried her face in her pillow, hoping that maybe she’ll suffocate to death without him noticing, but sadly, it didn’t work like that.

Meemo eventually came out of hiding and ambled towards Jeonghan, nestling against his legs. Arin only noticed when she lifted her head from her pillow and found Jeonghan petting the cat with tender affection.

It was still so confusing to see Jeonghan like that, to see him showing affection and care for something else besides himself. She remembered she saw that side of Jeonghan through the security camera footage Woozi had shown her that morning.

“Your curse doesn’t work on animals, right?” Arin reasoned.

As soon as he heard her voice and noticed that she was watching him, the tender expression on his face faded away into a frown. He didn’t answer her, but continued to pet Meemo nonetheless.

“My curse doesn’t work on animals either,” she stated. She didn’t know why she was even talking to him, but in some strange way, it felt good to acknowledge their common affliction. It felt like she was finally speaking to something human, like she was getting through that cursed masquerade for once.

That feeling didn’t last long though, because Jeonghan immediately told her to shut up. He was being cold and unkind to her, but she understood that maybe it was his curse that was telling her to shut up, and not him.

“What exactly is your curse?” she asked. She knew it was something about being hateful and unkind, but that’s it.

He continued to ignore her, and she gave up trying to get to him at that point. And she was tired of just sitting there waiting for him to leave or for something to happen, or for an opportunity to run away. She needed to fill her time and distract herself or there will be no more skin on her fingers left for her to pick.

She reached for her phone and turned it on. There was nothing else she could do.

There were many missed calls and texts from Hyojung, but Arin ignored them all. Instead, she felt compelled to open her fandom social media and check for Chilli updates.

Jeonghan was busy petting Meemo, so he did not seem to notice that she was on her phone until a few minutes afterwards, because he got up off the floor and snatched the phone from her hand.

He looked at the screen to see what she was doing.

She had only been on her scoups4eva account messaging her Internet friends, fangirling about how good Mingyu looked in his latest pictorial. It seemed like Jeonghan expected she would be doing something else.

Jeonghan put her phone in his pocket and sat back down. His reaction is what got her to realize that there was a much better way she could have used her phone. She could have easily messaged Woozi, and he could have come and taken her out of this situation.

“You’re crazy,” he told her. “You wanted to kill yourself just now, and now you’re fangirling about some celebrity acting like you’re all happy and excited? Stop deluding yourself. You’re a miserable wreck, and no amount of happy emojis will change that.”

She was beyond shame and embarrassment at that point, and his words no longer hurt her like they used to. She knew she was miserable, but he was miserable too. He was the last person to judge her coping mechanisms.

She didn’t want him to get away with insulting her anymore. She wasn’t the same person he ordered around like a slave and offended without consequence. She glared at him and responded: “You’re just as miserable as I am, or even more. At least I have friends, even if they’re on the Internet. You’re just a lonely man who isolates himself in his fancy ivory tower, no friends or family that care about you. You even drove off your own mother!”

The mention of his mother seemed to have struck a sensitive chord with him. The empty look on his face morphed into an expression of anger and distress. “You have no ing clue what you’re talking about, so shut the up and mind your own business,” he said.

His reaction pleased her. She liked that she could get an emotional reaction out of him, harass him like he used to harass her. She wanted to continue harnessing that power; she wanted to make him angry and hurt him even more. “Your mother came to your door, crying. She came with an open heart for you, and you just blasted her and told her to go away. What kind of a hateful person are you to be able to do that? You know how lucky you are to even have a mother—”

He cut her off suddenly. She would have spoken over him, but she didn’t when she realized that she wanted to hear what he was saying.

He was reciting his curse.

“Incapable of kindness this boy will be,
Doomed to be hated indefinitely.
He’ll spurn his mother, that pesky shrew,
Hurt her till she hates him too.
And everyone else that comes his way...
Would be abused, insulted, and turned away.
If he shows compassion, let it bring him pain,
If that doesn’t work, let the devil take reign.

So I curse him with a venomous soul.
A curse of hatefulness beyond his control.”

A/N: Hello patient people, thank you for waiting so long for this update! It took this long because I was spending a whole lot of time mapping out the rest of the story and figuring out the sequence of events that will follow, because I hadn’t really done that before and it was leading to a lot of writer’s block.

I still have a few more things to map out, but once that’s done, it will be much smoother sailing and updates will come a lot quicker. Please continue to be patient, I promise I’m still working on it and thinking about it literally everyday. I’m actually super excited about the upcoming chapters because finally things are picking up and gradually being revealed. I can’t wait to share the rest of the story with you!!