The glass doors swing open, in perfect sync, precisely timed so he doesn’t have to think. He doubts it’s quite as easy to turn around and walk back outside. To retreat to familiar ground. Home turf.

He was escorted past tinted Plexiglas doors, down spit-shined corridors. The echo of his soft footsteps bounced around the empty hallways, resonating in his ears.

One foot in front of the other, he walks, counting the floor tiles absentmindedly. He didn’t want to focus on the blur of painted smiles and fake faces. Nothing here was genuine.

A man with a firm voice and sharp eyes stops them.

“I’m Dr. Wufan. Welcome to M&K Resorts. I’ll give you the tour. Joonmyun, please take his things to the Redwood Room.”

M&K Resorts. Redwood Room. Oh, as if this place were a five-star hotel, instead of a lockdown where lunatics pace. Sure.

At least it doesn’t have a hospital stench, Luhan scoffs to himself. Oh yes, it’s all very clean, maybe even a tad too clean, from the sparkling floors to the polished furniture. Spotless.

But the clean comes minus the gag-me smell, steeping every inch of that antiseptic hell where they excised the damnable bullet.

Luhan wonders what his father thought once he heard that he’d tried to put himself six feet under— and failed, at that.

I should have put the gun to my head, worried less about brain damage and more about getting dead, he thinks bitterly. End of story.

Instead, he decided that a shot through the heart would make it stop beating, rip it apart to bleed himself out.

He couldn’t even do that right, the up. The bullet impaled bone, left his heart in one piece. Honestly, luck wasn’t on Luhan’s side that day. Mother found him too soon, otherwise his pitiful life might’ve ebbed to the ground in arterial flow.

Luhan thought she might die too, at the sight of so much blood and the thought of it staining her white Armani blouse.

“Luhan, what have you done?” She asked, her expression as cold as her heart. “Tell me this was an accident.” She never heard him reply, never shed a tear.