The Unbelievers Chapter 68

Tightening his jacket and hunching his shoulders, Eunseong returned to the motel. He handed a chocolate bar to Kim Dongjun.

“Thanks. How much was it?”

He pulled out his wallet to pay, but Eunseong waved his hand to signify it was fine.

“I bought it on a 1-plus-1 deal. Just have it, hyung.”

“Still, I have to be thorough with payments. That’s my principle.”

“It’s okay. You don’t have to give me anything. I just bought it while I was getting mine.”

He hadn’t given it to get money, but Kim Dongjun insisted that they had to be thorough with money so there would be no reason to feel hurt by one another; he asked how much it cost and said he would pay half.

Regretting having shown a small kindness to someone who acted so strictly, Eunseong ended up awkwardly accepting the 1,000 won he offered.

Since it was Kim Dongjun’s turn to watch the counter, Eunseong cleaned a room where a guest had just checked out. After finishing the work, he went into the staff quarters to organize his belongings.

A three-tier drawer next to the bed was the entirety of his storage space, so if he didn’t keep things organized as he went, the surrounding area quickly became messy; Kim Dongjun, who had to pass through Eunseong’s spot to get to his own space, did not tolerate this.

He was a person with a strong sense of individualism, almost to an excessive degree. Saying he hated being inconvenienced by others and hated causing inconvenience to them, he always paid for products bought on 1-plus-1 deals, and they had to take turns cleaning the room daily like a duty roster.

Because he never allowed anyone to look into his space, it was usually enough to just wipe it down with a rag a few times; moreover, since he organized his surroundings every day, there wasn’t much to clean, yet Kim Dongjun cleaned diligently, so Eunseong followed along without a word. It was even more so because when it was Eunseong’s turn, Kim Dongjun would check with a scrutinizing eye.

After tidying the room roughly, he pulled out the bag he had tucked under the bed. In the backpack he had bought secondhand, he had kept all the money he had saved up until now, along with the monthly pay he received last week.

Eunseong, who hadn’t even been able to think about college and had been too busy running away from Yoo Siun, was feeling a sense of crisis as he watched Kim Dongjun, who worked several jobs while also attending night college and staking his life on a diploma.

For a life that had to be lived painfully without parental help, degrees or diplomas were essential to make life less painful in the future. Furthermore, thanks to having attended the academy Yoo Siun sent him to so diligently, his Suneung scores had come out quite well, leading to a sense of regret that perhaps he had given up on school too hastily.

At that time, he hadn’t even dreamed of going to college. His calculation—that he should first solve the problem of making a living and then decide later the year after next if there was something he wanted to study—had before he knew it turned into impatience.

About a year’s worth of tuition might be possible, but school life wasn’t settled just by paying tuition.

“Even if I keep doing part-time jobs in between, I’d need at least 10 million won, no, more than 20 million won to start with.”

Muttering to himself, Eunseong opened the bag and reached in to take out the envelope he had tucked into the inner zipper.

“…Huh?”

He couldn’t feel the bulkiness that should have been sitting there thickly at all. In that instant, his heart thudded.

“Huh? Huh?”

The hands fumbling inside the bag became urgent. Nothing was caught in his grasp. He opened all the zippers and turned the bag inside out. He scrambled through the inner pockets, but the two envelopes that should have been there were nowhere to be seen. Eunseong’s face turned deathly pale with panic.

Setting the bag down, he hurriedly left the staff quarters and headed for the counter. He saw Kim Dongjun sitting down after just sending a guest up.

“Hyung, um, hyung, did you happen to see an envelope with money in the room?”

“Hmm?”

“I put the pay I got the day before yesterday and the money I saved in my bag, but it’s gone.”

In the voice asking about the whereabouts of the money, bewilderment and sorrow were lumped together, sounding as if he were on the verge of tears.

“The money is gone? Where did you put it? How much was there?”

“I kept it in my bag. It was there yesterday too; even yesterday, I took out about 50,000 won to buy something and checked it while putting it back, but it’s gone. It’s gone. It was over 10 million won, and including the 1 million won I got for my monthly pay, there was about 11 million won.”

As he counted the number 10 million won out loud, his hands began to tremble. it was a large sum of money. it was his entire fortune.

The money he needed to live on, go to school with, and buy winter clothes with had vanished completely. Including the money he had saved from previous part-time jobs and the money made by reselling things Yoo Siun had bought him, the sum he had gathered bit by bit to resolve himself to run away was over 10 million won, and the money he received as pay the day before yesterday was a significant amount of a little over 1 million won.

Eunseong felt as if his mind was being bleached white. He couldn’t think of anything due to the shock.

“Where on earth did you leave the money to lose it. Wait, a guest is coming. Welcome. Did you make a reservation through the app?”

A pair of guests who looked like a couple walked in just then, and Kim Dongjun turned away. Eunseong went back to the room. Comforting himself that he was just mistaken, he searched the bag. He searched the bag, flipped over the bed mattress, and opened and overturned every drawer, but the envelope where he had gathered the money was not to be seen.

His heart throbbed anxiously. Eunseong, who had been sitting slumped under the overturned bed mattress, stared at Kim Dongjun’s spot on the opposite side.

“…”

In this room where he kept the money, the only place he hadn’t searched was his territory. The opposite side, hidden by a curtain, was somewhere he had never even opened while cleaning, per Kim Dongjun’s demand.

He pulled back the concealing curtain. Beyond the curtain that divided the staff quarters in half, there was a bed, a wardrobe, a desk, and even a table with instant rice, ramen, canned tuna, and Spam.

Eunseong’s space was by the door, assigned one bed and one three-tier drawer, but the space beyond, which he had believed would be divided into an equal size, was much more spacious.

Such a thing didn’t matter right now. He was about to open Kim Dongjun’s drawer, even while thinking it couldn’t be true. The door opened and Kim Dongjun walked in, screaming like a bolt of lightning.

“Hey! What are you doing? I told you the inner part is my territory, didn’t I? Why are you going in there?”

“The money, the money is gone, so just in case.”

“What ‘just in case’? What do you mean by that? Are you saying I stole your money or something?”

“…”

Eunseong hadn’t thought that far. Since it disappeared from the room, he only had the mind to search the remaining space. But when Kim Dongjun shouted and confronted him like that, only then did Eunseong realize with a start that he might have stolen the money.

Kim Dongjun, huffing with a reddened face, approached and pushed Eunseong’s chest hard with both hands. Eunseong staggered back a few steps from the forceful shove and fell to the floor.

“What kind of bastard are you? I felt sorry for you so I told you everything, taught you things, and even did the favor of bringing your bag for free! Fuck, why would I steal your money? Am I crazy?”

“It was there until yesterday evening. If we check the CCTV, it’ll show up. We just need to find the person who went in and out. Because it was there until yesterday!”

Eunseong stood up quickly. He rushed to the counter. Because of all sorts of nuisance customers, CCTVs were installed everywhere in the motel; one in every hallway, monitoring every entrance.

There was also a CCTV in the hallway of the storage room used as staff quarters, and while it wasn’t crystal clear, it was in a position to identify who went in and out. The only people who went in and out of the staff quarters were him and Kim Dongjun.

Eunseong was desperately hoping it wasn’t Kim Dongjun. He prayed in his heart that it was instead a thief who had snuck in, entered the quarters, and stolen the money.

Sweat gathered in Eunseong’s palms as he hurried his steps to the counter where the computer was. Sitting in front of the computer where he could view the CCTV, he used the mouse to open the folder.

He looked for the CCTV camera numbers saved since last night. Since there were two cameras at both ends of the hallway, he opened and closed the file for the opposite side first and then found and opened the camera folder for the other number.

“…”

It was a mistake to leave the spot after asking Kim Dongjun about the whereabouts of the money envelope earlier. Among the recording list saved by the hour, some parts had been deleted and were missing. There was a gap in the time.

“Fine, look for it. We can see who was going in and out through the CCTV. Is there anyone else besides you and me?”

“…There would have only been you and me anyway, so why did you delete it?”

Still holding the mouse, Eunseong lifted his gaze and looked up at him.

“Delete? Who deleted what? Ah, seriously, this kid is trying to frame an innocent person. Do you really suspect I took it?!”

Kim Dongjun screamed as if having a fit.

“The person who knows I keep my bag under the bed is you, hyung, and the one who knows I have a large sum of money is also you, hyung. You saw it too, hyung, when I put the pay in my bag. No one goes in there, and there’s no one but you and me, so who else would have taken it?”

“So what? Fuck, is the fact that you put cash in your bag evidence that I’m the culprit? Bring evidence if you have it. I said bring the evidence that I stole your money, and stop making a person feel miserable! Are you even sure you really lost the money? Are you lying?”

“…What did you say?”

“Whether you ran away from home, or ran away after killing someone, or like you said, you’re hiding because of your father’s private loans, or you ran away after committing some crime, how would I know. Are you sure you even had a large sum of money from the start? Aren’t you just trying to pin it on me to extort money!”

“What kind of nonsense…”

It was so absurd that he was dumbfounded, to the point where words wouldn’t even come out. Eunseong’s face gradually hardened into a stiff expression. Kim Dongjun, his face distorted into a terrifying look with a tone he had never used before, cornered Eunseong. At this point, Eunseong felt as if he were the one in the wrong for having hastily suspected him.