Heavy Rain Chapter 12

The answer flowed out without a moment’s hesitation. Haejin wore a calm face from start to finish. It was certainly surprising that Lyle had come all this way, but that was all. It was easy enough to read from his furrowed brow that he had chased him down out of anger at the continuous rejections. Now that the question was resolved, all that remained was emptiness once again.

That expression, which held absolutely nothing, was quite bothersome. As was the hand gripping the doorknob, as if ready to close it at any moment.

Something was not going as planned. The moment he realized that, Lyle swallowed a sigh inwardly.

“Tell me what you want.”

It was a statement steeped in arrogant confidence, implying he could grant whatever it was that he wanted. It was also laced with a warning to stop holding out and simply comply at this point.

Fitting for such absurd confidence, Lyle had the ability to make anything happen, no matter what it was. At this point, he even became curious about just how exorbitant the conditions Haejin would demand might be.

“There is nothing.”

However, Haejin merely answered while letting his gaze slide slightly to the side.

This utterly uncooperative attitude was frustrating to a bizarre degree. Lyle’s lungs expanded as if he had just finished a full sprint. Above all, he disliked that hollow gaze. Only two weeks had passed, but seeing the face where the jawline had become even more prominent, even irritation began to seethe.

The hand holding onto the doorknob as if wanting to close it right away was so gaunt it didn’t seem to have any strength at all.

“Look, Jin. Don’t overdo it.”

Finally exploding, Lyle took a large stride forward and growled at Haejin. If Haejin had at least pretended to deliberate, Lyle might have fallen away while trying to persuade him. Or, in that process, he would have figured out what the fellow truly wanted and reclaimed the initiative for himself. However, this was the first time someone had treated his proposal as if it weren’t even worth listening to.

Meanwhile, hearing Lyle’s rude words, Haejin realized something. Right now, he was treating him like someone negotiating over contract terms. For the first time in a very long while, a small spark flickered inside Haejin.

There was no need to maintain etiquette on his own when the other party was being this rude. So, Haejin even abandoned the polite speech that had become a hardened habit.

“Lyle.”

“…!”

Lyle, who had been about to grab the door roughly, flinched for a moment. He had the ridiculous thought that Haejin’s chilly gaze directed at him was somehow holding him whole. Haejin’s voice calling his name pierced right into his ears.

There was still no emotion in the look watching him. Even so, strangely, Lyle easily recalled Haejin’s face from when he used to resent him.

“I’m not doing the contract. I don’t need it anymore.”

“….”

Had the words “don’t need it” ever struck Lyle this violently before?

Haejin’s words were merely dry, as if reciting a fact. The thin body, which seemed to accumulate fatigue just by standing for a moment, was nothing but precarious. It felt like one could invade the room instantly with just a light nudge.

However, Lyle could not take any action until the door in front of him closed.

“Jin!”

Only after his figure disappeared did Lyle snap out of it and knock on the door again.

Haejin, who had fallen into skepticism over why he had to listen to such a persistent proposal, simply ignored it. The sound of the door being knocked several more times was heard, but there was no hesitation in his body as he lay down on the sofa.

After waiting a little while, the still air wrapped around Haejin again. Thanks to that, he sank into a sense of relief that it was truly over now. After being rejected like this, there was no way the prideful Lyle would seek him out again.

However, one week later.

When a somewhat haggard Lyle appeared in his room again, Haejin instinctively felt that a problem had arisen.

“Is money the problem?”

“….”

When Lyle, who had returned out of the blue, said this in his still-rude tone, Haejin lost even the energy to retort.

However, the question that had died before it could fully burn reared its head again. Why was he going this far? Lyle, of all people.

“Jin. Answer me.”

Now, Haejin’s empty face had joined his dreams. Because of those afterimages that surfaced even while he was working, Lyle was truly on the verge of going crazy.

The answer was easy if he just attributed it all to the pheromones’ trickery. All that remained was to resolve this situation somehow. Lyle, feeling a sense of urgency for the first time in quite a while, had to come find Haejin again.

Just in case, he had also investigated the time when Haejin’s foster parents died. It was because he remembered Haejin saying he had to make a payment while being dragged away by him.

Of course, naturally, no points of suspicion could be found at the hospital. The hospital wouldn’t dare neglect a patient entrusted by the Vermouth family, and contact had been made in a timely manner. It was simply a truly unfortunate thing that the foster parents had died.

Of course, it was the handling by the butler and Lyle that had made it complicated. So, he could only think that the matter had just gotten annoyingly twisted.

‘I don’t need it anymore.’

Haejin’s indifferent words hovered around him like a hallucination. Those words he had heard during his previous visit dug into his mind from time to time. The headache, which had now grown uncontrollably, was at a level where he had to rely on medicine.

The after that, he had tried bringing over Omegas several more times. However, now he felt nauseous even before stepping into the same room as an Omega.

It was a repulsion so intense that even if his head were splitting from the headache, he didn’t want to lay a single finger on another Omega’s body. Something was going wrong. He knew that, but for now, what he needed was clear.

It had to be Haejin.

“Money was a problem. Weren’t you the one who made it so that it’s no longer a problem?”

At Haejin’s rare emotional response, Lyle snapped his head up. Even though it was a face no different from the one he had seen the other day, his gaze was strangely drawn to it.

He had acted as if he were indifferent to everything, but it seemed he had been angry about that fact after all. Is that what’s bothering him, making him show such a refusal toward a new contract?

“Look, even for me, keeping a person’s life attached indefinitely is….”

“You seem to be mistaken. I’m not saying you should have taken responsibility for my family’s lives.”

“…Then?”

Just as he said, there was no resentment contained in Haejin’s words. Even the emotion that had faintly flowed out hid back deep inside. Words as dry as if he were reading a law book poured over Lyle’s face.

“At the very least, you would have had a responsibility to notify me of my family’s death immediately. Do I have to remind you that you were the first to violate the obligations clearly specified in the contract?”

The contract clauses Haejin was talking about were quite numerous, but he didn’t want to bother explaining them here. If he were going to talk at length now about what he and his mansion had done to him, he would have chased after Lyle much sooner.

Of course, even if he had chased after Lyle, nothing would have changed.

Haejin, who remembered that fact clearly, felt that this entire thing was just an unnecessary scuffle. He did not want to return to the mansion. In fact, he didn’t want to do anything, not just the mansion. It was his honest feeling that he wanted to sit in this stagnant, dusty room and freeze like a statue.

So, he hoped that Lyle would just give up with this.

Naturally, Lyle did not remember such detailed clauses. Because it was the kind of work that a butler or secretary should handle. The only reason he remembered that Haejin had to go to the hospital once every two weeks was because that clause was what the fellow had mentioned while trembling during their first meeting.

To be honest, he was at a loss. He was used to earning personal grudges, but he had never spent mental effort on resolving those grudges.

And if Haejin had truly resented him, the task would have been easier. Despite listing that such things had happened, Haejin wanted nothing from him.

It was troublesome.

Frowning, Lyle let out a sigh. He didn’t want to show a disheveled appearance, but he couldn’t control it at all.

He knew that Haejin had hardly left this room for nearly two weeks, but Haejin’s pheromones were so faint they didn’t even drift outside the room. As if he were hiding them away tightly, just like his heart.

Thinking of Haejin’s pheromones made him strangely thirsty.

“Then go ahead and sue me or something.”

“What meaning does that have now?”