An Eye for an Eye

"We have to get rid of the body — quickly." Fiddling with her mug, Baek Ga-yoon muttered the words impatiently, her eyes searching Geum Sa-ra's face.

Geum Sa-ra weighed it in silence for a long moment, then slowly shook her head.

"That won't do."

The dead did not rise again. The body would remain exactly where it lay until someone found it — and that someone could not be one of their own. She would be walking back into that scene with incriminating circumstances already on record.

"That would be little different from stepping forward and confessing. I am the culprit."

And yet they could hardly leave the corpse where it was, either. Jung Ga-yoon's fingernails would be packed with Baek Ga-yoon's skin, her blood — evidence enough to bury them both.

"We'll have to make use of someone."

Geum Sa-ra drew out her phone. It was a person she would have avoided contacting under almost any other circumstance, but this was a matter where every minute counted — and this, at least, was someone who could make a thing vanish without a single soul the wiser.

Saying she would take the call outside, Geum Sa-ra stepped out onto the veranda.

Baek Ga-yoon sipped her hot chocolate and stared after her mother's receding back. Mother won't abandon me — not as long as I'm her daughter.

Even if I did kill a person.

This position I can never give up. Doesn't she know how much dread Jung Ga-yoon's mere existence has poured into me all this time? My insides feel clean at last — like a tooth that ached for years finally pulled.

"Hehehe..."

Watching the slow convection currents drift through her hot chocolate, Baek Ga-yoon broke into secret laughter — as if the fact of having killed a human being weighed nothing on her at all.

Behind her back, a swarm of evil spirits churned and writhed.

Back home, Ga-yoon washed her hands and checked the mirror once more.

She could see the time engraved at the back of her neck — right where the little shadow, the one that had called itself an evil spirit, had seeped into her. Would it answer if she called?

"Hey. Shadow? Evil spirit?"

No reply came. They had managed a perfectly good conversation earlier, though.

"Hello? Are you listening?"

She rubbed and tapped the area around her collarbone, but nothing so much as stirred.

Well, fair enough. It wasn't a genie in a lamp; what had she expected — that a bit of rubbing would summon it?

"Mm." A short sigh escaped her, and Ga-yoon left the bathroom and settled onto the living room sofa.

Spread across the low coffee table was a scatter of scripts — projects that had come pouring in from every direction after her villain performance in The Terms of Inheritance. Every last one of them a villain role.

A week. It was certainly longer than twelve hours, but with an expiration date of one week stamped on her life, she needed her next project lined up fast. This run of The Terms of Inheritance had barely two episodes of filming left to it.

So which one should she choose?

If she played someone even more vicious, might she be granted more than a week? A week did feel a touch stingy. She leafed through one script, then another, but the roles were all barely distinguishable from the part she already had.

Well, nothing for it. Similar role or not, she would have to take one. That was the shape of her life now — earning lifespan instead of wages, one day at a time.

A sigh slipped out of her unbidden. A headache was building, and Ga-yoon closed her eyes for a moment.

Perhaps because rehearsal had become second nature to her, the remaining scenes from The Terms of Inheritance surfaced in her head on their own, like habit. One of them was the scene where Nam Yu-ju hunts down Lee Ha-yeon, looses her cruelty on her, and shoves the female lead off from a great height.

"In the drama, our positions are reversed."

She caught herself wondering, suddenly, how Baek Ga-yoon would react upon learning she was alive. Baek Ga-yoon believed her dead — what would happen if they came face to face on set? Would she jolt back as if she'd seen a ghost? Wilt in fear, glance around warily, then dredge up her old shamelessness?

How wicked of me. But then, she did want a front-row seat — to watch, vivid and unobstructed, every different way that face could be crushed—

Then, with a sudden flare, a black shadow kindled out of nothing, and the evil spirit's voice rang in her ear.

Across her long, white throat, the handprint Baek Ga-yoon had left there surfaced black.

"Ugh...!"

The pain burned and throbbed. Reminding her that she had already died once at Baek Ga-yoon's hands, the evil spirit whispered:

It was the scene where she shoved Lee Ha-yeon from that great height. What if it simply passed for a wire accident? An evil spirit, all right — one that egged its host on toward real evil.

And yet when she'd tried to strike up a conversation earlier, it had played deaf...

"No."

Cold sweat beading on her skin against the searing pain, Ga-yoon cut the spirit's coaxing off with a single stroke. The spirit couldn't have cared less.

A childlike, guileless voice dropped low, conspiratorial.

A voice sweet as a lure.

Baek Ga-yoon was the same age as Jung Ga-yoon. Barring the unusual, she would live at least a few decades more. That was what it meant: those remaining years could be hers for the taking.

She faltered. Her hand, resting on her knee, flinched. Living with a date of death issued to you up front was a life lived in one long, unbroken tension. And so—

Kill Baek Ga-yoon.

It wasn't as if she would wrap her own hands around that throat. All she had to do was leave a wire loose. Repayment in kind, nothing more. It wouldn't even be difficult.

"Ha... This is driving me mad."

Jung Ga-yoon's eyes squeezed shut. Tempting, yes — tempting as anything — but she had no intention of being jerked around on someone else's string.

"Get lost. I'll handle it myself."

Weren't the two of them supposed to be symbiotic? Parasitizing her the way it did, and now it wanted to work her like a puppet?

Even if I take revenge, it will be mine — planned by me, carried out by me.

At that—

The shadow that had been circling her, sizing her up, spat out the syllable and slipped from sight.

The voice grumbled itself away into nothing. What was with this thing? An incredulous laugh slipped out of her. She had assumed it was only the voice that sounded like a child's — apparently the thing genuinely behaved like one, too.

When the evil spirit gave no further response, Ga-yoon sprang up and headed for the vanity in her bedroom.

The countdown was ticking away as ever, and the patch of skin that had burned held no handprint. Ga-yoon ran her fingers along her clean, unmarked neck.

In the end, it was because this was outright murder that she hadn't given in. If the spirit had whispered her toward some sin that even her own conscience rated as small, she might very well have slipped.

"I really do need to watch myself."

The evil spirit's whisper, sly as a serpent, carried a power that could beguile a person. But unlike Baek Ga-yoon, she had no backer standing behind her to bury her sins.

No. Even if she had one.

Some things ran against common sense and conscience alike, and those things simply were not to be done. Shaking her head as if to shake off the last of the temptation, she steeled her resolve all over again.

"What? The body's... gone?"

Mid-call, Geum Sa-ra strangled the words down to a whisper.

Someone had gotten to the body first.

Baek Ga-yoon, listening at her elbow, drained of every last drop of color. A curse tore out of her before she could stop it.

"F—. You did search the place properly, didn't you?"

Perhaps her outburst had disturbed the call, because Geum Sa-ra pressed an index finger to her lips, again and again, and moved away. Baek Ga-yoon stuck to her heels the whole way.

"Understood. Understood for now. I'll look into what happened myself and be in touch."

The call ended without fanfare, and Baek Ga-yoon seized Geum Sa-ra with frantic hands and shook her.

"What did they say? Why is it gone? Huh?"

"Ha..."

Sweeping her short hair back, again and again, Geum Sa-ra relayed what she'd been told.

"There's no sign anyone dragged it off. To haul away a limp body you'd need people around to see it happen — and they say there wasn't a single witness."

Muttering, over and over, that none of it made sense, Geum Sa-ra turned to look at Baek Ga-yoon.

"You don't suppose she isn't dead?"

"No. She was — she definitely stopped breathing. It felt different. It felt different, I'm telling you!"

Baek Ga-yoon shook all over as if seized by a fit, clinging to the words.

"Who was it? Who on earth cleared the body away? She was dead. I killed her!"

"Tsk—! Quiet, quiet!"

However spacious the CEO's office, however decent its soundproofing, this was, in the end, still a company.

Geum Sa-ra smacked Baek Ga-yoon square on the backside by way of telling her to behave herself, then called for Lee Jeong-han, who had stepped out earlier.

"Manager Lee!!"

Lee Jeong-han, who had been waiting on standby, knocked on the door of the CEO's office and let himself in.

"How's the mood on set? And Director Kang?"

"The same speech as always, ma'am. He's hounding me to lock in the next shoot as soon as possible."

The drama was in the thick of its broadcast run; not a single misstep could be afforded.

"The filming got done, then? What about the other actors?"

Geum Sa-ra had no intention of letting anyone on earth learn that Baek Ga-yoon had killed Jung Ga-yoon — which was why she circled in as sideways as she could.

"Ahn Ji-ho, or Jung Ga-yoon. They filmed first, didn't they?"

Even as she asked, she was clutching at one slender hope: if Jung Ga-yoon were truly dead, would the set be idly chattering about next week's schedule in answer to a question about its atmosphere?

Faithful to that hope without knowing it, Lee Jeong-han answered as though it were nothing.

"Yes, ma'am. Jung Ga-yoon filmed first, and then Ahn Ji-ho arrived and took over the shoot."

"Jung Ga-yoon... filmed?"

At the repeated question, Lee Jeong-han's eyes flicked briefly to Baek Ga-yoon before he answered. Judging by the way things were going, he seemed to have gathered that the wound on Baek Ga-yoon's face had something to do with Jung Ga-yoon — after all, stray fragments of talk about killing someone had drifted faintly through the CEO's door.

"Yes, ma'am. She filmed right through to the end, then went home for the day."

At Lee Jeong-han's firm answer, Baek Ga-yoon's face twisted into something strange and unreadable.