Price of Silence

Liu stepped out of the taxi, slipped his hands into his coat pockets, and exhaled a long breath. Through the mist of that breath, the sight of Phantom looked unfamiliar.

The narrow parking lot in front of the building was completely choked with trucks loaded with demolition equipment and debris already pulled from the structure. The main entrance, wide open in contrast to usual, offered a glimpse of the bustling activity inside.

A worker carrying a detached door panel on his back glanced over at the man standing there — tall, striking, and adorned with the kind of jewelry rarely seen on a construction site. After tossing the timber onto a pile by the truck bed, the worker quickly disappeared back inside.

Liu followed him, stepping slowly into Phantom.

Large yellow sacks of the kind common on construction sites were stacked full along one side of the entrance, and fragments of torn plywood and broken tiles littered the floor. Most of the partition walls on the first floor had already been demolished, making the entire space visible even from the doorway. Manager Han and Juhan were standing where the exhibition hall had been just yesterday, deep in conversation with the director overseeing the demolition work.

Liu lingered near the entrance, unable to step further inside. The feeling was different from when they had first purchased and remodeled this building to expand Phantom.

Juhan spotted him and came over, handing him a mask. Come to think of it, it had barely been five minutes since he walked through the main door, yet a fine layer of white dust had already settled across the front of his coat.

"What brings you here?"

"It's the first day of work. I had to come see."

Liu looped the mask's straps over his ears and looked around the gutted interior.

"It's a madhouse, isn't it? It looked exactly the same until dawn this morning. The way it used to look seems like a lie now."

Juhan, perhaps feeling something of his own, spoke with a layered complexity in his voice from behind the mask. Liu smiled silently and nodded — though to him, it looked less like a madhouse and more like ruins.

Even knowing the demolition was a necessary step toward something new, a bitterness kept rising from somewhere deep in his chest, as if he were watching the final dismantling of something that had lost its meaning once everything fell apart.

Liu, with his hands still in his coat pockets, was looking up at the chandelier being carefully lowered in sections from the ceiling when he nudged Juhan's shoulder.

"I let you have the remodel done exactly as you wanted, so don't even think about trying to back out of it now."

"If you hadn't thought it was a good idea, you never would have approved it. Why are you making it sound like it's all because of me? I just wanted a small café in one corner. You're the one who turned it into this whole enormous project by saying we might as well do a full remodel while we were at it."

Juhan stiffened and took a half-step back. Liu laughed and slung an arm over his shoulder anyway, pulling him along.

"If you make the project big enough, you won't have room in your head to think about anything else — the responsibility takes care of that."

"You acting clingy is genuinely strange, Director."

Liu was still laughing as he steered Juhan by the shoulder into the room that had served as the office.

The office — where the staff had been busy clearing things out until midnight — had already been completely gutted, its ceiling and walls stripped back to their original state. Liu walked over to an open window, pulled his mask down under his chin, and reached into his pocket for a cigarette.

"Turns out, I'm just naturally a bit strange."

It was strange — the way he hadn't been able to stop the Changing, as though part of him had been intent on his own destruction even while knowing what waited at the end. Up until then, self-control and regulation had been second nature to him.

But no human being could achieve perfect control over themselves. Not even a Golden Alpha capable of suppressing his own pheromones to the point of passing for almost a Beta.

"It becomes strange when something that should be there isn't in its proper place."

"……"

Liu had been bent forward, elbows on the windowsill, bringing the lighter flame to the tip of his cigarette, when he paused. For a moment, unable to hide his surprise, he turned back toward Juhan. Juhan had pulled his mask down and watched Liu with a steady, serious expression.

"Go and take him back."

Liu let out a quiet laugh at Juhan's very characteristic way of laying out exactly what he wanted in the plainest possible terms, then turned back and lit the cigarette. He took the first drag and exhaled a long, slow stream of smoke.

"He wasn't taken."

"Have you seen the paintings Yeehyeon has been putting out lately?"

"……"

"'Colorful Ghosts' — what do you think that means?"

Since around autumn, Yeehyeon had been releasing a series called Colorful Ghosts. The paintings depicted various figures in his signature style — each subject's defining characteristics, strengths or weaknesses, were exaggerated, and the background of each piece gave form to that person's story. The series had been generating sharply divided opinions in Paris.

Juhan didn't know that Liu was a Ghost. So he was speculating about the series title simply because it echoed the meaning of Phantom, reading it as a signal from Yeehyeon that he still carried some lingering feeling for the gallery.

But Liu saw it differently. It wasn't that simple.

And beyond that — whatever conclusions he had arrived at within himself, he was not the kind of person who made up his mind and then sat waiting for someone else to notice and act on his behalf. At least, not right now.

"I told you not to bother coming in. Why did you?"

At the voice from the entrance, Liu and Juhan turned simultaneously. Manager Han was stepping into the office through the gap where the door had been removed. The meeting with the construction director appeared to be finished.

Juhan glanced at Liu one more time, adjusted his mask, and slipped out of the office as if passing the baton to Manager Han.

"Why's he sulking? He was all excited about the construction starting this morning."

Liu shrugged at Manager Han, who was watching Juhan's retreating back with a puzzled expression.

She came to stand beside him, leaned against the wall, and tossed a file on the construction overview onto the windowsill.

"The electrical wiring is more tangled than expected, which complicates things a bit, but the demolition should stay on schedule for now. You probably won't need to come in for about a week."

Liu drew one last short drag from the stub of his cigarette and turned to look at her.

"Is this a slow plan to gradually ease me out of management?"

"I'm giving you a vacation."

"……"

"You'll need to do the occasional site inspection, of course, but a break like this — several months — is a rare thing. After the reopening I plan to work you into the ground for a while. So rest. Do whatever you want to do. Go wherever you want to go. Just don't spend twenty-five hours on a plane over the weekend."

She spoke as though she already knew exactly what he wanted to do, where he wanted to go, and where he had been slipping off to on his weekends. Liu had no way to feign ignorance. He managed an awkward smile, the corners of his mouth pulling up stiffly, then pressed the tip of the cigarette against his fingers to put it out.

He tossed the stub and his mask into a trash bag and walked out of Phantom, hands back in his coat pockets. The northwesterly wind sweeping down from Bukhansan made him pull his shoulders in. It was the second winter since Yeehyeon had left. Just as he didn't know the twenty-three-year-old Seo Yeehyeon, the winter version of him was uncharted territory too.

Beneath a sky that hung low as though snow might fall at any moment, Liu started down the slope — imagining Yeehyeon walking the path beside him, wrapped in a scarf, breathing out small white clouds into the cold air.