Accept Me

Chapter Twenty

HYUK JAE

My chance to quietly murder Song Ah has come and gone.

We tracked Kimi's watch out of the city the day she was taken from the restaurant and searched the shoreline where it appears to have been tossed into the water. I don't think about the watch being attached Kimi when it went into the ocean, that would mean she's likely dead, and I can't handle it.

Song Ah is in custody because we caught the waiter who snuck Kimi out the back of the restaurant and he crumbled and told what he knew. We'll see about commuting his sentence for cooperating, he's done this twice now, and it's good he was forthcoming when he was caught but it's not like he was planning to turn in himself in or tell anyone he helped to abduct my wife. Again.

Also I understand he hit her, so we can commute his sentence but then I'm going to permanently disable him with my fists.

Of course Song Ah won't talk. A forensic psychiatrist has been called in to evaluate her. She has been declared fit to stand trial, so she will, but the doctor has indicated she should be put in a locked psychiatric unit because she's still extremely ill.

Her intent is her intent, however, and while I feel for her being ill, she kidnapped my wife several times and I can't forgive her. Not ever. Perhaps she'll become well enough at some point to repent, right now her insistence that Kimi is a gold digging whore who should die and I'm being fooled and she's the only one who understands the situation and she won't let me ruin my life because she loves me desperately...it makes me sick to my stomach and I vibrate with restrained fury.

Kimi is gone without a trace.

It's impossible. I can't understand it.

"I think we should follow the route the watch took out of the city," I tell Lim Tan and his brother Adnan who're sitting in my living room.

"Chul is doing that now, actually," Adnan casually mentions his secretary-henchman type guy, taking a sip of his beer. He's far more alert and tuned in than he lets on, he appears indifferent and distracted but he's not really, not at all actually.

He's an interesting combination of down to earth and snotty royalty. While Lim Tan is unpretentious and as normal as someone like him can probably be, Adnan is irrefutably egotistical and weirdly callow. While he's worldly in some ways, he comes across as very much out of touch with the lowest common denominator. His grasp of the polarity between the rich and the rest of humanity is very narrow.

I know he's agitated that Kimi is gone again. I've gleaned from conversation with him and his brother that Adnan's somehow managed to blame himself though he had nothing to do with anything other than the initial abduction that he didn't know was an abduction. I've told him several times he doesn't have to feel guilty, I'm grateful that Kimi ended up stranded with Lim Tan and not somewhere else.

It's my third day in hell and I can barely function anymore. My wife and unborn child are missing and it's like they just went up in smoke. Song Ah has finally managed to successfully kidnap Kimi and hide her...or worse, but, again I can't let myself think about that.

Adnan's phone rings and he picks it up. He listens and then instructs the other person to trace every route through the city that might lead to the place where the watch is.

By late evening I can't take anymore and leave Lim Tan and Adnan behind to take a walk. I find myself walking by the spa Kimi ran away to that time half a year ago, then at the bar where I finally caught up with her that day, and on to the coffee shop she told me she was at that she was not at.