KILL THIS LOVE | JENLISA

Chapter 139

Jennie

"Jennie honey, I can't even begin to imagine how hard this must be for you." A soft, superficially mellow female voice came for the little girl in anomalous echoes of three. "I'm very sorry about your sister, but we must go over the details to fully understand what happened. Now, you say you found your mother on the floor..."

The eerie reverberation in my ear abruptly began morphing into a shrill ringing screech, rattling every cell of my frail body.The social worker's soft words were drowning out in the excruciating loud noise. I couldn't help but latch my palms to my ears in a dire attempt to make it all stop.

"Jennie, are you alright?" The woman said with concern emanating in her tone, yet her voice never reached me, who kept wincing with my hands desperately blocking my ears. "Jennie?" I closed my eyes shut, wishing it would all just go away.

"Miss Kim?" The noise stopped at once. "Miss Kim?" This time it was a deeper, distinctly masculine voice that sounded in the background. My lids fluttered wearily open and it instantly dawned upon me where I was.

Deadbeat silence desolately blanketed the very air they all stood surrounded in. Apart from all the insolent chatter coming from the corridors of the building, the day was doomed to bask in unbearable quietness.

"I think she's in shock."

I sat with my arms snaked around my knees, wild auburn hair sheathing most of the vicinity around my exposed blanched face. My eyes were vacant, not even a single trace of unclouded emotion peeking through.My head was still whirling.

"Miss Kim are you listening to me?" A rich brown-skinned pair of fingers snapped in front of my eyes, finally capturing my attention. I blinked up, only to find the familiar face of Sergeant Cha hovering right by my seated figure. "May I sit here?" He asked, motioning with a slight tilt of the head towards the little vacant space beside me on the limestone staircase that I currently sat on, adjacent to the elevator.

I turned my gaze away, shrugging my shoulders with a negligible movement, as my eyes landed on a stray speck on a limestone tile. The Sergeant swivelled to the officer on his right, "Start talking to the neighbours, and get DetectiveKim to check for CCTV footage." Next thing I knew, Sergeant Cha was taking a seat on the empty spot beside me.

"I thought the KCIA was taking over the case." I mumbled as I continued to stare off into the obscure space, my voice oddly faint like a broken whisper.

"The police and the KCIA are working together." Small lines appeared between his brows, forehead puckering, as he studied my face. "Are you okay?That is... was your Professor, I understand?"

A macabre flash of Professor Lee's headless, scorched cadaver invaded my brain for a second. I flickered my lids quickly to purge the image of the severed head from my mind, cold irises staring straight into my soul. Professor Lee's aqua eyes, like her demeanour, had always been cold from the very beginning; but there was something so exceptionally frigid about death, that seemed to have harden them into spiritless marble orbs.

I simply nodded twice. With lips pressed in a thin line, I finally looked at SergeantCha's face, "Was Agent Lee following me this morning?"

Now it was the Sergeant's turn to look away, as he glanced to the other side hastily. "Yes," His fingers stroked his chin as he expelled a deep breath. "TheKCIA is exploring... other angles."

My nails inadvertently dug into the flesh of my palms restlessly, "Am I a person of interest in this case?"

"You know I can't disclose details Miss Kim."

I quietly gazed at the crowd that had started to gather behind the area sealed off with yellow caution tape in front of ProfessorLee's apartment. The elevator chimed that very moment and flew open, out from where emerged a familiar woman. Detective Kim,I recalled.

"Boss, the medical examiner is here."She announced from below, making Sergeant Cha rise up from his seat immediately. "Excuse me," He said to me before beginning to descend down the stairs.

"Oh and stick around, we're gonna need your statement and Agent Lee probably has a few questions for you." He piped in quickly.

I chewed on my bottom lip feebly, even drawing some blood perhaps. I could already tell it was going to be a long day. And for the first time in what felt like ages, I wished for the night to fall sooner.