Echo || NCTau ||

20 - About lines drawn on water

Yeoreum's heartbeat was loud in her ears as she ran through the hallway towards the apartment. The second her flight had landed in Seoul - hours later than planned because her original flight from New York had been canceled - Sungchan had called her. He told her that Daniel had gone rogue; that director Barros Carvalho had realized his aspirations too late and Yeoreum's monitoring mission had become a mission of damage control. Now it was her duty to ensure that her boyfriend wouldn't draw too much attention or do anything insane before she would get back up from the organization.

The lock on the apartment door had been deactivated and Yeoreum couldn't stop her hands from shaking as she pushed the door open. She didn't know what to expect.

Compared to her, Daniel had always been comfortable with their job description as Echoes and had toed the line of breaking the code a couple of times in the past, but he had also helped her out many times ever since joining the organization. He wasn't a good person (none of the Echoes were, really) but there was goodness in him. Yeoreum knew it. She had to believe in it.

Yet now he was about to murder an innocent person just to create confusion amongst the Korean police and make a simple assassination of a corrupt businessman into a double murder where no one would know who was the real target.

It was against the rules. It was against everything that made it possible for Yeoreum to get out of her bed in the mornings and get to work that would eventually pay off her family's debt.

As soon as she entered the lavish apartment, she could hear the guttural sounds coming from the apartment.

One of the main rules was that the actual killing was supposed to be done in an efficient way. Yeoreum preferred to use knives or poison because she knew how to use them in a way that was as quick and painless as possible.

The painful sounds echoing through the otherwise quiet apartment made it clear that Daniel had chosen another way.

"Aww, are you crying?" How Yeoreum wished that she hadn't recognized that voice! But Daniel was half-Korean and she could recognize his broken accent and deep voice anywhere.

He was mocking his victim, making fun of his pain. Her stomach turned and she ran towards the sound of his voice while begging that she could wake up and that this all would be just a bad dream.

"Daniel!" She called out as she pushed through the door leading to a living room. "Stop it!"

What she was met with pierced through her calloused heart.

Most surfaces of the carefully decorated, white and gray living room were spattered with blood and its rusty smell filled the air. The form of the man – the victim – on the floor was barely recognizable as a human being and Yeoreum would've assumed that he was already dead if his back wasn't rising with ragged breaths and if quiet wails weren't escaping his mouth with every exhale.

Next to him stood Daniel. There was blood on his white shirt and some of it had even splattered on his face, accentuating his sharp facial features and seemingly bottomless eyes.

Yeoreum, alongside with everyone working for the organization, had always fawned over his handsome face but now looking at him made her sick.

"Kim!" He flashed her a toothy grin as if pleasantly surprised to see her. "How come you are here? I thought that you were in NYC!"

"What is going on?" Yeoreum stood still by the door. Her body refused to step further into the room.

The blood seeping through every surface of the room, the unbothered look on Daniel's face, the innocent man on the verge of dying... It was like seeing her own dad being murdered all over again because of her mom's disobedience.