Promise

24: Reunion

Yunho immediately reached a hand back for his gun, but hesitated when he realized that despite the deep red eyes, which usually indicate near insanity for a vampire, didn't make any attempt at moving from their place. The little room was still pretty dark, but after a second or two of processing, he was quick to realize that the five pairs of red eyes belonged to five girls, five prisoners.

Their arms were cuffed above their heads, attached to some mechanism on the wall, and they were sat meekly on the floor, legs piling on top of each other from how little space there was. Yunho's eyes were wide as he looked around at all of their faces, feeling anger bubble inside of him. Mingi knew that look on his face, and he was kind of glad that the hunters upstairs were already dead. Their fate was a lot better that way compared to what would've happened if they were still alive and Yunho could get his hands on them.

"Please don't hurt us." One of the girls begged, voice light and pitiful, which was a complete contradiction to the tone she should've had given the color of her eyes.

"I'm not here to hurt you." Yunho immediately reassured, sheathing his knife and crouching to the girls level, trying to be an non-intimidating as possible. He kept a safe distance, just in case, because he was still weary of the face that they were all obviously low on blood. "Is...I'm looking for Lee Chaeryeong."

The girl on the right side of the room flinched, almost in a way of unconscious acknowledgment to hearing her name. Yunho had his answer right there, knowing he didn't have to ask any further.

"Whatever you want with her, don't think about it." One of the girls with shorter hair, on the left side of the room, sneered. She was the most dangerous looking of them all, eyes being the darkest of color, showing the meanest of looks. But both Yunho and Mingi understood that look, it was a show of protectiveness.

"Like I said, I'm not here to hurt any of you." Yunho repeated, still trying to not be intimidating, but he knew he had to be firm. He turned his head back to Chaeryeong, she seemed the most unresponsive out of the five. "Chaeryeong? Your sister is looking for you, that's why we're here. We are going to bring you back to her."

"What's her name? Her sister." The other girl on the left side of the room stated, also sounding pretty mean. Her cat-like eyes narrowed at the two men, obviously suspicious and fear ridden at the same time.

"Lee Chaeyeon." Yunho recited, looking over at the left side as he answered. His eyes trailed upwards, noticing how each of their hands were bound with blueish-purple looking cuffs. His brows furrowed, looking over his shoulder to Mingi, who was standing guard, both watching in the room and the rest of the basement for any threats. "I'm not going crazy, right? Those cuffs look like the same ones..." he hesitated, looking back over his shoulder for a moment, before he decided to just screw it, "the same ones captain uses on San, right?"

Mingi's attention was drawn further in the room, taking a good look at the girls bindings.

"Yeah...they do." Mingi slowly said, nodding his head as well. He seemed skeptical of all of this. "Those ones that hunters used to use. But why would hunters want to keep vampires alive down here?"

"They were experimenting on us." One of the other girls spoke up without hesitation, she looked to physically be the oldest of the five captive. She didn't need any further questioning to continue speaking after she got the attention she wanted. "We're...all turned, and I overheard those hunters talking about how little is truly known about turned female vampires. And well...they wanted to see how long we could last without blood, how many injuries we could sustain before we couldn't heal ourselves anymore, amongst other things. This was a trap that we were lured into. Chareyeong...she didn't realize she was working amongst hunters, and this isn't her fault in the slightest. When we turned her maybe a week or so ago...that's when things fell downhill."