Broken Memories [I Did it for You - Book 2]

39

Despite Yoosung's constant reassurances and her craving for a luxurious meal after a long day of travelling, Emjay didn't take a single bite of her food. Instead, she had watched, her arms folded tightly across her chest as she watched Yoosung eating his.

"Emjay, the moment you think something was in his food or drink, let me know straight away" Vanderwood ordered into her earpiece. The special agent admitted that he had also tried to convince Yoosung to not eat or drink anything, but the boy had completely ignored him.

Whilst keeping her eyes trained on Yoosung and pretending the plate of food that made her mouth water wasn't there, Emjay studied Yoosung's eyes, his mouth, his fingers - anything that might give off a sign that he had been poisoned in some fashion. She looked for any twitches, listened to his sentences to make sure they were coherent and his words hadn't slurred and watched his motor mobility closely for any changes or sudden struggles he began to have that he'd never shown any struggles in before. Thankfully, as Yoosung practically licked his plate clean, he seemed to be okay.

However, Emjay still wasn't satisfied, and to her surprise, neither was Vanderwood. The agent continued to ask Emjay questions about Yoosung, double-checking that he hadn't digested something he shouldn't have. And so, for the next few, painstaking hours, Emjay watched Yoosung like a hawk, ticking off things Vanderwood had mentioned. To reply, she'd snap her fingers for 'yes', and click her tongue loudly for 'no'.

Every time she did this, Emjay felt ridiculous. She was worried that those around her had begun to notice, and she was more worried about Yoosung calling her out on it as he knew she had never done things like this before in general. Thankfully, no one seemed to notice, and if they did, they didn't show it. Perhaps they didn't care.

When the three-hour mark was up and Vanderwood finally deemed Yoosung as okay, Emjay felt that she could finally breathe again.

During those three hours, while she snapped her fingers and clicked her tongue, Emjay followed closely behind Rika and Yoosung as the woman guided them around the building. Within it, they not only had a ceremony hall and a prayer room, as Emjay had expected them to have, but they also had an adult sensory room with dimmed, green lights across the floor with a dozen cloud-shaped sofas and bean bags splayed about the place with headphones attached to the sofas, a cinema room that had a screen covering the entire back wall with cushions lining the floor in front of it, a gymnasium that Yoosung turned his nose up at, an art studio lined with already-used canvases and easels, and even a spa and sauna.

Although Emjay hated being inside the building at all, she had to admit that all of this was pretty impressive. She began to wonder how on earth Rika and the number of believers she had were able to build this entire thing from the ground up so quickly. This was supposed to be Mint Eye's second building after the first one was abandoned after Yoosung was captured by Saeran and taken to that warehouse. How could this building be the second one when it looked as though it had been running for years?

Coming to the end of their tour, Emjay chewed on her bottom lip in confusion. She had expected to see dungeons, torture chambers, rooms filled with chains and cells that were damp and mould and reeked of dried blood, urine and vomit, but they hadn't come across a single room that displayed any of what she had imagined in her head for months. Of course, they could have always cleaned up all the remnants of the countless tortures committed beforehand, but was that even possible? If there had been numerous tortures that had taken place at Mint Eye, wouldn't there be a limit to how much could be cleaned away successfully? 

There had to be a limit.

When Scarlett stumbled into the safe house and everyone had found out what happened to her, Jumin had sent a dozen armed men over to the old Mint Eye building to make sure it wasn't still being used, but there were no signs that anyone had stepped foot in it since Yoosung's kidnapping. So, Rika couldn't be using that building to torture people instead of the current building.