Let Me Protect You (Sahyo)

21.2

There was a distant ache in her body, and it grew less distant the more she forced herself to wake up from this nightmare. The last thing she saw was darkness, listening to Sana's voice through the staticky speakers of a phone, before she fell into unconsciousness again.

Jihyo  opened her eyes in a panic, only to be blinded by a bright light shining directly at her. She was seated on the ground with her back against some kind of wall, and her hands bound in shackles in front of her, with the blindfold now around her neck instead. She scanned her surroundings, noting the small, confined space, the open laptop facing her a few feet away, and the dark silhouette of a door with some painted words in red at the other end of the space. It was a container. She was in a shipment container.

The doors swung open, flooding the space with light for just a brief second, and a man stepped in before shutting the doors behind him again. He clicked the lock close, pocketing the small key.

"What do you want." Jihyo spat out. The man simply smirked in response, eyes still eerily locked onto hers.

"What I want," he walked over, footsteps reverberating in the boxy room, "is for you to stay away from Sana."

What?

"And why do you want that?" She probed further, trying to assess if he's armed besides the plethora of knives laid out on the ground beside the laptop.

"Not for you to know." He said, inching dangerously close to her.

"You," There were hands suddenly digging into the hollows of her cheek, the feel of cool metal against her cheekbone making whatever retort on the tip of her tongue stop itself short. "You were the one who threw it all away, weren't you? The one everyone praised for destroying Sana's happiness."

"Destroying her happiness? What do you mean?" Her words had a practiced calm, not betraying her wildly beating heart at all.

"I could have been with her by now. Happy." He teeth grinded together in barely concealed anger. "You took those gifts away from her, and now you will pay."

"Those gifts? You mean the poisoned water? The photographs and letters? The threats?"

"That water, that gift was supposed to bring her to me. I had the same thing, all I was waiting for was for her to go first, and I would join her as soon as she did. And you took it away from her, you ruined everything." His tone turned threatening, and no matter how skilled she was as a trained bodyguard, she still felt the humanly undoing of dread coursing through her veins.

He let the knife slide across her cheek with a sadistic grin on his face, taking his time with it and watching the blood bead on the blade.

Jihyo stubbornly refused to let her herself even flinch, staring him down defiantly. This man plotted over the course of months, to somehow get sana's attention, and when that failed, turned to the horrifying option of killing her then himself, probably with the sick hope of being with her in the afterlife.

This man was the one who terrorised sana's nightmares, kept her from sleeping at night, who was deep in the crowds at her events, watching, following, and plotting. And now, he had Jihyo at the mercy of the razor sharp knife in his hand, on top of the wound in her sides that she was thankful had stopped bleeding.

"You're a sick excuse of a person. You will never deserve her." Jihyo ignored her palpitating heart, throwing the words at him through gritted teeth. Even with the spotlight backlighting him and making his features all but a dark silhouette, she could feel his anger rising, the tension in that moment boiling over.

He stood up suddenly, the knife finally brought away from her face. He drew his leg back, sending it kicking forward into her side, where the wound was barely healed over. This time, she couldn't bite back the scream of agony if she tried, curling over herself in pain. Her vision turned white for a moment, before it cleared up and she could just faintly make out the outline of his movements.