𝑩𝒆𝒂𝒖𝒕𝒊𝒇𝒖𝒍 𝑩𝒐𝒚 | Taekook

Chapter 4 : 𝐂𝐔𝐑𝐒𝐄

✦Some beauty binds, some beauty blinds. In my world, it does both✦

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𝐓𝐚𝐞𝐡𝐲𝐮𝐧𝐠

Oh, you’re curious about Ji-hoo? Right?

Well..

He’s my brother. STEPBROTHER to be specific. And you'll wonder if he was like this always, well nope... we weren’t always like this… We were close once. Before all the twisted obsessions took root. Before it became complicated...

The curse of beauty. Those were the words my mother once murmured over me.

I was young, not yet aware of the meaning that would bind itself to those words, but I remember the look in her eyes. It was almost as if she feared what she had created. A small hand reached up to her face, trying to wipe away a hint of sadness, and she cupped my face gently, studying my features as though she was the one condemned. She whispered,

“I wish you weren’t so beautiful. Beauty… it’s not a gift; it’s a curse. Remember that, Taehyung. It brings nothing but trouble.”

At that time, her words were just that—words. Now, they feel like a haunting prophecy.

Before Ji-hoo’s father, there was my real father, my mother’s first husband. A man so deeply consumed by her beauty that his love turned possessive, clinging like a poison.

He was kind, at first. A man who would have given up the world for her, obsessed in ways that blurred the line between love and madness.

He’d stay awake late into the night, watching her sleep, and when the light caught her face just right, he’d whisper,

“The world is lucky just to hold you.” But that love was smothering. It grew darker until it became an obsession.

My father was willing to change for her, to undo all the harm he’d done, but his desperation swallowed him whole. One night, he promised he’d be better and make things right.

But in trying to numb himself, he took too much—died in a haze of dreams and pills, his love left unfulfilled.

Then came Ji-hoo’s father, a man different from my father but drawn to my mother for the same reasons.

He was kind, or so I thought at first. He stepped in when I was barely five, healing the wounds that lingered, helping us rebuild.

But even he, with his warmth and patience, could not resist her beauty’s hold. That kindness turned fierce, the warmth almost feverish. And when his obsession deepened, it consumed him, just like my father.

When I was old enough to understand, I heard how it ended. Ji-hoo’s father chose death with her, taking her with him. He swerved into darkness, clutching her hand, telling her,

“We’re bound forever, even if I have to make it that way.”

The car crash that night wasn’t an accident. It was a choice.

And that was how I was left with Ji-hoo, my only family now. At first, we were close, maybe even closer than brothers by blood.

He had this way of protecting me, looking out for me, as if he understood the weight of our parents’ past. We were bound by loss, by the shadow of that curse my mother had whispered of.

And that curse—the one my mother once feared—it came back, creeping into the way Ji-hoo looked at me. Over the years, I saw it happening. The glances grew longer, and the protective warmth turned into something possessive.

I tried to ignore it, to pretend he hadn’t become like my father, like his own. That his obsession wasn’t real.

But deep down, I can’t help but tell myself that this is his way of showing protectiveness—his way of loving me. It’s as though he’s convinced himself that this twisted love is a gift, his way of keeping me safe.

And somehow, in those dark moments, I even convince myself that he’s doing this out of love. That he’s my only family and that he’ll regret these things one day.

And yet, as much as I try to see it that way, I can’t shake the feeling that it’s all part of the curse.

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