𝐇𝐈𝐒 𝐃𝐄𝐀𝐃𝐋𝐘 𝐎𝐁𝐒𝐄𝐒𝐒𝐈𝐎𝐍 || 𝐉𝐉𝐊

chapter 52

A/n: I'm not even giving the HDO readers the big target I give for my other books, but still, targets don't get completed on time. If I'm even an hour late uploading, so many complaints?

I'm not just an author but a human with a life outside of writing as well. Please do consider that for once. I might fall sick. I might get busy with something. Have a little patience. That's all I ask for.

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[Continuation of Hazel’s pov]:

The silence after the bodyguard left was the loudest sound I had ever heard. It wasn’t an absence of noise; it was a presence, a thick, suffocating blanket that pressed down on the study, on my lungs, on my very heartbeat.

I sat there, frozen in the plush velvet of the armchair, my body forgetting the mechanics of movement. My limbs were made of stone and ice.

The words from that note kept flashing behind my eyes, not in my own voice, but in his—that low, calm, utterly merciless tone I knew too well.

“These fingers… had dared to touch what is mine.”

The meaning was a cold knife twisting in my gut. He wasn’t protecting some abstract principle. He was protecting her.

That woman. The one he’d brought to my birthday gala.

Since I’d returned to the country, the society pages had been a relentless, glittering parade of his supposed exploits. A different actress one week, a model the next, a socialite the week after.

I’d watched it all from a distance, my lips curled in a bitter, knowing smile. It was a performance.

A cruel, elegant pantomime staged just for me. He was using those beautiful, empty-headed creatures as props, dangling them like shiny baubles to remind me I was replaceable.

And those pathetic things actually believed it. They actually thought a man like Jeon Jungkook, who saw people as either assets or obstacles, would waste a genuine feeling on them.

But the party… that was different. Bringing one of them into my home, on my night. On my day. Letting her cling to his arm like a vine, her touches too familiar in the halls that were supposed to be mine.

I’d seethed, of course. I’d watched her, cataloging every flaw, every moment of desperation in her eyes. I’d told myself she was just another tool in his elaborate game of humiliation.

A particularly pointed one, but a tool nonetheless.

But…?

I was wrong. There was something else there. A calculation in his eyes when he looked at her that wasn’t just about provoking me.

And he knew. God, he knew me. Every time he paraded one of these women, he was dangling a string, and he knew with absolute certainty that I, the cat, would be unable to resist the urge to pounce and claw. How many had there been? A publicist’s career quietly ruined after a vicious, anonymous tip to the press. A model’s lucrative contract suddenly, mysteriously falling through. A rising starlet’s old, embarrassing photos finding their way online.

I’d lost count.

And through it all, he’d never blinked. Never inquired. He’d let the carnage happen with a detached indifference that told me only one thing that these women truly meant less than nothing to him.