Right then, footsteps echoed from the stairs, and Doyoung returned to the kitchen.
“They really were sleeping together,” Doyoung said with a quiet chuckle, shaking his head slightly.
“And now?” someone asked.
“I woke them up,” Doyoung answered simply.
“Why?” another voice protested immediately. “Why didn’t you let them sleep a bit longer—especially when Taeyong hyung is injured too?”
“Noona called a few minutes ago,” Doyoung explained. “That’s why GongMyung hyung and I actually came back from our walk early. She called me because Taeyong hyung wasn’t answering his phone.”
“He left it in the medical room yesterday,” Kun added calmly. “I placed it in his office, but even if he had been sleeping in his own room, he probably wouldn’t have heard it.”
“Okay,” Taeil clapped his hands once. “Haechan, YangYang, Jaemin, Chenle, Xiaojun—prepare the table. Go.”
“Soul,sweetheart, you can already sit down,” Doyoung added more gently, offering her a reassuring smile.
“Yahh! And why not us?!” came the immediate protest.
“Because you all seem pretty healthy and energetic to me,” Taeil shot back.
“Now go,” he added, pointing toward the dining area, “before I kick you in the butt all the way outside.”
Groans and laughter filled the kitchen as the boys obeyed—while the girl remained seated, her thoughts still tangled around one realization above all others:
Her brothers hadn’t just been angry.
They had been angry for her.
She sat down slowly, as she had been told, but her body did not fully relax. Even as the noise in the kitchen grew louder—voices overlapping, cutlery clinking, someone laughing too loudly—there was a strange distance between her and everything around her. It felt as if she was watching the morning through a thin layer of glass.
So it really wasn’t a dream.
The thought kept circling in her mind, persistent and heavy. The forest. The shot. The screaming tension in the air. Taeyong’s blood. The way everyone’s faces had changed in a split second—from control to pure fear.
Her fingers curled unconsciously into the fabric of her sleeves. She remembered how cold the night air had felt in her lungs, how her legs had moved before her thoughts had caught up. She remembered the pain, sharp and burning, and then Taeyong’s voice—angry, rough, uncontrolled. Not because she had disobeyed him. Not because she had followed them.
But because she had been hurt for him.
Her chest tightened at the memory.
She slowly lifted her gaze, her eyes instinctively searching for one specific person.
Sungchan was standing near the counter, helping Jaemin with plates, his movements calm and practiced like always. On the surface, he looked exactly the same as every other morning—tall, relaxed, quiet. But she knew him too well. She saw it in the tension of his shoulders, the way his jaw tightened when someone mentioned the night before, the way his eyes flickered toward her again and again as if checking whether she was still there.
He was angry yesterday, she thought.
Not just worried. Angry.
And that scared her more than Taeyong’s rage.
