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The gun fit perfectly into my palm.
Seulgi and I entered the building back-to-back, guns out in front of us. The casino was empty—even the two Lees were gone. I glanced at the blood staining the carpet next to the slot machine and grimaced, knowing it was mine. I had seen Vernon punching the daylights out of Minho, but I had no idea where Hyojong had disappeared to at that time.
"How many did you see?" Seulgi asked over her shoulder, and I clenched my gun tighter as we approached the corridor.
"Just Hyojong and Minho. There were a few men upstairs, but I think I managed them," I answered, pushing down the sick feeling in my stomach as I remembered the way I had beaten them up. Crudely and cruelly, with a baseball bat. I remembered the glee I had felt while 'managing' them, so different from the disgust I felt now. What was wrong with me?
We advanced towards the staircase, not risking the elevators this time around. I stepped slowly when we came to the corridor I had found, the one that led to the lounge which had the glass wall. Well, used to have a glass wall.
"Is this what you used to beat the shit out of these men?" Seulgi asked. I turned around to see her holding up a bloody baseball bat. There was an impressed look on her face, and she smirked when she noticed me looking. "That's hot."
"Not really," I muttered, and we started in the opposite direction. One of the men lying on the floor groaned. I whipped around, gun in the air, but Seulgi had already pulled the trigger to her own. The sound of the gunshot echoed around the hallway, and I winced when the man's blood spattered the earlier spotless white wall. "That wasn't necessary."
"It was fun, though." Seulgi shrugged, flipped her hair away from her shoulder and walking away. I watched her retreating back warily, observing her careless gait, the contrast her raven hair posed against her pale skin, and the drops of blood on her skin. "Walk faster, honey. You don't want your pretty boy to die, do you?"
The fact that I knew she was talking about Vernon without her even mentioning his name made me shiver. I followed her nevertheless, trying not to thin about the dead man behind me, and the dead men that may lie on the path in front of me.
Seulgi shot the two other henchmen we encountered, but we didn't come across any significant killers that she would recognize at a glance. After scouring the upper two floors, we turned and went back to the ground floor, which we hadn't looked through yet. The building had gone eerily silent, and every step I took was as loud as an avalanche in the suspenseful quietude.
"The police should be here soon," Seulgi said as we raked the casino again, finding an injured man whom I shot in the leg, leaving him there to bleed out rather than put a bullet through his skull. At least then there was a chance that someone would find him before he died. "Unless this is a backward area and the blues avoid it like a plague, but I don't know this place very well."
