Flowers Are Bait

“Possibility of sepsis can’t be ignored. We need to draw blood right away and proceed with a culture test. Sepsis can lead to death within a short time after onset, so we need to get to the hospital quickly. If it spreads acutely, it has a mortality rate of 70 percent, given complications such as organ dysfunction or shock.”

“What are you saying right now?”

Kwon Chae-woo face turned chillingly rigid. The grip on Lee-yeon’s ankle suddenly lost its strength.

In his determination to erase any traces of his past, he had destroyed everything related to his past self, including breaking and discarding all objects. Canceling his phone was also part of the same reason.

Ever since he accepted that So Lee-yeon was still a presence that could reach him, he reconnected his phone number.

This was the first call he received since then. When he heard Lee-yeon’s voice, weak and terrifying, he initially thought it was about the wound from the eel. That’s why he had urgently grabbed the sleeping doctor by the collar and brought him here.

“Death?”

But that sounded utterly preposterous. Kwon Chae-woo had the doctor by the collar, but the doctor’s groans made him glance back at Lee-yeon.

Death. Who? Lee-yeon heard bits of the conversation near her.

Kwon Chae-woo’s pupils shattered the walls he had built over time, crumbling at the mere two-letter word.

He released his grip on the doctor, which seemed fruitless now, and from behind, he pulled Lee-yeon, who was shivering from fever, closer to him.

The doctor composed himself, his face now flushed, and opened his medical bag.

“The culture test might take a while. Let me give you a fever-reducing injection first.”

He skillfully drew liquid into the syringe.

“No… Not the injection.” At that moment, Lee-yeon firmly, albeit hesitantly, uttered those words.

“Shh… It’ll be okay. It’ll be over soon. We need to run the test.”

Kwon Chae-woo rolled up Lee-yeon’s sleeve to prepare for the injection, holding her hand and overlapping their palms.

But the sharp needle in her hazy field of vision, the unfamiliar doctor, the nightmare with its menacing teeth, everything drove Lee-yeon into terror.

She struggled, her arms flailing, scratching the arm covered with alcohol swabs. Kwon Chae-woo, like a creeping vine, tightened his grip around her legs to immobilize her.

“No… Don’t… dog… pups…”

Alcohol swabs brushed against her arm, and unfamiliar hands lightly tapped her bare skin.

She wanted to say, “No, stop, I’m pregnant!” but the words wouldn’t come out. It was only when tears filled her eyes out of frustration that it happened.

The door suddenly opened with a creak. There stood Gyu-baek, rubbing his drowsy eyes with rolled-up sleeves. After surveying the room briefly, he rushed in unexpectedly, clutching his fists tightly.

“Director!”

Gyu-baek immediately lunged at Kwon Chae-woo, biting down hard on his forearm.

“Director, you’re really foolish! I’m so disappointed in you!”

Gyu-baek was unusually agitated. The child attacked Kwon Chae-woo’s forearm like a battering ram, vigorously yelling.

“This won’t do. You’ve gone mad…! You’re letting us down! You’re not supposed to be like this, Owl Monkey!” Gyu-baek shouted at Kwon Chae-woo.

“Kid, get out of the way.”

He wiggled his eyebrows, but that was all. There was no time for the kid in this situation.

“The Owl Monkey is the best dad among all primates…! If you hurt the baby, I’ll seek revenge for a lifetime. Giant Asian hornets, bullet ants, Africanized honey bees, army ants, horseflies…!”

Gyu-baek chanted the names of dangerous insects like an incantation while clinging to the doctor’s coat this time.

With a sudden burst of energy, he grabbed the doctor’s clothes and began rambling. In the midst of the child’s unexpected commotion, the two men appeared momentarily stunned. In that moment, a clear idea crossed the doctor’s mind.

“Do you happen to know if this patient… is married?”

“What?”

Kwon Chae-woo scowled deeply, and just that look seemed to convey pressure. The doctor wiped his forehead, feeling the tension.

“I immediately thought of sepsis but in early pregnancy, women’s ability to regulate body temperature is often decreased. They can have a low-grade fever of up to 37.7 degrees Celsius.”

“…”

“The patient sweats and experiences chills, especially when feeling unwell. It’s easy to mistake it for a cold or the flu, but most women naturally recover.”

An eerie silence settled in, with only the ticking of the clock intruding. Even the fine lines on Kwon Chae-woo’s forehead seemed to solidify, like white plaster. The doctor, growing more anxious, adjusted his glasses and continued.

“Still, just in case, we should do a blood test quickly.”

“Pregnancy?” Kwon Chae-woo’s voice, breaking the long silence, sounded oddly unfamiliar. There was no trace of emotion in his tone, no hint of curiosity or contemplation.

He looked at Lee-yeon, whom he held in his arms, with an entirely unfamiliar expression. He rested his chin on her shoulder and pressed his entire body against her like a crumbling dam.

With a nervous twitch, he removed the earplugs from one ear and placed his hand on her belly. His eyes, which had been tightly closed to block out noise, trembled. The difference in her body temperature from before, the lovely blush that had risen, the cute freckles that had appeared recently, her rapidly shifting emotions, and…

The subtly different scent, the change in Lee-yeon. Kwon Chae-woo had previously thought that his failure to notice Lee-yeon’s transformation was due to her detachment as she mended herself from the damage he had caused.

No, she was being filled with something else.

That’s part of me, in her.

Only now did the mark that Kwon Chae-woo had etched onto himself start to fade, and the reason for his inability to sense Lee-yeon’s changes became clear. When he finally let go and unraveled the threads that bound him, it was So Lee-yeon who had grown and emerged, like fresh skin.

“Ah, I can’t live without you.”

Please, don’t push me away and leave. He thought.

And so, little by little, as the unbalanced scales finally tipped completely to one side, Kwon Chae-woo felt a profound pain he had never experienced before.

Lee-yeon had prepared to find happiness even without him, but he couldn’t shake the relentless premonition that he would have nothing without her.

There was no way to turn back time.

The fall from ecstasy to the depths of despair happened in an instant.