Unhealthy - Chapter 52

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Team. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Chapter 52. Tragic Ending

Cold sweat trickled down his temples.

When the car stopped at a traffic light, Taejun finally couldn’t hold back and let out a thin groan as he dropped his head.

Only then did Hae-yeong sense something was wrong, her gaze fixed on Taejun’s profile.

“You look terrible… Are you okay?”

Taejun shook his head slightly at Hae-yeong’s worried question.

“No, I’m just a bit tired.”

Taejun forced his voice to steady as he pressed the accelerator.

But the ominous dampness he felt around his waist had now penetrated even his jacket and was soaking the seat.

His vision kept turning white.

After biting his lips briefly, Taejun lost consciousness while waiting at the signal.

***

Watching Taejun receive emergency treatment in the emergency room from a distance, Hae-yeong could only cry endlessly.

Her hands and entire body were covered with Taejun’s blood, but she couldn’t even think of wiping it off. In that confused state, Hae-yeong clasped her trembling hands together.

The sounds of medical staff moving busily, the sharp friction of metal clashing, and someone’s urgent shouts reached her like distant noise from underwater.

When those in white gowns mercilessly cut away Taejun’s shirt with scissors, Hae-yeong covered her mouth as if she had seen something she shouldn’t have.

Fortunately, the sharp glass fragment hadn’t completely penetrated the abdominal cavity or pierced through organs, but it was lodged deep between muscle layers, barely grazing the kidney cortex.

The dark red blood that gushed out each time the wound opened proved how much excruciating endurance he had shown in the car.

It felt different from the past when Taejun had returned home after being stabbed and she thought he would die.

This time, she had a strong premonition that something might really happen to Taejun.

“Blood pressure keeps dropping! Blood pack, quickly!”

With someone’s shout, a thick needle was inserted into Taejun’s pale arm. Hae-yeong collapsed to the floor, unable to watch the scene directly.

The cold touch he had given her and his last brief promise of “I’ll come back” tore through her mind.

He must have known. That the moment he entered the estate, his body would be destroyed, that he might never return.

Yet he walked alone through that hellish door. Solely to pull Hae-yeong out of that terrible purgatory.

“Excuse me, guardian. Please pull yourself together.”

Someone shook Hae-yeong’s shoulder, but she didn’t even have the strength to respond.

Taejun’s silhouette visible beyond the emergency treatment room curtain felt as distant as a ship departing for an unreachable place.

Looking down at her hands, a mess from Taejun’s blood, Hae-yeong measured the weight of pain he must have forcibly swallowed.

A man who chose to become a monster for me. And now a man who offered himself as a sacrifice for me.

Hae-yeong pressed her forehead against the cold hospital corridor floor, calling upon the name of a god she had never believed in, pleading.

He had told her, trembling with betrayal, to watch him destroy himself, but this was never the way she wanted it. His atonement through death was not the revenge she had desired.

Later, the red light of the operating room came on, and Taejun was wheeled past Hae-yeong on a gurney.

Time outside the operating room flowed abnormally slowly.

Hae-yeong sat on the hard chair in the corridor outside the operating room, staring blankly at Taejun’s bloodstains that had hardened under her fingernails.

All the sounds around her were just distant noise to Hae-yeong.

The surgery ended safely, but Taejun didn’t regain consciousness for a while.

On the afternoon of the third day, the hospital room was excessively quiet.

Slanted sunlight filtering through the curtains illuminated Taejun’s pale face.

Just when only his barely sustained steady breathing proved he was alive, Taejun’s eyelids trembled slightly.

Hae-yeong held her breath and grasped his hand properly.

His hand, which she had hesitated dozens of times before finally holding, was still cold, but she could feel very faint strength entering his fingertips.

Eventually, Taejun slowly opened his eyes. His unfocused pupils searched the ceiling before settling on Hae-yeong, who was keeping watch beside him.

“You didn’t leave.”

Like that day when she was left in the car, those were the first words Taejun uttered. The voice that leaked through his cracked, split lips was precarious, as if it would crumble at any moment.

Instead of answering, Hae-yeong dropped hot tears onto the back of his hand.

He was a man she should resent and hate, yet her throat burned with painful gratitude that he had returned alive.

A news bulletin flowed from the hospital room TV that had been turned on to ease the oppressive silence.

It was the tragic ending that Taejun had completed by throwing himself as bait before losing consciousness.

[The prosecution indicted and arrested Jiwon Group’s Gi Chairman this morning. Following witness testimony and decisive evidence secured regarding a past murder case…]

Gi Chairman on screen stood at the photo line wearing prison clothes.

His head, which had been arrogantly held high his entire life, was bowed, and his once-gleaming eyes appeared only dim and clouded with age.

His pitiful figure being led away by guards while handcuffed contained the desperately ruined state that Taejun had so desperately wished to see.

The sight of the massive evil that had dominated his entire life being dragged away in prison clothes was strangely dry.

Taejun watched the downfall beyond the screen with dry eyes until the end.

It was both the completion of revenge and the settlement of the only debt he had carried as Gi Chairman’s son.

Taejun slowly turned his head to look at Hae-yeong.

The end of this revenge that he had proven by destroying even his own body was so bitter that Hae-yeong couldn’t decide whether to embrace him or push him away. His devotion, already stained with blood, had transcended the realm of forgiveness.

Taejun struggled to raise his hand to wipe away the tears on Hae-yeong’s cheek, then let it fall weakly.

“Now it’s my turn.”

His voice was like wind leaking through cracked gaps.

That cold resignation that now that he had witnessed his father’s downfall, it was his turn to face judgment, that he would willingly be torn apart. Those words pierced deeper into Hae-yeong’s heart than any sharp glass fragment.

“Are you crazy? After getting hurt like this, what are you doing all this for? Why do you push yourself this far and… hurt yourself like this? Why on earth?”

Hae-yeong couldn’t overcome her grief and burst into tears.

The contradictory desires of hating him and hoping he wouldn’t collapse mixed together inside her and exploded.

Instead of answering, Taejun silently accepted Hae-yeong’s anguished cry with deep eyes.

“Why should you be punished? You didn’t kill anyone. You didn’t order it! So why do you keep acting like you’re going to die, why!”

Hae-yeong’s hand gripped the collar of Taejun’s patient gown.

Each joint of her trembling fingers had turned white.

Taejun felt that trembling completely, gazing at Hae-yeong’s pain that pierced more clearly than the pain in his own waist.

He had never once thought of himself as a victim. Just by inheriting Gi Chairman’s blood, he was already an eternally unwashable sinner to Hae-yeong.

“If not me, who would end your revenge for you?”

Taejun parted his lips very slowly.

His murky voice, whether from pain or suppressed emotions, floated quietly through the hospital room.

“When you let go of my hand and leave, I hoped there would be no hell in your heart. That’s why I did it.”

At that confession of terrible selfishness and terrible love, Hae-yeong collapsed beside his bed.

Taejun stopped his hand in mid-air, unable to reach Hae-yeong’s faintly trembling hair, feeling the fire within him finally dying out.

Nothing existed between the two of them now. Only the miserable truth they had protected while destroying each other, and Hae-yeong’s desperate sobbing piling on top of it remained.

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Team. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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