Chapter 150.2

Chapter 150.2

“…”

“Why do you keep making me feel like I’m starved for affection?”

Her dry, thirsting eyes squeezed shut before reopening.

“So? What are you planning to do? Go over there?” He asked.

“…”

“If that deputy director really was wearing your face, we should get out of here as fast as possible. Who knows what that woman is capable of, and you’re still not fully recovered! Who’s in a position to worry about whom right now? You think the workers here didn’t notice something was off?”

“Then I’ll go get my face back.”

“What?”

Seoryeong wiped her damp lips with her sleeve.

“If that woman does something under my face, just like you said, I refuse to take the blame for it. But based on experience, the NIS is capable of anything. Who knows what kind of trap she’s setting for me this time? So I’ll go tear my own face off myself.”

She gripped his collar tightly.

“Then we’ll leave together.”

Staring straight up at him, she made her demand. His sleek eyebrows arched. Meanwhile, the numbness was fading, and her knees buckled slightly.

Lee Wooshin immediately caught her waist, muttering under his breath that she’d be the death of him.

The heat of his hands, firm against her waist and hips, suddenly burned her throat. Torn between wanting more of his warmth and the urge to slap those hands away, she abruptly pulled him into a fierce embrace.

Then, eyes wide, she let venom seep into her words.

“I love you.”

The man’s back stiffened, his breath halting.

“Thank you for saving me. And I’m sorry if I made you worry.”

As if salvation exists in this world. Seoryeong hid her sneer, pressing her forehead against his shoulder. It was her first time saying it.

“You’re all I have left now.”

No matter what anyone says, Han Seo-ryeong’s everything was always him. That much is certain.

“Don’t you trust me?”

A crushing force, almost painful, bore down on her. Slammed against the wall, Seoryeong hastily met his biting lips with her tongue.

Their noses pressed close, breath tangled and shallow. He cupped her cheeks, angling deeper. A low, desperate groan wrapped around her like a vise. But the farther her jaw tilted back, the more her stomach burned, until all she could see was fire, dark and crimson.

‘This was never happiness meant for me.

How could I have dared to dream of an ordinary life while carrying memories this horrific?

What I need to abandon isn’t just this man.

The name Han Seoryeong…

That, too, must be left behind.’

At that moment, a faint vibration echoed through the wall.

A single gunshot. Joo Seolheon, having just placed the owl inside the coffin, leaned against the door and took a deep breath.

A storm of complicated emotions raged inside her, but she clenched her fists and strode down the hallway with measured, deliberate steps.

Her hand brushed against the silenced pistol at her waist. This was her first field operation in thirty-three years. This body-double mission, one she personally orchestrated and executed, might very well be her last.

“Chief, are you really just letting Agent Lee Wooshin go like this?”

The cautious voice of Na Wonchang crackled in her earpiece.

“Don’t worry about him.”

“….”

“Wooshin may have left the agency, but at his core, he’ll always be an agent. He’ll spend his whole life carrying that owl on his back, protecting it. In some ways, that’s an even crueler path. His affiliation doesn’t matter anymore.”

And she, more than anyone, knew just how harsh that path would be.

Last night, she had met Lee Wooshin and handed him a forged passport, advising him to leave Korea with the owl. She wasn’t sure how far that stubborn bastard would listen. He’d never even treated her with proper respect as his superior.

The birdbox was just a smokescreen. A sub-operation for the mission she had been preparing for thirty-three years.

“….”

A foreign bodyguard opened the door, his eyes slowly scanning Han Seoryeong’s face.

She hid her wrinkled hands behind her back and stepped past him. When he demanded the key in Russian, she hesitated briefly but brushed him off, saying the situation was urgent.

The room was pitch black, not a single sliver of light allowed inside. Her trembling fingers pushed open the heavy door.

Even so, Joo Seolheon recognized him at once, the man hunched over, curled in on himself.

“Rigay.”

Her voice trembled as she approached.

Operation name: Red Veil.

Back in 1990, it had been her first and only mission, assigned to her when she was just twenty-three years old, a rookie agent.

The objective: to approach Rigai Viktor, a graduate student at Moscow State University.