I Just Needed Someone to Hate - Episode 5.4

Her gaze was already fixed on the floor, but she could feel him silently scanning her.

It wouldn’t matter anyway, since he had no feelings for her. He was too decent, too gentlemanly, and a great agent who wasn’t swayed by unnecessary emotions to do such strange things.

He moved, passing Vivienne and leaning against the headboard of the bed. As Vivienne hesitated, he reached out, took her chin, and gently turned her towards him.

“Are you satisfied now?”

As he said that and withdrew his hand, his thumb brushed against her lips.

It was only to ease his sense of obligation, and he had obtained the ointment for that purpose. Recalling the purpose she had thought of in the morning, Vivienne opened the ointment tube. She dabbed some ointment on her finger and turned back to him. As she leaned forward, drawing closer to him, her heart raced like crazy. Could she be falling for him?

First love.

As she mulled over the words, her finger brushed his cheek. The man, who seemed endlessly insensitive to pain, subtly furrowed his perfect brow at her slightest touch. The fact that she felt good about that made her certain. She had been placed in an absolutely disadvantageous position.

Knowing that, watching the man’s eyes change from moment to moment as he stared at her made her heart grow cold.

This was the beginning of an emotion that would hurt her for the rest of her life.

But what do people wish for when they start a one-sided love? Holding hands. Receiving the same feelings back from the other person. Talking for a long time. Receiving a kiss on the forehead around bedtime.

This time, before she could leave, her hand was caught once more. The man lightly kissed her palm.

“Go to bed now.”

When his gaze turned to Vivienne, she was surprised by how seductive his eyes were.

Vivienne nodded. The courage to ask if she could lie next to him for just a moment, just a brief moment, vanished all too easily. Vivienne quickly left his room, entered her own, closed the door, and leaned against it.

Her legs gave way on their own, and she slid down to the floor. She felt suffocated in a different way.

‘I like you.’

How many ways could that phrase not sound cheap?

Or did any exist at all? The thought suddenly choked her up. Before she knew it, she was already crying.

It was a tragedy for her to harbor feelings for the only person she could rely on. Such relationships were usually lopsided, and the one with the feelings inevitably became smaller. She had always belonged to the side that had more, making it hard to endure such an imbalance.

Knowing that, appealing to his emotions felt like undignified begging. It could also lead to the misunderstanding that she was using him as an escape from her unhappiness. If he knew the real reason she had left home in detail, he might also look at her like a worthless woman.

‘Or, like he’s been doing, he might happily try to use me. Because he’s an intelligence agent.’

The man was sharp. She remembered his changing eyes as he scanned her earlier.

The eventful dawn was as silent as death.

❖ ❖ ❖

“Dear.”

Vivienne wasn’t the only one spending a sleepless night. Mrs. Eastwell, who had knocked and entered her husband’s study, spoke to her husband.

“You were too cruel to our only child.”

Councilor Eastwell seemed lost in thought. He turned his back to his wife, but Mrs. Eastwell placed her hand on his shoulder and met his gaze.

“Cynthia was just worried about her friend and wanted to know. How could you scold her like that? Cynthia was shocked.”

Mrs. Eastwell remembered the voice that had echoed through the mansion around sunset.

“Don’t try to find out about that man again. Do you understand? And don’t contact Chairman Rex’s son privately anymore. It’s time you learned what you should and shouldn’t get involved in.”

“Vivienne is my friend. How can I do that?”

“So you’re going to get involved in this too, and make your father’s life miserable just like your friend?”

She knew that her daughter had returned to her room with a tearful face after that.

“What on earth is going on? What did the Criminal Intelligence Agency say?”

“……”

“Won’t you even tell me?”

She followed her husband’s gaze as he turned his head several times. After an endless silence, Councilor Eastwell shook off her hand and picked up a whiskey glass on the desk. After wetting his throat, the councilor spoke with difficulty.

“The people at Kellerhill Staff College were right.”

“Excuse me? Please tell me the whole story in more detail, dear.”

“…My daughter was wrong, and they were right. That man wasn’t the Prime Minister’s son.”

“Did the Prime Minister’s office tell you to cover this up?”

“No. It would have been better if they had.”

“……”

“It seems that the Criminal Intelligence Agency approached Miss Mergoville with an agent. They never said so, but this must be the Prime Minister’s order. They said that the Criminal Intelligence Agency is watching the Mergoville family, and if we disclose this, we will be considered to have helped the Mergoville family.”

So, the information they gave them was a kind of test.

“Olivia and Marquis Mergoville they’re really good people. How could they do that?”

“The Prime Minister doesn’t seem to think so.”

Councilor Eastwell moved to open a wooden desk drawer and took out a document, handing it to his wife.

“The agent’s code name is, unusually, Edmund Colt, the name of the Prime Minister’s only son.”

Mrs. Eastwell took the file with the red stamp and slowly opened it.

“The project name is…”

There was a photo of an agent who really looked like the Prime Minister’s only son.

“It will be ‘Hyde’, which resembles the middle name of that only son.”

❖ ❖ ❖

A basement on Mirabolta Street.

There was a neat man with his face skinned off, but without a drop of blood on his face. Slowly blinking his eyes, what he faced was a face that looked exactly like the facial skin disguise he had lost approaching him.

He knew it because he had studied everything about him. The attitude, the arrogant eyes, the aristocratic accent. That was definitely Edmund Colt.

He’s alive! An instinctive relief washed over him.

[…for the third time…. …made the surrounding agents suspicious with the code he found…. The resistance was too severe….]

There were words in another language, but he couldn’t properly interpret them because of the relief that he was alive. The man who had been standing regally listening to the report approached him. He must have wiped them out instead of him. That’s why they were bowing down to him so subserviently.

“……”

The man sitting across from him smoked without answering. Only the man with his back leaning against the pillar and his arms bound by chains blinked his dazed eyes.

“Th, th, thank you for saving me…”

The words didn’t come out properly. Edmund Colt frowned and asked the man standing behind him what was going on. It was a savior-like move.

“We’re going to kill him anyway, so I messed with his tongue a little so he couldn’t do anything stupid before that. Since we used drugs, there won’t be any special traces left on the body.”

Foreign language followed.

Edmund Colt asked in a very soft and kind tone who that was. The madman, grinning and wanting to be rewarded, walked forward and became a cold corpse lying on the floor with a gunshot in less than a few seconds.

The agent tied to the pillar doubted for a moment whether he was still hallucinating.

Everything quickly flashed through his mind like a panorama at Edmund Colt’s calm order to kill. When he was first captured here, about three days ago, when he tried to escape from here again and tell the other agents about his actions and everything he had seen here.

Public telephone. Bloodstains. And, the third.

Third kidnapping.

“……!”

The man who learned the truth struggled, but he couldn’t move, only hearing the clanking sound behind the pillar. He started screaming as much as he could. It was out of helplessness that he could only do that.

Was it around that time?

He felt like his thigh was burning. He resisted, foaming at the mouth. The end of the cigarette that Colt was holding was mercilessly scorching his thigh.

“You have to be quiet, Major.”

It was a cold, subdued voice. It was also a figure he had never shown in official settings.

“I hate noisy bastards like you.”

With that, the agent’s vision went dark again. Edmund threw the cigarette away carelessly, got up, and walked back.

“About the bearer bond that the chairman, who claimed to be the Prime Minister’s henchman at the time, asked us to find out the source of…”

The voice faded away.

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