No Love For The Villain - vanish into fiction

Eli’s steps halted as he exited the red house.

The village people called the prosecutor’s house, built of red brick, the ‘Red House’. The scene, with its large tree and a hanging swing, looked like the perfect house from a child’s fantasy.

But the scene that should have been there—a little girl on the swing and her father pushing her from behind—was buried in darkness. The swing was still, covered only in cobwebs.

Raising his gaze, Eli looked toward the window. A pale yellow light shone from the window, and a shadow moved beyond the curtain.

The curtain was drawn back. A woman looked outside. Just like when she had watched the hearse carrying her father arrive.

Her lifeless face reminded him of a meticulously crafted porcelain doll. The delicate doll rolled her blue eyes, which easily lost focus, like glass marbles.

‘Can you kill the prosecutor’s daughter for us?’

There is only one thing in this world that cannot be killed.

Something already dead.

You can only kill something that has a soul, right?

But the prosecutor’s daughter looked no different from a soulless doll.

Eli, watching the window, saw the tracks of tears glistening on Sierra’s cheeks in the light. Only when she shed tears did a spark of life return to the woman whose emotions had long since died.

‘Father hopes you will handle this thoroughly.’

Eli recalled the request he had received, a sneer touching his lips.

The members of the Pater Family were ‘sons,’ and the boss was the ‘father.’ Just as Boss Enrico, obsessed with playing family, preferred.

The sons solved problems according to their father’s commands. But the problems no one else could resolve peacefully ended up before the killer.

‘Can you kill that person for us?’

Those who threatened the family, targets needing revenge, enemies, or internal traitors. Different individuals filled the anonymity of ‘that person,’ coming and going.

And then, that woman.

Thanks to the righteous prosecutor, Enrico had been driven to the brink. Now he wanted that prosecutor’s daughter dead.

Whether it was personal revenge or a desire to erase anything that reminded him of a defeated foe, the reason didn’t matter. He was just being paid to do a job.

He recalled the sight of the woman running away. Her golden hair fluttering in the dark of night, her fragile sprint, her slender ankles, and the eyes wide with fear looking up at him.

She was an excessively easy target. The thread of her life would be as slender as her ankles. He could kill her anytime.

If not now, then anytime.

So he turned away.

Even as he left the red house, the afterimage lingering in his mind nagged at him. Like the cloying sweetness of the grape that lingered unpleasantly long on his tongue.

A face so fragile it seemed it might shatter, eyes that looked at him as if clinging for dear life, lips that accepted whatever he offered and fed her. Absurdly delicate and foolishly docile, that woman.

“Sierra.”

He called the name softly. More fragile than the fruit, it melted and vanished from his tongue in an instant.

He ran his tongue along the inside of his cheek, ruminating on the name he had just swallowed.

***

Back in her room, Sierra took off the man’s coat she was wearing. The long coat slumped like a shadow he had left behind.

She needed to return it…

Sierra went to the window and drew back the curtain. She searched the pitch-dark night for any trace of the man.

Had he already left?

Sierra’s gaze, searching the deep darkness, fell upon the gateway. He was standing there. His suit attire, without the coat, seemed too thin to block the harsh winter night wind.

But before she could resolve to go down and return the coat, he turned away first. The man, who seemed like a part of the night itself, faded away into the darkness as if merging with it.

Sierra held the ownerless coat in her arms. She headed to the wardrobe. Among her few clothes, she hung his coat neatly.

‘I’ll come again tomorrow.’

‘Again tomorrow.’

Would he really come tomorrow?

It felt like he wouldn’t return.

The lone button from her father lay under the long coat. It seemed the coat, like her father’s button, would remain like that forever. Its owner never coming back to retrieve it.

Even after lying down on the bed, Sierra gazed endlessly at the black coat in the wardrobe, the thing he had left behind. She waited for death as if waiting for rest, waited for the man who would kill her. Her slowly blinking eyes closed heavily.

She dreamed of her father. She heard a voice calling, *Sierra*. She answered the voice she had waited so long to hear.

‘Father, the flowers have bloomed. The flowers we planted.’

She finally delivered the words she had held for ten years. There were so many things she had wanted to say on the day her father returned.