Page 34 of Doubts of the Egoist (Egoist #3)
He didn’t want to go to bed; it was too big, too cold.
The moment he lay down, a beast of loneliness clawed at his rib cage.
He didn’t want to feel lonely or miss Yugo because it made him feel like an abandoned puppy pining for its master.
The fact that Yugo hadn’t called even once only worsened his mood.
Where the fuck are you? Coward, why are you running away? Come, face me… what are you afraid of?
He bit his lip and tried to sleep, but unlike his body, his mind remained alert.
When hours passed and he still couldn’t rest, Kuon got up and shuffled back into the small surveillance room.
He approached the metal rack and ran his fingers over the black leather of the nearest box, identical to the one Kuon had already opened.
His heart sped up, urging him to drop the idea, but the need to see if Yugo had other pet projects like himself or kept mementos of one of his former lovers, of Mio, overpowered his instinct for self-preservation.
He hesitated before pulling the next box from the shelf.
He needed to know if he was special or just another number in Yugo’s collection.
“Curiosity killed the cat,” Yugo’s voice jeered in Kuon’s head as he scrolled through countless evidence of bribes, verbal agreements, and transactions instead of the expected sex records.
Politicians, military officers, prosecutors, police officers, among others…
Kuon couldn’t fathom the scope of Yugo’s reach.
The amount of dirt he’d uncovered on so many powerful people was impressive.
If I could only bring this to the police, the whole system would collapse.
Kuon cringed, suffering an ego-demolishing flashback of Gray’s confession.
“If the government wanted Yugo or me arrested, we would be rotting in jail . We call it ‘taxes’. From time to time, we gotta let the police show results. So we occasionally give them a scapegoat along with a decent amount of goods. While we do that, the government lets us work. Everyone’s happy. ”
“Everyone is happy…” Kuon echoed, realizing how stupid he’d been and that Gray had every right to use that condescending tone with him.
He alone had been na?ve, clinging to the ideals long dead in this world.
Everything became meaningless—his life, achievements, and even the price he had paid for crossing the Black Duke.
He burst out laughing. Police work was a relic, as bribery and nepotism ruled the world.
“I wish I had never been transferred to the Organized Crime Unit…”
The world around him darkened. An external hard drive he’d discovered among the boxes hammered the final nail in the coffin of his freedom.
A chill spread beneath Kuon’s tongue, as he couldn’t look away from a video file from fourteen years ago.
In his early twenties, Yugo already had the eyes of a killer. Cold, ruthless, they showed no kindness as he looked down at a bound man gabbling something in frantic Italian. On the screen, Yugo let out a harsh, barking laugh that made Kuon’s blood freeze in his veins.
Yugo’s thin lips curled into a smile that never reached his eyes. He coiled a boxing hand wrap around his right hand and approached a tall wooden box topped with a pile of glittering shards. A bowl stood at its base.
Crouching, Yugo plunged his fist into the bowl, then rose and pressed it firmly into the glittering pile. When he lifted his hand, light danced across the sparkling shards clinging to the handwrap. With a casual stride, he approached the hostage, whose eyes were wide with terror.
A honeyed voice murmured something, then Yugo’s fist swung forward. Blood gushed and trickled down the victim’s face. Screams bounced off the walls of the surveillance room.
“Crushed glass…” Kuon’s stomach turned. “So cruel…”
Not wanting to watch the senseless torture, Kuon skipped to the end.
Yugo’s once-white shirt was stained red all over his chest. His messy hair stuck to his forehead and temples while reddish sweat trickled down his face and neck, soaking into the no-longer-white collar of his shirt.
He stood beside the box, his elbow resting by the pile of crushed glass, holding a cigarette between bloody fingers and taking slow drags.
Farther away, under the swaying ceiling light, Greg struggled to wrap the motionless body in black plastic sheeting. None of them looked distressed.
As he opened file after file, Kuon watched the video evidence of cold-blooded murders, for none of those men could have survived such blood loss. Not a single muscle on Yugo’s face betrayed remorse, only annoyance and dissatisfaction.
“God, how could I have been so stupid?” Kuon breathed out the words, realizing that he not only willingly flew into the spider web Yugo had set up for him but also shot himself in the foot. A block of ice formed in the pit of his stomach, making him shudder.
He lowered his head onto the smooth surface of the desk and closed his eyes, listening to the dying agonies of strangers and the questions he didn’t understand, spoken in a deep baritone. Kuon had always known Yugo was a killer. Now, he had seen it with his own eyes.