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Dongmin’s nails were bitten down with anxiety, and he felt the kitchen floor worn down with how much he had paced.
Jinwoo was still knocked out. Minhyuk kept delivering pills to him in an effort to keep him asleep. Dongmin wrote it off as kindness, for they were allowing Jinwoo to sleep without experiencing any pain, but he knew better. It was simply so Sanha could have time to devise a way for Jinwoo to never speak of what had happened.
Except it was taking Sanha longer than Dongmin had initially anticipated.
He ran his fingers through his hair as he held onto Jinwoo’s phones.
What if they were tracking him with the phones? What if they would come rescue Jinwoo when they saw he hadn’t moved from a single house in the village in over twenty-four hours?
He knew he had to trust Sanha to fix things, but his heart still thumped wildly in his chest.
Tired of being alone, frustrated with waiting, he hurried into the bedroom where Minhyuk stood, staring down at Jinwoo’s still form.
“No signs of change?” Dongmin asked.
Minhyuk glanced over at him and shook his head. “No.”
Dongmin sighed. He wasn’t sure if he was relieved or upset anymore.
“Sanha has not yet contacted you?” Minhyuk questioned.
It was Dongmin’s turn to shake his head. “I assume he will soon. He works fast, but...I suppose he’s getting something that will force Jinwoo to keep his mouth shut.”
Minhyuk’s eyes narrowed as he turned back to Jinwoo’s body. “I do not trust Sanha,” he declared.
“Why not?”
“Because he’s also working with this government agent,” Minhyuk responded. “And if he’s working with the agent, that means he is working against us.”
“He was trying to send Jinwoo elsewhere,” Dongmin muttered. “He gave Jinwoo a list of locations and was having Jinwoo check those, to make sure he stayed away. It seems Jinwoo decided to stray from the plan on his own. He didn’t tell Sanha what he was doing, either.”
Minhyuk scoffed. “So he is a bad government agent.”
Dongmin wasn’t going to argue the point. He knew nothing about Jinwoo, except he apparently had someone back in Korea whom he loved, and he just was trying to get his job done. He didn’t seem like an evil man, in any case.
“I don’t know if he’s bad or not,” Dongmin muttered. “Whatever the case, I don’t want to hurt him further. I feel bad for what you’ve already done to him.” Dongmin looked the man over. His face was still badly bruised and his arm was now wrapped properly to ensure it healed.
“He was going to shoot you. I did what I had to so he would not shoot you.” When Dongmin said nothing, Minhyuk added, “You should be mad, for he shot me .”
“It was easy to fix,” Dongmin said, waving him off. “He didn’t hit your wirings.”
“But he could have.”
It was true. If Jinwoo had better sense of Minhyuk’s unprotected locations, then he would have done serious damage. Dongmin did not have the tools to fix Minhyuk should Jinwoo’s bullet hit the wiring.
He really could have lost Minhyuk forever.
The thought had been plaguing him since they brought Jinwoo inside, and he would rather not focus on such morbid ideas. He shook his head and muttered, “And thank god he didn’t.”
Minhyuk remained silent, turning back to his watch over Jinwoo’s body.
One of Jinwoo’s phones in Dongmin’s pocket vibrated. He pulled it out frantically, knowing that it was likely to be Sanha with more information on what to do.
It wasn’t. He sighed in disappointment as he stared at the notification.
“It’s not Sanha, is it?” Minhyuk asked.
“How did you know?”
“You’re disappointed.”
Dongmin groaned and ran his fingers through his hair. “It’s an unknown number. They sent a picture message.”
“Will you open it?”
He felt weird rifling through someone else’s messages as they lay unconscious on his bed. However, he was curious, and he would like a heads-up if it contained some sort of government-sanctioned plot to capture Minhyuk.
So he opened the message.
The phone nearly fell from his hands when he saw the picture.
A young man was seated on a chair in a dark room, bound and gagged. He was crying, desperate, scared . His eyes begged for mercy. His posture was tense in terror.
Dongmin felt it difficult to swallow suddenly. His mouth was dry. He had to remind himself how to breathe.
Minhyuk noticed. Alert and worried, he faced Dongmin. “What’s the matter?”
Dongmin held the phone out and Minhyuk looked at the picture.
“Oh,” Minhyuk said. He narrowed his eyes in concentration, then added, “That is Myungjun. He is on the agent’s other phone. Remember?”
Dongmin had to think, but he did remember the background picture they had seen when they first checked Jinwoo’s phones.
“Oh, god,” Dongmin whispered. He felt his knees shake. “Sa-Sanha...oh, god, Sanha’s using Jinwoo’s partner as a hostage.”
“That will probably work.”
It would work, but that wasn’t exactly the issue. Dongmin had always been good. He hated breaking the rules. He had to force himself to steal Minhyuk, to travel far away with him, and that had been a felony that didn’t hurt anyone.
Now, however, Dongmin was keeping captive a hurt government agent and participating in the kidnapping of the agent’s partner.
It wasn’t at all what he had wanted.
“Dongmin,” Minhyuk said, gently grabbing onto his arm. “Dongmin, you need to breathe.”
He felt like he was suffocating under the weight of what his actions had caused. “Minhyuk, I-I did this!”
“It was Sanha.”
“I let him do it! I drove him to the point where he felt he had to!”
“You need to breathe.”
Dongmin gulped down a few deep breaths, then whispered, “What do I do?”
Minhyuk looked back over at Jinwoo. “Well,” he started, “we let the government agent see the message. He’ll return to Korea. Sanha will release his partner with the condition they keep silent, I assume. You and I will move. And then we will be safe.”
Minhyuk was right. If they took things one step at a time, nothing bad would happen. Sanha wouldn’t kill anyone; he was just using Myungjun was a scare-tactic.
“Dongmin,” Minhyuk said again, and Dongmin stared up at him. “Dongmin, it will be fine. I am here for you, okay?”
Dongmin nodded his head. “Okay,” he murmured, though the fear had not relinquished its hold on his heart.
He didn’t like the direction things were going, and he felt as if it would only get worse.