Long after the chaos had faded, after the ballroom was swept, and panic replaced with uneasy laughter, she found herself pacing her tiny studio apartment, hands stained with paint and memory. Amal tried to make sense of the party's end—tainted drinks, glass and footsteps, a stranger's hand warm and insistent around her wrist. She ought to have been angry, wary even, but what echoed loudest in her chest was a question that felt like longing and dread colliding. Who was he? What was he?
The city outside drowned in restless honking and neon, but in this room, shadows moved with a will of their own. Amal set the crushed red rose on her easel. The petals were already browning at the edges but still so fiercely bright. It felt like a warning—beauty that promised both a wound and a memory.
She unrolled a new canvas, hands trembling. The urge to paint was heavy as grief. All the panic, all the confusion—the stranger's words about scars and art—demanded shape and color. As she painted, her mind returned to the party's silhouettes in gold and black, to a pair of eyes watching her through the crowd, endlessly thoughtful and far too knowing. Brushstrokes followed her racing thoughts: a dark, faceless figure emerging from a wash of scarlet, hands reaching, not to threaten, but to steady.
"Why did you save me?" she found herself whispering aloud.
If his answer was anything but honest, she'd know. She'd always been able to tell truth from comfort. Tonight, though, she'd let herself lean into the mystery.
The painting took hours; Amal barely noticed the way darkness slowly claimed her flat. She was used to it, the city shrinking outside while color bloomed within. Back when she was a girl, before medicine and money and all the grown-up vows to make sensible choices, she had let herself be consumed by imagination. The world was safer in watercolor, every pain held at arm's length.
But tonight, something had crossed over—real danger had found her. As she dropped her brush, a splatter of crimson paint hit her wrist. She watched it bead and run, a perfect trick of blood, and found herself shivering, not with fear, but with exhilaration.
She cleaned herself up methodically, as if she could rinse away not just paint, but the question of who she'd become. There was a thrill in the memory of that stranger's closeness. His hands had been steady, certain, undeterred by her resistance. No one had ever looked at her like that, not as a prize or a puzzle, but as someone worth breaking the rules for.
She scrolled through her phone, finding an influx of messages. Friends asking if she was safe, a terse email from the host half-apologizing, half-threatening about the "incident." She ignored them all.
It was only later, as she checked her notifications, that she noticed the oddest thing: an anonymous message, no number, just a simple line typed beneath a digital rose emoji.
"Monsters are not always in the dark. Sometimes we find them in the light."
It was cryptic, childish almost, but it landed somewhere deep in her gut.
A knock at her door snapped her from her thoughts. Her heart stuttered—she lived too high for trick-or-treaters, too privately for neighbors to bother at this hour. Cautious, she peered through the peephole, but saw only the empty corridor and a square black envelope dropped on her doormat. She cracked it open slowly, half expecting a prank, half expecting something more.
Inside: a single photo, candid, taken at the party. She stood outlined in gold, a shadow right behind her—just slightly out of frame—eyes glinting, mouth curved in a half-smile she'd seen up close only hours before.
Amal pressed her fingers to her lips, both frightened and electric. She should report this, burn it, delete whatever trace of this man—and the pull he seemed to have over her. But she did none of those things.
She slipped the rose petal inside the envelope, tucked both into her journal, and stared at her half-finished canvas, which now trembled with half-light, hunger, and secrets.
Tonight, she painted not just with brushes, but with fear, with longing, with all the shadows she'd tried so hard to keep at bay.
Somewhere in the city, Min-jun watched the sky from his penthouse, lips curled in something dangerously close to hope. Tonight, a piece of darkness had finally found its artist.