Chapter Nineteen: Gilded Betrayal
The days settled into a macabre rhythm, a waltz of silences and searing proximity. The mansion, my gilded cage, absorbed all sound, leaving only the whisper of his movements and the echo of my own fractured thoughts.
Taehyun kept me close. Not as a prisoner in chains, but as a treasure in a vault. His presence was the architecture of my new world. He moved through the rooms with a predator's grace, his attention a physical weight that followed me from the sun-drenched conservatory to the library's perpetual twilight. He would materialize beside me as I pretended to read, his fingers brushing a stray strand of hair from my forehead.
"Little angel," he'd murmur, the endearment a velvet-covered blade. "You're thinking too loud. The words won't come if you glare at them."
He fed me with an obsessive care that felt like a violation. He'd sit across from me at the long, lonely dining table, watching every bite I took. If I pushed the food away, his jaw would tighten, but his voice remained deceptively soft. "You need your strength, wife. Eat." And he would lift the fork himself, holding it to my lips until I relented, the act of nourishment twisted into an intimate conquest.
He brought flowers. Not cheerful bouquets, but single, exquisite blooms—a midnight-blue iris, a black dahlia, a stem of belladonna with berries like polished jet. He'd place them in crystal vases beside my bed or on the grand piano I never touched. "A dark garden for my dark queen," he'd say, his thumb tracing the petal of a blood-red rose before tucking it behind my ear. The fragrance was always intoxicating, cloying, a perfume meant to drown out the scent of my own fear.
It was a meticulously crafted paradox. The monster who had bathed my wedding in blood was also the man who warmed milk with honey when I stirred from nightmares, who wrapped me in cashmere when I shivered, whose eyes lost their icy calculation when they traced the shadows under my own. This proximity, this devastating care, was a form of psychological warfare more effective than any torture. It blurred every line. My hatred for him began to feel like a betrayal of the only hands that had touched me with something resembling tenderness in this cold new world.
And it was driving me insane.
My grief was a silent, screaming thing, but beneath it, another plan was taking root—cold, sharp, and fueled by a desperate need to reclaim some semblance of control. I would not be a passive prize. If I was to survive Kim Taehyun, I needed to understand him. To find the cracks in the invincible facade.
I used the savings from a life I could no longer remember, accessed through banking details my "parents" had conveniently left in a sealed envelope. The transaction was a whisper in the digital void. The man I hired was a private investigator named Choi, a man with the weary eyes of someone who'd seen too much and the palpable terror of someone who knew exactly who my husband was.
Our first and only meeting was in a shabby tea room that smelled of stale ginger and regret. Rain streaked the grimy window between us.
"You're playing with hellfire, Mrs. Kim," he whispered, his fingers nervously turning a cold cup. He wouldn't even say Taehyun's name aloud. "He has eyes everywhere. In Italy, in Paris, here. His network isn't business; it's an ecosystem. He doesn't just have influence in those countries; he owns the shadows there."
"I don't want his empire," I hissed, leaning forward. "I want his past. His weaknesses. The things that hurt him."
Choi paled. He slid a plain manila folder across the sticky table. "There's one thing. An event. It's a ghost story in his world. No one speaks of it. They call it the Venice Derailment."
My breath hitched. Venice. The word triggered nothing but a faint, dizzying static in my mind.
"Three years ago," Choi continued, voice dropping even lower. "A mission. Details are smoke. All that's known is that it failed catastrophically. Not from outside force. From betrayal. One of his own men turned. It ended in a staged car accident on a bridge near the canals. Taehyun was pulled from the wreckage barely alive. They say someone saved him, got him out before the authorities arrived. No one knows who. The traitor was never found. The mission objective was never revealed. It was his first and last failure. After that… he became what he is now. Not just powerful, but untouchable. Paranoid. It's the root of everything."
Venice. Betrayal. A savior in the shadows. The words swirled, finding no purchase in the blank slate of my memory. Yet, a cold finger of coincidence traced my spine. My parents—the ones who had sold me—were Italian. They had moved to South Korea two years ago, they said, after my accident. The accident that stole my memory.
Could it be…?
No. It was absurd. A tragic symmetry, nothing more. I was Aish, the psychology student, the reluctant bride. Not some phantom from a mafia kingpin's catastrophic past.
"Find more," I urged Choi, my voice trembling with a fear that was not entirely for my safety. "About Venice. About who saved him. About any… any Italian connections that might have gone dark around that time."
Choi looked at me with something like pity. "It's a black hole, Mrs. Kim. Asking these questions… it's a good way to disappear. Even I am afraid. For you, and for me."
I took the folder. It was pitifully thin. A news clipping about a luxury car found submerged in a Venetian canal, no bodies recovered. A few lines about an unidentified man being treated at a private clinic. Nothing concrete. Just whispers.
But whispers were enough to plant a seed of something far more dangerous than hate: doubt.
---
Returning to the mansion was like stepping back into a sensory deprivation tank of his making. That evening, he found me in the library, the folder's contents seared into my mind. He stood behind my chair, his hands coming to rest on my shoulders. I flinched, the contact electric with my new knowledge.
"You're tense, little wife," he said, his thumbs kneading the tight muscles. His touch was masterful, both a comfort and an interrogation. "What dark paths has your mind wandered down today?"
Venice. Betrayal. Who saved you?
"Nowhere," I whispered, leaning into his hands despite myself, the traitorous part of me craving the solace he alone offered. "Just… memories that aren't there."
He bent, his lips brushing the shell of my ear. "Make new ones with me. Better ones."
He turned me in the chair to face him. In his hand was not a dark flower, but a single, perfect gardenia, its white petals luminous against his black suit. Purity and poison. He tucked it into the neckline of my dress, his knuckles grazing my skin. "In Paris, they say this flower means secret love. A truth that can only be shown in darkness."
I looked up into his eyes, those deep, knowing pools. Did they see my secret? The investigation? The fledgling plan to use his past against him? Or did they only see the fragile amnesiac wife he had crafted for himself?
"Tell me a truth, then," I dared, my heart hammering against the flower's stem. "Tell me something real."
For a fleeting moment, the impenetrable mask slipped. A shadow crossed his face—old, profound pain, the ghost of a wrecked car and sinking metal. He cupped my cheek, his gaze searching mine with an intensity that felt like he was trying to see through my eyes into the empty vault of my past.
"The only truth that matters," he said, his voice rough, stripped of its usual calculated smoothness, "is that I found you. And I will burn down heaven and hell before I let anything—anything—take you from me again. Not memories. Not ghosts. Not even your own stubborn will."
The conviction in his words was terrifying. It didn't feel like the passion of a new obsession. It felt like the fervor of a man reclaiming something he had already lost.
That night, the nightmare was different. Not of blood or weddings, but of water. Cold, dark, silty water filling my lungs. The glint of submerged headlights. The crushing pressure of metal. And a voice, desperate and choked, shouting a name I couldn't hear, pulling me from the wreckage.
I woke with a gasp, drenched in sweat. Taehyun was already awake, propped on an elbow, watching me. The moonlight through the shutter slats painted tiger stripes across his bare chest.
"You cried out," he said, no question in his tone.
"A dream," I panted. "Water… a car…"
He went utterly still. The air in the room chilled. For several heartbeats, he was a statue, his eyes like chips of flint in the semi-darkness. Then, he moved. He pulled me into his arms, his embrace so tight it bordered on painful, his face buried in my hair.
"Forget it," he commanded, a raw edge in his whisper. "It's just a dream. Phantom pain from a life that doesn't exist anymore. This is your life. Here. With me."
But his reaction was all the confirmation I needed. The Venice Derailment was real. And it haunted him as deeply as my own missing past haunted me.
The next day, a new vase appeared in my room. Not with a flower, but with a small, intricate model of a Venetian gondola, carved from black onyx. It was a message. A boast. A warning. I know what you dream of. I control even your nightmares.
My revenge plan, fragile and born of fury, now twisted into something more complex and perilous. I wasn't just plotting against the man who destroyed my present. I was possibly digging towards a past where our lives might have catastrophically collided long before the coffee shop. The detective's fear, Taehyun's proximity, his devastating care, and this gnawing, terrifying doubt—they were a vortex, and I was at its center, spinning.
He called me 'wife' and 'little angel' with a possessiveness that scarred. He fed me and brought me flowers with a devotion that felt like a different kind of violence. And all the while, the unspoken question of Venice hung between us, a silent scream in the opulent stillness of our gilded prison.
The betrayal I was planning felt smaller now, overshadowed by the monstrous, looming question: Who was I before the accident? And what, in God's name, did I have to do with Kim Taehyun's only failure?