Yeom Ra knew no life beyond that company. He traded pieces of his humanity for a warm meal and a place to belong, selling his dignity under the neat pretext of "patriotism." So when they handed him the ridiculous assignment of enrolling a school and befriend the offspring of a person of interest, he had no choice but to accept. He was to enter the family's inner circle without arousing suspicion.
He never expected his moral, the beliefs and tidy worldview that had held him together, to be dismantled by one man. Vasiliy was not only the target of the mission; he was the most confounding puzzle Yeom Ra had ever been asked to solve. Trying to remain true to the self he'd been trained to be, Yeom Ra nevertheless slipped, almost imperceptibly at first, into a different current.
Curiosity became intimacy, intimacy became complicity. The small acts he'd rehearsed as a spy, casual questions, well-timed jokes, the practiced fumbles that signaled harmlessness, suddenly felt like betrayals of something he couldn't yet name. Vasiliy's presence worked on him like a slow, meticulous erosion.