The First Mastery | Gitae Kim
First Mastery Masterlist Here
Tw | Psychological Horror | Domestic Violence | Infidelity | Murder | Attempted Suicide | Dub-Con, kind of Non-Con
Notes | This will probably be the darkest story of this series because it's, well, Gitae. The point of this series is to make the characters as close to their manhwa personalities as possible, and I feel like Gitae is one of those character (so far) that just doesn't have any redeemable qualities. This is not a romance in any way shape or form. It's one of the few of this series where things don't work, so don't worry, majority of the characters I'll write about later wont have such depressing and disgusting stories!
You were a squeamish child.
It could have been a simple cut, a small dreg of blood dripping between parted fingers, an organ spilling gash against the abdomen. No matter the severity, nausea would claw at your insides and up into your throat until you had no choice but to spew it out.
You were an emotional vessel of unease and doubt, fearing every corner and every blip in your meticulous routine. Throughout your youth, you struggled with random bursts of depression. Every day made it harder to get up, every day the motivation to do something escaped you.
You had finally reached a point in your life where you were okay. Not perfect, not good, but okay. It was more than you’d ever hoped. You’d finally made it into law school; you’d finally bridged some friendships.
You, for the first time in your miserable life, had plans, had aspirations.
You colour coded your notes. You lined your pens against your desk in a certain way. You recited law codes in your head when anxiety clawed at your throat. You made plans to actually experience life properly. As a person with dreams, and hopes, and goals. You were trying to not be the fatigued, crumbling girl with no desires.
You, for the first time in forever, felt comfortable, free, in your own skin.
So, when he touched your mind for the very first time and your Resonance snapped into place, you knew, deep down, that your story would end in tragedy, just as your beginning had.
Kill. Kill. Slice the bones away, rip into their flesh.
You were in your first university class of the year, after finally making it into law school, when it happened, when the thick, malevolent thoughts of an older, darker man pierced into your psyche and lay waste to your scattered thoughts.
His wicked satisfaction at a kill well-done crumbled something within you. That arm tore off rather easily. That wasn’t tasty. Not tasty at all.
You had rushed out of the classroom, ignoring the inquiring eyes of your classmates as you rushed to the closest toilet, spewing into the bowl as your mind wreaked havoc.
I just felt a random man rip someone’s arm off. How can you feel murder?! To do such a thing…
You gaged again, hands tightly gripping against the rim of the toilet lid, heaving and shuddering.
You startled, eyes widened in terror as a dark, gravely voice booms across your thoughts, the loudness piercing at your temples.
Why the heck is there a voice in my head?! Who are you?!
You can feel his darkening thoughts, more sharpening thoughts of slaughter and malevolence overloading your being. Your fear rises.
Am I going down that road again? One of fear, despair… am I not getting better after all?
You try to silence the raging thoughts of another rushing through your head. You recite law codes backwards, prayers in the way of sentences flowing out your parted lips. You stifle the murderous thoughts, evil aspirations as terrifying goals behind a hard wall of the law.
Despite the blinding migraine that starts to pulse at your temples, it works, for a time.
Your footsteps slowly patter against the pavement; hand clutched tightly against your backpack strap. The orangey hue covering the sky has all but disappeared behind the towering buildings around you, your only source of light a dim illumination of the rising moon.
The low hum of passing vehicles pauses sooner than you would have liked, the static noise a reprieve from your darkening thoughts. Despite trying your hardest to block out the strange, murderous thoughts filtering unwantedly through your head, a few seemed to slip through every now and then.
Usually abbreviations of kill, meat, slice and tasty.
You couldn’t deny wondering if the source of this terrifying voice was some emotional stunted yet murderously adept ghost out to haunt you.
Begone, ghost. Snivel over your tasty meat slicing tendencies elsewhere. Cannibal.
I am no ghost. It turns its attention away from you, its thoughts filtering back to what you’ve realised as it’s usual murderous tendencies.
You screech openly, body flinching backwards as you neared the alley by your house. Your eyes widen at the sight in front of you.
A body lays scattered across the exit of the alleyway, their limbs strewn about in awkward positions as their blood drips to the concrete beneath them, a small yet growing pool of lifeblood seeping into the earth.
You retch to the side, goosebumps sliding across your arms as killer wasps swarm against your stomach.
The voice jolts you out of your heaving, eyes snapping up to the looming figure stepping across the paling corpse. The man was almost the size of a mini mountain, almost beefy with his muscular stature, yet when he came into sight under the overhead light, you realised he was all pure, hard muscle.
Your fear returns two-fold as you stumble backwards, breath leaving in frantic pants as your terrified eyes look for any available exit.
Before you can run back the way you came, the man is onto you, crushing you with menacing force into the concrete wall behind you. His thick hand wraps punishingly around your throat, grip tight enough to leave a bruise behind.
The newfound connection within you explodes.
Electricity races across your skin, booming across your chest and exhilarating within your heart. The man in front of you seems to expand. He becomes more menacing, if that was even possible, his aura sharpening and thickening until it becomes suffocating. Breathing becomes almost impossible with his thick hand still wrapped tightly against your jugular.
You start to claw at the meat of his arms, dangling legs kicking at his shins as he suffocates you. He releases you abruptly, moving his hand to your wrist while is looming body still presses you into the wall behind you.
Flashes of memories not your own seep in; a menacing father and his hatred for the man, his curiosity at his next brother’s choice, his fratricide. His malicious urgency to rule over the underworld he’d been born into.
“So that Resonance myth was true after all,” he tuts, sneering down at you. “But I really hate romance.”
“I sure can do that though,” he smirks. It wasn’t a nice smirk. Your fear lashed against him, eyes diluted as you peer up into his empty eyes. It was as if his soul had been left behind in his mothers’ womb.
You slowly come to the daunting realisation that a historical myth has reappeared between you both, and the man you’d been forcefully connected to was a fucked up psychopathic, murdering bastard.
“You’ve got some colourful language for a thing so small,” he snickers, his other hand coming up to pat at your head; not like a lover would do, but like an owner and its obedient pet.
You let out a stuttering breath. “Please- let me go, please,” your eyes a pleading, sweat pooling above your top lip as you try to force back a tearful quiver. Every single person involved within the fighting sector knew about the Resonance and ‘First Mastery’.
It was supposed to be a fantastical myth. It wasn’t supposed to be real!
So why, why has this mythical bond snapped into place for you of all people, and why did it have to be with him.
Terrifying cartel leader, murderer and wanted man.
You could recognise him now, up close. The Mexican boogieman.
“You know why that’s not possible,” he smirks down at you, reaching up to twirl a lock of your hair around his finger. “You, my fearful little bond, are coming with me. Permanently.”
But… I tried so hard to get into uni. I-I finally figured out what I want to do later. I finally have a, a plan. I got over my fear of blood enough to be able to stomach law school. So why-why?
Why have I been bound to my souls very own antithesis?
Later, when the time passed you by, you’d realise that everything you’d finally stood for; order, justice, routine – they had all been destroyed by the unfeeling demon the stars had thought to bind you to.
“You, my fearful little bond, seem to be my anchor to this world, and my one-way ticket to true mastery.” You can feel his murderous internal thoughts, the cackles and screams of psychopathy that fills his brain 24/7.
His arms bracket around your torso as he flings you roughly over his shoulder. Your stomach crashes painfully into the sharpness of his shoulder, the wind nocking out of you at the aggressive, yet accidental blow.
If he can be so aggressive with you not on purpose, then what’s awaiting you in the future when you do something he doesn’t like? When you speak a certain way, act a certain way that doesn’t combine with his ideals?
He drags across alleyways and down streets, until he bridges what you realise but be his cartel compound. Leering gazes of large, tattooed gangsters surround the two of you and only look away when Gitae says: “She’s off limits.” He did not shout; he did not raise his voice. It was a creepily, eerie sound you’d find out later to be an anomaly.
He nears a room at the back of the compound; thrusts open the door and settles you roughly against the ground. “Do not leave here unless I say so.” He turns abruptly, without a single look back, and locks you inside the dim room.
Over the next few weeks, after Gitae had dragged you back to his compound and locked you inside his room, the despair and loneliness you’d finally been able to stifle, starts to creep back into your brain and your psyche until it becomes almost an impossibility to dig the sharp claws back out of your skin.
At some point during the early weeks, someone drops your belongings at the edge of the king-sized bed. It’s then that you finally realise the life you had just started getting used to, was over.
You knew it was Gitae from his thoughts as he trampled over your small apartment, disgusted and ashamed that he was connected to someone so poor and so insignificant.
Despite this, your law books and laptop were included within your belongings, so you eventually managed to enrol into the online syllabus of your law classes. You spend what feel like months cracking down on assignments and revision for your law classes, using it as a tool to distract yourself from your impending doom at the hand of Gitae.
Not all his thoughts were doom and gloom about you, at least. It was just that, majority of the time, he thought thoughts of murder, world domination and other highly illegal activities that broke your lawyer-in-training heart.
You were just glad he’d not tried anything sexual yet. Not that you hadn’t been cursed to hear his thoughts as he fucks random women on almost a daily basis.
From your minor knowledge on the bond, you knew that, at some point soon, Gitae was going to want to complete the bond.
And that meant sexual intercourse with a beast of a man, who was not only twice your size but also thought about murder and meat on a daily basis.
You shiver at the demented possibilities of sharing a night with the man. At least he’s attractive I suppose…
It was that night that he finally came to you. After only seeing him pop into his room (that you were apparently staying in) every now and then to sleep next to you (yes you laid there like a tense robot and edged as far as you could to the side of the bed without actually falling off).
You’re sort of glad he wasn’t a cuddler. Well, with you, at least.
You, depending on how this night goes, hope he’d stop going to other women once your bond clicks into place. Multiple tellings of the myth suggested the Resonance was basically a soul bond and likened it to that of finding a soulmate, a person who was made for you in every way.
You hope, in some decrepit hole at the back of your mind, that it could end well for you. That you could… have that connection. Even if that meant being connected to him. Maybe it would do him good. You don’t know.
He looms in the doorway like an abominable mountain ghost, eyes piercing down at you. You’re huddled up against the headboard, oversized t-shirt on and arms wrapped around your knees.
Despite your hope that things end well, because who know what’d happen to you if things went sideways. Like if he hated it or liked it too much, and you didn’t like it at all, and what that meant for your future livelihood, and if you might just die.
You are, undoubtedly, scared.
Sure, it was sort of embarrassing to admit to being a virgin at twenty years old, but all you’d had were failed situationships and a lack of urgency at being at the beck and call of a man.
This went against everything you stood for. The toxic masculinity, the illegal activities, the nauseating crime scenes.
You swallowed down your fear. Better to get it over with now than to continue fearing it and stewing over it the longer you were trapped in his room.
He stalks toward you as he strips his white wife-beater from his torso, his rippling muscles glinting dimly underneath the orange light.
He leans over the bed and cuts you off by sticking his fingers into your parted mouth, your words becoming muffled murmurs around his fingers. Your eyes widen as a blush spreads across your cheeks.
“You know what I want from you,” he says it stoically, with the usually lack of emotion across his face and emptiness within his eyes. But you can hear his lustful thoughts, see his straining hard on against his jeans. Yet, you know the root of those lustful thoughts are not of you, not of you as a person or as an attractive body.
No, they were lustful thoughts at the idea of a powerup, at the idea of being so unbeatable and powerful once the bond fully snaps into place and Resonance occurs between you both. Your body was a vessel for his pleasure. Not your own, his.
I don’t really want this. But- I need to get it over with. I need to just suck it up. It’ll hurt the first time, but-but I’m sure it’ll be fine in the times after.
The sound of a sliding zipper fills the room, and soon Gitae only dons a pair of white boxers. As he reaches up to tear your jumper from your body, one of his hands winds its way into your hair, pulling at the strands as he tilts your head back.
“Since you’re a virgin,” he mutters as he slips his hand down into your panties and thrusts a finger into your tight channel. You flinch at the sudden intrusion, shoulders tight, yet when he rolls your clitoris around with his thumb you start to relax. The electrical touch of a Resonance bond thrums through you, and you have no doubt it’s the reason for your higher levels of pleasure.
You feel when your wetness becomes too much, the squelching noises becoming more and more obscene as he adds a second, and eventually a third, finger.
You can feel the blind-hot pressure start to building in your stomach, and you can tell from the lust-hazed look over Gitae’s face that he can tell what you’re thinking and can almost feel it thanks to the bond almost reaching its final stage.
It was as if the bond was forcing you to like it.
You let out a strangled moan as your peak rushes through you, eyes rolling to the back of your head as white-hot pleasure thrums in your stomach.
Just as you come down from your high, you can feel a thick rod at your entrance. You look down at the beast in Gitae’s hand, body still quivering from the aftershocks of your orgasm. “That’s not going to fit,” you groan out, hands now clenched against his broad shoulders as he teases you with the head.
That’s the first thought that crosses your mind as crippling pain spears through your pussy. You can feel the hum and thrum of the Resonance clicking together once and for all, and then your mind is squashed beneath Gitae’s own pleasure.
It’s as if your thoughts, your sight and your emotions have merged as one, as if you’d become a singular being. You can feel his gratification at your pussy squeezing his cock like a vice. You can feel his pleasure; you can feel his pain.
This swirl of both pleasure and pain consumes you both; you feel his cock slide within your walls and hit that sweet spot deep inside of you, and you feel yourself squeeze and slide over Gitae’s cock as if you were him.
He ruts into you like a man possessed, your legs hung over his broad shoulders like a broken doll as he fucks up into your sopping hole, almost brushing against your cervix because of the sheer size of him.
His hands grip tightly at your waist, fingers digging roughly into your hips as you squeeze and squeeze against him. His hands almost cover your entire torso, yet you can see the obscene bulge of his cock digging up at your stomach as he thrusts in and out of your pussy.
Gitae doesn’t talk, doesn’t moan except for a rare few low-toned groans. Yet, you can hear him.
Dripping all over me, you little whore.
His face dips into a crazed, lustful sneer as his hips increase pace, slamming into you almost violently as he chases his own release.
It’s a fucked-up interlacement of both your souls, pleasure and pain bridging the gap of two separated souls joined together finally, as if cradled in the essence of each other, among the stars, was the only destiny waiting for you.
Later, the haunting silence of your love would be known as something so strong that it simply wouldn’t enable you to be left peacefully entwined between one another; it became too hungry to exist as anything but a void.
Over the next few days, after the bond permanently snapped into place, you fuck almost constantly.
He has you in all sorts of positions, usually with a hand tangled in your hair and face smashed into the sheets beneath you. He likes to take you from behind like an animal, thinking and feeling with satisfaction as he sees the droll pooling against his bedsheets from your slack mouth as he fucks your fear out of you.
If there was a single good thing about this arrangement, it would be the sex. It was great.
For weeks, it was a fuck-fest of bliss. He lost the edge to his murderous tendencies, stopped seeking out other women and just focused on you. It was as if your entire beings merging into one had changed him, as if shared thoughts, emotions and visions had made him go soft on you, and only you.
The first problem was your career path. You wanted to be a lawyer, to lock people like him away. You wanted to continue your course at law school and at least finish it, even if you needed up not actually becoming a lawyer.
You even managed to convince him that you could cover for him like some corrupt mafia lawyer you would read about in your novels.
It worked for a time, more so that he’d found the idea of you covering for him amusing.
For a time, despite sometimes having to walk on eggshells (he was a cartel boss!), you could say you were happy with the arrangement. He hadn’t been on a killing spree in a while, nor used his famous axe since the two of you had fucked for the first time.
“We’re going to Korea in a few days.” His tone is clipped, final. As you look up from your laptop, your heart drops. “But I- my law classes, I need to finish law school.” Your eyes are wide and quivery, teeth biting into your bottom lip as you try not to panic.
His eye twitches. You can see it coming from a mile away. You share thought, emotions, sometimes even sight. Of course, you know what was about to happen.
He snatches the laptop from your hands, and once he places both hands at opposite ends of the machine, he tears it in two.
“How could you do that!?” You scream at him as you’re overcome by the rage he’s feeling.
He goes for your law books next, and you rush off the bed, hands clenched around the other side of the book as you try to pull it from his grasp. He snatches it away casually, yet because of the pure violence that embodies Gitae, you drop hard onto the floor, the wind knocking out of you as your vision swims and you start to feel nauseas.
He looks menacing, enraged. As if your raised voice was the one and only offence you’ll ever make against him.
He rips the book apart, and the next, and the next, and the next, until all your books, all your notes, become evidence of the crumbling life you fought so hard to build, fall in a single day.
Destroyed in only seconds.
He orders one of his men to build a fire in the middle of the compound and then grabs your clothed arm before dragging you roughly into the compound. Funnily enough, it’d been the first time you’d properly been outside in weeks.
You stand there, paralyzed, as you watch your hard, tear-earned work break into little black flakes that scatter across the wind, your tears burning a path through the fiery steam blazing across your face.
Gitae’s hold on your arm tightens, “You don’t need that pathetic career, it is no longer of any use to me. Your purpose is to serve me and watch as I take over the underworld as your energy fuels mine.”
You were to become a slave of a beastly, horrid man. A life-long, low-maintenance battery that would enhance his abilities to their truest peak.
You were no longer a functioning human being with hopes and aspirations. You were a useful tool for his walk above and among criminals.
Over the next two years, you are forced to shadow Gitae as he consolidates his power among the Korean fighters, and as he takes reign over the legacy his hateful father left behind. You can feel his childlike curiosity yet burning rage at his father, someone you’ve come to hate yourself; not only had Gitae taken after all the worst parts of him, but his own hatred had started to fuel your own.
You can feel the pleasures rushing through him as he breaks and kills each new victim. You see it and feel it through his eyes as if it was you who had committed such a heinous act.
The law codes you uttered at these moments had seared themselves into your brain. The recitals and fanatical way you memorise them in your head is the only way you’ve been able to keep your sanity over these past few years, especially after he’d destroyed all your things to do with law.
Sometimes, in the lonely hours of the night when Gitae’s away on business, you can’t help but miss him. You’re certain you love him.
Yet, no matter how hard you try, his fiendish, murderous and psychopathic thoughts drown out the noise you try to place as a static wall.
So, when you meet his brother, Jake, for the first time, you have a revelation.
That revelation was your downfall.
Gitae had dragged you with him down a dirty street you’d later know to be called ‘Big Deal’. Despite the grit of the streets, it was a stark difference to the sterile, cold walls of Gitae’s luxurious room.
Brother. Brother. Will he win or will he fail?
Not yet sound of mind to deal with Gitae’s murderous thoughts, you try to block him out.
Jake greets the two of you at the door, more relaxed after his earlier confirmation of his shared hatred for their father. You couldn’t help but feel a connection to Jake. He was only a year or two younger than you, and he made you feel warm, as if you were standing beneath the sun as the waves of the sea crash gently against the shore.
Jake becomes your brightest hope and your ultimate despair. You realise, after all this time, that Gitae is the cause for all your misfortune. Not the Resonance bond, nor the ‘First Mastery’ bullshit. No, it was being connected to a demon from the depths of hell; that was what caused your ultimate misery.
“Please, let me,” Jake says as he motions to your coat. As you shrug the material off your shoulders, you can feel and hear Gitae’s unimpressed, possessive aura cloak over you. Yet, unbothered by his older brothers posturing, he offers you a seat and places a bottle of water in front of you.
You can’t help but feel touched and the soft handling after dealing with Gitae’s abrasiveness for the past two years.
“We struggled, a while back, to protect this street,” Jake told you, hand rubbing at the back of his neck. “My friends and I loved each other enough, respected each other enough, to band together and protect this street.”
It’s here that you realise the difference between the two brothers; one fights for the freedom of his people while one fights and crushes people for power. You look at Jake and realise what you could have had.
He was the type of person who would have supported you through law school, who would have sat in the back of a courtroom during your first ever case. You could have finished law school.
You can feel Gitae’s rage on the ride back to his penthouse, his jealousy over feeling your warmth for Jake’s kindness through the bond. That was the first time he hit you.
He punishes you for a single, fleeting thought you’d had. An echo of a life you wanted yet knew you can no longer have. Gitae hates it. You aren’t supposed to have dreams and aspirations of your own.
You were supposed to want him and only him, to be consumed and so infatuated by him that only his wants and desire mattered to you, even more than your own.
When his fist strikes against your cheek, you become the abused and the abuser. You watch as his hand comes down in slow motion, eyes watering as your skin splits between his unnatural force. Bells ring across your ears, sharp static crackling as you collapse onto your knees at the aggressive blow.
Yet, you also become him as he strikes you. You feel his rage and possessiveness, feel on his hand as your cheek splits and blood brushes against his knuckles. You see how you look in his eyes; a weak, fearful little mouse beneath him. He feels you deserve this punishment because of his offence of his property daring to think of another man in a nostalgic way. You hadn’t wished for Jake, you had wished for Gitae to behave like him. To not have ruined your life.
To not have taken away your freedom.
You feel his fascination at your pain, at his realisation of experiencing being the victim through you while remaining the unstoppable aggressor. He doesn’t stop when he feels your pain, doesn’t quiver at the thought of harm coming his way through you. No, he doesn’t stop, he escalates.
After you move your quivering form from the floor to the side of the bed once he leaves, you curl up into a ball and sob.
The harsh cut across your cheek drips onto the fresh white pillow, staining the pure colour like Gitae has stained you.
Later, when you’ve both calmed down, he comes back in with an expensive knife, and places it next to your bed table. “For you. Don’t disappoint me again.” He kneels down next to your frozen form on the bed, fingers trailing not softly through your hair. “You’re quite strong to still be awake after that.”
And there goes a vicious cycle, where you do, act and speak in a way that triggers him, he beats you for it, and then leaves you with a parting gift (always a weapon of some kind) and encouraging words to forego any blip of guilt an emotionless man like him could feel.
He doesn’t confiscate the weapons, nor care that you might use one of his gifts against him some day. He welcomes they day you truly start to fight against him. He’s sure it’ll be exhilarating.
Over the next few years, in this grey area of your time with Gitae, a sick, twisted and looped power dynamic rears it’s ugly head; he hurts you to feel something other than his own coldness, rage and apathy.
Through your pain, your terror and your utmost despair, he feels what it is to be human.
Certain it couldn’t get any worse than this, you deep-dive into a long period of low-functioning depression. You’d rot your days away inside, staring out the large windows that purview the city as you daydream about the life you could have had.
There was no escaping Gitae, someone with supernatural prowess and a multitude of underworld connections. You couldn’t even escape his direct, personal orbit, let alone that. You were tied to him by a twisted bond, cursed onto your soul by a set of malicious stars called fate.
While you were despairing, Gitae was obsessing. His drug to humanity was becoming more and more like him. You were starting to become an empty shell, an unemotional vessel for his power.
He didn’t like the lack of reaction. He didn’t like pleasuring himself upon an unfeeling corpse of a person.
So, he twisted your despicable situation into something akin to actual hell.
You know when he thinks it, feel when he goes through with it. Down to the very second, you feel when you no longer become and observer. You become a prisoner of Gitae’s sexual acts, trapped mentally between his body and the women he betrays you with, and you crumble beneath the sensory violation.
As you sit in your little nook by the window, gazing longingly at the twinkling stars above, you feel a sudden, unprompted surge of heat that isn’t your own. Your skin flushes with the ghost of sweat belonging to a body miles away from you. Your body betrays you, unbeknownst to feeling the pleasure of your partner when not in the throws of passions with yourself.
You vision stutters with images of the sky and the image of Gitae’s hand’s clenched around the waist of curvaceous woman. You hear his impulses, the loud, thumping bass of his desire for her which he shows in his own predatory, hungry way. His satisfaction drains out of him and latches onto you like a leech, bleeding into your brain like a vicious infection.
His thoughts drown out your own, like a static hum you can’t turn off at the back of your head.
As your heart begins to race in sync with his own, and you start to feel phantom sensations of touch upon your skin as if you were the one being held by the woman, you become stained by Gitae’s infidelity.
Your Resonance bond tries to harmonize you both, forcing the mimic of his pleasure over you as if trying to bridge the wretched scar sliced across your souls because of his betrayal. Nausea claws at your throat as you drop to your knees, nails raking damagingly over your skin as you try to rip his pleasure away from your body.
Tears bleed down your cheeks as you sob and gag, violated and disgusted at what he’s forcing upon you. Gitae knows you’re watching, knows you’re feeling every thrust as a rip to your own soul, but he feels no guilt, feels no remorse at what he’s doing to you.
Yet, because tour nerves a firing with his pleasure, you feel the extreme heat of his arousal as if it’s your own.
You become the witness and the participant of your own heartbreak.
You can see the tangle of sheets through his eyes, and the silhouette of the woman he’d betrayed you with.
You realise then that he’d done this on purpose. He’d purposely not tried to block you out. He wanted you to know, as if this was his way of finally stifling your presence at the back of his mind.
His fidelity, the single strand of hope keeping you going, vanishes within a single night.
A layer of cold, dark despair settles over you like a finality; he’d used this woman to rid himself of any remaining emotional connection between the two of you. You were no longer his liability, his partner, his soulmate.
You were just a tool for him to use, and when he finally pulls away from the connection, and a calm static washes over you, you’re left in a shivering heap on the cold tiled floor as the phantom scent of cheap perfume and natural musk cling to your skin.
As you gaze at your quivering hands on the cold floor, you make a first and only promise to yourself.
I hate him. I hate him. I hate him.
It takes a single hour for Gitae to return, the sound of your bedroom doors clicking closed making you flinch. Your skin still crawls with the phantom sensations of his mental violation, yet after scrubbing the other woman off his skin to replace it with expensive smelling soap, he still can’t scrub the memory of his infidelity from your skin.
“Good, you’re awake,” He murmurs, kneeling down next to your quivering form. You can feel his mood; he’s satisfied, surprisingly energetic. He doesn’t offer you an apology, just slowly rakes his fingers through your hair.
He chuckles, hand pawing at your head. “It was a mistake.”
He shrugs, patting your hair down as gently as someone like him can.
“It won’t happen again. I had a… revelation of sorts. I still need something from you, and this was the only way to get you out of that un-tasty state you’ve been in for months.”
“You hit me, multiple times!” You hissed at him, raging boiling in your veins. “You’re the reason I’m like this- you took away everything, my law books, my life. And then you hit me because I mused over what life would have been like for me if I hadn’t been forcefully stuck to you.”
“And then you cheated on me, something that goes against the very foundations of Resonance bonds, something you would have known if you weren’t an illiterate monster!”
He’s pissed now. “You are a tool for me to take of the underworld. Nothing more. And you’ll soon be a vessel for me heir,” he snarls down at you, his rage filled eyes peering into your own as if he wants to rip into your skull and pull the only good thing about you out; the part of your soul connected to his.
He drags you up by the arm and the moment his flesh brushes against yours, your bond flares. Your disgust, fear and hate don’t matter to the bond. He’s your fuel and you are his. Your spiked heart rate slows into the low thrum, your raging nerves calming into a serene void. The bind forces you to relax, forces your body to betray your mind in his proximity.
He pushes you toward the bedroom, ignoring as you try to pull away from his grasp, but the link between your souls betrays you. You can feel his hunger for you, can feel as your nerves thrum to the drum of his rhythm. A sickening, involuntary heat flies through you as he pushes you onto the bed.
Tears escape your lids once more as your mind screams; No, no! Not after what you just did, not after what I just felt you do.
Yet, despite your internal protests, your body has already bended to his will, your breath hitching loud enough to betray you physically to him.
As he forces himself upon you, roughly and with no thought to your lack of sexual consummation over the last few months, he treats you as a vessel for his biological continuation.
Your mental link swirls around you both, forcing you to feel his possessiveness over you as a tool for his legacy, not a partner. Yet, your body still responds to his as you convulse with pleasure in his arms, nails racking down his back as he hits the spot he knows will finish you.
“This child will be my legacy, another source of power to continue on my succession.” His words are daunting, and despite being in the throws of pleasure, you fear for the future of your child. Used by his father and unwanted by his mother.
As you come back down from your high, and as his heavy arm drapes across you like a shackle, you feel yourself mentally disappear for good.
You watch blankly and from afar as your son, Hijoon, trains with Gitae.
He’d succeeded with his legacy goal, and despite the relief you felt at Hijoon not taking after father, he was starting to show Gitae’s violent tendencies in the more recent years.
Yet, despite how hard Gitae tries to quash any sort of relationship between you and your son, your depression (and therefore mentally clocked-out state) and Hijoon’s strive to impress you, means that he has absolutely no control over your bond.
You count your blessings that he turned out more like Jake than his father.
Later, as you look over your old law school acceptance letter (the only sheet you’d been able to salvage from Gitae), now wrinkled and yellow with age, you wait for Gitae to return, smelling of women and gunpowder.
After you mentally clocked out from Gitae and instead focused all your time and energy on your son, he stopped seeking you out, something you were immensely grateful for.
You couldn’t even bare to look at him most days.
A knock comes sounds against the door.
“Come in,” you say quietly as you fiddle with your necklace, eyes wandering the lake below the hill Gitae’s estate was built on.
“Ma,” Hijoon says as he comes to stand next to you. You smile up at him before patting the space beside you on the nook. “Sit, Hijoon.”
“Is there something you need?” You ask as you brush your hand against his hair. He swallows, and you know he’s about to ask something he’s not supposed to.
“Why do you stay with him? Even after all his does to you?”
You sigh, eyes flickering back out the window. With a deep breath, you take Hijoon’s hands into your own.
“It is not love, Hijoon. It is biology. Has your father taught you about Resonance bonds?” you ask.
“I know it’s like a soul bond thing? Like the soulmates myth but it gives fighters a power boost or something like that. But I thought you were supposed to love each other for that to happen?” Your boy looks genuinely confused.
You feel blessed that you’d managed to keep him away from Gitae for so long. You had managed to shield him from Gitae’s unmoral stance on the people for long enough to teach him proper empathy and morality; not enough for it to make him a pushover, but just enough that he wouldn’t turn out to be anything like his father.
“It’s a myth from generations before Gen 0. The bond, once fully completed, allows for fighters like your father to become truly invincible. I’m like a battery for him to drain so he has infinite power and energy.”
He frowns. “But I see all the others in the first and second generations with their partners. I assume the majority of them have these bonds since it re-appeared around their prime. They all seem to love each other so much – I’ve seen Jake with his wife, he loves her to bits and seems to get all the same power ups as father does?”
You smile sadly as you cradle his cheek with your palm. “I was simply unlucky,” you say simply.
“But he shouldn’t treat you that way, why do you let him walk all over you?” he argues before wincing. “I’m sorry.”
“See, you’re already a better man than your father could ever be,” you tease. You let out a tired sigh. “You know, I was quite hopeful when I first met your father. Deep down, I thought it would end like one of those mafia novels I used to love reading. That he’d fall in love with me, respect me. But I was wrong.”
You let out a bitter smile. “Did you know I was going to be a Lawyer?” Hijoon shakes his head.
“I spent so long worrying about what to do with my future. I kept putting it off and off and off until the very last moment. I took a gap year to figure out what I wanted to do and there’s nothing I regret more.” You voice starts to quiver as you let go of your sons’ hands. You reach up to squeeze at your neck as your vision blurs.
“But I never got to finish law school. I never got to have fun galantines nights or sleepovers in our uni apartment,” you’re sobbing now, the unemotional wall you’d put up for so long crumbling beneath the harsh gale-force of your pain and regret. “I never got to live.”
“Your auntie was simply luckier than I was.” Your chuckle is watery. You reach out to brush down his hair again. “Don’t let your father destroy you like he destroyed me.”
“I love you Ma,” he tells you as he wraps his arms around you.
“I love you too,” you reply softly.
The next few months hit you where it hurts: and then comes the two times he almost destroys you and then the one time he does.
The first time it happens, you don’t really see it coming. Gitae had started to become increasingly unstable in his actions; he was getting old and past his prime. Despite this, you weren’t expecting him to use Hijoon so soon.
He drags your son to one of his underworld deals and forces him to partake in an execution of an enemy in order to prove his worth.
You didn’t know until Hijoon came to you later that night shaking and covered in blood. You could see Gitae’s genes trying to fight up to the surface of your kind son.
That was you first breaking point.
“How could you make our fourteen-year-old son kill someone you fucking bastard!” You are enraged; you are screaming. And he’s finding your theatrics increasingly unamusing.
Gitae’s fist connects with your face before you realise it’s even coming. The impact is just as painful as the first time, and the recoil in your bones as you drop to the floor flings the wind out of you.
“How dare you speak to me like that,” he snarls down at you as he gets to his knees to wrap your hair around his fist. As he drags you across the floor by your hair, your hands go up to clench around his wrist in attempt to pry him off.
Gitae snarls again as you’re thrown into the bar in the corner of the room, his eyes alight with rage as he watches the glass bottles shatter around you. You hear his utter disdain at you calling him a bastard.
Storming out of the room, Gitae slams the door behind him as he makes his way outside of the estate. You’re left there quivering on the floor in a bloody heap.
“Ma!” Hijoon comes in with wide eyes, his growing form rushing over to you as he sees the blood marring you skin and the bruises starting to form across your sallow cheeks.
As your own young son fixes up the mess caused by his father, you have your own little revelation.
I need to disappear. To stop him, to get away from him- the only way is to die.
So, after Hijoon leaves, after you’re left alone properly, without guards, for the first time in years, you plan.
I’m so sorry, Hijoon. I’m so sorry I brought you into this world with such a twisted father. I’m so sorry.
As you walk into your shared bedroom, you tie a bedsheet around the hanging light, move up the bed, tie the sheet around your neck, you take a single deep breath before jumping off the mattress.
Please. Let me die. Please.
You can feel Gitae’s panic through the bond, his visceral fear as he feels your life force dim away from his own.
NO! Don’t die – I still need you!
Your vision starts to dim as your body sways beneath the strands of moonlight invading through the windows. The fabric digs suffocatingly into your neck as you wheeze for air.
You barely feel the vibration of the door being ripped from it’s hinged.
You don’t feel as Gitae rips you down from the light, not when he compresses against your chest.
Until you’re looking up into his panicked eyes.
No. Why-why didn’t it work?
That was the second time he almost destroyed you.
A year passes after your failed suicide attempt.
You’ve become even more of an empty shell the before, finding it difficult to focus, to not zone out and be stuck inside your own head.
You can feel the rage brimming beneath Hijoon like a plague. He wants to kill his father for what he’d done to you.
You’re afraid he’s dimming into something you can’t shine your light on; you’re hopeless against dispersing his darkness with your light. It seems like he’s slipping away from you more and more every day.
The estate chatter starts to dim as the last Gitae’s guests leave after the party’s over.
You know what’s coming. He’s fired up after celebrating a massive win to do with the underworld.
You can’t stand it, not for another second. You can see the ruination of your son in front of your own eyes. You won’t stand it for a second longer.
You open the bond completely, for the first time in over a decade. You’d muffled and twisted that bond into nothingness, as much as you could, for such a long time.
His mind is weak because of it.
You attack the bond. As you project up every single hit, violation and betrayal that’s existed within you for the last sixteen years, sizzling and burning with rage, you mould it into a single solid ball before thrusting it through the bond.
Gitae feels every blip of your life with him; the nausea, the depression, and the pure, unfiltered hatred.
STOP. He screams through the bond as his anchor breaks and his hardwire and mastery start to shatter.
You had been fuelling his strength for so long, so to feel himself slowly lose it…
Before he comes at you in his typical fit of rage, you fiddle with the dagger tucked into the back of your shorts. The very same one he gifted to you after the first time he hit you.
He lunges right at you, his hands enclosing around your throat viciously before he digs his fingers into your throat and tears.
But, not before you’re able to grab the dagger and slice it through the side of his torso.
You pull the dagger out and stab at his flesh over and over again, until your blood fills your throat and pours all over the floor, and his torso is a fleshy mess of hanging meat.
Yet, despite that, it does not kill him. Because of the years of endurance mastery, your stabs do not kill him. You start to feel hopeless as your last lifeblood drips away from you.
Yet, he does not escape his fate. He feels as your heart stops, as you choke and suffocate on your own blood.
Your soul bond snaps and rips apart between you, affronted and enraged that a resonant has found the gall to kill the very soul given to them by the stars. The neural tremor of your souls being ripped apart so abruptly causes Gitae to go into shock, and he keels over as his heart thumps to a dangerous beat, before it finally stops.
Jake lets out a stuttered exhale as he takes in the sight in front of him.
His nephew sits in the blood of his hateful brother and… you.
He’d tried so hard to get you away from him. To free you from the shackles forced onto you by his brother.
Hijoon doesn’t acknowledge his keeled over, dead father. No.
He stares brokenly down at the bloodied corpse cradled in his arms.
Hijoon’s eyes remain broken and enraged even as Jake takes him into big deal. When he adopts him with his wife and they try to teach him about the romance of Gapryong Kim, it does not help.
Hijoon does not care for the man who made his evil father.
Eventually, Hijoon does take to his uncle and the Big Deal streets. He learns an echo of that romance, but at the back of his mind, only a single strive keeps him going.
I’ll destroy everything you ever cared for, father. That underworld you worked so hard to rule? As it’s rightful heir, I’ll destroy it for destroying my mother.
Later, as Hijoon becomes an adult and stands at the seat of power that rules over the underworld, he begins his quest: he burns the underworld to the ground and becomes the vengeance his mother never got to be.
Finally, once Hijoon stands over the burning remains of a forgotten era, he pays his respects to his fallen mother.
“The law prevails, Ma,” he chuckles as he places a single tulip to your grave (your favourite flower), and a single leather-bound folder. A law doctorate.
“I finished it for you, because you never got to.” He places a gentle hand across the gravestone. “The doctorate?” he can’t help but chuckle. “Because you would have gone as far as the world would have let you if it were up to you.” He runs a ragged hand through his hair, a similar colour to your own.
He turns away into the darkness.
“It’s quiet enough for you to sleep in peace now.”
The Moral of the Story: When two opposite souls are forced together to mirror the darkest depths of the human soul. Here, fate became a cage rather than a gift. The only way to truly end a bond forged in possession and use instead of love and peace is to silence the heart tethered to it.
