“OW! Fucking hell, that hurts!”

“Stop yelling so much. You’re going to bother the other people here. I thought you were an adu~lt.”

Before Sigmarus could retort to her teasing remark, Grace yanked the last thread of messy stitching from his chest wound. Stinging pain assaulted him, drowning out his other senses. As if the disinfectant spray didn’t hurt enough, she brutally tore out the stitching, too! Eyes clamped shut, he drew in a sharp breath, held it for several seconds, then slowly exhaled. Brows deeply wrinkled, he groaned. How could this girl be ferocious enough to pull it out in one go?

“Couldn’t you have been more gentle?”

“It’s better to get all the pain out of the way in one go, right?”

“Where’d you hear that?” Sigmarus grumbled.

“Urm…” Grace fiddled with the tweezers and needle for the new stitching while answering with a somber smile and nostalgic tone, “My mom always did stuff like this for my dad. He was a scavenger, so he got hurt a lot. When she taught me how to do it, she told me it was better to get it done fast... and she also didn’t like hearing him whine.”

Sigmarus sighed. He couldn’t bring himself to retort after that. Instead, he silently prepared himself for more pain.

* * *

While Sigmarus was suffering under Grace’s treatment, the woman who had previously confronted him outside the brothel stood in front of the Madame’s door with her lips slanted into a frown. She knocked lightly and waited for permission to enter.

“Who is it,” Madame Lee tiredly asked from within.

“It’s Leena.”

“Oh. Come in.”

Once inside, Leena saw the Madame sitting on the edge of her bed. One hand covered her yawning mouth.

“What do you need, Leena?” Madame Lee asked after yawning.

“Well, a couple customers complained about some noise from one of the other rooms.”

Rolling her eyes, Madame Lee quietly said, “Noise is normal. They can get over it. You wouldn’t come to me for just that, right?”

Leena nodded. “It’s because the noise is coming from Gra- Valerie’s room.”

Bolting up from the bed, Madame Lee rushed over to change out of her nightgown while worriedly asking, “Is she alright?”

“Umm… It’s the guy who came for her this morning who’s yelling like he got injured.”

“Excuse me?” Halting midway through removing her nightgown, Madame Lee stared at Leena for a moment. Then, she mumbled, “Did she bite him or something?”

“I don’t know, but it’s inappropriate for me to check. She’s in room nineteen today.”

“Alright. I’ll go down to find out if everything’s alright in a moment.”

With that, Leena nodded and left the room. Madame Lee hurriedly threw on a simple dress which was easy to put on. She counted the seconds ticking by. Once fully dressed, she grabbed her keyring from her desk, stepped into the hallway, and hurried downstairs to room nineteen. At first, she was going to barge in, but then thought doing so would be rude if nothing was wrong. So, she took a deep breath and knocked.

“Valerie, it’s me. May I interrupt?”

Beyond the door, she heard something fall onto the floor, followed by someone scrambling about. No matter what was going on inside, she doubted it was anything she hadn’t seen before, and interrupting a customer could always be compensated later. What mattered most was Grace’s safety. If someone got hurt, Grace would be the one to suffer most. As such, she unlocked the door and, anxious about what she might find, slowly pushed it open.

When the door fully opened, what she saw stopped her in her tracks. Apparently, she really hadn’t seen everything the world had to offer. What kind of situation was this? The girl she had been worried about was fumbling about on the floor, picking up some simple medical supplies scattered about and placing them back in a metal box which had obviously fallen off the table a moment ago. Aside from that, a man wearing only a pair of ragged gym shorts was nonchalantly sitting on the edge of the table with his back to the door, completely unperturbed by the intrusion. He calmly turned his head toward her and raised a brow. His lean musculature briefly caught the Madame’s eye, but his unique white hair pulled her attention away from it. Not only was his hair white, but his eyes were too, though slightly darker. She could count on one hand the number of young people she had met with that mutation. Now that she looked more closely, he looked somewhat familiar.

While Madame Lee was busy trying to comprehend the situation, Grace stood up and awkwardly fidgeted while looking at her.

“Umm… Did you need something, Madame Lee?”

“Oh, sorry. Leena said a few people complained about loud noises, so I wanted to make sure you were alright.”

Grace immediately glared at the white-haired man and said, “I told you you were too loud.”

“Not my fault,” he placidly replied, only briefly glancing at her before returning his gaze to Madame Lee with brows furrowed as though trying to recall something important.

The moment she heard the man’s soft-spoken but blunt words, Madame Lee blinked. It couldn’t be him, right? There was absolutely no way. However, the more she looked at the man, the more he resembled that skinny underclassman who always used to get bullied in school. Before she could decide if it was the same person or not, she finally noticed the grotesque gashes on his forearm and chest. At least that explained the medical box, but why was Grace helping him? Perhaps they knew each other?

Noticing that Madame Lee and the man were staring at each other with a weird gaze, Grace frowned, poked the stitching needle into the man’s chest wound, and grumbled, “The Madame isn’t available, Mister Sigmarus.”

“OW! Fucking hell, you damn brat! At least warn me first!”

The moment she heard the man’s name, Madame Lee’s heart rate shot through the roof. Almost without thinking, she backpedaled and slammed the door shut. She pressed her fingers against her temples and rushed back upstairs. Her face contorted with frustration, anxiousness, and embarrassment. There was no way two guys with such a unique mutation would have the same name.

Dumbfounded due to seeing a person she never should have seen again, her heart hammered with shame for the first time in years. For a long time, she had forced all of her memories into the furthest corner of her mind in order to avoid the pain. Now, seeing a vaguely familiar face caused countless memories to resurface of the days when she first got pulled down into this hellhole. The fragile gates she had erected around her emotions started to crack.

Before long, she plopped down on her own bed and curled up into a ball while tightly hugging one of her pillows. First, she recalled the few times she encountered Sigmarus. Then, she remembered her family. She remembered her friends. Just one face was all it took to remind her of everything she had lost. Tears streamed from her eyes for the first time in years as she tried to force the memories back down. The always elegant Madame Lee quickly crumbled into the broken girl she tried to hide deep within.