To My First Love, With Regret - 60

He’s walking already. And now, he’s speaking.

Whenever the sound of the child’s happy laughter reached her, Eve would think: Though my love was a foolish mistake, your birth was surely a necessity planned by God.

Like a sick person gaining the will to live by watching a young sapling grow, she gradually fell in love with that small life.

So, how could she ever hate him?

My little one.

Except for those days when she was intoxicated by her own foolish mistakes, she had lived a life far removed from the emotion of jealousy. Yet, whenever Chantal called the child by that name, Eve invariably became a prisoner to that unfamiliar feeling.

She straightened her body from where it had been leaning against the windowsill.

Little one, my little one. She could never bring herself to call him that aloud, but she decided she must go to Tony, who would be nursing his wounded feelings alone by now, and hold him tight in her arms. She would comfort him as a sister, if not a mother—and through him, she would find her own comfort as well.

But Tony had already found solace from someone else.

—No matter how far you fly a kite, you’ll never lose it as long as you hold onto a single string.

Tony passed beneath the wide-open window. He was side-by-side with Ethan Fairchild, who held a plane-shaped kite in his hand.

—Let’s go to the cliff and fly it!

—The wind is too strong there. Test it here first before we go.

Anthony Sherwood, there you go again.

His attempts to break his grounding whenever he found a spare moment had become a ‘cute’ sort of deviance. In truth, all his rebellions felt trivial now—at least compared to the fact that he had opened his heart to a man he should never associate with.

What parent in the world would sit idly by while a gang leader associated with their child? Especially when that gang leader was a man who considered their family his mortal enemy.

Even if Ethan harbored no ill will and was simply playing with the child out of a passing whim, Eve could not let her guard down. An enemy was an enemy. A relationship with rotten roots could not last, and its end was bound to be grim. In the end, Tony would be the one hurt. Just as she had been.

And even at this very moment, Eve was being hurt.

Tony, that man abandoned you. I am the one who protected you.

This incredibly shallow bitterness soon vanished into a guilt as deep as the sea.

She couldn’t blame a child who knew no better. Was this not a house without a single friend his age to play with, nor an adult to teach him the world of men in a man’s language?

A man who had experienced both the back alleys of the world and the battlefields. Ethan Fairchild was the first strong man Tony had ever met in his life. It was only natural that the boy couldn’t resist falling under his charm.

I, too, once had a time when I was so blinded by that man that I could see nothing else.

The only reason she was currently butchering her own heart by recalling those days—days so brilliant they were painful—was because his appearance today so closely resembled the Ethan she had once loved, before he had changed.

Standing in the center of the vast parterre garden, the man handed the kite to the child. Tony ran until the string pulled taut and then let go.

—Wow!

As the kite caught the wind and soared into the sky, the child’s cheers echoed innocently throughout the garden.

Tony ran back to Ethan, his pale blond hair—so like his father’s—fluttering like sunlight.

Ethan was so incredibly tender as he handed the reel to the child and taught him how to let out and wind in the string. It was a cruel play-act that showed Eve exactly what kind of love Tony would have received from his father had he not left.

—Agh, no!

Tony’s cry shattered Eve’s hollow illusion. The kite, swaying in the wind, had caught on the top of a cypress tree at the edge of the garden.

Back when those cypresses were much shorter and kites wouldn’t get caught—back when Eve was Tony’s age—Ethan used to make kites for her by hand. It was Ethan who had taught Eve how to fly them, too.

—Ah!

As the kite was pulled high by a strong gust, she felt the phantom sensation of hands catching her waist as she lost her balance.

—Lady… a kite doesn’t fight the wind; it rides it. Feel the wind with your fingertips and let it out gently….

—Like this?

—Yes, just like that. You have quite a talent for kite-flying. Though it’s a useless talent for a Lady.

Once again, she fell helplessly into a sad vision. The scene before her eyes created the illusion that childhood friends had grown up to be a married couple, passing down the same memories to their beloved child.

If the past hadn’t gone awry, this would have been our present.

Even though she was in the process of reclaiming everything that had been stolen since that day, Eve sank deeper—ever deeper—into the abyss of loss, feeling that she had lost everything forever.

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Though she had paid a steep price—suffering a severe emotional fever for peeking at another version of today called ‘What If’—Eve was able to wake from that fleeting dream and return to reality much more easily than expected.

Mainly because Ethan had personally slapped her back into that cold reality.

—This is the status of the assets you inquired about.

She had commissioned a private investigator to track the assets Robert Kallas had embezzled under borrowed names. Contrary to her expectation that it would take a long time, the report came back in just ten days. That speed had felt ominous, and for good reason.

—They are all currently registered under this name.

Ethan Fairchild.

An uncrowned king who reigned above the law. When the name of that notorious gang leader appeared, even the gutsiest investigator had no choice but to think about backing out.

—I’m sorry to say it, but even I can’t touch this anymore. In fact, no one will be able to touch it. I know it’s a disappointment, My Lady, but why don’t you just give up now?

We’ll see about that, Eve scoffed inwardly.

This wasn’t a warning to stay away. It was an invitation. He had ostentatiously written his name all over her property to tell her that if she wanted her assets back, she had to come to him.

Eve decided to accept the invitation immediately.

It had been a long time since Ethan Fairchild had turned the game room of White Cliff Hall into his gang’s hideout. The moment she opened the door, Eve frowned at the drinking party taking place in broad daylight.

His subordinates—who couldn’t hide the fact that they were mobsters even in military uniforms—lost their smiles and tensed up the moment they saw Eve. It was quite unlike the mindless thugs she had imagined.

Sometimes they acted like ruffians and picked fights with the male servants, but strangely, they never even directed a joke at the women. It was particularly bizarre how they avoided Eve as if she were a landmine.

The man leaning over the billiard table noticed the unusual atmosphere among his men a beat late. When his eyes met Eve’s, he acknowledged her only by tilting the cigarette dangling from his lips before turning his gaze back to the tip of his cue.

Crack.

The short, dry sound of impact echoed like a gunshot. The white ball, fired from the tip of Ethan’s cue, pierced the heart of the pyramid like a single bullet. Cracks formed in the perfectly arranged formation, and the balls let out rhythmic screams as they scattered like shrapnel. A few luckily rolled into their ‘graves.’

He handed the cue to a subordinate without even checking to see if the balls dropped into the pockets. Walking toward Eve, he roughly swept back the blond hair that had fallen over his forehead. The smile visible beneath the momentary shadow of his hand was intolerably contemptible.

—Ah, well now. You should have told me you were coming. I’ve had quite a bit to drink; I don’t know if I can even stand.

The crude joke was the language of a thug, but his subordinates didn’t laugh at all. It was their unwritten law that whenever their young leader brought up his first love, they were never to laugh—even if it sounded like a joke.

I won’t be shaken anymore by your pathetic provocations to drag me into your mire. Eve didn’t even blink at his lewd remark, aiming straight for the main point.

—Since you tortured Robert Kallas for a long time instead of killing him instantly, I thought it was for revenge. Was it just for money? Whether it’s a dead leech or one still drawing breath, you’re both equally pathetic.

Eve belittled him as a ‘leech’ who only cared for other people’s money. Ethan pulled out a fresh cigarette and let out a sneer.

—Acting all high and mighty over a pittance that wouldn’t even satisfy a leech’s appetite.

In the ten years that had passed, their positions in the pyramid of wealth had been completely reversed. The money that woman was struggling to reclaim was, to Ethan, nothing more than a single coin dropped at his feet. It wasn’t worth the effort to bend down and pick up, let alone serve as a commission.

Nevertheless, the reason he had not declined the worthless effort was, first, as a personal revenge against the accomplice who had framed him and driven his grandfather to his death; and second, to uphold the ironclad rule of his organization: anyone who dares touch the Master’s money loses their hands.