Somehow, this novel went completely ignored? Well, I don’t have a copy yet either, but between the preview on and scanning part of it, we at least have the prologue available. Death and tearjerker warning.

Prologue (pages 9-24)

My living with him had lasted for 2 weeks and 1 day.

About what I expected it to last, all things considered. I didn’t know nor did ever really want to know more about myself, but I did sense that this body of mine was about to die.

To be exact, the medical opinion was that I had 2 weeks left, so you could say I was given an entire extra day to live. Given by whom? That, I didn’t know either, nor did I want to know, for that matter.

But in any case, it was on that extra day that I had decided to place a certain request with them.

Backstreets were always wet.

With saliva, blood, semen, tears, vomit, excreta, cheap whiskey from cracked bottles, and all kinds of other stale liquids the main streets wanted to hide away. Stuffed and littered with those things, back alleys were always wrapped in that humid atmosphere.

On that night, right cheek pushed against damp paving, I tried to breathe as quietly as possible. I, too, made a contribution to the moist air around, wetting the back alley with the blood from my nose.

At the time, I was thinking that I would part with my life before the sun was up tomorrow’s morning. I didn’t feel especially sad about it. Dying unknown to anyone in some nameless back alley no different from any other anywhere else, was not an entirely bad end to a life. At least it was more normal than any other end my imagination could paint.

I closed my eyes.

Maybe I dozed off for a while or simply couldn’t feel the flow of time properly with my head so hazy, I didn’t really know. Either way, just as I was about to let my dimming consciousness slip away, I heard a voice that forced me to drag it back.

“Hey, young lady. You’ll catch a cold if you sleep in a place like this?”

I gave an involuntary shiver. Even my best case death scenario - as little as that ‘best’ was -  was not to be granted to me, huh?

Even my eyelashes felt heavy like lead. When I managed to pry my eyelids open with difficulty, what I saw was a man’s face.

That face, the left eye sporting an eyepatch, was unfamiliar. And you always gotta be wary of unfamiliar faces. But then again, seeing a familiar face would only plunge me into depths of despair, so it was better that way.

To me, there was only one person I could trust. Only one person in this whole world. If it wasn’t him, then it was all the same from there. Gotta resist.

What, still, even now?

Now, what was happening sure more resembled a comedy than a tragedy at that point, but I still folded my arms that hurt like they were coming clean off, and crawled, dragging my body that positively felt as heavy as a cloth bag thoroughly soaked in water, away. I writhed on the stone pavement, my mind urging me to put some distance between myself and this man, even if it was just another few inches.

“Oh come on, no need to be so on edge. I don’t know what happened to you, but it’s OK, I won’t bite.” The man’s voice, too, was moist.

The 10 inches I, enduring the violent pain, managed to put between him and myself he closed with half a step, rendering my effort futile. With my body falling apart like that, I had nowhere to escape. As the barest means of resistance still available to me, I settled for lifting my chin and glowering at him. And that’s when I had the first really good look at his face.

Long ash blond hair, messy at the back. Through part of it hanging down his cheek you could see the moonlight. Pretty, was my honest impression. That said, it wasn’t like his hair being pretty was going to help me any, of course.

“It’s just that it’s gonna be a problem if I let you die here. Bad for business. This is right in front of my shop, you see.”

It was hard to tell if there was malice underlying that superficially smiling face with a 5 o'clock shadow. While I was busy trying to determine if there was, his right arm sneaked under my thighs.

“Ah,” I could only yelp as I was gathered up in his arms like some old useless rag.

Trying to twist my body, I clawed at his neck. My index and middle fingers did succeed in piercing his skin, drawing blood. Said blood looked black in the moonlight.

It had to hurt, but his expression didn’t change. He still wore that light smile, like nothing had happened.

“What are you planning to do with me?” I asked, not forgetting to glare daggers at him.

He stared at me wide-eyed, as if in surprise. A heartbeat later, he smiled.

“Hee, ain’t your voice cute.”
“Answer.”

He started walking, carrying me as he was in his arms. Slowly but with big steps.

“Don’t make me out more cruel than I am. I’m Worick. And who are you?”
“What do you want from me?”

The man who introduced himself as Worick sighed and smiled again.

“For starters, I want to move you away from my shop’s front door.”

“I can’t exactly just dump you on other people’s doorstep either, now can I. Besides, young lady, your voice is really charming. I wanna talk to you a bit more.”

His intentions were beyond deciphering. If he just wanted to kill me, surely he could’ve done so already.

Did the Family request this man to capture me alive? If so, it was strange that he didn’t bother to restrain me, or at least prepare a car or something. In the first place, he didn’t so much as point a gun at me, how absurd was that?

I positively sucked at this kind of games. I didn’t have nearly enough experience for it. But at the same time, showing weakness was also out of question.

I gulped down the accumulated saliva. And immediately dreaded he heard it. Gotta say something.

“Alright, then show me to your shop.”

If nothing, avoiding being brought back to the Family was the priority. If I was up only against this one man, maybe I could still run away somehow. If I rested for a bit and got my limbs move like I wanted them to for at least 5 seconds, it could still work out.

His gait showed no sign of stopping as he peered down at me. His face, dark when backlit by the moonlight, wore a carefree smile.

“But of course. After the date, that is.”

I admit that for a second I watched the expression on his face in a fascinated daze. Except when I relaxed in his arms, it was more because of my body hitting the limit of how much exhaustion it could take than anything else.

I decided to let myself simply rest for a couple of minutes. Some of my strength would return, and I would try to shake his arms off.

The moment I had settled on that course of action, my eyelids felt unbearably heavy, and I shut them close. Drowsiness enveloped me. No way, you can’t, my spirit still tried to resist. Except I still did end up falling asleep in the arms of a complete stranger. I could only curse my own childishness.

In the dark, all I could feel was the warmth of his arms and his scent. He smelled of women’s perfume. And not of one kind either. Numerous, countless. They all mingled on this man’s body and soaked into his skin. Somehow, it was a smell that brought sadness.

Sinking deep into the murky swampy waters of sleep, I remembered something. When Worick smiled, it wasn’t my face that he was looking at. It was the plain old metal tag hanging around my neck and laying on my chest.

I didn’t see any dreams.

The next time when my consciousness resurfaced, I found myself lying on a snow-white sheet on a simple but clean bed. The morning sun I had never expected to see again was shining through the window and I even heard the chirping of a wagtail.

I also felt surprisingly good, which confused the hell out of me. Sure, my head still ached with the grating, creaking kind of pain, but when I tried to lift my arm, it moved, and when I repeated the same with my leg, it did, too. I took a very deep breath and let it out. If this kept up, maybe my body would hold out for 2 more weeks. That was the hunch I got.

As previously, I wasn’t restrained with anything. In the room, a few more beds were lined up, but no one else was around. I had a thought that if I acted now, maybe I could run away, but at the same time a certain realization dawned on me. At the very least, this place had no connection of any sort to the Family. There was no way the Family that had me working for them would have something like clean white bedsheets. In which case, it was hard to imagine a place that could be safer than this one.

Without anything that had to be done and without any ideas on what I wanted to do, I simply stared at the ceiling.

After a long while, I heard talking voices coming from the base of the stairs found in the corner of the room. They were quiet, but I could hear them just fine.

“Nothing really can be done?” That voice belonged to that man, Worick.

“I see. Thank you, as always.”

“But she’s still alive.”

“Mn, 'kay, will do.”

With that, the conversation had ended. One of them - hard to tell which - sighed. One set of footsteps ascended the stairs.

For a second, my fingers closed around the tag on my chest.

By all rights, I wasn’t human. Legally speaking, a sub-species of humankind, but still a being different from a Normal. A Twilight, as they called us.

Footsteps were coming closer, and I shut my eyes close. The sound of them climbed the stairs, resounded against the floor of the room and stopped at my bedside.

I figured from the smell that the person standing there was Worick. He didn’t make an attempt to speak up.

Annoyed, I opened my eyes again.

“Did I wake you?” Worick was smiling the same superficial smile as yesterday.

“A clinic. Run by a middle-aged grumpypants named Theo for a living, although he barely scraps by. But he’s not one to rat it out to mean jealous adults if you bring a charming girl here.”
“Do I look like a girl to you?”

It was a question out of pure curiosity. When I looked in the mirror, the youngest I’d give the face reflected there was 30.

Worick cocked his head to the side slightly.

“Your voice sounds like a young girl’s. And your face looks like a girl’s who’s barely reached the threshold of adulthood.”

That put a sarcastic smile on my lips. It was like realizing that the outside didn’t match the inside and being pointed out just that.

“How are you feeling?”

“Good to hear. Then let’s go. I got the discharge permission for you from the doc.”

“To my office. I promised to show it to you yesterday, remember?”

Now that I thought about it, true, we talked about something like that yesterday.

Planting my right hand on the bedsheet, I was able to get up somehow. Worick tried to help me, but I ignored him and planted my feet on the floor. But when I made an attempt to rise up and stand on them, sharp pain exploded in my head, making me involuntary groan. Unable to comply further, my body folded in two, collapsing.

I braced myself, fully expecting to hit the floor, but before I did, Worick had propped me. He gathered me in his arms once again, just like yesterday. It was driven home to me then that the very thought of my getaway being somehow possible was but an illusion.

“You’re simply tired, young lady. You shouldn’t push yourself too much right now. You’ll get better in no time.”

I smiled despite myself. It had been a long time since I was able to smile like that.

“Liar.”

“I was awake earlier.”

Although coming from someone as broken as myself, it was a fact that Twilights’ physical abilities were off the scale. Eavesdropping on a conversation taking place downstairs was nothing.

Worick didn’t say anything, simply started walking slowly. When he spoke up, it was in a soft voice, much like concentrated soup the chef spent hours on cooking properly.

“Young lady, what is your name?”

“Yeah, since you didn’t let me know yesterday.”

I didn’t ask back to hear a reason like what he gave me. The information about me was engraved on the tag on my chest after all, with my name obviously being the first line on it.

With a long sigh that wasn’t really a sigh, I answered, “Sophia”.

That was one thing - and nearly the only thing - that was my own. The only something properly belonging to me aside from the body that couldn’t really move anymore and the pain residing in my head.

“Nice to meet you, Sophia,” Worick said.

Like a stray dog on the verge of dying finding an owner just before passing away, or like a tragedy with one act of tranquil lull before the inevitable woeful ending, my life with him had started from that morning on.

There is nothing much I could tell about the 2 weeks I spent with him.

As a matter of fact, I was mostly bedridden on the compact bed in the bedroom, so I couldn’t even figure out his office’s layout accurately. He was courteous enough to make me pasta, but due to the constant headache that was getting only worse by the day I couldn’t taste it properly.

There was another person in that office, called Nicolas. A black-haired man of Asian descent with beast-sharp eyes. He wasn’t by any means tall, but to me that solidly built body looked like an exquisite finely chiseled sculpture of a warrior carved out of solid rock. Worick addressed him as 'Nic’ or 'partner’.

I sensed from the first glance that Nicolas wasn’t a Normal. You could tell birds of feather by the smell somehow, and there wasn’t even any need to see the tags hanging around his neck to confirm it. That man apparently held no slightest interest in me, so till the end we’d never exchanged any words with him.

Often times, Worick would be summoned somewhere, and when he came back, he would be clad in a coating of women’s perfume. I couldn’t bring myself to warm up to that smell no matter how I tried, and that was the only unpleasant detail during those 2 weeks I spent next to him.

Summarily, my last days could be described like this: for the last stretch of her miserable life, Sophia was granted a peaceful bedroom, where she fell asleep with eternal sleep happy.

If there was something missing in this description, it would be the request that I placed on the fifteenth day of my stay there, that is, on the day of my death.

From a conversation in the next room that I overheard, I had learned that Worick and Nicolas ran a business as handymen.

That was one strange conversation, too. I only heard Worick’s voice, Nicolas didn’t speak. But it wasn’t like Worick was simply talking to himself or holding a one-sided conversation either. Rather, it was like listening to someone talking on the phone, where you could only hear one of the participants but knew that a proper conversation was taking place nonetheless.

Anyway, I had learned that they were handymen about a week before my passing away, and since then I had been pondering a certain request.

I was about to die. And die a quiet peaceful death I couldn’t have dreamed of before.

I didn’t peg myself as greedy enough to wish for anything more than that, but it looked like greed was endless and the appetite really did come with eating. As my heart was calming and finding peace, a single wound appeared from under the filth that had been cleansed away. And I requested to heal that wound.

At the time, Worick sat by my bedside, a plate of thin soup in hand. He held the spoon out to me, saying “Aaam”, so I tried to open my mouth but was unable to swallow properly, and the soup dripped down my chin. After one mouthful, I shook my head.

“Listen, Worick,” I said. Or tried to, anyway.

He leaned his ear close to my mouth. With difficulty, I continued.

“You’re working as a handyman, right?”
“Yeah.”

Worick ate a mouthful of the soup himself. “A little too salty,” he murmured.

“I want to place a request with you.”

“Hide me for the next 3 years.”

Worick put the plate somewhere next to the pillow. At least that’s what I thought he did. I couldn’t really see him do it though.

“3 years,” he repeated in a calm voice. Like he was inspecting every little crack in an antique vase or something.

The focusing function of my eyes must have given way then, as my field of vision grew hazy and I couldn’t see his face clearly anymore. As far as I could remember, there was a playwright whose last words before death were “Mehr Licht!” [*] I understood the sentiment then.

In any case, I could have sworn that Worick was still smiling with that usual smile of his.

“We don’t come cheap though.”
“In the inner pocket of my coat…” I had to pause and take a breather there. “There is a necklace…”

It couldn’t have been all that expensive. It wasn’t elaborately decorated or anything, I got it as a present so I didn’t know the cost, but I guessed that it wasn’t too pricey. The coat I mentioned was wrapped around me over the blanket. I asked Worick previously to put it over me like that, and he did.

Now, he fished out that silver necklace shaped like a wing from the coat’s pocket. To be exact, I just kind of saw his silhouette move to do that.

He wasn’t a man who wouldn’t know the value - or lack of thereof - of that necklace, but he still said, “Not bad. Alright, we’ll take your request.”

Relieved at his reply, I closed my eyes. Knowing full well that I would never open them again.

Something touched my head.

His hand, I guessed, although I couldn’t feel its warmth or its smell anymore. The hair he petted must have lost its glossy shine, too, and that weighted on my mind.

Eyes shut, I rambled as if sleep-talking, “When you cremate me, keep my clothes on.” I didn’t want anyone to see this ugly body of mine.

Worick didn’t answer.

Or maybe it was just that I thought I spoke but my voice had already failed me. But strangely enough, I felt like my words did reach him somehow.

“It is time for you to rest for today, Sophia,” Worick whispered as if putting a very young child to sleep.

Yeah.

Good night. And thank you.

This time I knew for sure that the words went unvoiced. I tried to smile but I wasn’t sure if I had managed to.

And that was how my 2 weeks and 1 day had come to a close.

T/N:
[*] “More light!” is said to be the dying words of Goethe.