Chapter Fourteen

"Did you kill him?" Jin had asked Nes after Mr. Steven was killed.

She shrugged. Jin grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her. "Nes, did you truly kill him?"

"Yes." There was no remorse, no feeling. It was as if she was telling him the weather.

When Champ died falling from the stairs, Jin knew somehow that Nes had done it. But he never asked her about it. He did not want to know the answer. Now Mr. Steven was dead and he finally asked her about it. His suspicion was right.

They were sitting on Nes's bed. Nes placed her head on his shoulder. He knew he should be repulsed to be near a girl who killed two people. But he could not move away from her. His hand moved on his own and he wrapped an arm around her shoulder.

"I won't tell anyone," he murmured.

"I never for once thought you would," Nes said. She believed him with her life and her secrets. Not just back then, even now, Jin could not thought of betraying her.

When they were ten, one night, Nes and he were on a video call. Basically, they had the call on, but both of them were doing different things. Jin was doing homework. Nes said she was going to do something. Jin thought she meant she was going to get some food from the kitchen.

When she came back, she had something red all over her face and arms.

"Nes, are you hurt?" Jin almost yelled. He wanted to crawl through the laptop screen just to make sure she was fine.

She shook her head. "Jin, I want you to tell your parents that something happened here. I want you to tell them that I'm very scared."

"Nes- are you okay?"

"I killed them, Jin. I needed to get rid of them."

Jin woke his parents up and told them how Nes called him and told him she was scared. It was hard to imagine Nes breaking down, but he told the lie and convinced his parents anyway.

Everything happened very fast then. Nes's parents were found dead in their house and the police said Nes was the sole witness. She said she heard a loud noise and when she went there, someone shot both of her parents in the head. They were instantly dead. No jewelry was stolen.

"Why did you do it?" Jin asked. "Why, Nes, why?"

"They were killing me," Nes said quietly, sitting beside him on the roof of his house. "They wanted a robot who they could say anything to and it would do exactly that. They hated that I had an opinion. They didn't let me express my thoughts. Papa argued with me every single day and yelled at me. I was tired of all of this, Jin. So tired. I wanted it to end.

"I put on a pair of gloves and shot them with Papa's gun. It was easy. They died quickly."

Jin put his head in his hands. He was not afraid of her; he was afraid for her. It was a surprise how no one still figured it out. But then again, Nes was way too careful. She almost never left a gap in her plan. Sometimes, it was like she was a professional assassin in her past life; not that Jin believed in things like past life.

***

Jin knew something was wrong with where Seth lived. Something about this place felt familiar. And odd. Jin had no reason to be here before. But he was pretty sure he had been to this place.

"Sometimes I have dreams of seeing things that I never should have seen. I see people I never met in my dream. I see myself doing things I never did before," Nes had told her many times.

Staying here, Jin felt the same way. He was seeing incidents in his dreams that never happened to him. But he was there and it felt very real. He saw Nes in a black dress, the kind she never wore. It was old-fashioned too. She was showing him the library in this place. But what was she doing in Seth's place? She did not even know Seth.

"I love the books here. You can find the books forbidden for the Angels here," Nes said, excited. She had a small smile on her face. "I swear, Jin, this library is the best one yet. Seth has one hell of a collection."

"Angels don't say 'hell'," Jin said in the dream. His voice sounded just like he sounded usually- serious.

"I'm no angel, Jin. Not anymore. I'm an angel gone rogue," she said and laughed. "This suits me better. I was tired of pretending."

Jin had woken up from the dream with an odd feeling. The memory of the dream was fading and he knew he would not remember any part of the dream soon enough. So, he wrote it down quickly. He kept tracks of his dreams for the past few days. He had no idea what angels or demons truly meant, or what being one was like, but he knew that those dreams about angels and demons and their lives were connected.

In every dream, Nes was there. It was like his life revolved around her.

In another dream, he was in a garden with her. There were black roses all around them. It was odd. It was like a garden only of black roses.

"He is manipulative, crazy and obsessive. He is too much," Jin said. "I don't like it at all."

"You don't want me to marry him?" Nes asked.

"You know why."

"I know. It's just, Jin, I'm no different, am I? If he is evil, so am I. I didn't do anything good in my life," she said.

"He tied you up in his room and kept you there so only he can have you!"

"And I killed his sister. I don't see much difference. I mean, what he does is bad. But what I do is bad too. I honestly find him quite romantic," she said with a laugh. "I like the way he obsesses over me, how jealous he gets and it turns me on."

When Jin woke up, he had no idea who Nes was talking about in the dream. He had never seen a garden like that. He wrote this dream down too.

Then, he had many more dreams. He saw people he never saw before. He saw a red-haired boy who kept telling him how unfair everything was.

"It's unfair, isn't it? I love her. I love her despite everything she did. Yet, every time, every single time, she chooses you. She chooses you over everyone else. Yet, you act like there is nothing between you two," he said. His eyes were blue. Jin thought his eyes were a little too intense. "Is it because you are bound to her? Is that why you are so confident that she won't have anyone else?"

Jin told Seth about his dreams and showed him a few of his writings. Not all of them, since some of them Jin wanted to keep to himself.

"Interesting. I never thought-," Seth trailed off. "Has Nes ever saw dreams like this?"

"I don't know."

"That's not possible. If she did, you would know."

Just how much does this guy know about us?

"What does these dreams mean?" Jin asked.

Seth muttered something under his breath that Jin could not grasp. "Well, they are just dreams. Dreams rarely mean anything," Seth finally said.

He was not even trying to convince him. Jin knew it was a lie. Dreams meant everything.