Kisa gives a funny little shrug and clears her throat. “I became so sick of it—the work, I mean—but I sometimes miss it now. No, I miss my life. It’s like this…sharp longing in my chest. An ache in me that won’t go away.” She smooths Hwanin’s hair away from his sleeping face, a small frown crossing her own. “Although…I suppose it’s abated, actually,” she murmurs. “With everything that’s happened, I suppose it’s harder for me to wallow in my own self-pity…” Kisa trails off, lips twitching a bit wryly. Yet Seokga doesn’t smile back.

For in her encroaching silence, his anger toward Samsin Halmoni has returned, crawling through his veins with a molten, deadly heat. He inhales thinly through his mouth, struggling to keep his composure so as not to frighten Kisa.

But fuck.

Samsin Halmoni, the old bat. It was her. She kept Kisa from him all these years, leaving him to find her only when it was too late, when she’s dead. A murderous rage tints his vision red. Controlling his fury is now an exercise in futility.

—looks—upset—why—

“Seokga?”

He is going to march right up to Okhwang and give Samsin Halmoni a piece of his mind. He is going to send his shamans on a war against hers. He is going to explode as his blood pressure continues to rise and rise and rise…

Kisa’s face swims into his blurry vision. “Let’s get you to your room,” she murmurs in concern, and he’s acutely aware of how her free hand wraps around his arm, guiding him back up toward Deck 7 after he manages to mutter what suite he’s staying in. Room 7345. Kisa makes a quick stop in the sick bay, stuffing some jars from the medicine cabinet into a bag which Seokga carries. He supposes he should carry his brother, but he’s much too overwhelmed to tote around a baby. What if he drops him? Sure, Seokga has had dozens of children in his long lifetime, but the children aged so fast in comparison to himself that he usually forgot to pop down for a visit until they were at least twenty-five (or forty-seven, maybe even sixty-two).

Babies are foreign entities to him.

He doesn’t think he likes them.

At all.

Back in the suite, Kisa sets Hwanin down on a stuffed settee in the adjoining room between the two brothers’ suites. Seokga slumps into an armchair in exhaustion.

Kisa looks at him curiously over her shoulder, pausing from fussing over the child. “Something crinkled when you sat down.”

“Oh,” he mutters, hand drifting to the pocket of his dark pants. Seokga pulls out the candies that Hajun gave him and wrinkles his nose. “These.”

She raises her brows. “Have you tried them?”

“Shan’t,” he says, rather mulishly. “I don’t like sweets.”