Chapter 15: The Hunt for Yeji
The sheets in Lewis’s apartment were cool and tangled. Yeji moved above him, human-sized, sweat making her blonde hair stick to her temples. Her eyes were closed, her breath coming in soft hitches. Lewis’s hands rested on her hips, his own expression one of focused, ordinary pleasure. The room smelled of sex and the cheap sandalwood candle Yeji liked.
“Don’t stop,” Lewis murmured, his voice thick.
Yeji opened her eyes, smiling down at him. “Wasn’t planning on it, baby.”
The world exploded.
The apartment door didn’t open. It ceased to exist. One second it was painted wood, the next it was a cloud of splinters and twisted metal hurtling inward. The candle snuffed out. A colossal green hand, mossy and thick-veined, shot through the debris. It closed around Yeji’s torso and plucked her off Lewis as easily as taking a doll from a shelf.
Lewis shouted, scrambling back against the headboard, the cozy intimacy vaporized by sheer, mind-breaking terror.
Lia filled the doorway. Twelve feet of vengeful green muscle, naked, dusted with plaster from Yuna’s demolished ceiling. Her eyes glowed with a feral, hungry light. Held loosely in her other hand, Yeji dangled, human and limp, a quick, efficient knock to her head having silenced her.
And beside her, leaning against the ruined doorframe with crossed arms, was the other one. The one from Yuna’s apartment. Ana. She surveyed the scene, a smirk playing on her lips. “Cozy,” she said, her voice a low, amused purr.
Lewis could only stare, his brain short-circuiting. “L-Lia?”
“Hey, Lewis,” Lia said. Her voice was the sound of boulders grinding together. It held none of its old warmth, only a chilling, casual familiarity. “Miss me?”
Before he could form a word, her hand—the one not holding Yeji—snaked out. It engulfed his chest, pinning his arms to his sides, and lifted him from the bed. The strength was absolute. He kicked, useless, his bare feet brushing air.
“Let’s go somewhere we can talk,” she said. “Catch up.”
The journey was a blur of vertigo and cold night air. She moved with impossible speed, leaping between rooftops, Ana a sleek green shadow keeping pace beside her. The city lights streaked below. Lewis squeezed his eyes shut, nausea rising in his throat.
They landed in a place that smelled of damp and ruin. Yuna’s apartment. Or what was left of it. The ceiling was a spiderweb of cracks. The wall by the kitchen was punched inward. The shattered mirror glittered on the floor. Ana gracefully stepped over the wreckage and settled on the remains of the sofa, watching as Lia set the unconscious Yeji down in a corner like a discarded bag.
Then she turned her full attention to Lewis.
She didn’t throw him. She dropped him. He hit the warped floorboards on his back, the wind knocked out of him. Before he could roll over, her foot came down, not crushing him, but pinning his hips in place with immovable weight. He was trapped, looking up the vast landscape of her green body.
“Okay,” she sighed, as if beginning a tedious but necessary chore. “Let’s talk about us.”
“Lia, please—” he choked out.
“Shhh.” She crouched over him, the sheer scale of her blocking out the broken ceiling light. Her face was a monument of carved emerald rage. “My turn to talk. Remember our third anniversary? You forgot. I made steak. You came home at midnight smelling like her perfume.”
“I’m sorry, I was—”
Her hand slapped down on the floor beside his head, the impact making his teeth rattle. “I’m not finished. You lied. For a year. To my face. Every time I asked if you were tired, if you were stressed, you looked me in the eye and you lied.” Her voice dropped, became almost conversational. “And then I find out it was Yeji. Little, helpless Yeji who needed your protection from her big, scary girlfriend. That was the story, right?”
Lewis trembled, tears of fear and shame mixing on his face. “She was… it was complicated.”
“It really wasn’t.” Lia shifted her weight. Her free hand came down, fingers encircling his thighs, moving him with chilling efficiency. He was exposed, vulnerable. “But you know what’s funny? Even after I became this… even after she stole from me, tried to break me… you still loved her. I could smell it on you back there. You were relieved it was her. Your little human damsel.”
“No, I—”
“Yes.” The finality in the syllable was absolute. “And that… that is the unforgivable part, Lewis.”
There was no seduction in it. No passion. It was an act of dominance, of reclaiming territory in the most violating way possible. She lowered herself onto him, a force of nature accepting a trivial sacrifice. He cried out, a sound of shock and pain.
She didn’t move at first. She just held him there, impaled, looking down at his contorted face. Her own expression was one of cold, clinical scrutiny.
“This is what you reduced me to,” she said quietly, her voice almost lost in the rumble. “You made me small. You made me quiet. You made me nothing. And then she made me empty.” A tremor ran through her massive frame, but not from pleasure. From fury. “So now you get to fill the silence.”
She began to move. It was a brutal, punishing rhythm. Each thrust drove the air from his lungs. The floorboards groaned beneath them. Tears streamed from his eyes, but he was silent now, beyond screams.
“You get to hear,” she grunted, the words punching out with each movement, “how much it hurt. You get to feel how angry I am. You loved her fragility. So you can have mine.”
From her perch on the sofa, Ana watched, her chin resting on her hand. A faint, approving smile touched her lips. This wasn’t about desire. It was an exorcism. A transference of poison.
Lia’s monologue continued, fractured, raw things spilling out between the sounds of straining wood and skin. Betrayals he’d forgotten. Small humiliations. The way he’d criticized her career. The night he’d called her “needy.” Every whispered doubt she’d ever swallowed now given weight and volume and violent, physical form.
Finally, with a shudder that seemed to start in the very foundations of the building, she went rigid. A low, grinding sound of release escaped her, more a snarl than a sigh. It wasn’t climax. It was the expulsion of a ghost.
She lifted off him, leaving him broken and shaking on the floor. She looked down at her own green hands, flexing them as if seeing them for the first time. The blinding, all-consuming rage had burned through, leaving something colder, harder, and settled in its place.
She turned to Ana. “What now?”
Ana unfolded herself from the sofa, stepping over Lewis as if he were a stain. She placed a hand on Lia’s colossal arm, her touch startlingly gentle. “Now,” she said, her green eyes shining in the gloom, “we don’t need to take things from anyone else.”
In the corner, Yeji stirred, letting out a soft moan. Two pairs of luminous green eyes turned toward the sound in unison.
Ana’s smile widened. “But we might keep some trophies.”