Beast, Blue Blood - Chapter 7

Chapter 7

[Anyway, find it quickly.]

Suddenly, Kate spoke, snapping Hisha back to reality. Luckily, Kate didn’t notice that he had momentarily zoned out and continued talking.

[There isn’t much time. See you in 12 hours.]

Kate’s hologram then disappeared. Hisha swallowed softly as he stared at the now-empty spot. He carefully opened the door and checked the hallway for any presence. The corridor was quiet.

He slipped out and began searching for the room, recalling the mansion’s layout he had memorized earlier. He listened carefully outside the room. There was no sound of cameras operating.

Hisha looked both ways down the hall again, then pulled out a pair of black latex gloves from his pocket and carefully pushed the door open.

Creak.

The room was dark and silent.

He headed straight for the desk and carefully rifled through the neatly arranged documents without disturbing their order.

There wasn’t much of importance. The legal and administrative jargon was so complex that he wondered if it was even in a language he knew, but one thing was clear: there was no information about what he was looking for.

Next, he crouched down and opened the drawer, finding a pack of cigarettes. They were a brand he had never seen before, suggesting that even her smoking habits were different from ordinary people. The pack was half-empty.

‘She smokes, huh.’

However, he had never noticed a cigarette smell when near Eugene, so he figured Eugene must only smoke occasionally.

Hisha imagined Eugene smoking, shook his head, and put the cigarettes back. He wondered how even that would look sexy.

There was a Zippo lighter in the drawer too, with a dragon pattern that seemed more suited to scary tough guys.

‘Surprisingly weird taste.’

He closed the drawer quietly, amused. He searched the lower drawers and moved on to the bedroom. The king-sized bed was neatly made like one in a hotel.

He looked under the bed and inside the mattress but found nothing significant.

Next, he entered the dressing room. It didn’t look like a rich girl’s wardrobe as he had expected. Of course, compared to his wardrobe, its variety was astonishing, but all the women he knew had closets like this regardless of their wealth. The difference here was the abundance of suits and dresses.

Hisha flipped through the dresses like a customer browsing in a store. Since he had only ever seen Eugene in suits, whether in photos or in person, he was surprised to see so many dresses.

‘Oh, this one’s pretty.’

He thought, looking at a peach-colored dress with a lace top.

The skirt, which fell to the ankles, had a deep slit starting from the thigh. Feminine yet sexy, just imagining it on Eugene made Hisha think it would suit her perfectly. She would look like Aphrodite emerging from sea foam. He put the dress back in place and opened a drawer. It was filled with underwear. He almost whistled. Though he had a conscience, he didn’t blatantly take things out as he did with the clothes; he just gently sifted through them with his hand.

‘It’s for finding the item.’

Absolutely no other reason…

Among them, a black lingerie set with minimal fabric made him react below at the thought of Eugene wearing it.

‘Relax.’

Hisha took a deep breath and closed the drawer. He then went to the bookshelf to see if there was a secret room or something similar, pressing and pulling on all the books. There were no mechanisms.

Surprisingly, the bookshelf contained a lot of literature.

‘Seems she likes classics.’

Iliad, Odyssey, Gilgamesh, Plutarch’s Lives, The Song of Roland… She particularly seemed to like heroics and epics.

Her tastes were surprisingly bold.

Realizing he was learning more about Eugene than finding what he was searching for, Hisha recalled his original purpose and left the bookshelf, pressing his ear to the wall. He knocked on the wall as if to check its density, but there was no space behind it.

He got up, leaning on the wall, and looked around the room.

It seemed to lack personal items. There were no common family photos, no notes, nothing like that. The room felt barren in that sense. There were no traces of memories or personality.

Then, Hisha suddenly realized, looking at his hand wearing the black latex glove.

‘Well, you never know who might come and snoop around.’

“It’s a thorny place.”

Kate had once said.

“There’s not a single safe step.”

Click, creak.

Just then, he heard someone entering the living room from outside the room. Hisha quickly closed the drawer quietly and hid by the door. He could hear two female employees coming in from outside, judging by the sound of their footsteps.

“Have you seen the new guy?”

He recognized the voice of one of the female employees.

“Oh, Kim Young-soo? He’s super cute.”

Another woman answered. Hisha frowned.

‘Cute?’

He was a 189 cm tall adult male with a weight unliftable by most people. Out of all the adjectives in existence, “cute” never applied to him. Not unless it came from parents or older relatives.

“Don’t you think the director is kind of interested in him too?”

Hisha’s ears perked up at that.

“Actually, the fact that the director personally hired him is unusual…”

The two women, not imagining Hisha could hear them, continued their conversation as they moved inside. From the sound of cleaning supplies clattering, it seemed they had come to clean.

“No way. Would the heir to this family name really be like a little kid with not a single bill in his pocket?”

For some reason, Hisha reached into his pocket and turned it inside out. He didn’t have a single bill, so he couldn’t say it was wrong. Not just in this pocket, but in his actual bank account too.

Whatever he had was spent to become ‘Kim Young-soo.’

“Well, she has plenty of money herself, so it’s better if her lover is young and strong.”

One of the women laughed.

“She’s going to marry her current fiancé anyway.”

Hisha looked up at the ceiling.

This too—

‘I knew that.’

Not from being here, but from prior research.

An image came to his mind of a man with blond-brown hair and blue eyes, wearing an expensive custom-made suit, seated in the Russian parliament. He was as tall as Hisha, with firm muscles visible even through the suit, likely due to his love for exercise.

Above all, he had confident eyes like a Siberian tiger.

Sergei Aleushin.

The eldest son of the Aleushin family, one of Russia’s oligarchs. And Eugene’s fiancé.

“Haven’t you heard the saying that real rich people are Russian tycoons?”

The two women kept talking.

“She inherits Fuger-Dulloch, her maternal family is Lian, and her in-laws are Aleushin. How much money is that?”

“They could probably buy a small country.”

“It’s literally ‘their world.’ Ah, I should try to seduce Young-soo. I wouldn’t mind keeping him as a gigolo and supporting him.”

‘Thanks, but no thanks, ladies. I have my preferences.’

While he was thinking, the women laughed and moved further inside.

From their voices, Hisha could tell who they were. They seemed very kind and professional, but their conversation was no different from teenagers smoking behind the school. It reminded him that this place was just like any other where people lived.

After the women disappeared inside, Hisha carefully exited the room.

* * *

Eugene stepped off the helicopter. It felt like she had just arrived at an exotic beach, a stark contrast to the bustling city she had just flown from.

A massive swimming pool, large enough to blend in with the sea, sprawled across the deck of a giant yacht. Women in colorful bikinis laughed, chatted, and drank around the pool.

Bodyguards in black suits stood around the pool, but no one seemed to pay them any mind.

Eugene descended the stairs leading to the pool. She passed a burly bodyguard with red eyes standing at the bottom and approached the end of the deck, where three men, the only ones not wearing suits, were seated on a sofa.

The man with a physique like a bronze statue in the middle saw her and pushed his sunglasses up onto his head.

“You’ve arrived.”

Eugene stood in front of Sergei, one hand on her hip.

“It’s no wonder the Russian people resent the oligarchs.”

Sergei’s blue eyes swept over Eugene, who was dressed in a suit and wearing sunglasses.

“Still working all the time?”

“Do you ever work?”

Eugene retorted without hesitation, making Sergei scoff.

“You sure boast a lot for running a small-town pharmacy.”

“Funny you should say that. Eighty percent of Vidnoybit disease patients worldwide use our company’s medicine. Among that 80% is your father, Maksimov Aleushin, the head of Nyev Industries and a close confidant of the Russian president.”

Eugene shot back, pointing a finger at Sergei.

“Are you looking for a thank you?”

Sergei’s eyes narrowed, but Eugene’s face remained impassive.

“And what would I do with your thanks?”

At that moment, the other two men burst into laughter.

“Give it a rest. You can’t win against Eugene!”

“They’re always fighting like lovers, aren’t they?”

Eugene chuckled.

“I didn’t realize a marriage partner chosen by our parents counted as a couple.”

The two men exaggeratedly shivered.

“You’re scary, Eugene Fuger-Dulloch. Terrifying.”

“You’re in fighting form today.” 

Sergei remarked. Eugene scoffed.

“Calling someone away from their work, you should have expected some backlash. So, what’s so important…?”

“First, take a breath. Have a drink.”

Sergei said, handing a cocktail to the woman sitting beside him in an exceedingly skimpy bikini.

The woman was stunningly beautiful, yet Eugene had never seen her in any media, suggesting she was either an unknown or someone who targeted men like Sergei.

She walked over to Eugene, her high heels clicking like a lingerie fashion show model’s, and handed her the cocktail.