Aria was wandering around aimlessly, as if she were even less substantial than a ghost—but this was a deliberate choice. Cayden, on the other hand, seemed angry at everything, as though the entire world were conspiring to erase his existence; he kept everyone at a distance. Deep down, he had never been someone who got irritated easily, but he had his reasons. In a world where he believed everyone was self-serving, he felt there was nothing left to tie him to life.
His ice-blue eyes and short-cropped black hair made him stand out immediately in any crowd. His hatred of unnecessary attention had been a preview of the fact that he had never truly chased after anything in his life.
To Cayden, someone like Aria felt like an illusion. "Someone I could never meet anyway—so there's no point even keeping her in my dreams," he thought, while at the same time reflecting that the world actually needed someone to embody that kind of feminine image. He curled his lip at the people crushed under the frantic pace of life around him.
Yet he had never truly fallen in love. No matter how much he despised those people, he too lived for gain—just at a more advanced level. While trying to push all these thoughts out of his mind, he only just noticed the pale-faced Aria passing by him.
Aria's hair was blacker than Cayden's; her skin was so white it could be called ghostly. Her coffee-brown eyes seemed to invite people into a warmth they had never known before. In that fleeting moment Cayden felt it right down to his bones.
Aria felt something she had never experienced before. Just as she was about to turn toward him, something inside her screamed no and pulled her back. "I shouldn't look at him. It's just something temporary anyway." But no matter how much she tried to reason, the chemistry between them could transform even the space they occupied into something entirely different.
In those two seconds of eye contact, Cayden could only hear his own defense mechanism inside his head: "She's no different from the others. Who knows how many hours she spends just to look like that. Even if her appearance is beautiful, she's probably living a life she doesn't deserve because of her arrogance…" He silenced the interest rising inside him with his hatred for life itself.
And perhaps Aria had heard those feelings from the voice of the universe. Her introversion wasn't a shield for self-protection; she simply heard the whispers of the cosmos, feeling them deeply. After all, she was cut from the same cloth as Cayden—only his exact opposite.
In Cayden, Aria saw a light she had never seen in anyone before, yet surrendering to it felt equivalent to a dying person walking into the white light. It's too early to die. I still have so much work waiting for me. She had thought this while cooking with the man who wanted to kill her in the kitchen.
Could this man—who seemed to have no problem except himself—really save her life?
The house Aria lived in was an abandoned place open to many entities. There were many such places in this universe, but the people who lived in them were cast out by society. Aria wore this like a mask on her face, filtering out the people she was never meant to meet anyway.
In Cayden, though, there was an aura that made even the mask he wore feel unnecessary for the first time. As if happiness wasn't something to be earned, but simply an option.
Cayden walked away with quick, angry strides. A little farther back, Aris turned her head to look at him. The intersection of two cold people.
While others looked at Cayden as if he were just an angry, useless thing, Aria listened to the echo of his footsteps—and the only thing she could think was that she had arrived too late in his life. If I had been in his life, he could have reached the places he wanted to go much more easily, she thought, then couldn't swallow her own ego.
The problem had never been the destinations. It was simply about being in the same place—and that meaning your ways of thinking matched too.
Aria no longer needed armor; Cayden no longer needed a weapon. Yet the destructive desire in Cayden's voice seemed to shout that waiting for someone in order to not need a weapon was pointless.
He opened his phone after a few calls.
"Aria… If I kill her, will everything finally end?"
Even as his hand reached for his gun, he wondered whether the only person who could actually pull him out of this state was the one he was about to cause the death of.
Aria stayed there for a few seconds, as if wanting to draw the warmth of the indoors into herself. Her eyes were still on Cayden, but she wasn't really seeing or hearing him. No matter what she did, he was the only man she would never come to hate.
She greeted the cold season in the black clothes she always wore to appear distant. She had left the floor of the hunt. Now the wild world—and whatever was left behind—waited for her.