Fair Trade - chapter 0

Prologue

Life is beautiful but human life is short. The world is a place where money is a man’s true companion, power, and center of life. Even if I was born poor, I wanted to live a decent life.

Because the world is unfair anyway.

God doesn’t reach out to everyone, so I decided to believe in myself.

‘By the way… what am I doing here?’

Her world tilted obliquely. No, to be exact, it wasn’t the world that had tilted, but it was she who was lying in a bed. She could smell the familiar scent of the fabric softener used on all bedsheets of DE:A cruise. But a unique scent of a perfume also floated around in the air.

It was a dark room. She looked around the room to find something that would help her. She wanted to move, but her tightly bound hands and legs made her completely immobile.

“Come on, what the…What the hell is this?

Every time she tried to move, a thin plastic strap dug into her skin. She could see that it was a cable tie.

‘Have I been kidnapped?

This was the first time in her 27 years of life that she had ever faced such treatment, so she was starting to get angry. She thought of all the names that might want to harm her one by one. However she was currently in the center of the vast ocean. Before boarding the ship, she had made sure to memorise all the names of the passengers boarding the ship, and none of them could have held a grudge against her.

Enduring the nausea and fear, Sei found someone sitting at the table in the opposite direction.

A cold sweat broke out on her forehead.

The man had an unlit cigarette in his mouth and was staring at the laptop screen. The screen was filled with graphs and parallel lines that made no sense to her. The screen suddenly blacked out and the corners of his mouth slowly turned up in a small smile.

Sei opened her eyes wide and inhaled sharply.

Rare platinum blonde hair and gray blue eyes. He was a man who seemed to be far from the dirt of the world. From his head to toe, there was only perfection.

It was her ’10th customer’.

But something had changed. His appearance, image and even the dangerous air around him… everything was strange. She was speechless. It was as if she was looking at someone else. Nevertheless, the man in the loose shirt was clearly the ‘customer’ she knew.

‘By any chance……’

Thinking of the butterfly knife hidden deep in her clothes, she paused and raised her body carefully. Her whole body erupted in pain because her arms and legs were tied up.

“Excuse me… sir?”

She knew to escape from here, she needed to act as powerless as a lamb. She didn’t know what exactly happened, but she didn’t want to die here.

‘Tying a poor woman with a cable tie. Are you a sick pervert? Or a psychopath?’

“Did you sleep well?”

By the way, was his voice so low?

“I…”

She looked around confusedly, pretending to be scared. Whether he believed her or not, he didn’t show it. He approached the bed with a sad look on his face. Then he lightly grabbed her chin and forced her to look him in his eyes.

“How does it feel to be the one to be deceived?”

Sei flinched and shrinked away from him. The man she saw up close had an unrealistic appearance beyond her imagination. With his features, it was hard to guess his age.

“So, what if the food was mixed with something? You shouldn’t have eaten it without knowing what was in it.”

“What are you…”

“If you were hungry, you should have rather ordered room service. If you had, we wouldn’t have met like this.”

Swallowing her dry saliva, Sei recalled a plate of high-end cookies on a mini bar. The man was looking down at her with a strange smile as if it was all fun to him.

No matter how handsome and angel-like he looked, she didn’t want to deal with anything that wasn’t normal. She just hoped he was not some crazy psycho.

‘Let’s escape from here.’

Making her eyes tear, she twisted her upper body and showed him her tied hands.

“Excuse me, sir…Please let me go. Yeah? I just came here to clean up the room. I think there’s some misunderstanding, please. Huh? I’m a normal person without anything! Dear customer, please!”

As she begged, she moved her eyes ceaselessly in search of a retreat. The man’s hand touched her wrist, which had become red because of the cable tie. It felt as if all her nerve cells were concentrated at the place where the man touched. The man while touching her swollen skin, bent down and whispered in her ears in a playful tone.

“You seem to have a very different standard from mine. Though not as fearless but you’re quite daring with quick hands.”

He paused for a moment and stared as if enjoying her stiff face. He was so close that she could feel his breath. Sei wanted the man to release her legs. That way, she would be able to break his nose and run away from here.

“Anyway. Before I release this, can I ask you a question?”

He lightly knocked on the cable tie that wrapped around her ankle. Sei felt as if she was out of breath.

‘Who the hell would answer a jerk like this in such a situation?!’

Sei silently grinded her teeth in anger. Then she smiled sweetly as if alluding to the man that she would answer him.

“Yuri Rose, Cecilia Lawrence, Diana Olsen.”

When Sei heard the names, she opened her eyes wide and unconsciously looked up at him. All the names that the man called were aliases she used. They were all fake names that no one knew.

‘I knew it.’

Her hunch was right. The man had set up a trap and she had willingly put her foot in it.

After understanding the situation, her smile disappeared and her face became stiff cold. Seeing her reaction, the man’s face had a gruesome and elegant smile.

“Why on earth are you using such an odd name for a pretty real name?”

At the same time, the muzzle of a gun touched her back. Her whole body stiffened with a chilling sensation.

Is this the end? Am I going to be thrown into this damn ocean as fish food? What the hell is this guy…!

“Answer me. Miss Jang Sei.”

[T/N: Just in case if you didn’t know, in Korean, the surname comes first, then the first name. Her surname is Jang. I didn’t want to do it in the western nomenclature. That would come out as Sei Jang and that sounds weird.]

If there really was a God…she wanted to beg him to let her go back to the time when she ate those darn chocolate chip cookies. If she could, she would stop herself.

“You’re… Julio Parenti’s mistress, right?”

‘Oh my god!’