Untouched [minsung]

Chapter 76

Hyunjin POV

I walked to the driveway to see if Jeongin had driven there. If he had, there was a chance my parents had released him on purpose. If he hadn't...

I walked around the house that was still ablaze to find an empty driveway. My parents hadn't let him out. He'd escaped. This could actually work in my favor.

If I could figure out where Jeongin was staying, I could try to talk to him. He was obviously scared of our parents. They'd tortured him and trained him to survive in this world and took all of it away in favor of a son who was basically a stranger.

Maybe they saw a darkness in him...something so dark even they couldn't deal with it or harness it to work for them. I know I did. Regardless, I needed to try. I needed to try so Han would be safe. And I needed to try so that I didn't have to turn around every second and wonder if the next person to come to the door would be there to kill me.

If Jeongin was on the loose, he'd need a place to stay. I knew he knew of a few of our parents' properties that were rarely used. I just had to figure out which one.

I looked at the house that had collapsed and all of the remnants everywhere. It would be next to impossible for me to find Chan's laptop in that mess so that I could look up all of the properties. I needed to think back to the ones I already knew of.

I pulled out my phone to go through texts with my dad and screenshotted anything that could be helpful. Now that I had service, I also shot a text off to the group chat hoping that by some miracle someone would answer, but they didn't.

I decided that I'd start with Felix's old apartment complex. My parents had put him up there since they owned the building. I obviously couldn't go knocking on every door but maybe an office manager would be easily convinced.

It was about a mile away so I began my run over. My feet were screaming at me to give them a rest but with Jeongin out in the world, there wasn't time to waste. He acted too impulsively for me to allow him to roam free for long. 

Before making it to Felix's, I passed the market and stopped in. We owned the units upstairs and I figured that may be easier to get a pulse check on than a multi-story building.

I went up the stairs and checked the names on the mailboxes. Most of the people who lived here were either market employees or our backup security. Most of the units were in use with the same names I've seen here for years. Only one name slot was empty and it belonged to one of the alley guys Seungmin had killed, Mr. Gomez.

I walked down to his apartment and knocked. I hid below the peephole in case Jeongin was staying there, but I heard footsteps on the other side and the door opened right away.