L*st and Death

The white marble floor, stained with drinks and alcohol, was littered with shoe prints. The table was a mess of disposable plates, half-eaten snacks, beer cans, and liquor bottles. Spilled soda dripped over the edge of the table, pooling into small puddles on the floor.

The cleaner’s gonna be fucking pissed.

None of the partygoers seemed to care about the mess, but Siron could fully sympathize with the cleaner who’d come in tomorrow morning and face this scene. After all, he’d been the one stuck with bathroom and hallway duty back at the youth shelter.

The mansion buzzed like a hive brimming with life. There was a pool party raging outside, and the DJ blasted hip-hop beats at max volume, rattling everyone’s eardrums. The music thundered indoors and out, and the guests screamed themselves hoarse singing along to the songs blaring from the speakers.

All this chaos was bathed in moody blue lighting that gave the dark, upscale mansion an eerie glow. The heat and noise of the party had reached their peak—creating the perfect conditions for theft.

A few days earlier, word had spread on social media that a UCLA student was throwing a birthday party at a massive mansion in Holmby Hills. The party was unusually open to any UCLA student, which made the buzz even bigger. The rumors were so loud even the boys at the youth homeless shelter had heard.

“Bring back as much booze as you can without getting noticed. If you show up with just bottom-shelf shit, you’re fucking dead. Especially you, Siron. If you come back empty-handed like last time, you’re gonna regret it.”

Siron chewed on cold pizza, gloom settling over him. For no good reason other than “you don’t look masculine enough,” he’d been singled out by Malik, the shelter’s leader. Malik was a hardened veteran of the streets who’d been homeless for three years before landing at the shelter. As the unchallenged boss of nineteen teenage homeless boys, no one dared defy him. Going against his orders meant life at the shelter would get very unpleasant.

Under Malik’s command, the boys from the shelter had come to the Holmby Hills mansion tonight to steal alcohol. Since none of them were of legal drinking age, they’d brazenly snuck into the party pretending to be college students.

They weren’t out here dealing drugs or stealing diamonds or anything, but sneaking into someone else’s party to steal booze wasn’t exactly noble either. Siron worried that if things went sideways and his mugshot ever surfaced online, it would kill any chance of reviving his acting career back in Korea.

Three beers should be safe... I won’t get in trouble for that, right?

He had to make it to graduation, no matter what. Just grab a few beers and look useful—that was the plan. With that, Siron moved off. In the dining room, guys with cameras were walking around the first floor, filming birthday messages from the guests. Most of the messages went something like:

“Congrats, Moby Dick!”

“Happy birthday, Moby Dick!”

“Happy twenty-first! Moby Dick!”

“Wait, who’s Moby Dick?”

“No idea! Anyone here actually friends with Moby Dick?”

Born on April 12. A UCLA student turning twenty-one. Wild guesses about the mystery birthday boy drifted around the mansion like fog. No one really knew who “Moby Dick” was, but everyone was partying in his luxury mansion anyway.

Lucky bastard. Some people get born into rich families, get happy birthdays from hundreds of strangers. Meanwhile I’m sneaking into someone else’s party like a sewer rat, trying to steal beer just to survive.

Siron, having stuffed three beer cans into his bag, grabbed a plastic cup from the table with a sinking feeling in his chest. He drank down half a glass of raspberry iced tea—and suddenly, the world tilted. He hadn’t touched alcohol, but it felt like he was dead drunk.

A wave of dizziness washed over him. When he came to, he was flailing in a swimming pool, gasping for breath. He struggled to lift his head above water, desperate for air, and someone—he couldn’t even remember who—pulled him out, a man and a woman with unfamiliar faces.

His memory blacked out in patches. In those blurry fragments, he remembered talking with people, but °• N 𝑜 v 𝑒 l i g h t •° had no clue what had been said.

Siron regained awareness hours later. His ears itched and his chest felt heavy. Whatever he was lying on rocked unevenly, like gentle waves.

“Ahh, yes, right there... harder, more, more!”

Siron slowly opened his eyes. He was lying in an unfamiliar room. Dim lighting revealed two people, tangled together beside him, bodies moving with frantic rhythm. The rhythmic thrusting and sharp moans made the scene impossible to misinterpret.

Sex?

The woman was gripping Siron’s thigh for leverage, bracing herself against the force pounding into her from behind. Eighteen years old, and he’d never seen anything this graphic in his life. His body froze from the shock. Overwhelmed and disoriented, he couldn’t even sit up.

He decided he’d pretend to stay asleep. Closing his eyes and breathing slowly, he waited for them to collapse so he could slip out unnoticed. But then the door slammed open, and the lights snapped on.

“What the fuck?! What are you doing in my room?!”

The two froze. Siron instinctively opened his eyes to see who had burst in—and was shocked to his core. A sharp-featured, strikingly handsome Asian man stood in the doorway, glowering coldly at the pair in bed. Siron’s breath caught at the man’s ice-pick glare and eerie beauty.

Before either of them could even get off the bed, the man stormed over and grabbed both of them by the hair, dragging them off the mattress.

“Kyahh!”

“Shit! Let go!”

“You filthy whores! I told you—stay off the third floor!”

He kicked the man’s bare ass like a soccer ball, over and over, the smacks echoing humiliatingly loud. After taking a proper beating, the guy finally scrambled to pull up his pants and swung a fist—but it didn’t even graze the man’s hair.

The man’s face twisted in rage. He started beating the guy in earnest. The woman, scrambling to fix her clothes, tried to intervene but gave up and fled the room in tears. Her cry for help jolted Siron into action.

I need to run. Now.

He had no idea when the violence might turn on him. But maybe because of the back-to-back overload of sex and violence, his limbs wouldn’t cooperate. Not wanting to draw attention, Siron tried to crawl off the bed like a worm. His muscles refused to work, and he rolled off the high mattress with a thud.

“What the fuck are you? Why are you soaked and lying in my bed?”

Having just dragged the bloodied man out of the room, the owner of the room turned and stomped toward Siron. Siron, head pounding, managed to push himself up with trembling arms.

“Goddamn it, you soaked the whole bed!”

The man raised his free hand as if ready to punch him at any second. Siron flinched, throwing up his arms and shouting in Korean.

“M–me? I’m Korean! You too, right? Korean?”

The man narrowed his fierce eyes and stared down at him.

“What the hell does it matter to you if I’m Korean or from fucking Mars?”

“I–I was just... glad, that’s all. I don’t remember anything. I don’t know how I ended up in this room. I swear. I don’t even know how I got to the third floor.”

“...You don’t smell like alcohol.”

The rage started to fade from the man’s eyes. He stared hard at Siron with black, glossy eyes like cracked marbles, then slowly let go of his hair. Still wary, he asked:

“You on something?”

“...I don’t know. I drank something from a cup, and everything after that’s blank.”

“That guy earlier—did he touch you?”

“W–what? No! Absolutely not.”

Siron’s answer must’ve triggered some unpleasant thought in the man. He pulled out his phone and barked a brutal order to his guards to hunt down the bastards causing problems and cut their dicks off.

“You’re not actually going to... cut them off, are you?”

“Mind your business. And get the hell out of my room.”

“You speak Korean really well. Are you first-gen? Or one-point-five?”

“1.5 generation” referred to immigrants who had moved to the U.S. at an age young enough to retain fluent Korean. The man didn’t answer, but Siron pressed on, feigning ignorance.

“You live here? Are you Moby Dick?”

The man scowled like a cat with its tail stepped on.

“Don’t call me that stupid fucking nickname.”

“So it is you.”

Siron, completely lacking in fear, burst out laughing. A bright, shameless laugh with no walls, no hesitation. The same laugh Malik once described as “lewd and provocative, the kind that makes men like us lose our fucking minds.”

Clearly, this man felt something similar. Siron saw it in the violent energy flickering in his eyes.

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