Chapter 2.2

Alice found it hard to accept it herself. It was only when she had done what had to be done, taken care of the body, cleaned up the situation and sent a letter to her parents, she sat down and thought about the gory events. Her memories had come flooding back in. She had lived in a completely different world then, with the name Kim Eun-seo.

It hadn’t been her legal name, of course. Legally, she didn’t exist. There was no birth record, no parental record, nothing. Her father had beat her mother in a drunken rage. Her mother had lived cowering in fear and hoping he would go far away and leave her alone. Alice, or rather Kim Eun-seo, had become the black sheep of the family to survive. She had grown up in a family without love and affection. After her parents’ death, she found out that she held no love for people. She had landed a job after her first kill. It had seemed easy. She was hired as an assassin. 

It was quite the job. You get paid to kill somebody you didn’t know. If the client didn’t pay you, you would kill them too. Most paid on time and with obedience though, given her reputation. Only very rarely were there clients who felt they could cheat her, being a woman and all. They had found out the hard way that they couldn’t cheat her out from taking their lives, if not money. There had been two she had killed because they had refused to pay. The amount of time, energy and planning the job took, they better shower her in money for doing their dirty work for them.

In her line of work, the most common clients had been middle-aged people, usually married. The target would mostly be a husband, or a wife, sometimes parents. The motive: inheritance, money, property, love, jealousy, more. They would always want her to make it seem like a natural passing, or an accident. Nothing messy. She would get paid handsomely for such jobs.

Kim Eun-seo had worked with gangsters in the second half of her life. The common people hungry for money or inheritance and willing to pay someone to make it a natural death had become boring for her. She had gotten involved with the gangsters who were rough, straightforward, didn’t think too much about right and wrong. The high risk jobs had been fun, thrilling and dangerous. She loved meticulously planning out her strategy and occasionally meeting a clever opponent.

Some had called her a psychopath, and she hadn’t denied it. Granted that she didn’t think much about killing for money. She didn’t feel regret, or dread, or guilt. But how was she any different from the ‘normal’ people who paid her to kill their families because they couldn’t do it on their own. They had the money, she had the means. That was that. She thought that the place and the state she had arrived in was just a natural occurrence. 

However, thinking back on it, Alice didn’t think she was a psychopath now. She grew up in a rich family, a daughter to the Marquess. She had loved her looks, her family, her parties, her clothes. How could she be a psychopath when she had grown up in such normal circumstances with so much love and affection around her?

But she thought about Sir Slanted Eyes. Even when she knew herself as naïve, vain Alice, she thought that perhaps she could have started with his fingers first, then cut off his limbs, flayed his skin. A simple death just seemed too kind for the likes of him.

Alice shuddered. It disturbed Alice to think that way. If she wasn’t a psychopath, then what was she? Shouldn’t there have been some kind of sign before the memories came back? Alice hadn’t even been capable of hurting a fly, much less a human. She saw that in her previous life she had killed humans, animals, anything she had been paid to do. But she couldn’t imagine hurting her furry friends in this life!

Perhaps it’s just a bad dream like Aaron said, she thought. It must be just fantasy, or some delusions she must be suffering from. These two worlds were just jarringly different. The Alice in this world and Alice as Kim Eun-seo in the other life were opposite. But the memories were so clear and distinct. She couldn’t ignore that. She knew that she had been Kim Eun-seo as much as she was Alice.

She had to find a way to clearly explain this to her brothers. If Alice could explain in detail, perhaps they might understand her… or not. But she at least had to try. She was nervous and hesitant. She didn’t want her brothers to think of her as a psychopath, or worse a cold-blooded killer.

She didn’t remember every detail of her memories though. So it was better to do it slowly, and carefully.