Regi let out a long sigh. His eyes grew distant as he remembered the moments of the ride on his scooter, with Mely sitting behind him.
Well... Regi had been forced to take Mely home on his mother's orders. Although his face showed clear reluctance, deep down, his curiosity about the chatty girl haunted him. Especially since Mely had chosen to keep quiet and refused to tell him about the three thugs who had chased her.
Throughout the journey to Mely's house, absolute silence nearly took over, even as the wind roared around them. But to Mely, silence was a crime against humanity.
"Bro Regi, you know, if you were an ice statue in a supermarket freezer, you'd probably graduate summa cum laude. I've been talking to you this whole time, and your only answers are 'Hm... yeah' and 'Oh.' Phew... Was your face set that way at the factory? Because it looks like you can't smile... or did your expression battery run out?" Mely had complained back then, complete with her dainty index finger occasionally pointing straight at Regi's face as it appeared in the scooter's front-view mirror. Every so often, she had lightly patted his shoulder.
Regi sharpened that memory again through half-lidded eyes. Without realizing it, the corners of his lips twitched faintly—a barely perceptible movement that could hardly be classified as a smile.
His memory leaped to the moment his scooter stopped right in front of the girl's gate. Before he had even turned off the engine, Mely had already bombarded him with a rapid-fire list.
"Whatever, I'll get off here. Thanks, Mr. Cold Ride-Hailing Driver. If we run into each other again, please turn on your interaction mode...! At least make it like GPS, so there's a voice or something. And don't forget to take expression-boosting vitamins. I feel sorry for your facial muscles—they always look so tense, like a raw cracker that's just been left out to dry." Regi pulled the blanket back up to his chest.
"Haha..." A small laugh finally escaped his tightly closed lips. Lying on the kapok mattress, which sagged here and there, the man known for being cold and untouchable had to admit one thing: the silence of his room tonight suddenly felt far more silent without the chatty girl's rambling.
*Will I ever get to see her again?*
Meanwhile, in the dimly lit study, Mr. Radit... a prominent property businessman with overflowing wealth... massaged his forehead as he thought about his daughter, who still had not come home.
Not long afterward... When the clock showed eleven at night, the main entrance creaked softly open, revealing Mely in clothes that looked rumpled and dirty. Mr. Radit stood rigidly upright. The veins in his neck bulged as his blazing eyes fixed sharply on his daughter, who had just come home.
"Mely... where have you been?!" Mr. Radit's voice boomed, shattering the silence of the grand house. His anger had been building since eight o'clock.
"How many times have I told you not to come home this late! You're a young woman—you can't go wandering around without telling anyone!" Mely flinched in shock, fury mixing with her father's angry words. Her eyes glistened as she tried to hold back her tears, staring at him in disbelief. The fear caused by the horrifying incident a few hours earlier still gripped her chest, but her father's furious gaze struck even deeper.
"Dad..." Mely's voice caught in her throat.
"Don't make excuses!" Mr. Radit cut her off sharply, stepping closer in anger at his daughter.
"Do you have any idea how worried I was? Look! It's already eleven at night. There are all kinds of dangers out there! You deliberately made me sit here stressed out, waiting for you to come home, after I've spent all day handling the company?!"
Mely could no longer hold back her tears. Her sobs broke free—not because of his shouting, but because of the irony of what she had just heard.
The girl stared straight into the eyes of the man she had always respected as her protector.
"H-huhu... You told me to be careful, Dad?" Mely's voice trembled, hoarse and restrained. "But you forgot... or are you pretending to forget? You almost made me disappear from the face of the earth tonight, you know?"
Hearing Mely's explanation, Mr. Radit frowned, his brows drawing together. "What do you mean, Mel? Don't talk nonsense!" Mr. Radit shouted, genuinely confused.
"Earlier... earlier, three thugs chased me, Dad!" Mely screamed, releasing all the terror she had just endured. On her way home from working at her father's company that afternoon, Mely—who had been taking taxis for the past two days because she had forgotten to renew her driver's license—had been stopped by three muscular men on motorcycles. They threatened the driver and forced him to drop Mely off in a deserted alley.
"They wanted to capture me! They said I had to be sold... to pay off an 'installment'!" Mr. Radit gasped. The businessman's face suddenly lost its color, leaving him with a worried expression that looked deathly pale. All his anger collapsed in a single second. "An installment? Wh-what are you saying, Mely?" Mr. Radit whispered, his voice suddenly weakening and losing all its authority.
"They didn't say who their boss was or give me the name of their syndicate, Dad..." Mely continued, trying to explain as her body crumpled to the floor. She hugged her knees as her legs suddenly felt weak while she remembered the chase. Luckily, Regi had saved her; otherwise, Mely might already have become a chocolate-cheese fried banana by now.
"Dad... I'm sure they're a human-trafficking or human-organ syndicate. They said... five years ago, when your company was almost bankrupt, you borrowed capital from them. Because you couldn't pay the interest they demanded, today... they came to take me as collateral!"