Czar did not go to his police station.
He turned in the opposite direction and walked — steady pace, natural, unhurried — toward the road where the tattoo shop sat. The artist there knew him well. They had been school friends once, back when the world was a simpler and smaller place.
His eyes stayed down. He moved through the street without meeting a single gaze, without acknowledging a single face. Just walking. Just breathing.
He stopped five steps from the glass door.
His shoulders rose and fell with a long, quiet exhale.
"I can do this," he whispered.
He pushed the door open.
Damen was inside, head down, scrolling through his phone. His eyes lifted at the sound of the door and landed on Czar — and in that single second he understood exactly why he had come. He looked away casually, stood, moved to the drawer, and pulled out a neatly folded piece of paper.
He extended it without a word.
Czar took it. Did not open it.
"I know I had written that I would not come for the erasure because of my skin." He paused. The paper stayed folded in his hand. He did not look at Damen and Damen did not look at him. "I know what she did. Everyone in Seoul knows. The news broke fast — it was the most tragic case. Lia's case. Her death."
Damen finally glanced at him.
"Can you change it," Czar said. His voice was quiet. Almost pleading. "The eye shape."
Damen sighed and let his hand fall onto the back of the chair.
"Draw them. I will make sure there is minimal erasure so your skin stays safe."
He took out a white sheet of paper and a pen from the drawer and slid them both across to Czar.
Czar looked at the blank page for a solid second.
Then he drew two eyes.
Not drastically different from before — just slightly changed. Subtle. Like the eyes carry something he can never even carry once.
They were Elaya's eyes.
He did not know why he drew them. He did not know why he was doing this at all. He just drew them and slid the paper back across to Damen without a word.
Damen looked at the sketch. Then at Czar. "You sure?"
Czar nodded calmly and sat down in the chair.
Damen cracked his knuckles, picked up the needle, and got to work. Czar sat still and said nothing. Twenty minutes passed in complete silence.
"It is done, Czar."
Czar sat up immediately, pulled his shirt back on, and left without a single word — straight through the glass door and out into the street.
His eyes were burning.
It had taken everything in him to walk through that door today and do what he did — more courage than most things had cost him. And now that it was done, something in him gave way quietly and without warning.
He started running.
Tears came and he did not stop them and he did not slow down, not caring who saw him or where he was going, just moving — through streets and corners and stretches of road that blurred past him — until he flagged a cab and rode the rest of the way home in silence, face turned toward the window.
Mahira had come home early.
She pushed the front door open and her eyes went immediately searching — habit, instinct
"Look, I bought red velvet pastries for both of us!" she called out, her voice bright, moving through the hallway toward his room.
The door was open.
She slowed.
The room was empty. But on the bed sat a folded piece of paper — and she recognized his handwriting before she had even fully crossed the threshold.
She picked it up.
Her face changed from the first line.
By the last line she was sitting on the edge of his bed without remembering having sat down, reading it again. Then again. Then again — six times, as though the words might rearrange themselves into something less devastating if she looked long enough.
They did not.
"She betrayed you," she whispered.
The pastry bag slipped from her hand and touched the floor softly.
The tears came quickly after that — quiet and uncontrolled, her face crumpling as she held the letter in both hands and spoke to the empty room.
"You came back in that condition and I thought it was a fight. I never once thought — this. This was the reason you weren't eating, weren't sleeping, weren't speaking." She pressed the letter to her chest. "And you just left. Without letting your lips say even a word of it to me. How much were you holding inside you, my child? Why didn't you tell me? Why — why?"
She asked the empty room. It gave her nothing back.
Czar had written only what Lia had done — just that, nothing more. He had not wanted to hide the truth from Mahira. He had already hidden too much for too long. But he had written it on paper instead of saying it out loud because some truths are easier to leave behind than to speak — and he had left before she could read it and pull him back.
She sat on his bed surrounded by silence, the pastries on the floor, the letter in her hands, and cried the way people cry when they are grieving something that was never theirs to lose in the first place — on behalf of someone they love