Cursebound Echo

The first time I understood the shape of the curse, I was seven years old and holding my mother’s hand while she died.

She didn’t scream. That’s what I remember most. She just looked at me with this wide, wet confusion, like I’d done something she couldn’t quite believe. Her fingers were cold. The blood on her lips was still warm.

My father found me ten minutes later, sitting cross-legged on the kitchen floor with her head in my lap. He didn’t say anything. He just picked me up and carried me outside, and I watched the red smear I’d left on his white shirt spread like a slow flower.

He never touched me again after that day.

I don’t blame him. I was seven, and I’d killed his wife. Not on purpose. Not in any way the police could understand. But the coroner called it a sudden cardiac event, and the doctors said there was no history, no warning, no reason. My mother had been running. We’d been playing tag in the yard. She’d chased me into the kitchen, laughing, and then her heart just stopped.

I didn’t know what I was back then. I just knew that things died around me. Pets. Plants. The goldfish my uncle bought me that floated belly-up within an hour. The stray cat I fed behind the shed that keeled over mid-meow.

By the time I turned twelve, I’d stopped trying to love anything.

It’s easier that way. You learn to keep people at arm’s length. You learn to smile without meaning it. You learn to say the right things while your chest stays hollow and cold. I got good at it. Real good.

But then I met Jungkook.

He was seventeen, two years younger than me, and he had this laugh that sounded like a glass bottle shattering. Bright. Sharp. Dangerous. He sat next to me in homeroom on the first day of senior year, and he didn’t flinch when I looked at him. Most people flinched. I had dead eyes, they said. Empty eyes. Eyes that had seen too much.

Jungkook just smiled and asked if I had a pencil.

I gave him mine. He didn’t give it back.

That was three years ago. Now we share a one-bedroom apartment in Itaewon, and I wake up every morning terrified that today will be the day I finally kill him.

The apartment is small. Cramped. The walls are thin enough that we can hear the couple next door fighting about money and the old woman upstairs shuffling her slippers across the floor at 3 AM. Jungkook sleeps on the left side of the bed. I sleep on the right. There’s a gap between us, maybe six inches, that I’ve never been able to close.

He doesn’t know why I keep my distance. He thinks I’m just cold. Reserved. He jokes about it sometimes, calls me his ice prince, and I let him because it’s easier than telling him the truth.

The truth is that I’ve already killed everyone I’ve ever loved.

My mother. My grandmother. My best friend in middle school, Minho, who drowned at the beach while I was standing right next to him. My high school girlfriend, Yuna, who died in a car crash three days after she told me she loved me for the first time.

I stopped counting after that.

I stopped counting and started running. I moved cities. Changed my name. Cut off every connection I’d ever made. I lived in a state of constant motion, a ghost drifting through rooms I never stayed in long enough to haunt.

But Jungkook found me anyway.

He found me working at a convenience store in Busan, buying ramen at 2 AM, and he recognized me from a high school photo someone had posted online. He’d been looking for me, he said. He’d been worried. I’d disappeared without a word, and he’d spent two years tracking me down.

I should have told him to leave. I should have walked out the door and never looked back.

Instead, I let him buy me coffee. I let him talk. I let him fill the silence with his stories and his laughter and his ridiculous optimism, and by the time the sun came up, I was already in love with him.

I’ve been trying to fix it ever since.

The curse doesn’t work the way people think. It’s not a switch. It’s not something I can turn off or control. It’s more like a gravity, a pull that draws death toward the things I care about most. The closer I get, the stronger it gets. The more I love, the faster they fall.

So I keep my distance. I sleep on the edge of the bed. I never touch him unless I have to. I’ve trained myself to pull back, to step away, to keep my hands to myself even when every cell in my body is screaming to hold him.

But it’s not enough.

Three weeks ago, Jungkook got sick. Nothing serious, just a fever that wouldn’t break. I told myself it was the flu. I told myself it was nothing. But I watched him shiver under three blankets, watched his skin turn pale and waxy, and I knew.

The curse was hungry again.

I took him to the hospital. The doctors ran tests. They said his white blood cell count was low, but they couldn’t find a cause. They said it was probably a virus. They said to rest and hydrate and come back if it got worse.

It got worse.

Last night, his fever hit 104. I held a cold cloth to his forehead and listened to him breathe, shallow and fast, and I felt the curse coil in my chest like a snake.

I can’t lose him.

I can’t.

I’ve been reading. Researching. Digging through old books and older websites, looking for anything that might tell me how to break this thing. Most of it is garbage. Superstition. Folk tales about shamans and spirits and blood sacrifices. But one book caught my attention. A leather-bound journal I found in a used bookstore in Hongdae, written in a language I didn’t recognize.

The woman who sold it to me was old. Ancient. Her eyes were clouded with cataracts, but she looked at me like she could see right through my skin.

“You’re carrying something,” she said.

I didn’t answer.

“It’s not yours,” she said. “It never was.”

She wouldn’t explain. She just pressed the book into my hands and told me to find the translator. Find the one who could read the old tongue. Find the truth before it was too late.

I thought she was crazy.

But I kept the book anyway.

Now it’s 4 AM, and I’m sitting at the kitchen table with the book open in front of me, staring at symbols I can’t understand. Jungkook is asleep in the bedroom. His breathing is steady now, but I know it won’t last. It never does.

I need answers.

I need to know why this is happening to me. I need to know if there’s a way out. I need to know if I can save him without destroying myself.

But the book is a locked door, and I don’t have the key.

I close it. I press my palms flat against the cover. The leather is worn smooth, warm from my hands, and I feel something shift beneath my fingers. A pulse. A heartbeat.

I pull my hands away.

The book is still.

I tell myself I imagined it. I tell myself I’m tired, stressed, desperate. I tell myself a lot of things.

But when I finally go to bed, I leave the book open on the table, and I swear I can feel it watching me.

Jungkook stirs in his sleep. He reaches for me, his hand finding my arm, and I freeze.

His skin is hot. Too hot.

I pull away.

He mumbles something, his brow furrowing, and I turn my back to him.

I lie there in the dark, listening to his breath, and I make a decision.

Tomorrow, I’m going to find the translator.

Tomorrow, I’m going to open that book.

And if the curse tries to take him before I can stop it, I’ll find a way to take it back.

I don’t know if that’s possible. I don’t know if I’m strong enough.

But I know one thing for certain.

I’m not losing him.

Not tonight.

Not ever.