The Villain's Sister - Chapter 61

It was a very long time ago.

“What the hell is it about this stuff that makes everyone live like that?”

Their parents, who had been low-level drug traffickers, were dead.

All that remained for the twin brothers was 14,300 raphens, overdue rent, and a bag of white powder hidden between the wooden floorboards in the living room.

Myers had always been smarter and more mature than others his age.

While other kids practiced dictation, he read incomprehensible books. While school taught multiplication and division, he devoured chemistry books in the library.

So when he discovered the drugs, instead of selling them to local gangs, he pondered whether that white powder held enough value to completely ruin a life.

“Who cares? Just pack your stuff,” Tristan snapped irritably.

The Mist Island authorities had decided to send the Bernadette brothers to a facility. The boys, saying they needed time to say goodbye to their parents’ traces, managed to get a one-day delay.

“Fucking bastards. Should’ve known from the way they were popping pills at home.”

Misery matures a child. Tristan was no different.

At ten years old, Tristan cursed the parents who had left them.

“What’s going to happen to us at the facility?”

“I don’t know. How should I know, I’ve never been.”

“I want to keep living like we do now.”

Tristan threw a bag at Myers in frustration.

Myers was naïve—or, in adult language, a dreamer.

He always had to do what he wanted, and practical matters were always an afterthought.

So even when their parents hadn’t come home for over a month, he didn’t worry once.

Whenever they ran out of money, it was always Tristan who pickpocketed or stole food from supermarkets.

‘I’m the older brother, so I have to endure.’

Myers had been born that way, and Tristan, his twin, knew it better than anyone.

But right now, he couldn’t hold back the surging anger.

“If you’re so curious, why don’t you eat it yourself! Fuck, that damn powder! They were killed because of it!”

In a fit of rage, Tristan snatched the white powder from Myers.

Then he flushed it down the toilet.

Whenever he recalled their parents lying around with hollowed-out faces from drug use, an overwhelming fire surged up from deep within his chest.

How could they live like that in front of their own kids? Why the hell was I born into a place like this…?

Countless sorrows tore into him.

Fucking hellhole. Fucking parents.

But he had never wished them dead.

Whoever it might be, loss left a deep scar on a young boy.

“Myers Bernadette. Listen carefully. The moment you start picking up crap like that, you’re no longer my brother.”

Tristan emphasized it again.

“Don’t mess around with drugs. That’s the one thing I’ll never forgive.”

His twin brother Myers Bernadette, whose smile was like sunshine.

Nicknamed Lucky Ginger.

A dreamer who could smile brightly even in a shitty place like this.

For Tristan, devastated by the loss, the one thing he couldn’t bear to lose was his only remaining brother.

That was all there was to it.

***

Myers, who had always been free-spirited, failed to adjust to the facility.

There were too many things they weren’t allowed to do. Too many rules to follow.

Myers questioned everything that tried to confine him.

“Myers. If you wanted to read books, you should’ve told us. Do you know how worried we were when you disappeared?”

One day, wanting to read even after the library was locked, he had hidden in the restroom and read in secret until sunrise. The entire facility went into panic.

Tristan thought he’d come back on his own in a few days, but the adults reacted differently.

The police were called to search for Myers, and late that evening, the school teachers were contacted as well.

“Some couple is coming today to look at the kids, so the teachers are in a frenzy. Not that it matters to us,” Tristan muttered indifferently while doing his homework.

If Myers was advancing grades thanks to his overwhelming genius in math and chemistry, Tristan was the type who performed solidly across the board for his age.

“Tristan. I have to get out of here. I can’t take it anymore.”

“Calm down. I sneak into the basketball arena on weekends to watch games too, right? As long as we don’t get caught, just keep things moderate.”

“That’s not the issue.”

“Then what is?”

“I’ve read every book I can. Now I want to experiment. Living like this here is unbearable.”

“Experiment? What experiment?”

Myers pulled a small pouch from his pocket.

When Tristan saw the powder inside, he threw his pen at Myers.

“Myers Bernadette, you psycho!”

“I didn’t take any. I swear. I just have so many questions. And to get answers, I need a lot of money.”

“What the hell is wrong with you! You want to end up like those people?”

“They felt pleasure because the substance delivered to their brains secreted dopamine. That pleasure was their highest value. I… I want to make a powder that doesn’t destroy people. One that brings the highest value but doesn’t corrupt them!”

If Tristan came to guard himself against the darkness of the world after witnessing his drug-addicted parents die, then Myers accepted the darkness along with his twisted thoughts.

He believed that if he could create a drug substance without addiction or side effects, he could restore the honor of the parents who had died because of drugs.

‘Valuing pleasure isn’t a bad thing. They were victims of their time, forced to take harmful drugs because of the era they lived in.’

That wish was all bullshit.

To believe in such crap so firmly—damn parents, they ended up turning his little brother into a fool.

When Tristan told the facility teachers about Myers’s condition, the next day the kid was taken to a hospital.

A week after starting therapy and medication, Myers ran away from the facility.

“Myers…”

Tristan swore under his breath as he stared at the empty bed of his vanished brother.

The Lindberghs, who had been volunteering regularly at the facility, comforted Tristan when they saw his tear-reddened eyes.

The warmth of being held made him uncomfortable—it tickled.

It was a warmth never allowed in a young boy’s life.

So he ran from the Lindberghs and hid deep within the facility.

“He may seem cold, but he’s a kind kid once you get to know him.”

At the teacher’s words, the Lindberghs pictured the child with complex expressions.

Time passed.

The couple came to visit Tristan every weekend, and slowly, he opened his heart to them.

“You’re adopting me?”

“Yes. We want to be your family.”

Tristan refused the adoption.

By the time it was offered again, when he was around twelve, Myers had become a kid the facility had half given up on.

He constantly caused trouble and had run away a few months earlier without even showing his face to his brother.

‘Where the hell are you, Myers…’

He didn’t know where or how he was living, but it surely wasn’t a normal life.

Tristan wanted a normal home.

Instead of worrying about how he’d survive after leaving the facility at adulthood, he wanted to go to college and study more. He wanted to become a prosecutor.

To charge those bastards and throw them in prison, sweep this shitty city clean—that would be satisfying.

‘No. That’s not it.’

Forget becoming a prosecutor. Before that, he wanted to learn what it meant to be a proper adult.

How to say thank you, and how to exchange the little gestures between parents and children.

More than anything, he wanted normal love.

The loneliness of waiting for his runaway brother was suffocating.

It was a loss.

One with an end, but no way of knowing when that end would come. A hopeless loss.

Tristan was only twelve. He needed a guardian.

“I’ll think about it for a week.”

If Myers came back within a week, he’d refuse. If not, he’d go through with the adoption.

That’s the decision he made, and a week later, Tristan became a Lindbergh.

***

Even after the adoption, he occasionally contacted the facility to ask about Myers’s whereabouts, but the kid never showed up.

Time flowed steadily on.

In high school, he joined the basketball team and became a star. He picked up magic engineering from his father.

Then his father passed away, and Tristan entered college.

He got his first girlfriend and made many friends.

Law school prep was going smoothly, and his life was on track.

Until the day he read the morning paper.

― Sunshine, the world’s worst drug kingpin

It was an article about the leader of Lucky Ginger, a drug organization that created new synthetic drugs.

The photo was blurry, just a silhouette, but it confirmed his worst fears.

They’d been apart for a long time, but no matter how much taller and bulkier he’d grown, there was no mistaking him.

“Myers?”

His heart sank.

Why was he showing up here?

‘Kingpin of drugs?’

Cold sweat dripped down.

Tristan clutched his bangs and shut his eyes tight.

Myers Bernadette had become a drug kingpin.

Crazy bastard. Fucking asshole.

He cursed him a thousand ways in his heart, but it didn’t change anything.

― 7 dead in one month due to new drug’s side effects

― Drugged man in his 30s kills entire family

Every day, the papers showed what kind of chaos Myers’s drugs were causing.

Guilt rolled in like waves.

Today it just brushed his feet, but tomorrow it might become a tsunami and crush him.

It wasn’t his fault, but Myers was his brother.

“Tristan. Don’t hang out with Tyson.”

“Why not? Did he get drunk and commit a crime or something?”

“That punk’s been pushing drugs around to make money lately. He’s gone off the deep end. Stay away.”

Emma delivered the shocking news, and instead, he went to find Tyson.

His room was filled with syringes. Tyson lay there like a corpse.

The drug he’d taken was one of Sunshine’s new creations.

Tristan called an ambulance, then headed into the alleys.

“Where the hell is Sunshine?”

Some days, it was fists. Other days, he ran from guns.

He searched every back alley. Again and again.

Two weeks passed, and then Myers appeared on campus.

His eyes sunken, his face pale.

“Tristan, who’s that?”

When a classmate asked, Myers answered for him.

“His brother.”

“Tristan, you had a brother?”

“No, I didn’t.”

My brother died a long time ago.