Chapter 2
Thud! Thud!
Do-geon grabbed the back of Honggyun’s head and slammed it against the table again and again. Every time his head struck hard, blood spurted from Honggyun’s nose.
Lee-jae froze as if in shock.
The other customers began hurriedly leaving their seats.
Do-geon let Honggyun’s head drop onto the table as if throwing it.
Honggyun’s mouth fell open wide. Blood and saliva mixed together and dribbled from between his lips.
When Do-geon saw Honggyun’s face sliding down, he placed a foot on top of the table.
More precisely, on top of Honggyun’s cheek.
With the smooth sole of his dress shoe, he ground Honggyun’s face down hard.
“Vice President Go, you seemed late in greeting me.”
“Hhk, urgh…….”
“So I came to receive it myself.”
Do-geon stomped on Honggyun’s face. As he ground it around with his foot as though stubbing out a cigarette in an ashtray, Honggyun let out pitiful groans.
“I-I was wrong, hhk, I was……. Haah…… hh.”
“Yes, it’s disappointing when someone pretends not to see you.”
Do-geon went on speaking as he continued crushing the man’s head beneath his foot.
“Next time, when you see someone from Mujung, you will bow this politely. Understood?”
“Hhuu, kh…….”
“Answer me.”
“Yes. Yes. I under… stand. P-please… please spare me, hhk.”
When Do-geon lifted his foot away, Honggyun slid weakly off the table.
Honggyun seemed unable to regain his senses for a moment, then grabbed his broken nose and asked clumsily,
“Wh-when did you get here…… I-I failed to rec… recognize you, I’m s-sorry…….”
“From the moment you were earnestly worrying about a country handed over to a gangster bastard, Vice President.”
“…….”
“I heard you’ve been losing sleep, worried I might go so far as to sell off the country.”
“Hhk, it’s not like I was o-only saying bad, bad things, I also said your handsome looks and… abilities, haah, were remarkable, Executive Director…….”
“Yes, well, thanks for the compliment.”
Do-geon answered carelessly and tilted his head to one side.
“Gyeongjin.”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Clean it up.”
Gyeongjin grabbed the back of Honggyun’s neck and dragged him away.
Honggyun was hauled off, dragged along. A long smear of blood streaked across the marble floor.
Having witnessed the entire scene right beside her, Lee-jae’s body began to tremble.
“I saved you, so why do you look like that, Baby.”
Do-geon clicked his tongue at the sight of Lee-jae’s bloodless face.
“Or was I wrong? Were you happily about to be sold off, and I just got in the way?”
Do-geon jerked his eyes in a signal for her to follow. As though entranced, Lee-jae followed after him.
The man’s stride was fast.
He was a man nearing 190 centimeters tall. For someone like Lee-jae, limping as she walked, it was hard to keep up with a man like that striding along on long legs.
In an instant, he turned around. His gaze fell on Lee-jae’s left ankle, and then, indifferently, he slowed to match his pace.
“Um, Executive Director……”
Lee-jae had just come outside the hotel and finally managed to stand beside Do-geon.
He stared into the air for a moment, looking lost in thought, then opened his mouth.
“All right, let’s do it.”
“What?”
“That marriage. Do it with me.”
It was shocking enough that Beom Do-geon had interrupted her blind date.
But then words she could even less believe came from him.
“Marry this mister instead.”
***
One month earlier. An upscale restaurant.
Lee-jae cut the steak into very tiny pieces and put one into her mouth.
The chunk of meat would not go down, caught in her throat. Even so, she felt that at least the sound of utensils clinking had to continue, or she would suffocate in the middle of this blind date.
‘Hey, you freeloader. Go on the blind date in my place without Dad knowing. I’m having too much fun right now with the new man I’m seeing.’
‘A blind date with who?’
‘How would I know! Dad wants me to marry some gangster! It’s called the Mujung Group, but that place is basically a gangster den anyway.’
‘…….’
‘He probably hits women too. Since even if you got hit, you wouldn’t cry that it hurts, isn’t that perfect for you? Pfft.’
‘……Mujung Group? All right. I’ll go in your place.’
A ruffian with neither blood nor tears.
There was only one reason she had come out to this blind date with an Executive Director surrounded by nothing but ugly rumors.
Because he had been her first love.
Beom Do-geon had been the only adult who had ever reached out a saving hand to Lee-jae, lonely and impoverished in childhood.
‘Ha, I’m so nervous…….’
Her mouth was going dry. It was when she took a sip of water.
The moment Lee-jae saw the man casting her a detached gaze, she nearly dropped the glass.
The successor of the Mujung Group, said to hold all of South Korea in the palm of his hand.
A man who had lived a life in which it was natural to make others kneel with a mere gesture and take whatever he wanted.
A man who, through long-standing collusion within the prosecution and police, committed illegal acts and yet faced no sanctions of any kind.
And a man who, if he wished, could even change the law.
Everyone understood his arrogance, and there seemed to be no limit to the influence he extended through political and business circles.
It had been three years ago. The time he had come looking for Lee-jae after her father’s sudden death.
“I never dreamed I would meet you again, Executive Director.”
Even without trying to take him in with her eyes, he was a man who drew everyone’s gaze.
Even back then he had strongly carried the air of a grown man, but now, at thirty-two and having become the head of the organization, an even more untouchable aura flowed from him.
His upper body, forming a perfect inverted triangle, was wrapped in a black dress shirt. Beneath hair slicked back with pomade, the jawline beginning below his ears was slightly angular, giving off a deeply masculine impression.
Inside his long, narrow eyes, his pitch-black gaze was both detached and intense, and the high bridge of his nose descending from between his brows looked as though it had been carved by God’s own hands.
More than anything, the unique pressure the man carried was extraordinary.
Living at her eldest uncle’s house, she had seen plenty of people who were said to be the biggest and most powerful in South Korea.
And yet this man, simply by sitting still, seemed to crush people’s spirit by his very existence alone.
“Baby.”
At the sudden form of address that slipped from the man’s lips, Lee-jae blinked.
When Lee-jae looked around quickly, the man gave a short laugh.
“Is there another baby here besides you?”
At the title Do-geon had used for her when she was little, Lee-jae’s face flushed bright red.
It was then.
He shifted sideways in his seat and stretched out his long legs wrapped in a black suit.
Lee-jae’s eyes wavered when she saw the expensive dress shoe come up onto the table where the food was set.
The man’s rudeness did not end there.
He even put a cigarette between his lips. With a click, a flame rose from the Dupont lighter.
After lighting the tip of the cigarette, he drew deeply on the filter until his cheek hollowed.
“Baby, how old are you?”
There was something unsettling in the low voice asking a question one might ask a three-year-old child.
“Are you deaf too?”
The man’s indifferent gaze touched her limping left ankle and fell away.
As though ashamed, Lee-jae hurriedly tucked her leg beneath the table.
“Twen…….”
Lee-jae’s lips parted faintly.
That sharp gaze pierced deep into her skin.
Overwhelmed by the tension pressing in, she could not answer easily. Then the man, who had shown a moment of patience, seemed unable to endure anymore and drew his brows together.
“……I’m twenty.”
“Right, for a baby, you speak pretty well.”
The man praised her carelessly, as if saying, ‘See, you’re not deaf after all.’
“I never thought I’d end up seeing you again like this.”
At his words that he remembered her, her heart pounded heavily.
“You’ve grown up well.”
“Twenty,” he murmured low, then smiled crookedly. As though he had never imagined he would end up on a blind date with someone this young.
“Did you come out knowing I was your blind date?”
“……Yes. I came knowing everything. You can have today’s blind date with me.”
Her cousin Hyo-won had told her to go pretending to be her, but Lee-jae had not done that.
Lee-jae had urgent reasons why she absolutely had to make today’s blind date a success.
“I heard that Mujung Group is looking for a woman to marry you, Executive Director.”
“…….”
“Please marry me.”
Lee-jae continued speaking, trying hard to steady her nerves.
But judging from the way he kept calling her baby, it seemed everything had already been ruined from the very start.
Even though they were meeting again after she had become an adult, did she still look like the seventeen-year-old student in a school uniform to him?
The man indifferently drew on the cigarette filter. In time with that movement, the black shirt stretched taut along the lines of his muscles.
“Professor Seo is really something else.”
“…….”
“What exactly does he expect me to do with a baby who still has baby fuzz.”
Looking at Lee-jae’s cheeks, still not quite rid of their baby fat, Do-geon exhaled a pale stream of smoke through his lips.
When Lee-jae coughed, he clicked his tongue and crushed the cigarette b*tt out on the white plate.
“So after all this time, what you have to say is that you want me to marry you?”
“As I said, I’m an adult now, and I can get married too…….”
The man coldly cut her off, his brows furrowing.
“Baby, do you even know what kind of relationship a married couple has?”
Lee-jae moved her lips, but at the explicit words that followed, she lost what she was going to say.
“A married couple sleeps together day and night.”
“…….”
“They sleep together the moment they open their eyes in the morning, while they eat, while they wash, while they work, and at night they go on until one of them collapses dead—that’s what a married couple is.”
Wh… what do they do?
The man let his gaze rest for a moment on the flushed nape visible between the collar of her shirt before he spoke.
“Could you do that with me, day and night?”
It was the first time anyone had spoken so openly and directly about such things to her face.
Lee-jae’s face turned bright red.
One corner of the man’s mouth twisted coldly. It was unmistakable mockery.
“Well?”
“…….”
“Baby, do you really want to marry a son of a b*tch like me?”
Do-geon asked with the cigarette slanted between his lips.
It was an arrogant warning that he would never, under any circumstances, marry a child.
