Chapter 4
After walking Jian to the front of the company, Taejun headed to the hotel where he would be staying for the time being.
WS Hotel, Room 1104.
He opened the door, entered, tossed the keycard and his tie onto the bed, and sat down on the edge.
“Hoo.”
He let out a long breath, his face troubled.
“Seo Jian.”
The name slipped through his lips.
She was his first love, the one who took his first kiss, and even his first experience.
On top of that, she was the woman who left him with a cruel wound he would never forget.
Taejun, who couldn’t trust anyone, had given his heart to someone for the first time because of her, and yet…
To Taejun, Jian was a very wicked girl.
Since she had to receive as much pain as he had suffered, if they ever met again, he planned to trap her by his side and drain the life out of her.
He had imagined how Jian would react when she saw him, having returned successful rather than worthless.
“Damn it.”
Among all the scenarios, he never imagined she would pretend not to know him.
“No, sir. I think it’s just because this is my first time attending such an event with the department head.”
The moment he heard those words in Jian’s voice, Taejun’s blood boiled in an instant.
How dare someone like you keep getting on my nerves?
He had to force down the words that had risen to his throat.
“Then I suppose I’ll have to remind you what we were to each other. Close your eyes, Seo Jian.”
He had almost impulsively kissed Jian, driven by sudden anger.
But when he saw Jian turn her reddened face away without saying a word, incomprehensible emotions swirled in his chest.
If he had devoured her lips right then and there… he felt he would ruin everything, so he stopped there.
He couldn’t let years of planning fall apart like this.
“If you wound someone’s heart, it’s only right that you get wounded in return.”
Taejun murmured quietly and opened the drawer of the nightstand beside the bed.
He opened the opening of a yellow envelope he took out from inside and shook it; a stack of papers fell out with a thud.
These were the materials he had researched about Jian before returning.
“Annoying. Tsk.”
Ten years ago, Jian had lived in a magnificent house, but now she resided in a dilapidated red brick building.
Taejun stared for a long time at a photo showing Jian standing at the entrance of the villa, looking up at the pouring rain with a gloomy expression.
Then he tossed the photo onto the table and clenched his fist tightly.
“Damn it.”
Their reversed circumstances from back then were also a variable.
Back when they believed they loved each other.
Jian was the daughter of a wealthy family, and Taejun was a child at the orphanage where she volunteered.
Jian, always with a bright face, seemed completely untouched by hardship or scars.
A hothouse flower.
A fairy-tale princess unaware of the ways of the world.
Looking at Jian, those were the only words that came to mind.
Her dimples that appeared whenever she smiled, her light, gentle footsteps.
There wasn’t a single thing about her that didn’t irritate him.
“Why are you sitting here alone? Come out and eat.”
“Mind your own business.”
Because of that, he didn’t even like her speaking to him.
Even when he answered deliberately to provoke her, Jian would just smile, her dimples showing.
She was so pure that it made the urge to taint her surge within him.
That was just his mean-spirited nature.
But.
“Ugh!”
One day, under the pounding rain, he ended up making a wound between Jian’s left collarbone and chest with the knife he was holding.
It was an accident, but Taejun was more shocked by the red bloodstain staining her white shirt than Jian was.
He was so shocked that his throat tightened and he couldn’t even say he was sorry.
“Why are you sitting here alone? Are you okay?”
Jian worried about him instead.
He had expected her to panic and not know what to do, but Jian acted as if it was nothing.
Instead, Taejun was the one who became bewildered.
After that incident, feeling guilty, Taejun found himself thinking about Jian more and more, and whenever she came to volunteer, he would deliberately strike up a conversation.
After a year of that, Taejun realized his feelings weren’t just guilt.
And he noticed that Jian’s feelings were no different from his.
“Jian. Will you go out with me?”
Their relationship began with a kiss.
They grew close quickly, and before they knew it, they were passionately in love.
At first, he wondered why she liked someone like him, but he trusted Jian without doubt and gave her everything he had.
But then.
“Am I crazy? Putting aside everything else, they say you can’t fake breeding. But why would I go for someone like that? Nothing happened, we’re nothing. What would I do with someone like that? Maybe if it were just for fun.”
The conversation between sisters that Taejun involuntarily overheard drove a nail into his heart.
Jian, who had driven him crazy with words of love, then unhesitatingly spewed such horrible words behind his back—it was a shock.
Just last night they had held each other passionately and slept together, and yet she could say such things without hesitation.
It made him think that maybe Jian had never liked Taejun from the beginning.
“You’re disgusting.”
Consumed by anger and a sense of betrayal, he left her with only those words and turned his back.
After that day, Taejun wished for Jian’s misfortune every single day.
And now, she really did appear, in such a pathetic state. What was he supposed to do about that?
“Why of all things…”
The thought that Taejun might have had a small part in Jian’s misfortune made him feel sick.
What he had imagined in his head and what he saw with his own eyes were vastly different.
After Taejun appeared, Jian’s life suddenly began flowing in a completely different direction.
Taejun’s official start date was said to be a week away.
So after that day, she didn’t have to face him.
But her mind was constantly filled with thoughts of Taejun.
At work, she had to watch her team members’ eyes; at home, her family’s; and on top of that, she couldn’t sleep, so she was out of her mind.
“Ha, I’m tired.”
For four days, she considered quitting the company rather than becoming Taejun’s personal assistant, thousands of times.
But it wasn’t easy to leave a place where her abilities were recognized.
She knew better than anyone that, based on her career alone, she would never get such favorable treatment elsewhere.
Above all, the biggest reason she couldn’t hand in her resignation was money.
She had received a special promotion, rapid advancement, and a decent salary increase.
For the sake of her father, Junyeol, who was buried in debt due to excessive business expansion, she couldn’t quit.
After the company went bankrupt and they filed for insolvency, he had struggled to get by, but then a few years ago, he started another business.
With bank loans blocked, he had even turned to loan sharks, and like pouring water into a bottomless pot, the debt snowballed.
Her stepmother, who still hadn’t given up the spending habits from when the company was thriving, and her half-sister, Sojin, also contributed to the problem.
To be honest, it wasn’t Jian’s debt to repay, but there was a reason she couldn’t ignore it.
After her biological mother died in a car accident right after giving birth to Jian,
Junyeol’s family, who had opposed the marriage from the start, tormented Jian, an innocent child, saying she was the source of all their misfortune.
But Junyeol, despite the pressure from his family, even remarried and took care of Jian.
“Now that you’ve remarried, things are going smoothly for you. Every time you stumble, it seems like she’s the cause, so why don’t you just get rid of her? Make her move out! Wouldn’t it be better for the three of you to live in harmony?”
“Does remarrying make Jian not my daughter anymore? The four of us will live well on our own, so if you’re going to say strange things, please don’t visit. She’s a child.”
Because of Junyeol, who gave so much for her, Jian grew up without being abandoned, and so she was helping to repay his debt.
Even knowing it was a task that would never end.
Jian opened the front door of her house with a bitter smile.
“I’m back.”
Her greeting seemed out of place; the entrance was clean, without a single pair of shoes.
It meant no one was home, so Jian let out a sigh of relief, thinking she could relax a little.
“I should shower before anyone comes.”
Jian put her bag down on the desk in her room, quickly grabbed her pajamas and underwear to change into, and headed to the bathroom.
She closed the door, took off her clothes, and turned on the shower. That was the moment.
“It would be best for you to admit it willingly before I strip you and check for myself.”
In the mirror, the scar that Taejun remembered so clearly was reflected.
She never thought this scar would be used in such a way.
Jian traced the trace of that day with her fingertips and let out a hollow laugh.
“Or I could just strip you myself and confirm it.”
Taejun’s voice, rising again, warmed her ears.
Why had she just stood there like an idiot, unable to give any answer, even after hearing such words?
Recalling his piercing gaze made her chest tighten and her heart pound painfully.
She hadn’t eaten all day, yet she felt a kind of indigestion.
“Ha.”
No matter how many times she thought about it, Taejun’s actions were incomprehensible.
There was a time when he had treated her as less than a fallen leaf rolling on the street.
“Maybe quitting really is the only option.”
She never thought that right after finally getting the permanent position she wanted so badly, she would be considering resigning.
But no matter how much she thought, the conclusion was the same.
She had to endure.
Underneath a man who looked at her with contempt, as if she were a bug.
“Why is this so hard?”
When she let the word ‘hard’ out of her mouth, it became difficult to bear, so she had forced herself to hold it in, again and again.
But now, helplessly, the words slipped through her lips.
Reality was already overwhelming, and now the little she had managed to build was suddenly being trampled into the mud, leaving her breathless.
Perhaps her life was just this terribly messed up.
The suffocating situation, with not a single ray of light, was too much to bear, so Jian buried her grimacing face in her hands.
Ha, I just want to give it all up.
