Chapter 8
They said it was a combination of overwork and malnutrition. Su-a wasn’t able to leave the emergency room until she had finished the entire IV drip.
Far in the distance, she could see the blue light of dawn beginning to break.
It was almost as if the entire world were urging her to forget Hajin, who belonged to a dream, and adapt to reality.
“Get in.”
Woojin opened the passenger-side door.
Su-a inhaled the faint citrus scent lingering around him. Instead of getting into the car, however, she stared at Woojin.
“Young Master.”
“You don’t have to thank me.”
“Yesterday, you entered my personal space without my permission. You know that, right?”
Contrary to Woojin’s expectations, she wasn’t thanking him at all. Her words carried an almost accusatory tone.
“I promised I wouldn’t do that again.”
Woojin gave a disbelieving little laugh at her stiff tone.
“Is that really what’s important right now?”
“Yes, it is. That’s the minimum boundary we need to maintain.”
She had agreed to let Woojin into her home on the assumption that he would strictly respect that boundary.
Yet the promise had been broken in less than twenty-four hours.
To Su-a, that was a fairly serious matter.
“So even if I have to watch my sister-in-law get sick and die, I’m not allowed to cross her boundaries?”
“Yes. If you really want to compare the two, I think you entering my space whenever you please is a bigger problem than me getting sick and dying.”
Su-a maintained her razor-sharp attitude, as though she were still wearing her military uniform.
Woojin rubbed the ridge of his eyebrow.
It was also a habit Hajin occasionally displayed whenever he found himself in a difficult situation. There was nothing particularly strange about identical twins sharing at least one habit.
“I said you didn’t have to thank me, but it’s honestly not very pleasant when you don’t seem even the slightest bit grateful.”
It wasn’t that she wasn’t grateful to him at all.
But Su-a didn’t add that.
For now, she felt it was more important to make her position clear.
“This isn’t an excuse, but the phone you left in the living room kept ringing. I was on the second floor, and even from there the vibration was quite irritating. The caller was your father.”
Woojin took Su-a’s phone from his pocket and held it out to her.
“I figured he must have been worried about his daughter, who had lost her husband at such a young age.”
He continued,
“It looked like the phone was going to keep ringing all night, so I had no choice but to try to let you know. I stood outside your bedroom door calling you for quite a while.”
Su-a accepted the phone with both hands.
“No matter how many times I called, you didn’t answer. All I could hear was a sound like some puppy whimpering.”
Just as Woojin had said, there were several missed calls from her father and mother.
There were also countless messages filled with concern.
“Anyone would have opened the door and gone inside at that moment. No matter what promise they’d made just beforehand.”
There had been a legitimate reason for Woojin to cross her boundaries.
He had had a reason to do so.
Even Su-a would have done the same.
If someone had suffered a major tragedy and failed to answer no matter how many times they were called, and if the sound of them being in pain could be heard from behind the door, anyone would have been seized by an ominous feeling and thrown the door open.
“Doing this won’t make Do Hajin understand you. I mean… your dead husband.”
There was more sorrow than anger in Woojin’s voice as he admonished Su-a.
Su-a wiped the cold sweat still beading on her forehead before answering.
“Hajin doesn’t have to understand me. This is a matter of my conscience.”
The lingering low-grade fever was beginning to rise again, making her mind hazy.
“I’m just a little rigid by nature. I was a soldier, after all.”
Su-a gave a faint, self-deprecating smile.
“I suppose Hajin must have found me frustrating, too.”
“Yes. I imagine he did. There probably wasn’t anyone else like you around my brother.”
When Woojin noticed Su-a’s complexion beginning to turn pale again, he gestured toward the passenger seat.
By her original principles, Su-a shouldn’t have accepted a ride in Woojin’s car either.
But her physical condition was terrible, so she had to compromise.
If she went out onto the main road like this and tried to hail a taxi, there was no telling when she might collapse.
“But I think you must have been special to him precisely because you were so frustrating.”
Su-a, who had awkwardly climbed into the passenger seat, froze at Woojin’s unexpected words.
“You’re the kind of person who somehow suits being so rigid.”
Their eyes met at close range.
Su-a felt her heart sink.
For that moment, he truly felt like her husband, Hajin.
Those eyes, dark as storm clouds, seemed to shake her to her very core.
“Maybe that’s what he fell in love with.”
When the pounding of her heart grew so fierce that she felt Woojin might hear it, Su-a realized something.
Maybe I’m the one who has actually been crossing the line.
Maybe she had been projecting Hajin onto Woojin, trying to soothe her longing, even if only for a moment.
“To my brother, someone like you must have been someone he’d never encountered before in his life.”
After uttering those meaningful words, Woojin closed the passenger door.
He walked around the hood and climbed into the driver’s seat.
Su-a couldn’t take her eyes off him until he did.
Then she squeezed her eyes shut and lowered her head.
I must really be losing my mind.
After that, she tried not to look at Woojin for the rest of the drive home.
But once she had become conscious of those sensations, there was no way to turn them back.
“Do you know how much money and effort it takes to raise a single heir in a chaebol family?”
Attorney Lee Han-kyung raised his head at the dry voice that suddenly broke the silence as he flipped through the gruesome case files.
His client stood with his back turned, looking out the window, so his expression was hidden.
“No. I’ve never been a chaebol.”
There was no need to guess his expression, however.
It was always the same.
Except when he was with one particular person.
“It takes enough money and time to wipe out several subsidiaries without batting an eye.”
Since she wasn’t here now, Lee Han-kyung was certain that his client wore an expression devoid of even the slightest trace of warmth.
“Every member of the family devotes themselves to raising him, fully prepared to make sacrifices.”
“That certainly is impressive.”
Although there was admiration in his words, Lee Han-kyung thought it was only natural.
The heir they had raised with such dedication would have to oversee every division of the massive conglomerate known as LOW, which had its operations spread throughout the world.
He had to be someone without a single deficiency.
Someone like the man standing before him.
“But isn’t it strange?”
His client suddenly turned around.
His flawless, handsome features only made him look even more otherworldly.
After meeting his client, Attorney Lee Han-kyung had come to realize that perhaps the world really was terribly unfair.
“His eldest son wasn’t just any child. He was the son he’d invested so much effort into raising. Yet even after his death, my esteemed father remained completely composed.”
For some reason, the words my esteemed father sent an eerie chill through the room.
“He even refused an autopsy. They say that most parents deny their child’s death until the very end, only reluctantly accepting it after the autopsy results come out. But there wasn’t even a moment of hesitation.”
It felt as though not even the most tenacious weed could survive in this man’s vicinity.
“As though everything had gone exactly according to plan.”
A bone-deep chill seeped into the room, and Attorney Lee Han-kyung straightened his posture.
“He was happy. Because his eldest son had died more easily than he’d expected.”
When he first met his client, Attorney Lee Han-kyung had thought one thing.
He is absolutely not an ordinary man.
After everything that had happened since then, that conviction had only grown stronger.
There were few people who would dare oppose him.
He seemed like someone born to rule over everyone else.
The kind of person who would make an invaluable ally, but whom no one could ever hope to defeat as an enemy.
“For some reason, that satisfied look on his face really gets under my skin.”
He clicked his tongue.
“Makes me want to crush him.”
At that moment, an image flashed through Attorney Lee Han-kyung’s mind.
A face that had been crushed so thoroughly that not even its original shape remained.
The handsome face it had possessed in life had been rendered completely unrecognizable.
The pitiful man had been his client’s identical twin brother, so similar that anyone could have believed they were the same person.
“So he can never smile like that again.”
“I’ll make the preparations even more thorough.”
Attorney Lee Han-kyung instinctively lowered himself before the stronger man.
His client gave a short, satisfied laugh.
The excessively captivating smile made it difficult, at times, to tell whether he was good or evil.
He resembled a fallen angel.
And yet, at the same time, he could have been a perfectly composed demon.
“By the way… when are you planning to tell Madam?”
Attorney Lee Han-kyung, who was gathering his bag, finally asked the question he had been hesitating to bring up.
“I’m not sure. She still seems to be in shock.”
As expected, his client’s expression changed.
Yet even then, it remained impossible to tell whether there was good or evil in his face.
“Do you really trust Madam completely?”
As an attorney responsible for protecting his client, Lee Han-kyung had to consider every possible scenario.
What if Chairman Do-young had involved his daughter-in-law in the matter?
What if she had colluded in the death of the husband she had married without love in exchange for some greater benefit that would help her family?
Or perhaps she had simply wanted to kill a husband with whom she had a poor relationship—a man who, unlike herself, lacked any sense of morality.
If so, his client’s decision to begin living with her would itself be an enormous trap.
“Attorney Lee. Then tell me. What exactly are you trying to say?”
His client showed no sign of surprise, as though he had already seen through Lee Han-kyung’s thoughts.
“She may be a good person, but you can never know what’s in someone’s heart.”
If Do Hajin had been his enemy, Lee Han-kyung knew that the first person he would have approached in order to neutralize him would have been his wife.
“It’s better not to let your guard down completely, at the very least.”
Without even realizing it, she had become the one and only Achilles’ heel of Executive Director Do Hajin, a man who otherwise appeared to have no weaknesses whatsoever.
As someone whose duty was to protect his client, Lee Han-kyung didn’t consider that a particularly welcome fact.
