Chapter 4
At some point, no one other than the cell leader dared to touch Ji-i.
Eventually, the cell leader became so anxious about not offending Ji-i that she was constantly on edge. And at some point, whenever Ji-i merely frowned for a moment, the cell leader would whimper like a puppy, unable to figure out how to appease her.
“You don’t have any, but you don’t know?”
“…….”
What is she even talking about right now……?
Ji-i had momentarily gotten distracted from the main point by thoughts of the cell leader, and she unconsciously furrowed her brow.
#2.
“Ah, I get it.”
Oh!
“…….”
Ji-i quickly returned to the matter at hand.
She asked whether I had any experience or not, right?
“Hehehe. You mean your partner wasn’t a man?”
Arang finally spoke with an expression suggesting that she had figured something out.
“…….”
“Really? Hehehe, so you were like that too? Hehehe, well, I suppose that happens. Hahaha. You’ve really changed.”
As if that weren’t enough, she started snickering.
The shame Ji-i had been forced to carry because of coercion she could never become accustomed to surged back up again.
Im Arang, do you want to die?
Hostility and murderous intent once again surfaced in Ji-i’s eyes.
If this had been inside the prison and someone had deliberately provoked her with that kind of expression, they probably wouldn’t have survived intact.
It wasn’t that Ji-i had been able to act with impunity merely because she had the cell leader backing her.
As mentioned before, that place was capable of corrupting even an ordinary person.
And Ji-i herself was proof of that.
Eight years is just about the perfect amount of time for training, isn’t it?
Ever since the cell leader had become obsessed with her favorite, Ji-i, her possessiveness had been unparalleled.
More than one prisoner had foolishly laid hands on Ji-i and ended up suffering serious consequences at the cell leader’s hands.
But even the cell leader couldn’t protect Ji-i around the clock.
So one day, she began teaching Ji-i self-defense.
Ji-i was naturally intelligent.
Although there was little she could do against overwhelming physical strength, against an ordinary opponent, her practical combat skills and intelligence were more than enough to hold her own.
As a result, present-day Ji-i had developed tens of thousands of ways to bring down an opponent without exerting much physical strength.
So dealing with this one shouldn’t be a problem. Hmph.
A mocking smile appeared on her face as she looked at the ridiculous Arang.
“Get to the point.”
But this was still a place where a guard could appear at any moment and swing a baton at her head, so Ji-i merely endured it because she had no desire to cause trouble here.
Whatever she felt inside, she had become an expert at suppressing it. After all, staying alive came first.
“You don’t necessarily have to go that far. If there’s a medical issue, it can always be dealt with somehow, so let’s put that aside. But you can still have children, right? You didn’t ruin your body fooling around in there, did you?”
Should I kill her?
Haa…… No. Forget it.
“Do you need my body?”
Ji-i asked Arang in a completely emotionless tone.
Judging from everything they’d discussed so far, the conclusion was obvious.
“It’s basically something along those lines.”
“Why do you need it?”
“There isn’t anything else I lack, but there is one thing my body can’t do.”
“…….”
“You went through high school, so you should at least know that a body like mine can’t give birth.”
So, according to this woman, her body was incapable of having children?
“…….”
“You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?”
What on earth happened to this woman all these years?
Wait.
Then……
“Are you asking me to be a donor?”
The thought flashed through her mind, so Ji-i asked indirectly.
“Looks like the food you’ve been eating all this time wasn’t very nutritious.”
Arang replied sarcastically.
“…….”
“At that level, why would I have come looking for you? Why would I bother?”
“Hmm.”
So this woman was saying that she couldn’t fulfill her biological function as a woman.
Just how recklessly has this woman lived all these years?
“It would be a kind of rental, I suppose. Under my identity, you’d marry my fiancé, get pregnant, give birth, and handle everything in one go. Basically, you would have to take care of every part of the role yourself so everything stays clean and simple. Right? After that, you can figure out the rest without me having to spell it out, can’t you?”
Judging by what she was saying, Arang intended to switch places with Ji-i at the postpartum care center and pretend to be the mother.
But how could that possibly work when they’re different people? Is that even realistically possible?
It was.
Because Arang—whose name before her legal name change had been Song Ji-ru, and who had been born thirty seconds earlier—and Ji-i were identical twins who had been born prematurely.
Their biological mother had been unmarried and, unable to afford the cost of keeping them in incubators, had abandoned the newborns at the hospital before fleeing.
Aside from the star-shaped birthmark behind Ji-i’s left ear, the two were physically identical—practically Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V copies of each other.
“Sweetie, you’ve got a star behind your ear. Look.”
Ji-i hadn’t known about it at all. It was only after hearing the cell leader mention it that she learned she had that star-shaped birthmark.
“Really? I do have a star behind my ear. And, Sis, could you stop calling me ‘sweetie’?”
“Why? You don’t like hearing it?”
“It’s not that I don’t like hearing it……”
It’s disgusting.
In any case, Ji-i herself had only discovered the birthmark while she was in prison, so there was a good chance Arang didn’t know about it either.
More importantly, this sort of role-playing wasn’t something that had happened only once or twice.
And as a result, Ji-i had spent the past eight years unjustly paying the price for Arang’s actions after being betrayed by her time and time again.
At 3:30 p.m., after exercising and taking a shower, Dong-in carefully applied his skincare products and thoroughly dried his hair with a hair dryer.
Even the slightest bit of dampness in his hair would invite all sorts of comments from one person or another, so there was little he could do about it.
He could simply ignore the nagging of those who loved to lecture him, but that didn’t make it any less bothersome.
In the end, the only option was to groom his hair even more meticulously.
If I’d known it would be like this, I should’ve just stayed abroad no matter how much everyone nagged me about coming home.
After putting on his clothes, fastening his cuff links, and choosing and tying his necktie, he finished everything off by putting on his watch.
Although it might have looked as though he was simply taking great care with his appearance, this particular period of time—apart from when he slept—was actually the only time when he could completely shut off his brain and enter a state of total mental blankness.
“Young Master.”
When he came downstairs, Butler Kang bowed at the waist.
The butler had neatly combed back his full white hair with pomade. He wore a crisp white shirt beneath a vest, a bow tie, and the characteristic black uniform of a butler.
“Yes, Butler Kang.”
When it came to Butler Kang, Dong-in was equally courteous.
“Did you sleep well?”
Butler Kang Hyun-seok was a man in his early sixties, a capable individual whom Dong-in’s grandfather had sent specifically for him.
The butler had once been a professional hotelier who received formal management training in Britain.
Over the course of forty years in various sectors of the hotel industry, he had risen to the highest positions before retiring several years ago.
Dong-in’s grandfather had even waited until his retirement and then personally flown to Dubai to bring this talented man back with him.
