Alms, Not Theft
It was a bizarre leap of logic, but Haeseo found herself nodding along earnestly anyway. The idea of her physically overpowering this hulking Baek Ruby and keeping him from leaving the house made no sense whatsoever.
“Thank you, noona.”
The moment he got the grudging permission he'd been angling for, Ruby scooped Haeseo up off the floor. Before she could even get out a word about being put down, he plopped down onto the sofa with her bundled in his arms.
Her hips slotted neatly between his spread legs, so that she ended up tucked sideways against him.
“I'll really try hard. I'll do everything you tell me to. I just don't want you hating me.”
Ruby hunched his massive frame down and rubbed his hair against Haeseo's cheek. With her forearms pressed together in front of her chest as her only line of defense, Haeseo turned her gaze into empty air, wearing the dead-eyed expression of a weary office worker.
Barely a day ago she'd been thinking the memory loss had mellowed him out. Yeah — Baek Ruby's true nature was, without question, that of a batshit lunatic dog.
Haeseo ended up forcing Ruby to keep his promise that he'd do anything.
To prepare for every contingency while they were lying low, she sorted out the information he needed to absorb quickly. Then, at the same time every day, she sat across from him at the table and taught.
Unsurprisingly, most of it centered on the company: Ruby's current rank and role, the scope of his duties, the faces and names of the TF Team members, their career histories and personal habits, their tastes, their quirks.
And above all, there was Baek Gi-baek and his faction. On this part, honestly, Haeseo had little to offer. Beyond the public information available on the corporate org chart, she didn't know much about them either.
Even after all that filtering, there was a mountain of material. They were doing nothing but tutoring, and yet the hours flew by. The one blessing was that Ruby had an excellent memory — whatever he heard once, he filed away perfectly. It made her wonder if his memory had actually come back, and she tested him again and again, but every time, he shook his head.
Telling herself not to get impatient, Haeseo still couldn't quite hide her disappointment. She tried to cover it by pulling at the corners of her mouth, but there was no way Ruby would miss it.
Ruby, for his part, didn't find watching that expression the least bit pleasant. Why can't I just chuck all this and spend the whole time with Haeseo? Even that wouldn't be nearly enough to make up for all the years we lost. Resting his chin in his hand, Ruby stared at Haeseo's back as she made egg rice.
She'd seemed unusually low on energy today, so he'd asked for egg rice for dinner.
‘We had that this morning, and you want it again?’
‘Yeah. You worked hard studying all day. Consider it a reward. Your egg rice is my absolute favorite.’
‘Honestly, there's just no winning with you.’
Even as she said it, the corners of Haeseo's mouth kept creeping upward. Strangely enough, Wi Haeseo took real pride in the most ordinary egg rice. She didn't particularly enjoy cooking, so it wasn't as if she craved having her taste validated.
Whatever the reason, if Haeseo loved it, he had no choice but to crave it too. Sure, he was getting a little sick of it. But whatever.
Ruby's gaze dropped to the papers spread over the table. Several printed photographs of Baek Gi-baek were mixed in. What's so great about this bastard that she had to print out pictures of him.
Ruby tapped the area around Gi-baek's face with his index finger.
‘He's gotten old. Practically a middle-aged man now.’
Ruby first met Gi-baek in his third year of high school. He'd already known his uncle had a child out of wedlock — it had always been an open secret.
But that the man would be adopted into the family — no, that he had already been adopted — was something he'd never imagined.
His aunt, Noh Joo-hee, was infertile.
Her family's company was a manufacturer that lived on subcontracted work — modest in scale, though not tiny. Landing a contract with a prime contractor had been their long-cherished dream, and they'd staked everything on a marriage alliance through their daughter. Noh Joo-hee herself regarded snaring BH Group's eldest son as the crowning achievement of her life. That peace began to crack the instant she was diagnosed as infertile.
His mother had told him it only got worse after his uncle took to his sickbed.
Their company depended heavily on the subcontracted volume it received from BH Group. Terrified of the future, they fretted that if Baek Yoon-ah — the second daughter they saw as nothing but a wicked woman — inherited the succession, the business would never remain what it was.
And so Noh Joo-hee willingly accepted Gi-baek as her own son. She never blamed her husband. On the contrary, she had supported Gi-baek and doted on him since the days he'd lived with his birth mother, firmly convinced that one day this child would repay her debt.
Gibaek, then twenty-one, came to pay his respects to the Chairman together with Noh Joo-hee. From the winter he was seventeen — when his uncle truly seemed about to die — the Chairman had left Baekrimjae behind and returned to Seoul. Naturally, his mother had followed the Chairman back to the city, and her marriage, already a marriage on paper alone, was fully dissolved around that time.
It was, quite literally, a period of upheaval for the Baek family. The phrase nineteen-year-old Ruby heard most often in those days was “Don't let it be stolen when the goal is right in front of you.”
A rival, huh. With even his youngest uncle still a bachelor, Ruby had lived his whole life as the one and only eldest grandson of the family — without so much as a cousin. He didn't think he'd gained nothing from that position, but even if other siblings had existed, he doubted anything would have been different. That was how confident he was. Confident he could trample anyone on his way to the top.
Still, he'd been obligated to show his face at every tedious family dinner. Summoned on the day Gi-baek arrived, Ruby drifted into the house absentmindedly sipping an iced americano through a straw.
A stranger was sitting on the bench in the middle of the garden. Even though he'd never laid eyes on the man before, he knew at once. That man was Baek Gi-baek.
He was about to walk right past when Gi-baek called out to him first.
‘Student. Your shoelace is untied.’
Student? Gi-baek had to know exactly who he was, and yet the feigned ignorance came off as downright sneaky. He looked down, and sure enough, the lace really had come undone. Gi-baek sprang up from the bench and snatched the coffee cup right out of Ruby's hand.
‘I'll hold that for you. Go on, tie it.’
‘Oh — yes, sir.’
There'd been no reason to refuse. But as he crouched to fix the lace and straightened back up, Gi-baek was casually drinking his coffee.
‘Why are you drinking someone else's drink, mister?’
Ruby frowned, and Gi-baek narrowed his serpentine eyes into a thin smile.
‘Stolen things taste the best, I find.’
‘…….’
In an instant, every trace of expression vanished from Ruby's face.
‘My name used to be Jung Gi-baek. Did you know? Apparently they'd wanted to name me Baek Ki-jung at first. The joy of Baek Huhan and Jung Mihee. Romantic, isn't it?’
‘Cut the crap. Jung Gi-baek or Baek Ki-jung — what difference does it make? Same meaning either way.’
At Ruby's sneer, Gi-baek only let out a light laugh. Haha.
‘Exactly my point. All the same, it's something to be grateful for. Thanks to them cramming a Baek into my name by hook or by crook, I've never once thought of myself as anything other than a member of the Baek clan.’
‘…….’
‘Looking forward to working with you, Kang Ruby.’
Ruby simply stared down at the hand extended toward him.
‘It's Baek Ruby, mister.’
‘You and me both. We only just got our “Baek” in front of our names.’
Ruby's answer was to pull his wallet out of his pocket. He extracted a fat roll of cash and dropped it onto Gi-baek's outstretched hand — plip, plip. The wad of bills brushed across the twitching palm and drifted softly to the ground.
‘You like taking things by force? I prefer giving alms.’
‘…….’
‘We make a pretty decent win-win, you and I. Come by often to collect.’
In his memory, that encounter hadn't even happened a full year ago — and yet the man had already aged this much. This goddamn sleazy bastard is the General Manager of the Business Strategy Department? This was exactly the problem with handing the company down through blood. A man with no ability whatsoever, coddled and cooed over into a position he never earned.
Bleary-eyed, Ruby shoved Gi-baek's résumé far off to the side. He'd spent days doing nothing but staring at stress-inducing bastards. He definitely, definitely needed a change of mood.
Here I am with Haeseo and, fuck, we can't even manage a proper date. Outside of tutoring hours, Haeseo bolted herself into her room and refused to come out. She was exploiting House Rule No. 3 to her heart's content.
Ruby reached out and seized Haeseo's wrist just as she was setting a spoon down on the table.
“Noona.”
“Ah — I told you not to grab me out of nowhere!”
Startled half to death, Haeseo dropped a spoon under the table. Really, over a spoon? With his eyebrows hitching up in displeasure, Ruby leaned his upper body under the table to pick it up.
“By the way, is Mr. Wi doing well? I'd love to pay my respects.”
He asked the question the moment he ducked beneath the table — but no answer came back.