An Answered Prayer

Ruby turned over and lay back down flat. The longer Haeseo stared at that sculpture-perfect face, fully exposed, the more brutally her mind sharpened.

Right. It was none other than Baek Ruby. Her superior as of this very moment, and a man who, by the Baek family's succession order, was all but guaranteed to climb to the very top.

'Ruby — always keep yourself clean and unsullied.'

Baek Yoon-ah's voice struck the back of Haeseo's skull like a bell — dong — snapping her wide awake.

'Sleep with a Wicked Thing even once, and everything you've built will be stripped from you, every last bit of it.'

She had been warned, sternly and repeatedly, to stop that exact act from ever happening — and she had gone and committed it with her own two hands.

Her brain bleached pure white, Haeseo slid down the towering American-style bed like a child on a playground slide, legs trembling beneath her. Tears prickled at the corners of her eyes, and her thoughts had cooked down to mush.

First, first, so, okay — first.

First…

There was only one conclusion. Run now, think later.

Once she got home, Haeseo scrubbed herself clean and searched YouTube for meditation music. She queued up the video with the most testimonials from people swearing they'd felt their souls cleansed, knelt neatly on the floor, and breathed along to the soft ding… ding…

Less than three minutes in, she shut it off and hunted down a yoga video instead. She followed along with 10-Minute Yoga to Master Your Mind and Manage Life's Misfortunes until her muscles ached too much to continue, at which point she collapsed in a deflated heap on the floor.

None of it was remotely her hobby or her taste — but unless she clung to something, there was no calming a heart that kept hammering away like a runaway drum.

Then her algorithm, which had been fed nothing but searches about diminished mental capacity all morning, served up a recorded sermon. A pastor was counseling a parishioner wracked with regret over a moment of waywardness.

That grave, measured voice offering advice to someone in circumstances eerily like her own — before she knew it, Haeseo had clasped both hands together and squeezed her eyes shut.

Tch. It'd be even better if the other party was the one who lost their memory.

"I'll pray so hard. If there's any god out there who grants wishes, I'll believe in every single one of them, whoever they are."

Bzzzt. Bzzzzzzzt.

"Agh, come onnn."

Startled by the shrill buzzing, Haeseo's eyes fluttered open. The screen no longer held the pleasant-faced pastor — only three dread-inspiring syllables of a name.

With the heart of a prisoner being dragged to the execution block, she answered the call.

"T-T-Team Leader. Did you, um, sleep well?"

It wasn't as if she was clattering away on a frying pan, so what on earth was "T-T-Team Leader" supposed to be? The longer the silence stretched, the more her anxiety inflated like a balloon seconds from popping.

A dry gulp crackled through the receiver.

Her heart, which had been hammering away down at her toes, sprang clean back up and now pounded at the crown of her head.

Oh my god. Did the prayer actually work?

Right — if one of the two of them was going to lose their memory like some drama protagonist, of course it had to be Ruby. A giddy, helpless smile spilled out of her all on its own.

"NO!"

The question that only she could hear in its double meaning made Haeseo leap up in denial.

"Absolutely not! Team Leader, open your message room right now. You haven't even read my earlier messages. And you've been dodging my calls for days — I was just waiting, that's all! Yes, and there are no call records either!"

It had been pure luck that she'd left when she did, after taking Gong Jigang's call.

"See? I never received a call from you yesterday, and I never went anywhere near where you were. Something like that could never, ever happen in this world."

Having proclaimed her innocence in its entirety, Haeseo let out an enormous, steadying breath — as quietly as she could manage. Overdone, maybe. But when life handed you a chance to defend yourself, you were supposed to empty the whole tank.

Strangely, nothing came back from Ruby. He should have said fine, or at least snapped at her for her cheek before hanging up. Instead came a sigh deeper than the last one — and buried inside it, a muffled stream of curses, just barely audible.

"Team Leader, are you… okay?"

In the end, being a secretary down to her very marrow, the fretting Haeseo asked first.

"Yes."

"Y-yes?"

At those surgically specific instructions, a chill split through Haeseo from the crown of her head straight down her face.

"Isn't that… a bit much? Wouldn't that be, um, difficult?"

"No, no! I'll do it, me! There's no need for you to handle it personally, Team Leader. I'm your personal secretary! I'll get on it right now."

By any measure her responses were stilted and strange, but Ruby looked far too frantic to spare a single thought for that.

Surely not… hmm. Rare as it would be, wasn't it possible there was some other reason Baek Ruby was coming on this strong? Say the wristwatch he'd hunted down — only three ever imported into Korea last season — had gone missing. Or someone had taken a sledgehammer to his car and driven off… Hmm.

"…Then why go to all this trouble? Did something bad happen, haha?"

Having slept not a single wink, Haeseo shuffled toward Ruby's office in full zombie drag.

Truthfully, she had given serious thought to simply ghosting the company — vanishing into thin air, job and all. But when she'd dug her employment contract back out, resignation turned out to involve a mountain of paperwork: confidentiality agreements and the like. Running would only mean BH Group hunting her down again under different pretenses.

One way or another, if she wanted to negotiate her way out of this job, she had no choice but to face Ruby. And as she steeled her resolve over and over, the elevator climbed without stopping even once, rising straight up toward the sky.

Ruby's office was a small, walled-off room at the back of the TF Team office. Modest quarters for royalty — but a deliberate arrangement, meant to close the distance between him and his team members.

It was lunchtime, and the office stood empty. Haeseo, arms and legs moving in rigid unison like a marionette, knocked on the door — knock, knock.

"Come in."

Ruby, facing her again after two whole days, looked as sleep-starved as she felt, the skin beneath his eyes shadowed and raw.

"Found it?"

Elbows planted on the table, hands clasped together in visible agitation, he cut straight to the chase. All she'd been told to do was fetch CCTV footage, but judging by the sheer menace rolling off him, you'd think he'd cornered the culprit himself.

Which would be because the culprit was, in fact, standing right there.

"Team Leader. As painfully as it is to report — Allmaps Hotel says there was a malfunction, and no CCTV footage from those hours was saved."

A lie, of course. But there had been no other way.

Let those who have never shivered in the cold — those who have never been desperate enough to piss on frozen ground — be the first to throw stones…

Thankfully, years of trust built up as his personal secretary paid off: Ruby didn't immediately cry foul. But that was all she got.

"There's the road out front. And shops lining both sides of it."

Meaning: even with the hotel's cameras down, surveillance lenses were everywhere if you looked.

And this was the man who always demanded a backup plan, and then a backup for the backup. Honestly.

"Ah, that is… you see… um."

Toying with the scarf she'd wound around her neck to hide the bite marks, Haeseo tilted her head.

"If even the world-famous Allmaps Hotel's CCTV failed, wouldn't the surrounding cameras in that same stretch have suffered the same malfunction around that time? A blackout, perhaps. Ha, ha."

"Did you even bother to check?"

Ruby's thick brows twitched sharply upward. Already raw-nerved and stretched to the breaking point, Haeseo had gone and pressed his trigger dead-on.

"You announced you were quitting, so now you can't even be bothered to do your job?"

"S-sorry, what?"

"Plotting a graceful exit via gross dereliction of duty, are we?"

"That's not—"

"Not what. Your job is to shield me from Wicked Things. Do you have any idea what kind of—fuck—what kind of miserable hell I've been dragged through, huh?"

The barb-tongued Ruby of ordinary days grew rougher and rougher around the edges, then dropped his head and raked a hand through his hair, mussing it completely.

Wh-what do I do…

She had never once seen Ruby under this kind of strain. She couldn't pinpoint where the memory cut off, but at the very least, Ruby seemed to retain nothing — nothing at all — of her visit to the hotel.

If he'd woken up and discovered the traces of such an insane tryst while utterly defenseless, the shock would have been beyond imagining. Still, from a man's standpoint, he hadn't exactly come out of it a loser, had he?

Hup — wait. He was a pre-marital chastity believer, wasn't he. He'd taken it seriously enough to hold out all these years, apparently.

The realization that she had flattened another human being's conviction, his values, his whole moral architecture — it set Haeseo trembling all over again in an entirely different sense. Me. Of all people, the villain of the piece.

And yet she couldn't help feeling wronged. There he was, playing the perfect injured party — but it had been Baek Ruby who coaxed her into it in the first place, and he was the one who'd told her to drink that cocktail wearing an orange juice's disguise!

And really, if he'd simply let her resign when she'd asked, none of this would ever have happened, would it? Haeseo wanted to bow her head to the floor and wail her eyes out too.

"Forget it."