Now You're Mine

In that instant her heart plunged straight downward. It began to pound so hard it hurt inside her chest.

What was this man saying right now.

Of every face she had ever seen on him, this was the one that looked most thoroughly pleased.

"Jin Jae-hwan gave up his daughter."

The unbelievable words scraped darkly out of his throat.

Dad… said what?

She could not make sense of the situation.

"You found my father?"

"I found him."

"W-where is he? Where's my dad!"

"He's in America, getting your mother treated."

In that moment Ye-seo's mouth simply fell open and her face went blank.

Only now did she understand. Why her father had committed such a shameless crime. The instant she finally grasped what he must have been feeling.

So that was it. Dad…

He found a way to treat Mom's rare disease. He staked his entire life on that hope.

So her father had turned his back on everything else in the world and tried to save his wife first. He had gambled the rest of his life on it.

Her mother's illness was both incurable and rare. Ye-seo had wondered where a man could possibly hide with a mother whose body was already failing—yet he had not slipped away to some quiet corner. He had gone looking for a world-famous hospital.

"It took longer to find him than I expected. The man was far too sharp. Well—he wouldn't have been able to work so closely with the Chairman and me if he were ordinary."

And even a father like that still ended up caught by this man.

"Still, he couldn't run forever. In the end I found him."

When an adult went missing it was treated as a runaway; the police told even family members like Ye-seo nothing at all.

Yet Do Kang-hyun had never reported her father's crime to the police. Without any investigation of theirs he had tracked the man down himself—someone who had fled overseas. Had the hospital been the weak point…?

"Once I found him I heard something very important. That he couldn't return the money."

Ye-seo's face drained of color. Her heart rate climbed as if it might explode.

"Even though he knew I was here?"

"A whole team of people has been put on your mother's treatment. It's an ultra-expensive new drug developed for a single patient. Chief Jin has already burned through tens of billions."

Darkness crashed in. At the unbelievable news, tears welled up in an instant.

She had heard somewhere that astronomical new drugs like that existed, but…

So that's why you stole that much and ran, Dad? And now you've thrown your daughter away too?

"So you're saying he abandoned me? Dad…"

Ye-seo asked, her voice thick with tears. Could she even believe any of this? It was only Do Kang-hyun's word.

"Because there was no other way not to."

"There's no way Dad would abandon me!"

Then Do Kang-hyun picked up his phone and moved his fingers. Bzzt. A moment later Ye-seo's phone rang. It was the new one the man had given her; almost no one had the number.

"Listen to it, Ye-seo."

When Kang-hyun lifted his eyes to her, Ye-seo's went round. Listen to what?

"What I just sent you."

Only then did Ye-seo hurry to look at her phone. What Do Kang-hyun had sent was a single audio file.

With trembling hands Ye-seo hit play.

Incredibly, Do Kang-hyun had been telling the truth. These really were her father's own words. As her father's sobs filled the room, Ye-seo cried with him.

Threaded through her father's weeping was another voice, cold as a sheet of ice.

At the promise to forget ten billion won, her father was truly handing over his daughter. Ye-seo squeezed her eyes shut tight.

At those words her father broke into even louder sobs. Ye-seo lifted a hand and clamped it over her mouth.

The recording ended there. When the mechanical weeping cut off all at once and silence fell, only Ye-seo's crying filled the studio.

Resentment toward her father, longing for him, and worry for her sick mother all tangled together inside the tears.

No matter how she turned it over, it always came back to her ailing mother. And at the end of that road lay a desolate kind of understanding.

A family's life had been split to extremes. For the mother, hope; for the daughter, despair. And yet if the mother died, that too would be despair for the daughter.

"Don't be too sad, Ye-seo."

The twisted sorrow of one ruined family meant nothing at all to this man.

"I'll keep the promise I made with your father. I'll only give you good things."

Good things… I'll take the good things—and take you as well?

"Your father wanted his daughter to be a filial Shim Cheong. You gave your parents the ten billion won that was like those three hundred sacks of rice."

Ye-seo lifted her reddened eyes and looked at Kang-hyun. She met the cruel joke he had thrown with a tone edged in scorn.

"Then… is the Executive Director the Dragon King? Is Jin Ye-seo the offering laid before Do Kang-hyun the way Shim Cheong was offered to the Dragon King?"

Kang-hyun let out a short laugh. The Dragon King had never lusted after Cheong, after all.

"Better a king met on land than the Dragon King. The one who claimed Cheong wasn't the Dragon King—it was the king on earth."

Contempt gathered in Ye-seo's tear-filled eyes as she looked at the man. Without a word she shuddered alone.

An evil man who never misses even a moment for wordplay. Fine… now you really will have me.

Day after day she had been barely holding on, walking a tightrope. And now even that rope had snapped clean through.

All that remained was to plunge toward a bottomless floor of darkness. The future waiting for her held nothing but despair.

A life that had become this man's. Jin Ye-seo, now the property of Do Kang-hyun.

Ye-seo felt as if she had lost her entire existence. Because it seemed she would never be able to escape this man.

The absurd idea that one person could own another somehow seemed possible for him. This was the man who had tracked down even parents who had fled to America.

And not out of some obsession to recover ten billion won—but because of one woman who had stirred his interest. Because he wanted to keep that woman like a toy, he had hunted down her parents and finally proven that they had given their daughter up.

The man lived in a world so high above her she could not even look up to it. He had power. He had the ability to decide the course of someone else's life.

On top of that he possessed a relentless will that seized whatever it wanted, and a lawless nature that ignored law and order like any thug. Ye-seo had no means at all of opposing him.

For an ordinary woman like her to run from a man like this was impossible. So now Jin Ye-seo's life belonged nowhere. Not until this man discarded Jin Ye-seo first.

She could not stop the tears that kept spilling out. Even after hearing it with her own ears she could not believe she had been abandoned by her parents. Absurdly, she was truly alone now.

The man who seemed to find this entire situation nothing but entertaining strode toward the weeping Ye-seo. With a face of complete satisfaction he spoke.

"Now that you're mine, you ought to become my woman first."

Woman… Ye-seo's body trembled hard. She could not control the shaking.

"I feel like I've waited far too long."