Unruptured
“It’s an unruptured cerebral aneurysm. Usually there are no symptoms, though some people do report occasional dizziness… We’d like to admit her so we can monitor it… Given her hypertension as well, there’s real risk…”
Grandma lay on the gurney, sleeping as still as the dead, an IV line running into her arm. The emergency room doctor’s explanation washed right past Harin, the words refusing to settle.
“Yes… we’ll admit her. We have to.”
Harin answered with a blank face. The doctor excused himself, and a nurse came by to say a room would be ready soon and they’d be guided up when it was.
For a long moment Harin simply gazed at her grandmother, who seemed only to be sleeping peacefully, then looked away. Now that she knew what was happening to Grandma, her worry shifted to Hayul. The grandmother next door was watching her, which was one weight off her chest — but what if the little girl felt abandoned all over again? The thought needled at her.
How much time had passed? Grandma’s eyes drifted open.
“Ha…rin-ah…”
Her voice was thin as thread, but her mind seemed to have returned. Relief flooded through Harin as she clutched her grandmother’s hand.
“Grandma, I’m here.”
“Where is this?”
“The hospital. You collapsed, remember. The doctor says you need to be admitted…”
“No. I’m fine. I’m not staying.”
Grandma was immovable. Harin had expected exactly this, and did her best to soothe her, but the old woman’s stubbornness wouldn’t bend. Finally she fetched the doctor and begged him to help talk her around, but he clearly had no interest in being dragged into a family squabble.
“Then make sure she’s well watched at home, and that she takes her blood pressure medication without fail. If anything seems off, come straight back.”
He stepped back with insulting ease.
With a sour taste in her mouth, Harin left the emergency room and headed for the administration desk to process the discharge. She could guess why Grandma refused to be admitted.
It’s the hospital bill, isn’t it.
Standing before the payment window with a tangled heart, she held out her card.
“Do you happen to have another card?”
Insufficient funds, apparently. The clerk asked with careful delicacy.
“Oh… one moment.”
Cold sweat broke out on the hand rummaging through her pocket. Her mind went white.
“Use this one.”
A long-fingered hand thrust a card out beside her. Harin turned, dazed.
Their eyes met. Lee-gang was looking down at her, his face expressionless.
Only then did it register — he was the one who had brought her here.
It’s almost midnight…
She glanced once at the clock on her phone, once at Lee-gang. For all the hours she’d spent in the emergency room, he had waited the whole time for her to come out.
In the dim lighting, his face seemed calmer than it ever looked at the gym. While the clerk processed the receipt, he stood beside her and waited without a word.
Where was the coarse, arrogant attitude from earlier? This quiet, cold figure at her side felt utterly unfamiliar.
Harin stole a glance at him, then fixed her eyes on the clerk’s hands, doing exactly what he was doing. In the silence, her thoughts grew more tangled by the minute.
This was the man who called her Chainsmoker, who forced sparring on her because he hated working out alone, who went pawing through other people’s clothes without a shred of permission. And yet — the look in his eyes when he worried over her injured shoulder, the trouble he’d taken to drive her to the hospital, the way he’d waited in silence and now, just like this, offered help without being asked…
The contradictions were braided together past all understanding. Should she be hostile toward him? Apologetic? Maybe even a little grateful? Harin couldn’t tell, not even within herself.
“Here’s your receipt.”
Taking the payment slip the clerk held out, Harin chose her words carefully.
“I’ll pay you back when my wages come in.”
He turned toward the exit and answered, lips curling sideways.
“Shall we log this as a loan, then?”
“……”
“If it’s a loan, I charge interest.”
Harin started to follow Lee-gang’s unhurried figure through the hospital doors — and stopped. When no footsteps sounded behind him, Lee-gang glanced back.
What is this — loan sharking? Or is he just saying it to get a rise out of me?
Moneylending. Illegal. Loan sharks. Because of the father whose name was tangled up with gangsters, anything in that world made her blood boil. She fixed him with a look of open distrust.
Lee-gang read the expression on her face and let out a short breath.
“Bring your grandmother out. I’ll drive you both home.”
He stepped through the hospital’s sliding doors, but Harin didn’t follow.
“No, thank you. I’ll take a taxi.”
Looking at the line of taxis queued up outside, she quietly refused his charity.
A beat of silence passed. Lee-gang’s face slowly hardened.
“Get home safe.”
Harin gave a shallow bow, avoiding his eyes.
“Then… I’ll be going.”
As she turned her back on those words, the wide-open automatic doors began to slide shut. Heading back toward the emergency room, Harin paused mid-step. In the instant before the doors sealed closed, their eyes met through the glass — and something in her chest trembled, faintly.
I should have said thank you.
She couldn’t name the subtle flicker of disappointment that had crossed his face. Maybe that was why the expression stayed with her, oddly stubborn, long after it was gone.
Lee-gang watched until she had vanished entirely from view. The sight of Harin’s retreating back looked, somehow, deflated.
An inexplicable frustration knotted his brow. Just then, his pocket buzzed. The screen read Coffee Prince.
He answered and spat it out at once.
“What.”
— “What”? To your older brother?
“Busy. Get to the point.”
— Father is calling for you.
He gave the corridor where Harin had disappeared one last sideways check, then climbed into his car as if nothing had happened.
“…Understood.”
He swallowed a breath like a man steadying himself and cut the call. The black sedan peeled out of the parking lot with a screech of tires.
It was late by the time he reached Seoul. He changed into a suit hurriedly in the car, and when he started walking, the click of his dress shoes rang cold and hollow through the near-empty underground garage. Breathing hard through his nose, he yanked his tousled hair back into a tight tie and rode the elevator up.
When Chairman Yoon summoned you out of nowhere, it was never going to be for anything good.
Crack—!
Just as expected, the slap came the moment he stepped through the door. Lee-gang didn’t so much as flinch. That dead calm seemed only to enrage the old man further — Chairman Yoon shoved up his sleeve and raised his hand, rings and all, high again.
Crack—!
Blood pooled at the corner of Lee-gang’s mouth, but he still didn’t blink.
Finished venting, Chairman Yoon dropped heavily onto the sofa, face crimson, and lit a cigarette. His illegitimate son, arriving right on cue, brought out wine and cheese instead of coffee, for some reason.
Maybe I should change his contact name to Alcohol Prince.
He was entertaining such worthless thoughts when the Chairman tilted his wine glass and fired off, low and dangerous.
“I hand you the assemblymen’s slush funds to launder, and you’re off doing side business. Why.”
Lee-gang swept the fallen hair back from his face and squared himself, hands clasped behind his back.
“Seo-in tells me you’re running an illegal fight arena next to the resort.”
Ah. So someone’s been running their mouth — and it was Ryu Seo-in. The absurdity of it strangled even his laughter.
“He’s got real ambitions of turning Gohyeon into a city of gambling.”
A city of gambling. The phrase didn’t sound bad at all.
Gohyeon Resort. Lee-gang had been running a game hall and an adult PC café serving the customers who appeared on the casino’s restricted-access blacklist, and recently he’d expanded the operation, putting up an illegal fight arena.
“Mayor Choi has been in touch. Says the arena has soured his mood.”
Mayor Choi — as in the mayor of Gohyeon City, presumably. Lee-gang had laundered the man’s money diligently enough, and now, over a little lost at the fighting pit, he was having Ryu Seo-in carry tales straight to the Chairman. The true measure of the man was laid bare.
“You can’t even keep the assemblymen’s slush laundering straight, and my own son turns his father’s work into a goddamn circus.”
At Chairman Yoon’s words, Lee-gang bowed his head in silence. A hollow smile caught at the corner of his mouth.
Hadn’t the man thrown him to the gangsters before the ink on his ID card was even dry — so he could learn this kind of dirty work?
Chairman Yoon’s BEX Holdings was raking in fortunes through sports licensing and athlete agency businesses. But black money always trailed behind the profits, and cleaning up after it had always fallen to the son — Lee-gang.
It was always this way. He was the dog of the shadows, saddled with the company’s filth, the things that could never be allowed out into the light.
How long does he think I’ll go on living doing only what he orders? Pathetic.
Laundering slush funds did nothing in the end but fatten his father’s accounts and the company vault. Money laundering was small-change business, and Lee-gang had no intention of being satisfied with it.
The illegal fight arena wasn’t merely a laundering channel. Entrance fees, betting, broadcast rights, fighter management… Once money started moving on a single fight, it snowballed like a avalanche. It was a different dimension entirely from running a handful of game halls and PC cafés.
And that money flowed straight into Lee-gang’s hands. Profit earned not for anyone else, but rolled and won by his own strength alone.
“The arena. Shut it down, fast.”
“……”
“Get out.”
Without a word, Lee-gang left the Chairman’s office.