The Flower on Her Wrist
“Don't call 119. Absolutely not.”
“You're bleeding a lot—you need to go to the hospital. They said your face is pale.”
“The dizziness isn't from the wound... why am I even explaining this.”
Dohyun let out a short breath and searched his pants pocket with his left hand. He meant to call Secretary Ahn.
But his fingertips found nothing. A faint crease formed between his brows.
Come to think of it, his phone must have slipped out during the scuffle earlier. A careless mistake he would never have made on any ordinary day.
No—a man like him wouldn't have let a situation arise in the first place where such mistakes piled up one after another.
Blood was seeping into the inside of his shirt sleeve, and his right hand refused to grip as he willed it. His back, propped against the wall, grew heavier by the moment, and with every breath he swallowed, a tight pressure coiled inside his chest.
If I stay like this much longer, I'll lose consciousness.
As if giving up, Dohyun let his head fall fully back against the wall and spoke.
“If you're going to keep stubbornly sticking around, at least call Secretary Ahn for me.”
“...Fine.”
Sojin quietly called Jihwan. Jihwan was startled and insisted he would come up to the rooftop right away.
The moment Jihwan arrived, he pushed Sojin toward the exit, telling her to go home. She hesitated for a beat, but with Jihwan there, she felt she could leave things in his hands, and returned home.
Only after Sojin was gone did Dohyun extend his hand toward Jihwan.
“...Medication.”
A shadow fell over Jihwan's face.
“No way...”
The symptoms are back again?
Jihwan swallowed the rest of the sentence and smoothly drew the pills from the inner pocket of his jacket. Dohyun swallowed them dry, without so much as a sip of water.
Jihwan asked, worried. “Why don't you carry them with you?”
“They haven't acted up in so long. I thought I was cured. Stupid of me not to see this coming.”
“...I'm telling your brother. You're getting checked out again.”
“I'd appreciate it if you did.”
Dohyun gave a self-mocking smile. The sight of Sojin standing on the railing earlier must have shaken him more than he cared to admit.
The medicine slowly began to take hold, and into his mind drifted a woman's gentle voice.
“My son, my everything.”
“No one will ever take you from me. You love Mommy too, don't you?”
And then the woman's next words—elegant, and cruel.
“Your mother is the one you killed. It was that woman who put the rope around her own neck, but you're the one who pulled it taut.”
So are you trying to kill me too?
Dohyun glanced down at his throbbing right shoulder. Where, he genuinely wondered, would this fight end?
Just then, Sojin's face burst through his heavy thoughts without warning.
His fiancée, with a face as alluring and beautiful as a flower in bloom. A woman who, he had believed, carried a armful of thorns beneath those petals.
No—a woman he had believed that about.
“How could you! There's a person! Bleeding right in front of you!”
Why were those words surfacing now, of all times? It was as if the woman who had sneered, a bastard child at that, had vanished somewhere entirely, because the concern on her face had looked so completely genuine.
And then...
The image of her standing so precariously on the railing would not leave his mind. Her eyes, gazing up at the far-off sky, had been filled with something too much like... liberation.
It frightened him.
Over Sojin's face, the lingering shadow of her—the woman who had tormented Dohyun without mercy—kept overlapping, again and again.
He knotted his brows.
So now I have one more reason to hate her.
And yet, a question was quietly taking root in a corner of Dohyun's heart. She lived drunk on her own self-importance, and she certainly wasn't doing any of this to win his attention.
So why, exactly?
Dohyun exhaled shortly and rose to his feet.
Not my problem. I need to focus on finding a way to break off this engagement, quickly.
Why Sojin had climbed onto the railing, the reason she had never finished explaining—whatever secret lay buried inside it—none of it was his business to know. It grated on his nerves, and that was reason enough to sweep it all away.
The moment he turned to leave the rooftop, something red snagged at the edge of his vision. Caught on a fixture in one corner of the roof was a single thin scarf. Every time the wind stirred, the crimson fabric fluttered precariously.
Dohyun regarded it for a moment, then turned his gaze away.
She'll come looking for it herself.
With that thought, he took a step. There was no reason to pick it up for her, no need to look after her things.
But before he'd made it more than a few paces, Dohyun's feet stopped. The wind was nudging the scarf, little by little, toward the railing. Another gust and it would be gone.
He clicked his tongue, low.
What a bothersome woman.
He strode over and snatched the scarf off the fixture. The thin fabric wound around his fingertips, and—utterly without reason—the memory of Sojin at that restaurant surfaced. The way she'd been done up to the nines yet had looked at him with those innocent, guileless eyes; the moment the lights had gleamed off her porcelain skin.
As if to shove the thought away, Dohyun folded the scarf carelessly and stuffed it into his pocket.
He hadn't picked it up for her sake. It was simply that she was bound to come around eventually demanding to know where her scarf had ended up, and that would be an even bigger nuisance. That was the whole of it, he nailed into himself.
Sojin collapsed onto her bed in a heap.
“There's no escaping it... in this drama world...”
No matter what she did, Sojin inevitably ended up acting like Sera. As if governed by some invisible system.
“I'm an idiot. It took me this long to notice?”
Come to think of it, there was more than one thing that didn't add up. Every single time she'd tried to act against Sera's nature, a constraint had descended on her without fail. A situation straight out of nowhere that wasn't in the original story, words refusing to come out, her body seizing up...
And conversely, the moments when nothing had held her back...
were exactly the moments she'd been acting like Sera.
More precisely: whenever she did exactly what Sera had done in the original story—the same actions, the same events. On the rooftop earlier, Sojin had done precisely what Sera had done in the original. Granted, the timing had been wildly different.
“But my role is still needed, so maybe the original story stepped in?”
And how, speaking of which, had Dohyun managed to grab her so quickly? Climbing to the rooftop at all, reaching out at the precise instant she was about to fall past the railing—it was far too perfectly timed to call mere coincidence.
Perhaps, even if she had fallen, she wouldn't have died. The power of the original story might have saved her somehow. Because Sera's role wasn't over yet—the role of the villainess fiancée who comes between the male and female leads and meets a wretched downfall.
In that case, Dohyun showing up there... might not have been a coincidence either.
The moment that thought crystallized, Sojin suddenly remembered her wrist. More precisely, the single flower etched into the inside of it, right near where her pulse beat. In the instant she'd been falling, that flower had unmistakably glowed white.
She bolted upright and examined her wrist. There, on her skin, a floral pattern remained, crisp and clear.
A small flower with four petals. It had no color. It wasn't inked on, and it wasn't a scar—it looked like a mark that had simply been there beneath her skin from the very beginning.
“What kind of flower is this?”
A flower she had no memory of ever seeing, and yet somehow felt she'd seen a hundred times. As if she'd known it since long, long ago—only the name wouldn't come to her.
And inside the flower, she could see it: the number 5%.
What is this percentage supposed to mean?
Sojin stared down at her wrist. There was no way either the mark or the percentage had appeared for no reason. Everything was far too suspicious to wave off as chance.
“All right. No counting on luck. We figure this out step by step.”
First, she had to learn what this flower was. And after that, pin down the rules of this world with certainty: how far the original story would force her hand, what constraints cropped up when she tried to stray from Sera's path—and, on the flip side, how far she could move by her own will.
She had to verify each one, piece by piece.
“I've been dragged around acting like Sera this whole time... so this time, I go the exact opposite way.”
Obsession with the male lead? No—free range. Reckless overspending? No—cost performance.
And then...
“Instead of an incompetent parachute hire, I become an excellent Team Leader.”
As it happened, the industry Sera worked in was Sojin's own field of expertise. If the parachute hire no one expected delivered results, solved problems, and became someone the organization genuinely needed...
“Then... maybe I could dodge the death flag, too?”
Sojin looked down at the flower on her wrist once more. Through the faint unease, she thought she could just barely see it—a single, very small possibility.
Knock, knock.
Just then, someone rapped on the door. It swung open and Madam Jeong swept into the room without ceremony.
“Sweetheart, your friend is here.”
Sojin's head snapped around.
Friend? What friend?
She pointed at herself and asked again.
“I have a friend?”
I'm the villainess, remember?