The Knife and the Knot
“Drugs…?”
“I asked if you were on drugs!”
“You crazy… crazy bastard. You pulled it too tight, I can't… hkk… breathe….”
Only then did Woo Tae-kyung understand. And he checked the back of Lee Do-hee's dress, where she was leaning against him, limp in his arms.
“Fuck.”
The curse slipped out through his teeth all on its own. A knot cinched tight. A knot tied so tight her chest had been hoisted up half a cup size — there was no untying that.
“Untie it, untie it, this thing.”
Even with her breath failing her, Lee Do-hee giggled in hiccuping little bursts at his words. Woo Tae-kyung genuinely felt like he was losing his mind. He tried to tear the knot apart by force, but the leather cord — coated like a shoelace, of all things — only snapped a strand or two at the front.
So Woo Tae-kyung simply picked her up. If he'd slung her over his shoulder, she'd have died right there, face-down and suffocating, so he slid an arm under her armpits and another under the backs of her knees and lifted her. Then he walked out of the VIP room.
“Move!”
Already enormous, his face made even more ferocious by the scar, Woo Tae-kyung's shout sent the couples standing on the stairs scattering in alarm. He carried the boneless Lee Do-hee quickly out of the club. The parking lot wasn't far. He opened the car door and laid her face-down against the passenger seat's headrest.
When he flipped open the glove box, his hand closed around a long-bladed knife, its handle wrapped in bandages.
“Lee Do-hee. Don't move.”
He reclined the passenger seat to angle her lower as he spoke. Her mind was still with her, apparently — she squirmed and laughed. His urgent voice sounded so good to her that even half-lightheaded, the laughter kept bubbling up.
“Don't fucking move.”
Pressing down on her back, Woo Tae-kyung muttered fuck, fuck under his breath.
With one hand he raised the knife and set its edge flush against her back.
“Kyaaaah!”
Someone had come to the parking lot for their car, and upon seeing a man about to stab a woman with a hunting knife, they screamed and collapsed to the ground. Woo Tae-kyung paid them no attention. Edge up, he sliced through the bastard of a knot behind her back — tied so tight it would never, ever come undone — snip by snip.
Where the knot had cut in, red welts scored across her back like the lash of a whip.
“You have to be out of your goddamn mind to want to die. You took fucking drugs, didn't you?”
There was no way she could act like this sober. Woo Tae-kyung kept swearing as he held the blade to Lee Do-hee's back. He'd stashed the knife in there for emergencies and long forgotten it — never once imagining he'd use it like this. And Woo Tae-kyung, who in his entire life had never once drawn a blade to save somebody, had no idea what he was even doing anymore. The curses just poured out, one after another.
Snip.
When he cut the final strand clean off her smooth back without leaving a single wound, she let out a long, slow breath. And Woo Tae-kyung — still holding the knife reversed — stepped out from the passenger side and dropped straight down onto the pavement. His hand stayed locked around the handle, the tip hovering a hair's breadth above the ground.
“Ah. I think I'm gonna live.”
Still draped over the headrest, Lee Do-hee turned only her head to look at him sitting on the parking lot floor, her face perfectly composed.
Then she leisurely observed the cold sweat trickling down his temple.
“Where— where is this? It's a parking lot! Somebody… agh!”
The public-spirited citizen who'd been shouting for the police looked over at Woo Tae-kyung, screamed, and dropped their phone. Laughing, Lee Do-hee gripped the top of the open passenger window, pushed herself up, and poked her face out.
“I'm alive.”
At that sunny declaration, the brave citizen lifted their phone again and hurriedly canceled the report. They stared suspiciously at Woo Tae-kyung, still sitting there on his heels with the knife hanging a hair above the pavement.
“Lee Do-hee, just tell someone to die instead.”
“You carry something like this around. What's with the handle? Is it wrapped so it won't slip?”
After announcing her survival to the citizen, Lee Do-hee settled back down over the headrest the way he'd laid her, turning only her head to ask. Her finger pointed at the knife in his hand. She kept making idle grabs at it, as if she wanted to hold it herself.
“Ha.”
Woo Tae-kyung laughed, dumbfounded.
The recklessness of reaching for a blade honed that sharp without a shred of fear; the strangeness, the alienness, of remembering himself — the man who'd sprinted out of a club clutching her on day one and immediately reached for a knife. Had he ever been drained like this while holding a weapon? Woo Tae-kyung decided he really had been playing around and resting too long, and couldn't stop the hollow laughter leaking from his lips like air out of a punctured balloon.
“Answer fast. Drugs — yes or no.”
The blade that had slid down so easily from his hand now pointed at Lee Do-hee.
“Is that really a question you ask while pointing a knife at me?”
“You made me take this out. Did you take drugs or not.”
Lee Do-hee smiled, an unreadable smile. She reached out again, because now that the blade didn't come quite so close anymore, it seemed like she could almost wrap her fingers around it. Woo Tae-kyung ground his teeth and pulled the knife back, veering just out of reach.
Her aimless hand dropped limply outside the passenger seat.
“Didn't take any.”
“Yeah? Then go get a drug screen at the police station.”
“Seriously? Woo Tae-kyung? You're hilarious. Hnn, ha— seriously, too funny. You're pointing a knife at me and trying to throw me in a police station?”
Lee Do-hee cackled. She hadn't come out with the shoes she'd kicked off, so she squirmed there barefoot, draped over the passenger seat.
“You didn't drink, didn't take anything, and you're still worse than the kids who do both and party.”
Woo Tae-kyung said through his teeth. Lee Do-hee blinked. They were the kind of eyes that anyone would have called innocent, seeing them without context. Even Woo Tae-kyung, the first time he'd seen them, had thought she looked gentle — and if he'd had a gun back then, he'd have shot his own head for it.
“But I really couldn't breathe, and that was your fault.”
“If you can't breathe, you shouldn't go sprinting around like that. You're worse than an unbroken colt.”
Even Jang Hee-jo, with his mountain of demands, had never been this bad.
Fuck. He'd killed people under Jang Hee-jo, torn an entire organization apart, done it all — and now he'd gone and met something worse than any of that. A woman. Lee Do-hee. He could hardly believe this was all happening less than a single day in.
“Everyone loves it when I buy them drinks. So I get excited. It makes me happy.”
“You're throwing money around. Of course they're happy.”
“Throwing around—?”
“…When you spend money so generously, Your Ladyship, of course people are delighted.”
Lee Do-hee snickered. Then, in an instant, the amusement vanished from her face.
“Do you not know how to be sweet and kind? The way you talk is pissing me off right now. Stop being sarcastic.”
The point of the knife that had been aimed at Lee Do-hee dropped back down toward the ground.
Even while he'd been pointing the blade at her, she'd been laughing — but her seizure button had been pressed again.
“Lee Do-hee, sweet? Kind? From a guy who carries a knife around? Doesn't that seem even weirder to you? Think with your head, not your feelings.”
Threat-or-not threat that he wanted her to think with her head because the man's feelings got hurt every single day — at that, Lee Do-hee went hmm, and blinked those unusually huge eyes a few times.
“Blinking doesn't count as thinking. Do it properly.”
“Don't copy me.”
“If you want me to act sweet and kind with you, then think with your head and act accordingly. You can chew up your words — spit them out like shit for all I care — just don't act on them. Don't do anything at all.”
Woo Tae-kyung said it dead serious. Usually when he talked like this, people cowered. Knife in hand, the textbook thug, nothing more and nothing less — and yet Lee Do-hee still stared him down without a flicker of color leaving her face.
“Woo Tae-kyung, I want to kiss your lips. I want to hit them, like earlier.”
“Hit people like that and you'll be getting implants at your age.”
Two more kisses like that and her front teeth were gone. Woo Tae-kyung glared at Lee Do-hee, who was licking her lower lip as she announced how badly she wanted his mouth. Then he got up, slid the knife back into the glove box, opened the rear door, and pulled out the jacket they'd brought from the shop.
He draped it over Lee Do-hee's bare back, exposed where she'd shed the dress, and shut the passenger door.
Then, instead of the driver's seat, he climbed into the back, folded his arms, and shut his eyes.
“Woo Tae-kyung.”
Still draped over the passenger seat with only her face poking up, Lee Do-hee called to him.
“Don't talk to me.”
“Aren't you coming to my house?”
“Not in the mood to go home with you right now.”
“Want to get a hotel room?”
A muzzle. He needed to buy a muzzle.
He'd get one of those and gag that little mouth of hers — or gag his own, whichever came first. Woo Tae-kyung squeezed his eyes shut and clenched his molars as he thought it.