The Dirty Work

Slowly, deliberately, he picked out the smallest condom on the shelf at the officetel's ground-floor convenience store, bought a pack of cigarettes, smoked it down to the filter, and then, at the hour when he figured business would be in full swing, Woo Tae-kyung caught the elevator and headed up to the den of that bastard — some senior or teacher or whatever he was supposed to be.

Ka-thud.

Thud.

Thud. Thud.

He stood in front of the door, fully intending to have some fun ringing the bell, but at the commotion seeping out from inside, Woo Tae-kyung didn't press it.

"For a loud fuck, someone's making an awful lot of noise."

The bastard who'd supposedly barely last ten minutes.

He checked his watch and gave the door another look. Lee Do-hee — the same woman who that very morning had pinned him down and demanded answers for how he'd timed twenty minutes, slept with someone, and showered afterward — was making a racket that fell well short of even that number.

"...You bastard, f—...."

Ka-thud.

"Die... you insane...."

Thud. Ka-thud. Thud.

Woo Tae-kyung lifted his chin and rolled his neck gently from side to side. Do-hee had once told him that cursing turned her on. So was this her taste? No — it took him only an instant to realize that the racket bleeding through the door wasn't the sound of simply loud sex.

What he'd waited for, briefly, was to hear whether Do-hee screamed or shouted. Curses drifted out at intervals, but not a single moan. And so his body moved on pure instinct, before thought could catch up. Somewhere in him, he'd even been prepared to gladly sit and listen if she'd been swearing mid-fuck.

Bam! Bam! Bam!

Three kicks was all it took for the door handle and the lock to come off together.

Woo Tae-kyung plucked the rattling handle away with ease, tossed it on the floor, and stepped into the officetel.

Do-hee was rolled up under the sofa. The man stood in nothing but his underwear, shirt and pants gone, one leg raised to start kicking — and he froze when he saw Woo Tae-kyung come bursting in amid the thunderous crash.

Then he watched Do-hee bite down on the man's calf with everything she had.

"Aaagh! You crazy, f—ing... you bitch! Dog of a bitch! Filthy piece of—! A murderer!

The man, sanity shredded by the pain, kicked her — face, chest, stomach — wherever his foot landed, like kicking a dog. And through all of it, Woo Tae-kyung could see Do-hee with both hands raised in guard, a glacial gleam in her eyes as she hunted for the man's openings. A grunt, a grunt — with every blow she swallowed her own cries, biting down on them. Stubborn to the last.

He didn't really think about it. His body simply moved first.

Before the scene he'd glimpsed in that sliver of a moment could even register in his head, Woo Tae-kyung seized the man by the nape and yanked.

The man's neck hung loose in his grip. He was sure he hadn't used much force, but the man flew exactly as far as he was pulled, like a bundle of straw, slammed into the wall, and crumpled.

"Do-hee."

Woo Tae-kyung looked down at her at his feet, his voice cracked.

Her lip was split, a bruise already blooming across her cheek, and she looked up at him. From her mouth, she spat a mouthful of saliva mixed with someone's blood — tch — onto the floor.

"He filmed me."

Her clothes were torn, one breast nearly bare. Do-hee pushed herself upright, sat, and pointed at the man still slumped against the wall with one hand.

"Find all of it and make it disappear. You can do that, can't you, Woo Tae-kyung?"

"Since when."

At his clipped question, Do-hee answered without a flicker of hesitation.

"From way back. I never knew."

If he'd been filming himself with Do-hee all this time, then the possibility of it leaking had to be assumed from the start. Woo Tae-kyung dragged a hand through his hair. Then he pulled the man's shirt out of the tiny closet in the officetel and wrapped it around her first.

"...I didn't know."

Apparently she'd decided he didn't believe her, because Do-hee said it again, forcing the words out. This was something she could have settled in five minutes by mobilizing Chairman Lee and her brothers — and instead Do-hee had tried to handle it herself. No matter how awkward it would have been to bring up with her family, why on earth would she try to do the single easiest thing in the world to fix, all alone?

Worse — she'd known he was standing outside that door, and she still hadn't made a sound.

"You erase all of it. You do it so my family never finds out. That's why I keep you around. You can do it. You can do it, can't you!"

"Why. Because I live my life doing dirty work in the filthiest places in the world?"

Woo Tae-kyung sank to one knee, matched her eyeline, and bowed his upper body deep — and his gaze gleamed. The corners of his mouth curved in a smile, and in keeping with Do-hee's tastes he asked, softer and kinder than he ever did. Her mouth had split open somewhere along the way; every time she spoke, blood trailed down from the edge of her lips. He swept his thumb gently across it.

"Yeah. You'd be used to this sort of thing."

At her words, Woo Tae-kyung let out a short laugh. The laugh died as quickly as it came, and he nodded, his face stripped to blankness.

"So my family doesn't find out... Do-hee, that's your weakness, right there. If I clean this up for you, that weakness belongs to me."

The eyes that had seemed incapable of ever wavering flickered — just for a beat. The cruelty and the pleasure he'd kept pressed down inside him crisscrossed like a seesaw set loose. Gripping a person's weakness and shaking them until their life rattled loose was, after all, the game he played best.

And at last, a stench that could never be scrubbed away draped itself over his skin.

The smell of Do-hee's blood — not rank, not to him. It was too familiar, too intimate, and laughter leaked out of him in a slow hiss.

"Suit yourself."

It was an answer entirely her own, without an inch of hesitation. It didn't matter either way, she said.

Woo Tae-kyung didn't truly believe this was Do-hee's weakness — and still the sensation crawled through him down to the tips of his hair.

You should have called my name.

Woo Tae-kyung, Woo Tae-kyung — she'd chanted it all day long until he was sick of it, and now, while she was getting her face beaten in, her lips stayed sealed to the very end even as he pressed and threatened her for the reason why. He was fed up with it. At the moment she should have called out most, she shut her mouth. That was all it would have taken — just the name — and Do-hee had been holding back even her moans.

He fished his car keys from his pocket and dropped them into her hand.

"Go wait in the car."

Saying it, he pushed her blouse up and checked her stomach and her breasts, the places she'd been struck.

"Does it hurt?"

Do-hee shook her head. If she'd taken a blow anywhere vital, there was no way she'd be talking this evenly. Her guard had come up clean over her vitals, and she'd counterattacked hard enough to bite the man's calf the instant he staggered from her entrance.

Come from a mob family, apparently — she'd learned well from somebody.

Woo Tae-kyung pulled her blouse back down and slowly buttoned up the shirt that had slipped off her shoulders.

At a jerk of his chin, Do-hee swayed to her feet. He watched her shove open the broken, rattling door and leave — and only then did he slowly dig his phone out of his pocket. He scrolled down through his contacts, and every single one of them led to somewhere reeking.

His careless gaze snagged on one entry. Nothing but a number, no name written beside it at all.

"It's me. Looks like I need to do some cleaning over here. Thought you said you'd gone independent? Congratulations — come instead of sending a wreath and clear it out for me. And tell your brother I need a body moved. Yeah. Uh-huh. Where do you think would work best?"

Woo Tae-kyung spoke in a voice pitched flat, without highs or lows.

On the other end came the whining — what the hell did he mean, come instead of a wreath? — but when Woo Tae-kyung offered nothing in reply to the dying-man jokes about whether he was running some grand opening, the voice quickly read the room and went quiet. He wedged the phone between his ear and his shoulder and prodded the collapsed man with his toe.

He flew like a bundle of straw. Surely he's not dead.

Woo Tae-kyung bent down, took a fistful of the man's hair, and forced his head up.

His eyes were squeezed shut, but the eyelids were trembling — and that drew the laugh right out of him.

"Turns out what I watched and learned was this side of things after all. Can't be helped. Hey, student. Quit playing dead, hm?"

He didn't even know the man's name, so he just gripped his hair and shook his head side to side until he finally wrenched those eyelids open. Honestly, finely raised students — you never knew where the line was with them, no matter how far you went.

"Resident registration number and full name. Yeah, I'm looking you up right now."

The first words were for the man. The last ones were for whoever was still on the other end of the phone, the call not yet ended.

"P-please... please let me live...."

"Do-hee got beaten like that, so somebody has to take responsibility. And I don't much care for being the one who does. You're a student — you are responsible, aren't you?"

Woo Tae-kyung spoke even more gently than he had to Do-hee. Because if the student screamed here and someone overheard, he'd have to clean that up too. He kept troublesome things to a minimum, and the ones that were troublesome anyway he dealt with as fast as possible.

That was what he'd watched and learned — this son of a bitch called Woo Tae-kyung.