The Young Lady Wants That Dog — 19

Only after the cleanup crew had come and gone did Woo Tae-kyung move toward the underground parking garage. Lee Do-hee sat in the passenger seat, doing nothing, staring blankly at some point in the empty air. She looked like a doll hollowed out to nothing but its shell, breathing out of habit alone — and she stayed quiet. She wasn't stomping her feet or screaming in fury anymore; she was docile.

Woo Tae-kyung watched her from a short distance away, careful not to come too close.

This didn't look like the panic of someone shattered by sudden violence. It looked like Lee Do-hee's true face, plain and simple. Somewhere broken and hollowed out, and yet desperately clinging to whoever was near, trying to stuff that emptiness full. Lee Do-hee was like this only when she was alone. This was the real thing.

Someone had to touch her before her eyes would slick over and she'd flare up like a candle whose wick had just caught the flame.

And how long does a candle burn, really?

Even a burning flame runs out of wick eventually.

"Lee Do-hee."

He tapped the car window with a finger and called her name.

Her head, which had been staring straight ahead, turned. The moment she recognized him, Lee Do-hee broke into a wide grin over her split lip. The bruise already blooming dark blue across her cheekbone scraped at his nerves. He frowned faintly at that automatic, manufactured smile — the one that triggered the instant her name was called.

"Did you wipe it?"

She yanked open the passenger door and asked out of nowhere.

"You have no idea how far it's spread. What do you think?"

He had to track down the possibility that video footage was circulating too. The experts had already collected her computer, laptop, tablet, and every other electronic device, and the only answer they'd given him was that it could take a while — that this kind of thing usually gets shared among friends and spreads before every copy can be deleted.

"Make them delete it."

Lee Do-hee said it while tugging at the hem of his t-shirt, gritting her teeth with a face that clearly couldn't care less whether his brand-new clothes stretched out of shape.

"They'll be wiped. Properly. That's why it takes time."

She nodded along obediently to his explanation, still clutching the end of his t-shirt like a child. Woo Tae-kyung let out a light laugh.

"It's easier to ask the guys who'll do anything for you, isn't it?"

He tossed the bait out, soft and casual. Even as he did it, he realized he was using the same tone he'd once used on that man who'd sat above him — the gentle, tender, skin-crawling way of speaking that Lee Do-hee had wanted so desperately.

"I don't want to tell my family."

Anyone would feel that way. A reasonable excuse — but Do-hee knew perfectly well how unusual her family was, and she still didn't use them.

"Everyone would worry. I don't want to worry them again."

How interesting.

She kept adding these little disclaimers, as if afraid he wouldn't believe her, and each one needled at Woo Tae-kyung's composure more than it should have.

Ah. Should I dig?

Should he excavate the human being named Lee Do-hee all the way down to the bedrock? Woo Tae-kyung knew that once he started something, he saw it through to the ugly end. So he rarely started anything at all. When Jang Hee-jo gave the orders, he moved as told, and the moment he had a premonition that a task would be more trouble than it was worth to handle on his own initiative, he'd slip out of it with practiced ease.

The bottom of a person is always too filthy to look at without wanting to retch. He'd lived his life half-heartedly avoiding the gaze — why go looking into that nausea-inducing pit when he was already standing in one?

"Stop asking me about it, Lee Do-hee. I'll handle it."

With every question out of her mouth, his true feelings had been drooling out of him, slavering and shameless. He didn't know what it was yet, but it was a weakness that could move her — or in building terms, a load-bearing frame. And once a person knows about a thing like that, they inevitably want to hold it from above, shake it, own it.

He was straining to press all that down, and Lee Do-hee kept shoving her raw, skinless innards right at him without even a shell for modesty. It was difficult.

"I keep a guy who's best at dirty work at my side for exactly that reason. So why would I worry?"

Woo Tae-kyung whispered it to her, smiling hard enough to split his lip, looking down with satisfaction at the white fingertips still gripping his shirt. At his words, Lee Do-hee's head snapped up. She glared at the corner of his mouth, where the smile hadn't quite died.

"I could have handled it myself. You're the one who came barging in uninvited."

"Ah, so the young lady's upset because I laughed."

When Woo Tae-kyung needled her so sweetly, she bit down hard on her lower lip and swallowed the rage boiling up inside her. His hand reached out and stroked the crown of her head, almost tickling.

"If I'd been even a little later, you'd be dead. What kind of trash have you been playing with until now, that you ended up running into a son of a bitch like that?"

How exactly had she provoked him, that a bastard desperate to fuck her would kick her to the ground like that?

Then Woo Tae-kyung remembered that he knew all too well how good Lee Do-hee was at needling people, and he broke into another lazy, silent laugh.

"Your taste in men, though…."

He clicked his tongue.

"What do you want me to do about it? So right now—"

"You could have picked anyone, and you picked the biggest piece of shit of the lot. You really do have a gift for choosing the absolute worst of everything."

The shitty student was one thing. But the fact that Lee Do-hee had gone and chosen him — that was what made Woo Tae-kyung's shoulders shake with laughter. How, in a place as respectable as a school, a place honest students attended, had she managed to pick the filthiest bastard among them?

Lee Do-hee's luck in the lottery was abysmal.

"Feeling pretty confident you've got my weakness already, aren't you? Whatever I pick — is that something you get to be sarcastic about right now? Say whatever you want. You're only here because my father handed you to me."

"It's fun. I live thinking, huh, so this is what boring and ordinary feels like — and then you go and stir up trouble, and I get thrown back into the mire, and it's fun. Sometimes I wonder if the young lady is really just dying to break in a dog."

Woo Tae-kyung had walked right back into the cesspool he'd crawled out of. No — truthfully, it had been inevitable ever since the day he'd kept every last Ant from the Ant Cave under surveillance and held the numbers of all the manpower he might someday need. It had been a prepared thing, waiting.

He'd assumed, vaguely, that it would be something involving Jang Hee-jo. But then Lee Do-hee had appeared out of nowhere and flung open the door to the Ant Cave still living and wriggling inside him.

No wonder, then, that ever since meeting her, he kept catching that stench.

"Do you really think the young lady could sink all the way to the cesspool where dogs roll, and still manage to hold the leash again?"

Raised so delicately, after all.

Living the life of a textbook family portrait, the kind he'd only ever seen from the outside —

That gap fascinated him: the things she was too ashamed to say in front of her family, but said freely to him, ordered without a flicker of hesitation.

"Isn't it a little too easy to be talking about cesspools when it's one errand you're doing me?"

Woo Tae-kyung grinned. He nodded along, silky and agreeable, conceding that she had a point. Lee Do-hee bit her lip again.

Her face was set in that stubborn scowl of hers — furious that Woo Tae-kyung held her weakness and refused to hate it. Amusing enough that he didn't press her. He simply waited.

"Six months. Then again, judging by how you work, it could get cut in half."

"Ah, so now the young lady deigns to set a deadline for wiping my ass?"

She was naming a longer period than he'd expected. But the implied answer — that she'd allow it to shrink to three — wasn't a bad deal at all. A fixed term suited Woo Tae-kyung far better than waiting indefinitely with no promise of when things would sour and end. When Lee Do-hee tossed him the length of time like a mercy, he simply took it between his teeth.

"You look like you're dying of happiness, Woo Tae-kyung."

Even at her icy words, the corners of his raised mouth showed no intention of coming down. Then he remembered that the jacket she was still draped in belonged to that piece of shit he'd just dealt with upstairs, and he walked to the trunk. A spare suitcase lived in there permanently, so he pulled out only a jacket and brought it back.

He tossed the bastard's clothes onto the garage floor, then dressed Lee Do-hee in the jacket, adjusting it to his own size until her small frame disappeared completely inside it.

The trunk was already stocked with basic medicines, so Woo Tae-kyung crouched down low and smeared a thick layer of bruise cream over her split lip and the mottling across her face.

"Anywhere else bleeding?"

"Don't know. My whole body hurts. You really do carry everything around with you."

"Curious what else is in there? Go on, try tearing something. I've got surgical needles too."

When she recoiled with genuine disgust, he added:

"Can't promise they'll be as pretty as a doctor's."

"Is that how you got all those tears in your body? You stitched them up yourself?"

He'd caught a good look at his own scars while changing clothes, so Woo Tae-kyung burst out laughing. Lee Do-hee was genuinely curious — her face had gone stiff with it, and she stood there waiting, determined to hear the answer.

"Some of them, I stitched myself. You don't like the work?"

"They're crooked and ugly."

"And why would I need them to be pretty?"

He answered her indifferently. While he was packing things back into the kit, Lee Do-hee's hand drifted up and traced the scar on his face.

"This one. Who did it?"

"You've been assuming you made this scar yourself. Chairman Jang made this one."