The Girl Beneath the Table

Hyun-tae and his men, beaten half to ruin by Ethan alone, had taken a spot with a clear view of the bar's entrance and were loitering there.

Hyun-tae wiped the blood from the torn corner of his mouth and called his older cousin—Kwon Sang-cheol, Dami's father.

"I think we're going to need more men."

"Well... I can guess where she is. I just can't get her out."

Sang-cheol's irritated voice spilled through the line, and Hyun-tae's beaten body throbbed all the harder.

"She went into a bar in the alley, and the bastard who owns it won't hand her over. They've got someone who can actually fight. The boys I brought aren't enough."

"The alley behind CH Department Store. The bar's name is J—the English letter."

"Yes."

Sang-cheol's deep sigh was the last sound before a suffocating silence.

Hyun-tae wanted to ask why he'd gone quiet, but he swallowed the question, afraid of the nauseating curses he'd get in return, and only clung to the phone, blinking.

"But shouldn't we grab her as fast as we can, before the old man finds out?"

A crease dug between Hyun-tae's brows. Those were not words that should have come from the man who, better than anyone, knew why they had to find Dami even if it meant running until the soles of their feet caught fire.

"What? No—why!"

"Who is he. That man."

He'd already guessed the man was no ordinary figure, but the moment Sang-cheol dropped his voice to frighten him, Hyun-tae's knees went weak.

"Yes. Understood."

Hyun-tae jammed the dead phone into his back pocket and bit down on another cigarette.

He had turned every nightlife alley inside out, tugged the whiskers of a sleeping lion and been beaten senseless for it, and now he would have to keep his eyes open through the night. The wretchedness of his own situation struck him all over again.

Seol-woo stood with his hands in his pockets, posture cocked at a careless angle, and let his gaze travel once around the empty room.

Yeon, who should have been inside, was nowhere to be seen.

There was only one door. She couldn't have left—so where had she gone?

He was still scanning for anywhere she might hide when he threw the bathroom door open.

A wooden chair scraped back with an unpleasant screech, and Dami, curled beneath the table, crawled out, watching his face.

"Are they gone?"

"Yeah. They're gone."

The moment Hyun-tae's familiar voice had carried through the wall, she had hidden on instinct. She hadn't believed this man could stop him. The one who ran the locked ward was, to the patients and to her, the most frightening thing there was.

Yeon, hands clasped tight around the thought of Hyun-tae, jolted back to herself and bowed her head again.

"Thank you. Thank you so, so much!"

"How did you get in here."

"I just ran in, mixed in with everyone else. I'm sorry for coming in on my own. With my hair like this, I don't have anywhere I can hide."

"The color runs pretty deep for a quarter."

That eye-catching gold seemed to stand out even more than when she was small.

Seol-woo swept his bangs back and kneaded the nape of his neck, which was going stiff. Maybe it was only that he was meeting those glass-bead eyes again after so long. The feeling was strangely unfamiliar.

"What's a quarter? I heard my real dad's mom—so, my biological grandmother—was a foreigner. I don't really know the details myself."

Told a story that had nothing to do with the truth, Seol-woo's dark brow lifted.

He set aside, for the moment, the words that her father was Korean and that beautiful color of hers came from her mother, and took the chair Dami had pushed out.

Chin propped on the table, he looked Yeon over with no discretion at all.

The first word that filled his head was small. Her height, her frame, her face—even her hands and feet were still small.

Under the bright chandelier the wounds showed all the clearer, and the scars slashed across her wrists were old. Not the kind of marks a day or two of being tied could leave.

And then there was the rest. Unlike the bruises staining her arms and legs, the blue mark fading over her chest looked almost like the print of fingers pressed into skin.

"I know it's shameless of me to impose like this, but I do know how embarrassing I look."

Dami offered an awkward smile and hid her wrists behind her. They were wounds too shameful to show anyone.

"The embarrassing part is your wrists?"

"Ah..."

A hollow laugh escaped him. Dami followed the place his finger indicated, ducked her head, hauled her inner layer up in a hurry, and closed the front of it. Then she went right back to the business of hiding her wrists.

"Sit. Rest as long as you want. You can leave whenever."

"R-really?"

"Of course."

When Seol-woo nodded without hesitation, a sigh of relief broke from lips still beaded with blood. He didn't bother asking about the wounds.

He was unsettled himself, and now that he had found Yeon, one way or another, there would be time enough to go back over the past.

"I was going to die if they caught me. Thank you for saving me."

"You were going to die?"

"Thanks to you, I didn't. Not yet."

Seol-woo's sharp eyes flinched. It was a violent resolve, ill-matched to a face smiling so softly.

"What's your name."

"Kwon Dami."

"Kwon Dami. Dami."

An unfamiliar name that didn't suit her lodged against his ear, and his head filled with nothing but questions that had no answers.

He needed to see Chen and Ethan. What was he supposed to do with this tiny thing.

"Tell me your name, too."

"Why don't you know my name."

"I don't. This is the first time I've seen you. Are you famous? Even if you are, I wouldn't know."

"Seol-woo. Cha Seol-woo."

"Wow. That's pretty."

"First time I've heard that. Ah—second, then."

The second time. From the same person.

"Really? It's so pretty, though."

Dami looked at him, golden eyes glittering.

Seol-woo turned a bitter taste over his tongue and went looking for the whiskey. He had expected she simply couldn't come find him because she didn't remember, and he thought he more or less understood why Yeon had forgotten him. It still left a bruise.

"Do you live here?"

"No."

"Oh—then are you the owner of this place?"

"Well. Something like that."

Tasting outside air for the first time in a very long while, face to face with someone from beyond the ward, Dami lit up and chattered without end. Even Seol-woo, who would ordinarily have snapped that she was being a nuisance, answered her in earnest.

"How much does it cost to open a place like this? I want to live as an owner, too."

"I don't remember what it cost."

"It was really expensive, wasn't it?"

Did she actually want to know? Searching her eyes for the point of such an empty question, he felt the corner of his mouth curve.

Those round eyes, so like a puppy waiting on a treat, seemed to insist she truly was curious, and the sight was ridiculous.

"Probably."

"Oh. Then you must be really rich, Boss."

"More or less."

Right as the talk broke off, a foghorn of a stomach growl shook the room. Mortified, Dami clutched her belly and ducked her head to escape his eyes.

Seol-woo watched her scratch her forehead and laugh, a strange look on his face, then took out his phone.

"Bring some food to the room. Not bar snacks. A meal."

"Oh—oh, you don't have to."

But her stomach pitched again the instant the words were out.

"Doesn't sound like I don't."

"It's because I ate dinner early. Hehe."

Looking like that—what on earth was there to smile about?

Watching Dami face him with a smile the entire time, Seol-woo's brow drew tight.

Every inch of exposed skin carried the marks of a beating. She was being hunted by men who looked like gangsters, and her feet were a wreck.

Was it normal for a woman spending time with a total stranger, in the worst situation imaginable, to grin so vacantly?

A brief knock, and Ethan himself came in towing a trolley. Salad, pasta, and sandwiches cut into easy bites were set on the table.

"Wow, that looks so good. Thank you."

Yeon, eyes shining as she counted the plates multiplying in front of her, sprang to her feet and bowed to the man who had brought the food.

When the buttonless top threatened to bare her chest again, Seol-woo rose at once and put himself briefly in front of her.

It seemed less that she was careless, and more that she had no shame at all about letting someone see her undressed.

"Huh? W-wait—you, you! Sun Woo-yeon!"

"Yes?"

Only now identifying the cause of the earlier uproar, Ethan jolted and rubbed his eyes as if he'd seen a ghost.

The face was one he knew by heart from childhood photographs looked at hundreds of times over—unmistakably the child they had spent three years searching for. However age might have changed her features, there could not be another person alive with that blond hair and those golden eyes.

"Out."

"No, what is this even—"

"Later."

Cut off, Ethan pushed his lips out and left the room. Dami didn't touch the food until Seol-woo had opened the whiskey and filled his glass.

"Eat."

He was slow to understand why she sat there looking ready to drool, doing nothing but follow his every move. The permission came out short.

"You should eat first."

"I'm fine. Just eat."

"Okay! Then I'll eat, gratefully."

Why were her manners so painfully bright.

As if she had been waiting for it, Dami took up a fork, bobbed her head, and speared a large shrimp from the pasta into her mouth.

"Oh no. It's so good."

After a glance at the man quietly drinking, she drew the plate closer without a sound and began to eat in earnest.

"You didn't eat dinner early. You didn't eat at all."

Seol-woo's eyes narrowed on her as she pushed the food in.

What caught him was the hand wrapped around the fork with all five fingers, the way a three-year-old grips a spoon. She was all but scooping the noodles up to her mouth.

For a man used to people who twirled a few strands and set them carefully on a spoon, it was a thoroughly shocking sight.

In his world, where every table manner was drilled in from earliest childhood, it was also something that simply did not happen. And the Yeon he remembered had never used a fork like this.

Even under the heat of his gaze, Dami's fork did not stop. She cleared the pasta in a flash, then bit deep into a sandwich soaked in what sauce remained.

Seol-woo emptied his glass again. Perhaps it was the sight of her eating with such pleasure—the brow that by all rights should have been creased hard had smoothed itself clean.

The mouth that ought to have spat no end of venom, that she looked disgraceful, that she looked like nothing, stayed shut. The only thing that weighed on him was how fast she was emptying the plate.

"Is it good?"

"Yes."

Her stuffed cheeks finally clear, Dami smiled a small shy smile.

Bright eyes, the straight line of her nose, red lips. Making so many expressions with all of them, she handed him back a joy he had missed.

Maybe the drink was coming on. When the air against his body began to cling, hot and close, Seol-woo switched on the air conditioner. In the cold blast, Dami, thin in her patient gown, gave a small shiver.

"Cold?"

"A little. But I'm all right."

This wasn't her house. She could hardly ask him to turn off an air conditioner the owner had switched on because he was hot. Seol-woo stood without a word, fetched the blanket from the recliner, and settled it around her shoulders.

"Thank you."

Two sandwiches vanished in no time, and her eyes moved to the salad. Gazing at it, glistening under a scatter of dressing, they shone.

"Can I ask you one thing."

"A hundred is fine."

"Were you living in a hospital?"

"Yes."

And she had said a hundred would be fine. The moment the hospital came up, Dami set her fork down, her face gone blank.

"Why?"

"Because my parents sent me. Oh—thank you."

A bottle of water was set in front of her as she mumbled through the salad she had shoved in without care.

"Eat. I'll ask later."

"Ah, it's not that. I'm sleepy right now. If I fall asleep, please tie me—"

Looking at him through eyes half shut, Dami lost to the sleep crashing down on her, and her head dropped.

"What is this."

Had he ever seen anything so absurd.

He shot an arm across, caught her as she tipped to one side, and his expression crumpled like paper.

He laid Dami, asleep in the middle of her meal, on the bed, stepped outside, and called Chen and Ethan to the room. The three men gathered with their separate questions and regarded one another, faces uneasy.

"Explain."

"You're the one who should explain, hyung! What is this? Why is she here?"

Irritation had climbed all the way up after a day of walking uneven hills in dress shoes, and Ethan kicked the expensive pair a good distance off. Handmade by an Italian craftsman, and his feet hurt just the same. He set to rubbing his aching feet in earnest.

"Eat this."

Chen tucked a slice of apple into Ethan's stubbornly pouted mouth and filled a freshly set glass.