You Will Live Here

Kwon Sang-cheol turned into a Pyeongchang-dong lane lined with showy detached houses and flicked a glance at the rearview mirror, checking his own appearance. He had already lost Dami, the girl he had promised to deliver today, and a miserable reckoning lay ahead of him. The last thing he needed was to hand them some fresh excuse to find fault.

The moment the car stopped before the massive gate, security men came running out.

"What brings you at this hour? We weren't told to expect anyone."

"I came in a hurry and couldn't call ahead. Think of it as standing in for the lunch visit."

He was hardly a stranger to this house. Snapping the answer at the guard who still would not relax, Sang-cheol ground the burned-down cigarette under his heel.

The title Baek Chang-seok had granted him was chief of staff, but in truth he was little more than an errand boy who handled whatever dirty work came along. Even the estate's hired help looked down on him. That was his place. He had meant to firm up his footing by using the stepdaughter he had kept only barely alive, and the whole scheme had snarled itself beyond saving. He had raised their expectations to the sky and then failed to bring Dami. If an ashtray came flying at his head, he would have nothing to say.

"Come in."

After exchanging a few words over the radio the staff used inside the estate, the guard opened the way.

Beyond a gate that towered as if it had never learned how high the sky was, the vast house—one that wrung a fresh gasp from him every time he saw it—slowly revealed itself. Once featured on television as the largest modern hanok in existence, the estate held countless annexes besides the main hall Sang-cheol came to visit. The people of the house kept their voices down about it, but those annexes were crowded with Chang-seok's concubines. The wild rumor that the old tiger of Pyeongchang-dong only grew hardier with age because he drained the vital energy of young women was, as it happened, true.

"Haah—hng! Ah, ahh, Elder, ah!"

Even before he crossed the threshold of the private room in the deepest part of the estate—Baek Chang-seok's own annex—a woman's voice was already breaking into shameless cries. Through the paper doors, which offered no soundproofing at all, it was plain as fire what the master of the room was doing.

"Elder, Chief Kwon is here."

Two women in slips, kneeling neatly as if waiting their turn, drew the sliding doors open from either side. Through the widening gap, a naked woman's sex lay fully exposed. Seated astride the legs of a robust old man, she shook her full breasts and cried out, and the thick cock driving in and out of her jerked with a vigor that did not belong to his years.

"Ah, hnn—!"

"You're slow. I'll have to call another girl."

"N-no, Elder! Haaah, I'll—I'll do more..."

Used to strangers walking in, the woman only worked her hips harder, whether or not someone was coming straight toward her.

"Did you pass the night comfortably, Elder?"

"As I recall, our appointment was for the afternoon. And why have you come alone?"

Sang-cheol sank politely to his knees below the sofa. Bowing his head to avoid Chang-seok's cutting stare and the woman's thighs, which twitched open and shut without rhythm, he chewed the inside of his lip. On the solid-wood side table pushed off to one side lay the photograph of Dami he himself had taken and shown them—a girl whose very dazed expression was like a painting. Today was the day he was supposed to have brought her.

"I'm sorry, Elder. I meant to have her prepared ahead of time, so I was bringing her out of the hospital yesterday when she ran. The men under me made a mistake."

News that cut his anticipation in half killed Baek Chang-seok's appetite at a stroke. He stopped the motion of his hips, drew himself out, and rubbed against the curve of the woman's spine. Even so, he did not pull free the arms he had hooked there to hold her thin thighs spread wide. Once the locked flesh parted, cloudy fluid seeped from the emptied passage. The thrusting had stopped, and still the woman kneaded her own breasts and panted.

"Nnng..."

Kwon Sang-cheol pressed down hard near his zipper, which was threatening to swell with no sense of the moment, and dragged his mind back into order.

"Then go and catch her. What is so difficult about catching a little child with nowhere to go? Have you come to beg the loan of a hand?"

"Well, the thing is... the place Dami ran into belonged to President Cha Seol-woo of CH. A shop of his. According to the hospital's head of security, President Cha hid her..."

At the name dropped out of nowhere, the line of Chang-seok's mouth went hard. Watching him set down the teacup he had been holding in silence, Sang-cheol could only swallow against a dry throat.

"You are certain it was President Cha who hid her?"

"Yes. It seems he met President Cha face to face."

Sang-cheol had braced for a blaze of temper. Instead Chang-seok, wearing an expression no one could read, kneaded the woman's thigh and stared quietly at Dami's photograph where it sat at a distance. She was a dazzling child he truly wanted, and of all people it had to be Cha Seol-woo. The old man's white brows rose and fell.

Seol-woo was one of the men it was awkward to deal with. Born the only son of the second son of CH Group—forever contending for first or second place in the business world—and the eldest daughter of Hyunjin Group, he was royal blood that even the permanent fixtures of politics did not dare look down on. A good deal of time had passed since his parents divorced over a difference in temperament, but nothing had changed the fact that he was the sole living tie between Hyunjin and CH. On top of that, he had now entered an engagement with the daughter of Seoul Mayor Han Kang-il. In his mid-thirties, he was becoming a man whose power answered to no one.

"But why would President Cha..."

"Sir?"

"Your daughter, I mean. President Cha has no reason to hide her. He has a marriage coming, and... no. That isn't right."

The man was at an age when his blood ran hotter than Chang-seok's own. Once he had seen a girl this special, there was no reason he would not want her.

"What should we do, Elder? We can't simply walk in and bring her out."

"Which is why you ought to have watched her properly in the first place!"

Chang-seok, muttering to himself, suddenly raised his voice. Turn the problem however he liked, no answer appeared, and the frustration had him thoroughly poisoned. Feeling the arm around her thigh go slack, the woman took the hint, drew away from him, and reached for a robe.

If it was only curiosity and Seol-woo let her go, that would be a mercy. If he refused to give her up, Chang-seok had no idea what to do. Going to Seol-woo himself to claim he had seen her first would cost him face, and sending Sang-cheol in blindly frightened him with the aftermath.

"I truly am sorry, Elder."

"I will find a way on this end. You keep a close watch, and kidnap her if you must. Do not, however, make a spectacle of yourself."

The child was a beautiful work of art. Her skin was white jade, so the flesh beneath was sure to be a lovely color, and they said the hair there matched the hair on her head. That only made him burn to have her in his hands. Baek Chang-seok's naked body trembled. From the moment he had seen the photograph, Dami had shimmered before his eyes, spilling gold light. Not one of the concubines packing the annexes came within reach of her toes. Ordinarily he would have turned his heart aside, but he could not bring himself to give her up.

He had been feeding his excitement day after day on nothing more than the fantasy of dragging a girl no man had ever laid hands on around this room for ten days, for a month, and breaking her to his taste.

"Yes. I understand."

"Only bring her quickly. I will give you all the money you could want. If you fail to bring her, you will pay dearly for making a fool of an old man."

Who made a fool of whom? As if I knew it would turn out like this.

Hiding the anger surging up in him, Sang-cheol rose without a sound and bent at the waist past ninety degrees.

"Of course. Then I'll take my leave."

He stared at the floor for a long while, and only after Chang-seok turned his body back toward the woman was he permitted to leave the room. Not even thirty minutes had passed, and already his head was pounding. Sang-cheol thought the old man was worrying far too much. However special Dami might be, she was hardly enough for a man of Cha Seol-woo's caliber to regret losing.

"Well. He'll send her out soon enough."

Once he had crossed the gate, Sang-cheol bit down on a cigarette and muttered it. It was a grave miscalculation, made by a man who knew nothing at all of their past.

Yeon passed through layer upon layer of security, rode the elevator up from the garage, and froze the instant she stepped through the hall that joined the entryway to the rest of the house.

"Wow. This can't be real."

At the far end of the wide-open living room, a blue garden filled her entire view. It was a sight she might have found only in the magazines they sometimes brought into her hospital room, and her jaw dropped.

"Your jaw's going to fall off."

Seol-woo, who had stopped beside her, pushed the fallen jaw back up and went into the kitchen.

"Are you a friend I'm allowed to step on?"

Shuffle, shuffle. Dragging slippers that were far too big for her, Yeon hesitated over a rug where gray and black blended in quiet harmony, then slipped them off and set them neatly aside. It felt like a dream. No—it was more astonishing than a dream. To think a world like this actually existed. Soft, softer still. A smile spread over her face as she wandered barefoot across the gentlest rug she had ever touched.

"You don't need to take the slippers off. I don't want the wounds rubbing against the fibers."

Almost before the words were finished, Seol-woo tucked her small feet back into the slippers and held out a hangover remedy with the cap already off.

"Drink. If the old man hears you landed in a hospital after drinking, he'll raise hell."

"What? Hos—hospitalized?"

Yeon, who had drained half the bottle, looked at Seol-woo through a cough. Hospitalized. Hospital. To her they were nothing but frightening words.

"Don't worry. It isn't the hospital you were in. We're going so they can see where it hurts, how it hurts, and how badly."

"Do I have to go? A hospital, all of a sudden, is a little..."

Seol-woo stepped closer and stroked the round back of her head several times. She fidgeted, picking at the sleeve of her cardigan, and the sight of it stirred something like pity in him. He must have been shortsighted. She had only just escaped. Of course a hospital would repel her.

"All right. We'll put the hospital off for a little while."

"Thank you. But... is it all right if I keep staying here? I don't really understand why you're taking me to a hospital, either."

"From now on, you live here."

"What?"

With that single firm sentence he offered nothing more. He turned his back and disappeared into the dining room, and Yeon's mouth fell open again.

The world was full of things she could not understand. Yeon, more than anyone, could not understand the misfortunes that kept happening to her. Her first memory was a hospital. Her name, her age, even her parents' faces—all of it had been erased. The moment she first opened her eyes, it was only natural to wipe her tears and believe the middle-aged woman beside her was her mother. On paper, the woman was unmistakably her mother. There had been a car accident, they said, and her father and older brother were dead. Two weeks had already passed, so the funeral was long over. She had not been sad. She could not remember her father or her brother.

"I'm going to live here?"

Yeon murmured it to herself, staring at the place Seol-woo had left. The words that had come from a strange man's mouth were as impossible to understand as they had been then.

Clink. Glass bowls and spoons struck one another, and the sound rang through the wide dining room. It was far too early for anything else, so they had stopped at a convenience store, and Yeon was happily spooning up instant porridge. Watching her, Seol-woo drank his coffee, then took up a spoon of his own.

"Hold it like this. Shovel it in any which way and half of it runs."

"Yes."

He had no intention of overlooking a bad habit. Her life in confinement was over, and he meant to teach her enough that people would not look down on her.

"Chopsticks."

"What?"

"The kimchi. In front of you."

When he indicated the well-fermented kimchi with a look, Yeon set the spoon down at once, smiled as if embarrassed, and picked up the chopsticks. She gripped them exactly as she had first gripped the spoon, and one of Seol-woo's brows climbed at a crooked angle.

"And how are you going to pick anything up like that?"

At the sharp edge in his voice her shoulders flinched, and she poked at the kimchi. Both sticks were clenched tight inside her palm, so there was no way she could lift any of it. She tried working them into the gap where they crossed and splayed, and red seasoning leapt out of the rummaged plate.

No one ever taught me. I should have just said I couldn't.

Her memory of using chopsticks was faint. Once she understood she could not do it properly, she had used only a spoon and a fork when she ate. In the end, only after she sent a cabbage leaf flying toward Seol-woo's mug did she set the chopsticks down.

"I-I'm sorry. I'll clean it up."

"Leave it. Eat."

Yeon, who had risen with a face gone red from shame, sank slowly back into her seat.

"Yes."

"Can you handle anything spicy?"

"I can manage kimchi."

I couldn't, before. Maybe because I was little.

Studying her closely, Seol-woo corrected the spoon again.

"Hold the spoon properly."

Mending a habit worn in over a long time was not easy. Yeon shrank under the steady scolding, though in truth Seol-woo had no idea that his manner, and his tone, were rather harsh.

"Thank you for the meal."

"There's no furniture yet, so sleep in my room for a bit. You got up too early."

"Yes. Before that, may I look around over there?"

The place she pointed to was the living-room terrace that opened onto the garden. A solid-wood table stood there, and beside an unplanted flower bed a row of pots had been set down carelessly, one after another, as the gifts arrived.

"Go look."

"Yes!"

When Yeon fluttered out onto the terrace, Seol-woo went into the dressing room and changed. He was just as tired. He had not slept properly either.

"It's so pretty."

Yeon sat down on the floor and stared, entranced, at feather grass in a whole range of colors. Things like reeds had dressed themselves in pastel.