Settling the Terms
Baek Yeo-eun was crouched low on the bare earth. Small-framed to begin with, she looked as if she had been swallowed whole by the flower beds the moment she curled in on herself.
“Tak Kang-hyun?”
At the servant’s call she lifted her head, spotted him, and let out a soft cry. The slight upward tilt of surprise in her voice almost sounded like a welcome.
Or perhaps the entire scene was only a hallucination. The landscape before him felt too unreal for anything else.
The flower garden itself, as though every bloom that existed in the world had been carefully sampled and put on display. The towering greenery that rose around it in a high, domed embrace. And Baek Yeo-eun, casually brushing soil from her knees with a pair of cotton gloves.
The scenery had changed beyond all recognition, but the woman tending it with such care was stranger still. She was the sort of person who seemed to have lived her whole life without ever letting so much as a drop of water touch her hands, let alone dirt.
“Shall I bring out some iced tea for you?”
The servant’s question—Kang-hyun had not even realized the man was still there—snapped him back to reality.
“No need. I don’t think he’ll be staying long.”
Yeo-eun glanced at him as if seeking agreement and gave a little shrug. Kang-hyun kept his eyes fixed on her and only nodded.
“Then I’ll leave you two to talk.”
Once the servant was gone and they were alone, Baek Yeo-eun did not come toward him. She simply crouched down on the soil again.
“Just wait a second. See this sunflower? It’s summer and it’s the only one that won’t grow. It’s been bothering me. I’ll just give it some fertilizer real quick.”
She chattered on in a way that did not suit her at all, gently scraped the soil away from the shortest sunflower, and carefully tipped a bottle of liquid fertilizer. Droplets fell through the narrow mouth and darkened the dry earth.
When the bottle was empty she finally rose and tossed the gloves aside. Her fingers, so slender they made the gloves look enormous—gloves that would never have fit his own hands—were laid bare in the sunlight.
“Took longer than I thought.”
She flung off the straw hat she had been wearing pulled low and roughly pushed back the hair that spilled free.
“So. Everything’s settled, then?”
The fresh, bright voice that slid into his ear did not match the provocative words at all. The easy smile at the corner of her mouth made no attempt to hide who held the upper hand.
Looking at that familiar face, the restless noise inside him quieted a little. This was the Baek Yeo-eun he knew. The one he was used to.
So he spoke before any other thoughts could intrude.
“I don’t know what you were thinking when you proposed this marriage, but you shouldn’t expect the kind of married life people usually imagine.”
The warning was dry and concise. It carried the clear message that he had no intention of playing along with her game.
“Are you still all right with that?”
He knew it was a foolish question. The answer was obvious.
Yet he asked it anyway—perhaps out of some last scrap of hope. This was the final moment he might still stop a future that was certain to end in ruin.
But he also knew perfectly well that Baek Yeo-eun was never a woman who moved the way he wanted her to.
“Yeah. It’s fine.”
Her voice was strangely calm, refined, and her eyes were gentle—again, nothing like the Baek Yeo-eun he knew.
That was probably why the predictable, simple answer grated on his ears.
“…….”
In that instant a fierce wind rose from somewhere. With a long, rushing sound like fine grains pouring down, the flowers bent at the waist and swayed.
Kang-hyun’s cooled gaze rested on the woman who stood unmoved amid the wave of blossoms—the mistress of a garden that felt like a tiny, glittering world sealed inside a snow globe, cut off from reality.
And he thought of the reason he had been so determined to return to Cheongbaekwon, the thing that still slept somewhere here.
He would probably never achieve his original goal. The landscape, changed beyond any recognition of the past, made that implication all too clear.
But that did not mean defeat. He had not yet thrown down his cards, nor had he left the table.
Even if he could never clear his father’s name, there were still ways to bring Chairman Baek to judgment.
Of course it would never be an easy road. Chairman Baek was a man who looked down on others like chess pieces, a vicious creature who never hesitated to dirty his hands with blood to keep that power.
Expecting to stay clean while dealing with trash like that was nothing but arrogance.
It would be a fight in the mud. Not just a few spatters—he would be rolling in it. Until no one could tell who was filthier.
He even considered that he might lose a great deal in this fight. Everyone who knew him might turn their backs; the reputation and fortune he had built over a lifetime might become worthless overnight.
Even so, he had decided to walk willingly into that mire.
And marriage to Baek Yeo-eun would be the first step.
“First, let’s settle the titles.”
At the sudden shift in his speech, Baek Yeo-eun blinked her eyes wide and round.
Surely she hadn’t imagined the man she was going to marry would keep calling her “young lady” and treating her with elaborate deference.
As if mocking a woman lost in that delusion, he lifted one corner of his mouth in a sharp little smile.
“I don’t have a taste for using honorifics with my woman.”
This marriage was an extremely disadvantageous deal for Kang-hyun, which meant Chairman Baek would let his guard down. If that complacency could be bought for certain, the price was worth paying.
When you walk into a tiger’s den of your own free will, you have to be ready to lose an arm. Even if you give flesh, you take the bone.
The flesh he had already planned to offer—whether it was torn away or whether he had to live pressed against the daughter of his enemy—made little difference.
“So you match me.”
Baek Yeo-eun would freely indulge her desire to possess Tak Kang-hyun; Tak Kang-hyun would use the position of Baek Yeo-eun’s husband to dig all the way into the core of Paeksan. A relationship of mutual use. Simple and clean.
“Then… Kang-hyun-ssi?”
The soft, slightly hesitant voice slipped gently into his ear.
Maybe it was the awkward form of address. For some strange reason his ear tickled, as if the finest, most insignificant strand of down were brushing against it, almost but not quite touching.
To shake off that unidentifiable strangeness, Kang-hyun deliberately put force into the tip of his tongue.
“Let’s get along well from now on, Baek Yeo-eun-ssi.”
His words were an impossible prophecy, a future that would never come true.
Even so, Kang-hyun remained unperturbed. There was no reason not to be.
As if answering him, the corner of Baek Yeo-eun’s mouth curved smoothly upward—and at that exact moment the clouds parted and sharp sunlight poured down.
Perhaps because the fierce beam bleached his vision white for an instant, the smile of the woman savoring her victory flickered as though it might vanish at any second. Even though that was impossible.
Days so smooth they were almost unpleasant followed one after another.
When he announced his intention to marry Baek Yeo-eun, Chairman Baek’s mouth literally split open in a grin. He made no attempt to hide the greedy gleam of a man finally calculating the usefulness of a card that had fallen into his hand.
But that disgusting smile would be nothing more than a drop in the ocean compared to what Kang-hyun would have to endure from now on.
“Welcome, Representative Tak.”
The staff of Cheongbaekwon greeted him with a deference that bore no comparison to before. The wedding had not even been held yet, and already the treatment had changed.
Kang-hyun showed no awkwardness at the conspicuous shift; he simply walked on with easy composure. In his neatly combed hair and formal suit there was a natural dignity that would have suited the master of the estate himself.
He had dressed so carefully because today was the so-called formal introduction of the families. Since he had no relatives of his own, it was in reality little more than a one-sided meeting with Baek Yeo-eun’s family.
Even the venue was Cheongbaekwon—an open declaration that they had no intention of hiding the fact that he was a live-in son-in-law.
“Chairman, Representative Tak has arrived.”
The servant carefully announced him outside the dining room and opened the door.
Chairman Baek, holding the seat of honor at the far end of the table, spotted Kang-hyun and waved cheerfully. Flanking him on either side sat the chairman’s wife and Baek Yeo-eun, facing each other.
“At last, our son-in-law.”
Kang-hyun bowed properly toward the chairman who was welcoming him so warmly, then moved to the seat beside Yeo-eun as if following a predetermined sequence. Only then did he meet the gaze that had been fixed on him without wavering ever since the dining-room door opened.