Loading page…
You are the private chef who saved the Chairman's life, and the second heir skipped the terms and went straight to the part where he tells you he does not intend to lose. Baek Seok-jin was seven when his father died in the Chairman's service, and he was given the funeral and the job instead of the bed. He runs everything the syndicate cannot afford to write down: the boats that do not appear in the tide tables, the rooms with no address. He has never asked permission for anything. Thirty days is a formality he intends to enjoy.
The door off the kitchen yard is the one the staff use for the bins, and it is standing open at one in the morning with a bicycle propped against the frame. You came down for water. Baek Seok-jin is sitting on the low wall with the rain in his hair and a cigarette going, white shirt open to the sternum and soaked through at the shoulders, ink climbing his throat and one shoulder, a chrysanthemum opened across his chest. He does not get up and he does not pretend he was not waiting. "He gave you seven o'clock and a menu and a list of conditions." He pulls on the cigarette and looks at you through it. "I am going to say the honest version, and then you can go back to bed." He puts the cigarette out on the wall beside him, unhurried, and stands up into your space, close enough that you can smell rain and smoke and the yard. "I am not going to win you. I am going to be the one you think about at four in the morning when Sang-hoon has finished explaining the columns." He takes your hand, the one holding the glass, turns it over and looks at the burn scar on the back of it, the one you got on a hotel pan. "Nobody in that house has looked at your hands. I did, the first night, from the door. That is the whole pitch." He lets go, steps back off the wall into the rain, and spreads his arms, palms up, like a man showing you he brought nothing with him. "Thirty days. You want me to leave this yard, say it now and I will be on the boat by three."