A dry, sarcastic scoff escaped her lips. She had spent days trapped in his skin, drowning in his pathetic despair, feeling his bare feet bleed on glass, and suffering the terrifying drop off a ledge...only to return to her real life and find herself stripped of her scalpel, banned from her sacred Operating Theater, and humiliated by a board of suits. He was a living curse. In her mind, coming into physical proximity with Do Ra-ik was equivalent to walking willingly into an ongoing natural disaster.
She folded her arms and sat back on her sofa, letting the doorbell chime again. And again. And again.
"Keep ringing, mummy," she muttered under her breath, her voice dripping with venom. "Maybe the vibration will snap your other arm."
Outside, Ra-ik leaned closer to the intercom speaker. "Dr. Maeng. I know you're in there. Look at the screen. I'm not leaving until you open this door."
She walked slowly toward the entryway, stepping onto the dark tile. She glanced at the wall-mounted video intercom display.
The screen showed a tall, imposing silhouette standing in the softly lit corridor outside her private elevator. He was wearing a heavy black wool overcoat over a simple dark sweater, his dark hair falling slightly over his forehead. His face was pale, marked by a fading bruise along his jaw, but his posture was rigid, formidable, and unmistakable. He had discharged himself. He had tracked down her private address. Se-na kept starring at his bruised face on the screen. The sheer audacity of this man...standing at her doorstep demanding an audience...was too much for her pride to bear.
For a long moment, Se-na simply stared at the monitor, her fingers hovering over the lock mechanism. She remembered the sheer despair of his soul, the way he had surrendered on that ledge, and the way he had screamed at the medical staff for dragging him back to life.
She took a deep, steadying breath, forced her clinical armor back into place, and instead of pressing the the door release, she slammed her palm onto the intercom talk button instead.
"You should be in Room 802 resting your cardiac tissue, Mr. Do," Se-na said flatly, her voice dropping into that familiar, razor-sharp register. "Discharging yourself just days after acute traumatic arrest is an act of sheer medical idiocy."
A faint, bitter smirk touched the corner of Ra-ik's lips, though his eyes remained deadly serious. "I see your bedside manner hasn't improved."
"I don't have a bedside manner anymore," Se-na replied coldly. "In case you were never told, I was stripped of my privileges because of you. So state your business, Mr. Do. If you're here to serve me with a lawsuit, hand over the papers so I can go back inside."
"I didn't come here to sue you," Ra-ik said quietly, his voice dropping into a low, resonant murmur. "I came to pay you back!" Ra-ik called out through the speaker, his gravelly voice tight with flustered humiliation. He pulled a crisp cashier's check from his coat pocket and held it up to the camera lens. "Fifty million won. The fine the hospital board forced on you. I paid it."
A sharp, cruel laugh echoed through the speaker.
"Fifty million won?" Se-na mocked, her voice laced with pure, arrogant laughter. "Do you think you're handing a tip to a waitress, Mr. Do? Do you have any idea who I am? I am Maeng Se-na! My family owns equity in half the private medical foundations in this province! Fifty million won is what I spend on a weekend shopping trip when I'm bored!"
"It's not charity. It's a debt," Ra-ik said firmly, his gaze unwavering. "You saved my life when my own family signed my death warrant. And you lost your scalpel because you slapped some sense into me."
"Listen to me very carefully, you pathetic excuse for a medical miracle," this time Se-na actually lost it. Her voice blasted through the corridor speaker, cutting through the quiet hall like a blade. "If you do not take your battered, fracture-ridden carcass off my floor within ten seconds, I am calling security to have you tossed to where you belong."
Ra-ik blinked, flinching slightly at the sudden raw, venomous cadence of her voice, but he didn't step back. "Dr. Maeng, please. Just open the door."
"Why? So I can marvel at the medical anomaly that is your survival?" Se-na sneered through the speaker, her words designed with effortless precision to strip away every shred of his dignity. "You plummeted off a building like a sack of wet flour, shattered a glass canopy, broke your own bones, ruined my record, and got me suspended...and now you're standing outside my home like a lost, brain-damaged stray? Do you have no shame, Do Ra-ik? Or did the fall knock out whatever microscopic brain cells you had left?"
A faint flush of color crept up Ra-ik's neck, burning red against his pale, bruised jawline. Her words didn't just sting...they completely dismantled his formidable composure, making him feel exposed and absurdly small. "I…"
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