The door suddenly unlocked with a loud, aggressive hydraulic click.
The heavy oak door swung open, and Se-na stepped into the threshold. She stood there in a crisp silk blouse and dark trousers, looking untouchable, immaculate, and utterly furious. Her eyes blazed with a sharp, lethal malice that made the air in the hallway feel paper-thin.
"You think my career is worth fifty million won?" Se-na snarled, her small stature completely overshadowing his towering, bandaged frame through sheer force of aura. "You think you can just hand me a piece of paper and erase the fact that my scalpel was taken from me because I had to slap some sanity into a dramatic 'Nation's Healer' who couldn't even save himself?!"
Ra-ik stared down at her, his throat working hard as he swallowed, completely paralyzed by her razor-sharp tongue and the terrifying intensity in her eyes.
"I don't want your filthy money!" Se-na hissed, poking her sharp index finger hard against his uninjured right shoulder, forcing him to stumble back half a step. "I want you to take your broken ribs, your stupid cast, and your pathetic savior complex, and get out of my sight before I use my bare hands to re-fracture your leg!"
Ra-ik took her verbal assault, his face burning with a mixture of embarrassment, shock, and an eerie, deep-seated awe. But as she raised her hand to push him again, his large, rough right hand moved on instinct, gently catching her wrist mid-air.
Se-na froze, her eyes flashing with pure rage at his touch. "Let go of me."
Ra-ik didn't let go immediately. He stared down into her fierce, intelligent eyes, his dark gaze searching her face with a terrifying, vulnerable desperation that stripped away all her cynical armor in an instant.
"I'll leave," Ra-ik whispered, his voice cracking with a raw, agonizing tremor. "I'll leave and never come back if that's what you want. But answer me one thing first..."
Se-na glared up at him, her breath hitching slightly at the sudden shift in his demeanor.
"That morning in the ER... and when you pushed me back in Room 802..." Ra-ik's chest heaved against his bandages, his fingers trembling slightly around her wrist. "You yelled at me. You spoke about the wind... about the ledge... about my mind..."
He stepped closer, his shadow falling heavily over her face as his voice dropped into a desperate, haunting whisper:
"Who are you, Maeng Se-na? And how... how do you know what it felt like on that ledge?"
The corridor grew terrifyingly quiet, the hum of the air vents fading into background noise against the heavy, syncopated rhythm of their breathing.
Ra-ik's grip on her wrist was firm, but not painful. His large, scarred palm was warm against her skin, transferring a steady, grounding pulse that made Se-na's chest tighten with an overwhelming, suffocating discomfort.
She looked up into his face...and for a harrowing, dizzying second, her breath caught in her throat.
She looked at him the way a person looks into a mirror that has suddenly stepped out into reality. Just days ago, this was her face. These dark, heavy-lidded eyes were the eyes she had blinked through. This sharp, carved jawline was the bone structure she had traced with her own trembling fingers in the penthouse glass. She had felt his heart pounding against his ribs, felt his lungs gasp for oxygen, and suffered the excruciating, raw agony of his bleeding soles.
A sudden, fierce flush of heat crept up Se-na's neck, burning hot across her cheeks.
It was deeply, unnatural and wrong. To be standing here in her own small frame, looking up at the towering silhouette of a man whose deepest, most humiliating secrets were laid bare inside her mind...it made her feel exposed, flustered, and profoundly stripped of her usual clinical detachment.
"Who are you, Maeng Se-na?" Ra-ik repeated, his deep, gravelly voice trembling as he leaned closer, his dark eyes boring into hers. "How... how do you know what it felt like on that ledge?"
Every self-preservation instinct inside Se-na screamed at her to deflect.
She wanted to laugh in his face. She wanted to summon her usual cold, sharp malice, scoff at his absurdity, and tell him that head trauma and brain swelling had turned him into a delusional lunatic. She wanted to strip away his dignity with a single, biting joke and shut the door on his battered face.
She opened her mouth to deliver a lethal verbal blow...to mock him, to insult him, to tear him down...but no sound came out.
Her tongue felt like lead. Her head began to spin with a sickening, dizzying vertigo as memories that weren't hers flooded her mind all at once: the smell of rain, the icy gale, the salt on her lips, the taste of blood, the sound of glass crushing beneath bare feet, and the agonizing, silent tears shed in a cold estate room.
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