Jihan got the apartment, no longer sure if the pounding in his chest was his heartbeat or the storm outside.
Rain had soaked through everything.
His shirt clung coldly to his back. Water dripped from his hair, ran down his jaw, slid beneath the collar of his suit. His shoes left dark, uneven prints across the floor as he stumbled inside and shoved the door shut with more force than he meant to. The sound cracked through the apartment and vanished into silence.
Except for the rain.
It battered the glass walls in hard sheets, turning the city outside into a blur of smeared lights and black sky. Thunder rolled somewhere far off, low and ugly, like something dragging chains across the clouds.
Jihan stood there for a second, breathing hard.
His fingers were still wrapped around his phone.
The screen had gone dark now, but he could still see it.
The pieces of his life collapsing one after another with his name pinned to every single one.
Then, he threw the phone.
It hit the wall near the entryway and dropped to the floor with a dead crack.
Jihan pressed a hand to his mouth.
His whole body was shaking.
Not from the cold.
He crossed the living room in an unsteady line, one hand catching the edge of the couch when his knees almost gave out beneath him. His head was a mess of noise. His father's voice. Boardroom silence. The ugly gleam of pity in people's eyes. Headlines. Questions. That sick, gaping feeling in his chest that had been growing for days and had finally become too large to carry.
He reached the wine bar by the window and braced both hands against it, head lowered.
For one second—one stupid, humiliating second—he thought he might throw up.
Instead, he grabbed the nearest bottle with wet, trembling fingers and fumbled for a glass.
The bottle knocked against the rim once. Twice. Dark red spilled over the side, running down the stem of the glass and over his knuckles, staining his skin like blood.
He filled it too high, nearly spilling it again, then brought it to his mouth and swallowed.
The wine hit his tongue—sharp, bitter, and wrong.
Jihan gagged and hurled the glass across the room.
It shattered against the floor in a burst of crystal and red.
His breath came out ragged.
He stared at the mess for half a second, chest heaving, then raised the bottle and drank straight from it.
It burned all the way down.
He coughed, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and drank again anyway.
The world kept moving. As if nothing had happened. As if he hadn't spent the last few hours watching everything he had built with his own hands turn to ash around him.
Jihan stumbled toward the armchair near the window and dropped into it hard enough to jar the bottle in his hand. He bent forward, elbow braced on his knee, and spat a mouthful of wine onto the floor beside the chair.
His stomach churned.
He laughed again, quieter this time. More broken.
This was ridiculous.
Twenty-eight years old, executive director of Kang Holdings, eldest son of a family that measured worth in stock prices and obedience—and here he was, drunk in a dark apartment, soaked through to the bone and falling apart over a man who had looked him in the eye and lied with a smile.
His hand tightened around the bottle.
Jae-min.
The name moved through him like broken glass.
Jihan tipped the bottle back again, swallowed too much too fast, and choked. Wine ran from the corner of his mouth. He wiped it away with shaking fingers, then reached blindly for his tie and yanked it loose. The knot slipped apart. He tore it off and let it fall to the floor.
His suit jacket followed. Then the first two buttons of his shirt, clumsy under numb fingers.
He felt trapped in his own skin. Trapped in the wet cloth sticking to him. Trapped in the smell of rain and alcohol and the ghost of someone else's hands.
All the signs had been there.
He had just been stupid enough to call it love instead.
A sharp sound split the room.
The front door opening.
Jihan froze.
For one suspended second, he thought maybe the alcohol had finally gotten to him. That he was imagining it. But then the door shut softly behind whoever had entered, and footsteps moved across the floor.
Slow. Familiar.
Jihan lifted his head.
Jae-min stood near the doorway in a black basketball vest and loose gray sweatpants, hair damp from the rain, shoulders tense beneath the low light. He must have come straight from practice or a late game—something casual, something ordinary, something cruelly normal against the wreckage of the room.
For a moment neither of them spoke.
Jae-min's eyes moved over the apartment first—the broken glass glittering on the floor, the spilled wine, the half-undressed state Jihan was in, the bottle in his hand, the wild mess of him.
Then his gaze returned to Jihan's face.
And stopped there.
Jihan didn't know what Jae-min saw.
A drunk mess. A fool. A man gutted open and still breathing somehow.
Something in Jae-min's expression shifted—just for a second. Guilt. Shock. Maybe regret.
Jihan was on his feet before he even realized he had stood.
"Get out." His voice came out hoarse.
Jae-min didn't move.
Jihan's chest rose sharply. "Get out."
Still nothing.
Something inside him snapped.
"Get out!" he screamed.
The sound tore out of him so violently it scraped his throat raw. "Get out of here! Get out now!"
Jae-min stopped in the middle of the room, shoulders rigid, face pale in a way Jihan had never seen before. But he didn't leave.
That made something ugly and desperate rip through Jihan's chest, because if Jae-min had shouted back, if he had denied it, if he had looked angry—anything, anything at all—it would have been easier than this awful, guilty silence.
"Why are you here?" Jihan's voice cracked on the last word. "Why?"
Jae-min swallowed. "Jihan—"
"Don't." Jihan backed away from him, one shaking hand lifting like he could physically hold him off. "Don't say my name like that."
Rainwater was still dripping from Jae-min's hair onto the floor.
Jihan hated that he noticed that. Hated that some traitorous part of him still knew Jae-min's shape in every light, still remembered how his skin felt under his hands, how he smiled when he won a game, how he slept with one arm flung over his eyes like he was too careless to guard himself.
None of it had been real.
That thought landed like a blade between the ribs.
Jae-min took another step.
Jihan grabbed the bottle from the side table and hurled it.
It flew past Jae-min's shoulder and smashed against the wall behind him, exploding in a spray of dark wine and glass.
Jae-min flinched hard.
Jihan did not miss the movement.
For one wild second, he wished it had hit, he wished it had hurt enough to make this even.
Jae-min straightened again almost immediately, jaw tightening. His face looked wrong—pulled in two directions at once, anger and guilt grinding together beneath his skin. He looked like someone trying not to come apart and failing quietly at it.
Jihan laughed, and the sound shook. "What, now you're scared of me?"
"No."
"Then what?" Jihan's voice rose again. "What are you doing here? Coming to check if I figured it out? Coming to see the damage for yourself?"
Jae-min's mouth opened, then shut.
That silence was answer enough.
Jihan stared at him.
His chest hurt so badly he could barely breathe around it. Every inhale felt splintered. He pressed a hand to the back of the chair to keep himself upright, because the room was swaying again and he couldn't tell if it was the alcohol or the rage or the grief chewing through his bones.
"Say something," he whispered.
Jihan took a stumbling step toward him. "Say something!"
Jae-min went still.
"Do you know what happened today?" Jihan asked, voice trembling now in a way that made him furious with himself. "Do you know what I lost?"
Jae-min looked at him, and in his silence Jihan saw the answer.
Maybe he had known before Jihan did. Maybe he had helped make it happen. Maybe every late-night smile, every touch, every quiet moment on Jihan's couch had been leading here from the beginning while Jihan stood in the middle of it too blind to see the knife being sharpened.
His stomach turned.
"What did I ever do to you?" Jihan asked.
The question came out smaller than he wanted. Not shouted. Not sharp. Just raw.
He hated that too.
Jae-min's face changed.
The guilt in it faltered first. Then the anger surged up harder, dragging something else with it—something wounded, something that looked almost as miserable as Jihan felt.
"What did I do," Jihan said again, louder this time, "to deserve this from you? Why did you do this to me?"
Jae-min looked like he wanted to say ten different things but only one came out—cold and utterly emotionless.
"Because, 'you' hurt my sister."