The transition was like being plunged into ice water. One moment, Se-na was drowning in the hum of hospital lights as a powerless teenager; the next, the world around her started getting vast, dark, and screaming with wind.
The air tasted of rain and the heavy, metallic tang of city smog. She wasn't in a hallway anymore. She was standing on a high terrace, the edge of the world dropping off into a sea of twinkling city lights that looked like cold, distant diamonds. Her thin clothes offered no protection against the gale, but the cold wasn't what made her gasp.
It was the stinging, rhythmic pulse of pain in her feet.
"AHJUMMA!!!" She broke out with a gasp. But there was no one.
Se-na looked down. She or rather, the body she inhabited was standing in the center of a graveyard of broken glass. The shards glittered like malevolent stars in the dark. With every shift of her weight, the glass bit deeper, the warm, wet sensation of blood blooming between her toes and staining the concrete. She looked at her hands. These weren't the trembling fingers of a teenager. They were larger, scarred, the hands of a thirty-five-year-old man who had lived a life of heavy, silent labor.
In her his hand, she clutched a pile of crumpled papers. As her eyes landed on the bold, typed letters, the world seemed to tilt.
I was right! the words screamed from the page. You are not my son! You are not even the son of the woman you call mom! Be ready to pay for the damages!
The word "damages" felt like a scalpel to the throat. To Do Hyun-joo, Ra-ik wasn't a human being; he wasn't a boy who needed a father or a man who deserved a name. He was a faulty product. A breach of contract. A bill that had come due.
Suddenly, the soul inside this body the real Ra-ik surged forward. Se-na felt it like a wave of black ink pouring into her mind. It was an absolute, hollow despair. It was the feeling of wanting to let go, to let the wind take him over the edge of the terrace and drown in the dark. He wasn't a bastard; he was a mistake. A ghost in a house that didn't want him.
Ding.
The doorbell rang, cutting through the wind. Before Se-na could decide what to do, Ra-ik's body began to move. It wasn't her will; it was his muscle memory, a puppet moved by strings of habitual obedience. He limped across the shards, leaving a trail of red blooms on the floor, and opened the door.
Standing there was the woman she had seen watering plants with such practiced grace as if she had no worries in the world. Do Hyun-joo's wife. No idea if her façade was beautiful or if she really had no worries in the world.
"Omm-oni..." se-na blurted out unintentionally, it was ra-ika's conscious at play ... his voice was a broken, deep rasp.
THRASH.
The slap was majestic. It was the movement of a woman who had practiced her dignity for decades, landing with a force that sent the man, a man double her size stumbling back.
She didn't stop. She stepped into the house, her face a mask of primal, distorted fury. She slapped him again, and then again, her rings catching the skin of his cheek.
"Because of an infestation like you, I suffered all my life!" she wailed, her voice cracking the heavy silence of the penthouse. "All my life, I went along with the tag of a 'bad woman'! I let people whisper about my loyalty just so my child and I could keep living! I knew I wasn't disloyal, but I never proved it because I didn't have to; I just had to keep quiet for my child! I just had to sacrifice myself and my honor for my child. As long as I stayed quiet, no one would harm me and my child."
She grabbed Ra-ik by the collar, shaking the grown man as if he were a rag doll. Ra-ik didn't fight back. He let his limbs go loose, his head lolling back as he accepted the blows as if they were his birthright.
"But to see you are not even my son!" she shrieked, her eyes wild with a terrifying, primal grief. "For a pest like YOU I had to sacrifice my life silently?! Tell me, where is my son?! Where is my baby?! What did you do with him?! Tell me! TELL MEEE!"
Se-na's mind suddenly snapped, taking over the dejected man. After all, she, the "guest," had seen enough. As a surgeon who had spent a lifetime fighting for lives, no matter how "damaged" or "mistaken" they were, she had to surge to the front.
With a strength that shocked the older woman, Se-na grabbed her wrists and shoved her back.
"Your child?" Se-na barked, pushing her further away. "Sacrifice? You seem terribly mistaken about your role here, if you even had one!"
She moved closer, her towering frame casting a dark, suffocating shadow over the trembling woman. "You were quiet because that was the only way to preserve your status as an elite lady. It was the only way for you to keep your VIP subscriptions, your high-society galas, and your unlimited black cards."
"YOU!!!" his mother snapped, her face contorting with sheer shock.
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