2:00 PM.
St. Luke's Medical Center, Taguig.
36°C.
The GT-R's exhaust note cut out in the hospital basement, one moment a roar and the next silence, the echo collapsing against concrete pillars under the yellow wash of sodium lights as Jae-min stepped out into the antiseptic air.
Floor cleaner and the faint metallic tang of blood underneath it all, fluorescent lights buzzing overhead in a frequency that lived just beneath conscious notice while doctors and nurses crossed the parking lot in scrubs that clung to their backs in the heat.
'In two hours, that hum goes silent.' Jae-min reflected, a grim certainty settling over him as he watched a nurse push a wheelchair across the lobby. 'Every machine in this building becomes a coffin.'
He found her in the emergency department with a clipboard in her hand and the stethoscope around her neck, indigo hair pulled back in a tight ponytail and blue eyes focused on a chart, not having seen him yet.
Jae-min moved, not walking, but gliding silently and precisely, coming up behind her close, too close, his chest brushing her back.
Alessia stiffened, then relaxed with a quiet recognition settling through her shoulders.
"Jae-min." Alessia murmured, a small smile tugging at her lips with a composed playful warmth as she continued reading the chart.
He didn't answer, and the silence was heavier than any reply, his hand sliding around her waist with a possessive, deliberate pressure as his palm pressed flat against her stomach and his fingers splayed over the thin fabric of her scrubs.
He pulled her back against him in one fluid motion, with her body molding to his chest.
"Someone could see us." Alessia whispered, but she didn't pull away, a composed, pragmatic acceptance softening the words as her grip tightened on the clipboard.
"Let them." Jae-min murmured, his lips brushing her ear with a quiet absolute defiance as his other hand found her hip.
His fingers squeezed, then slid lower, grabbing her through her scrubs with one bold squeeze that made her inhale sharply while his thumb traced the curve of her waist and dragged the fabric down just enough to feel the bare skin underneath.
'Mine.' Jae-min claimed, the word burning through his mind like a brand pressed into flesh as his fingers tightened on her hip.
Alessia's breath hitched, and her knuckles whitened around the clipboard.
"Jae-min." Alessia murmured, her voice dropping to something playful and dangerous, a knife wrapped in silk. "You're going to get me fired."
"Your job doesn't exist in two hours." Jae-min whispered, his hand sliding lower and stopping just above the curve of her hip. "Neither does this hospital. Neither does anyone in this building who isn't behind my steel door."
The playfulness died, and the words landed between them like stones in still water.
She turned in his arms and looked up at him with those blue eyes searching his face, reading the tension in his jaw and the quiet intensity in his dark eyes, not cold but concentrated.
"What happened?" Alessia pressed, her voice shifting into doctor mode with a sharp clinical focus straightening her posture.
"We need to talk." Jae-min declared, something flickering behind his eyes that was a fear he didn't try to hide as his hand dropped from her hip.
"I'm working." Alessia replied, her voice steady with that surgical calm she wore like armor.
"This can't wait." Jae-min urged, a desperate insistence tightening his grip on her wrist.
"Fine." Alessia conceded, her expression unreadable as she measured him with a pragmatic acceptance. "Five minutes. Break room."
— • • • —
She led him down a side corridor and closed the door behind them, a small room with a fridge and a microwave and empty chairs, 22°C.
The second the lock clicked Jae-min had her against the wall with his hands bracketing her head and his body pressing into hers, pinning her between the cold plaster and the heat of his chest as he kissed her hard and bruising.
One hand dropped to her thigh and hitched her leg up around his hip with his fingers digging into the soft flesh through her scrubs, a fierce devouring desperation flooding through every point of contact.
Alessia gasped into his mouth and her hands fisted in his jacket, pulling him closer with a willing hungry surrender.
'Ten hours of tasting her on my lips and losing my mind.' Jae-min ached, a raw gnawing fear clawing at his chest as he pressed his forehead to hers. 'Need to feel her. Need to know she's real.'
He broke the kiss with his breathing ragged and his forehead pressed to hers.
"Talk." Alessia murmured, her voice wrecked but composed, a demanding warmth steadying the word as her fingers loosened his collar.
Jae-min reached into his jacket and pulled out a printout and handed it to her with a grim deliberate purpose weighting the gesture.
"They sent this at eight-forty-seven this morning." Jae-min breathed, a flat controlled fury tightening his jaw as she unfolded the paper. "'Interesting visit, Mr. Del Rosario. The doctor is quite beautiful. It would be a shame if something happened to her.' Signed N."
Alessia read it and her face went still with the doctor's mask slamming down like a blast shield, a clinical analytical detachment taking over.
"They know about me." Alessia observed, her voice steady and precise as she set the paper on the counter.
"Through me." Alessia added, her voice flat and controlled with a cold calculating clarity sharpening her gaze.
"Yes." Jae-min confirmed, no inflection, just fact.
"What do they want?" Alessia pressed, her gaze sharpening with a surgical probing attention.
"To watch." Jae-min admitted, a heavy reluctant disclosure weighing down each word. "To decide if I'm a threat."
He paused, the next words costing him something visible.
"And now they know you matter to me." Jae-min finished, his voice dropping.
Alessia's hands were steady, doctor's hands, but her jaw was tight with a controlled simmering tension.
"And if they decide you are a threat?" Alessia measured, calm in the way only surgeons could be calm.
"Then they'll hurt you to get to me." Jae-min seethed, the words tearing out of his throat like broken glass. "They'll grab you off the street. They'll drag you into a basement."
His voice dropped to something colder.
"And they'll send me pieces of you until I tell them what they want to know." Jae-min finished, a raw terrifying fury hardening every syllable.
'I'll burn this entire city to the ground to find you.' Jae-min vowed, an icy lethal certainty crystallizing behind his sternum as his fists clenched at his sides. 'I'll tear Naraka apart with my bare hands if they touch a single hair on her head.'
Alessia leaned against the counter with her blue eyes unreadable and processing, a measured diagnostic stillness settling over her.
"What do you want me to do?" Alessia asked, leaning forward slightly with a steady pragmatic focus.
"Move into Unit 1418." Jae-min commanded, a firm authority carrying the words with no room for negotiation. "Today. Not tonight. Not after your shift. Now."
'Because I've seen what happens when you don't.' Jae-min urged, a grim iron resolve gripping his chest as the memory of her broken body flickered behind his eyes. 'I've watched the door fail. I won't watch it again.'
Alessia's eyebrow raised.
"I already told you I was coming." Alessia noted, a dry perceptive challenge warming her voice. "You told me four PM. Now you're here at two."
"Because I'm not waiting until four." Jae-min countered, nodding toward the printout. "Not after this. Not when they're watching the building. Not when they know your face."
"Jae-min, I have patients." Alessia replied, her doctor's voice clinical and warm. "A shift that doesn't end until six."
"Your patients will be dead by tomorrow." Jae-min stated, his voice steady but something behind his eyes cracking for just a moment.
The words hung in the air, cruel and cold and absolute.
"That's a horrible thing to say." Alessia whispered, her voice sharp and flinching with a wounded protest.
"It's the truth." Jae-min pressed, a quiet absolute certainty holding the words firm. "You know it is. The cold doesn't care about your patients. It doesn't care about your oath."
His voice dropped.
"In hours, everyone in this hospital who isn't behind my steel door will be a corpse." Jae-min finished, the weight of it settling between them.
Alessia stared at him long and hard with the silence stretching between them taut and weighted.
"What if I say no?" Alessia challenged, tilting her head with a deliberate testing edge.
"Then I'll guard you myself." Jae-min declared, his voice low and flat and immovable. "Twenty-four seven."
"You'd sit outside my door like a guard dog?" Alessia mocked, a hint of wry amusement curving her lips.
"If that's what it takes." Jae-min confirmed, completely serious. "I'll sleep in the hallway. I'll follow you to work. I'll be in the room when you shower."
His jaw tightened.
"I don't give a fuck about your privacy." Jae-min pressed, a fierce unyielding devotion hardening every word. "I give a fuck about keeping you alive."
'She hasn't seen it.' Jae-min feared, the memories clawing at the edges of his mind like frozen hands reaching from the dark. 'She doesn't know what I know.'
Alessia looked away and out the small window at the afternoon sun and the normal life moving beyond the glass, people walking and cars driving and a world that didn't know it was already dead.
"I've been thinking." Alessia whispered, her voice quiet now. "Since last night. About what you told me. The apocalypse. The way I died."
Jae-min waited with his hands curled into fists at his sides.
"I've been a doctor for years." Alessia measured, her voice probing and careful. "I've seen people die. Car crashes. Stabbings. Overdoses."
She paused, her blue eyes finding his.
"But the way you described it, it wasn't clinical." Alessia observed, a quiet precision settling over her words. "It was personal. You were there. You watched it happen."
"I was." Jae-min whispered, a raw aching grief stripping the words to bone.
'I was there. I watched her die.' Jae-min grieved, a bitter heavy weight pressing the words into the floor. 'And I couldn't do anything.'
"And now you're here." Alessia observed, her blue eyes unblinking. "Not because you love me. But because you're terrified of losing me again."
"Both." Jae-min choked, the word cracking in his throat.
'I love you so much it's eating me alive.' Jae-min admitted, a fierce overwhelming desperation gripping his chest. 'And I'm so fucking scared of losing you that I can't breathe.'
Alessia turned back to him and the clinical mask was gone, replaced by a steady resolute certainty as she nodded once.
"Okay." Alessia agreed, a calm accepting commitment softening her voice.
"You don't have to pack." Jae-min urged, a desperate urgent hope quickening his words. "I'll send Ji-yoo for whatever you need. Just come to the unit. Now."
"I'll pack a bag." Alessia decided, her professional mask returning like armor. "Tell my supervisor I'm taking a leave of absence. Family emergency. I need thirty minutes."
She started toward the door and Jae-min caught her wrist and pulled her back, his other hand grabbing her jaw and tilting her face up as he kissed her again, slower this time and deeper.
His hand slid down from her jaw to her neck, feeling her pulse hammering under his fingers, fast and strong and alive, while his free hand dropped to her hip and pulled her flush against him before he forced himself to let go.
When he broke the kiss Alessia was breathless with her eyes glazed and her lips swollen.
"Thank you." Jae-min rasped, his voice rough with a raw trembling gratitude.
"Don't thank me yet." Alessia murmured, picking up the printout and folding it and slipping it into her pocket. "I still think you might be crazy."
"Maybe I am." Jae-min replied, his smile faint and tired but real. "But you're not a liar."
"The date. You owe me." Alessia declared, pausing at the door. "When we survive. Dinner. Wine. You in something that isn't tactical black."
"Deal." Jae-min whispered, a soft aching commitment warming the word.
Alessia opened the door and stopped and looked back at him over her shoulder with the fluorescent light catching the indigo of her hair and the blue of her eyes and the set of her jaw.
"I'll see you tonight." Alessia whispered, a tender unwavering certainty carrying the words.
She left and Jae-min stood in the empty break room with his lips still tingling and his hand still feeling the ghost of her pulse.
'She's alive. She's coming.' Jae-min realized, a fierce burning gratitude flooding through him like warm blood. 'She'll be behind steel walls. She'll be safe.'
— • • • —
Jae-min pulled out his phone and typed a message to Ji-yoo.
[Jae-min]: She's in. Be ready tonight. We're moving her things after dark.
The reply came instantly.
[Ji-yoo]: About fucking time. I'll clear the second guest room. Also, I expect DETAILS. Every single one. Don't you dare hold out on me, oppa. I want to know if you're as handsy as I predicted.
Jae-min's eye twitched and he put the phone away without responding.
— • • • —
He walked out of the break room and down the corridor past the nurses' station with the fluorescent lights humming overhead and the smell of antiseptic following him, 36°C pressing through the building.
He pushed through the exit doors and the afternoon heat hit him thick and oppressive, the kind of heat that made you feel like you were drowning in air, and everything was still normal.
Then he stopped.
Across the parking lot under a tree, a man in a gray jacket sat on a bench with a newspaper in hand and a smile on his face.
Jae-min met his eyes and didn't flinch and didn't look away, his body holding still while something cold and precise locked into place behind his ribs.
'There you are. You fucking parasite.' Jae-min targeted, a frozen predatory resolve crystallizing in his chest as he held the man's gaze. 'When the time comes, I'll erase you.'
The man lowered the newspaper and tilted his head, then raised one finger slowly and deliberately, steady, pointing at nothing or pointing at everything, a warning and a countdown, one chance and one hour.
Jae-min turned and walked to the GT-R and got in and started the engine, and as he pulled out of the parking lot his eyes flicked to the rearview mirror where the man was still watching but wasn't smiling anymore.
— • • • —
2:34 PM.
GT-R, Bonifacio Global City to Pasay.
36°C.
The GT-R's air conditioning fought a losing war against the Manila heat seeping through the windshield while Jae-min drove with his hands on the wheel and his eyes on the road and his mind on the finger.
One.
One warning.
One chance.
The gray-jacket man hadn't approached and hadn't spoken, just sat there and smiled and raised one finger and stopped smiling when Jae-min looked at him.
His phone buzzed on the passenger seat, then buzzed again, then four more times in rapid succession.
He glanced at it at a red light and the screen was a wall of messages.
[Ji-yoo]: Did you pick her up
[Ji-yoo]: Oppa answer me
[Ji-yoo]: IS SHE COMING
[Ji-yoo]: I need to know how many mangoes to prepare
[Ji-yoo]: This is a logistical question I need mango data
[Ji-yoo]: OPPA
Jae-min stared at the screen and the corner of his mouth twitched.
[Jae-min]: Yes. She's coming. Two mangoes maximum.
[Ji-yoo]: Two???
[Ji-yoo]: She's CHIEF OF EMERGENCY MEDICINE
[Ji-yoo]: She needs at LEAST four mangoes
[Ji-yoo]: Did you hold hands
[Jae-min]: I'm not answering that.
[Ji-yoo]: YOU HELD HANDS
[Ji-yoo]: I KNEW IT
[Ji-yoo]: Wait did you kiss her again
[Ji-yoo]: Your lip was STILL swollen this morning don't think I didn't notice
[Ji-yoo]: FORTY SEVEN MINUTES OF LIP SWELLING OPPA
[Jae-min]: Guest room. Fresh sheets. Water bottles. She'll be there tonight.
[Ji-yoo]: Already done. I also put the good towels. The South Korean ones. From Seoul.
[Jae-min]: Good.
[Ji-yoo]: Oppa.
[Ji-yoo]: Bring her home safe.
'She's terrified.' Jae-min realized, his thumb hovering over the screen as he read the four words again. 'Under all that warrior calm, she's terrified.'
[Jae-min]: I will.
— • • • —
2:51 PM.
Shore Residence 3, Building B, Basement Parking.
36°C.
The GT-R's engine died for the second time that afternoon in a basement that was a kiln, the concrete having baked since noon and radiating heat through the soles of his boots while the fluorescent tubes overhead buzzed and flickered.
Jae-min stepped out and his black eyes swept the basement, left and right, pillars and shadows, the white van in slot B-14 and the concrete pillar next to it, empty.
The gray-jacket man was not here, yet.
He walked toward the elevator lobby and stopped and changed direction toward the stairs.
'If the power fails while we're in it.' Jae-min calculated, a sharp tactical reasoning guiding his feet toward the stairwell door. 'Fourteen floors. I'll do it in three minutes.'
He pushed through the stairwell door and the concrete chimney hit him, 36°C and climbing with the heat rising through the stairwell in visible waves that distorted the fluorescent lights on each landing into smeared yellow halos.
He climbed fast and controlled with his breathing steady and his legs burning, floor by floor, third and sixth and ninth, the sweat running down the back of his neck and soaking the collar of his t-shirt, twelfth and thirteenth and fourteenth.
— • • • —
2:58 PM.
Shore Residence 3, Building B, 14th Floor.
34°C.
The corridor stretched in both directions with the fluorescent light buzzing overhead, the same light and the same hum and the same pale walls, to the left Unit 1418 and to the right Unit 1419, ten feet of hallway between them.
Jae-min's eyes moved to the right, to her door with the tarnished brass numbers and the cracked paint around the frame and the deadbolt engaged.
'That door won't survive the freeze.' Jae-min reflected, a grim iron certainty hardening his jaw. 'None of them will. That's why she has to be on this side of the wall.'
He turned left and swiped his keycard and the steel bulkhead of Unit 1418 clicked open, the air conditioning hitting him cold and rushing over overheated skin and drawing goosebumps from sweat-damp arms.
He stepped inside and closed the bulkhead and engaged the deadbolts while the apartment hummed around him, the generator and the air system and the faint pulse of the radar grid on his phone screen, the Tannerite sleeping in the walls and the void sitting heavy behind his ribs.
Ji-yoo was standing in the hallway with bare feet and black leggings and an oversized South Korean flag t-shirt that fell to mid-thigh, her black ponytail perfect with not a strand out of place.
"Well?" Ji-yoo demanded, a pointed expectant sharpness carrying the word.
"She's coming." Jae-min replied, pulling off his damp t-shirt. "Tonight. After her shift."
"And?" Ji-yoo pressed, following him with a relentless forensic curiosity.
"And what?" Jae-min deflected, a flat defensive caution tightening his voice.
"And did you kiss her again?" Ji-yoo pressed, her eyes narrowing with a lethal delighted insistence. "Your lip is STILL swollen from last night, oppa."
She held up her phone.
"I timed it." Ji-yoo declared, a smug precision sharpening her voice. "Forty-seven minutes. I have a stopwatch. I'm a musician. Timing is literally my profession."
Jae-min closed the bathroom door in her face and through the wood he could hear her laughing, the sound bright and sharp and cutting through the weight of the day.
"I'll take that as a yes!" Ji-yoo called through the door, a smug victorious satisfaction ringing in her voice.
— • • • —
3:17 PM.
Unit 1418.
22°C.
The apartment was quiet with the generator humming and the air system cycling and the radar grid on Jae-min's phone showing no red dots, the corridor clear and the building calm.
Jae-min sat at the dining table with his phone in front of him and the Glock 19 beside it, the screen showing the latest message from N, and he read it again and then a third time and then set the phone face-down and stared at the wall.
'You touched the wrong woman.' Jae-min vowed, a cold absolute promise settling into his chest like ice crystallizing in a vein as his fingers tightened around the Glock. 'When I find you, and I will find you, I'm going to make what happens next very, very slow.'
He picked up the Glock and checked the magazine, fifteen rounds, slotted it back and racked the slide and checked the chamber and set the safety on and set it down.
He picked up his phone and opened the security app, the camera feeds cycling through the building, basement and lobby and stairwell and the 14th floor corridor, all of it empty.
The time read 3:22 PM.
Thirty-eight minutes.
'She's across the city in a hospital that's about to become a grave.' Jae-min worried, a fierce desperate patience gripping his chest as he stared at the clock. 'She's packing a bag and telling her supervisor about a family emergency. She's alive. She's coming. I just have to wait.'
The fluorescent light in the hallway buzzed and the steel bulkhead held and the Tannerite slept, and somewhere in the wall beside him a heart was beating, alive and walking toward his door.