“…Please do not.”

By saving him, I had effectively admitted that it was poison. Trickle. A single sorrowful tear ran down my cheek.

This is the end for me. I will die a hollow death without so much as scratching a single hair on my enemies.

Bitterness sharpened into something thorned inside me. This was all because of that demon Baek Seungjo. I could accept his betrayal as the desperate thrashing of a man who wanted to live. But why did he have to stand in the way of my revenge as well?

As I bit my lip and sobbed, indifferent sounds continued from in front of me. It seemed he was closing the perfume box and tucking it into his own br*ast.

“Ah, hm…”

Then he began searching my body again from head to toe. In the end, even the silver knife hidden inside my stocking was taken from me.

“Ha. It seems you came prepared with quite a ruthless resolve. To be this thoroughly equipped…”

His voice carried a lament whose meaning I could not read. Soon I heard the sound of him undoing something from his own person, and then something like a cord wound around my wrists.

He is binding me. He will drag me out and interrogate me now.

I did not want to suffer a brutal ordeal and die a dog’s death. More than anything, I could not bear to watch with my own eyes the moment Baek Seungjo learned that I was Han Seollyeon.

Not to live, but to die, I set aside my last shred of pride and pleaded with the traitor.

“My lord, I was fated to suffer humiliation at the hands of seven men today and die. Do you not feel even a little sorry for me?”

“…I do feel sorry for you.”

The answer was so brief it was almost flat, but his voice was heavy and sunken. It meant his heart was wavering. I seized the moment and clutched at his sleeve.

“Then please kill me here and now.”

The man’s hands, which had been roughly tying and straightening the ties of my undergarment and jeogori, stopped dead. After a short silence in which not even the sound of breathing reached me, his answer came.

“I am too tired for that.”

“…Pardon?”

I had no time to ask again properly.

“Ah!”

His hand pushed me and I tumbled onto the silk bedding once more. Right after, I felt the heavy weight of a man’s body drop down beside me.

Rustle.

Before I could even understand what was happening, a thick blanket settled down over me. I heard him turn his head toward me, and then a warm breath rushed against my ear. As I shrank my shoulders in surprise, Baek Seungjo whispered.

“Do not think about getting up until daylight. Do not answer even if someone calls from outside.”

“……”

“And do not try to kill me.”

…Then how do you expect to sleep under the same blanket as your would-be assassin?

I could only blink in disbelief, and then low, steady breaths began to tickle my ear at an even rhythm.

Good heavens. To fall peacefully asleep under the same blanket as someone who tried to kill you.

The Seungjo I knew was not this kind of person.

I thought I knew him well, but now I was not so sure.

Baek Seungjo was the only son of Baek Huiyang, who had been my father’s close friend. He was only two years older than me, so from the time I was toddling about on unsteady legs, I had grown up following him around like a real older brother.

He had been a true man of principle from the very start. Born upright as bamboo, he could not abide injustice and never strayed from propriety himself.

His patience, too, had been remarkable from a young age. Even when I was a foolish child who trailed after him all day long and pestered him without end, he never once showed that he found it tiresome, and always received me in quiet silence.

But heaven was indifferent, and in the year he turned nine, he lost both his parents at once. His parents had been returning from their hometown when they fell victim to bandits.

The Baek family’s fortunes had already been declining, and that year a famine swept through the land. When no relatives stepped forward to take Seungjo in, my father brought him to our home and raised him like a son.

Perhaps it was the grudge he bore against the bandits who had taken his parents. From that time on, he never set down his sword and bow, declaring he would become a military officer. But my father, who could not bear to see such a brilliant mind go to waste, opposed him.

‘Swinging a sword is not the only form of revenge. Becoming an official and ushering in an age of peace where there are no bandits, that is the most worthy revenge, and would it not also be the filial act of carrying on the dream your father never fulfilled?’

Moved by my father’s earnest persuasion, he took up the brush in place of the sword at last. And as though to prove my father’s judgment had not been wrong, Baek Seungjo passed the civil service examination at the astonishing age of just sixteen and stunned the world.

That was not all. Thanks to the king’s high regard for the depth of his scholarship, he seized in one stroke the position of Sixth Senior Compiler of the Office of Special Advisors, a post said to be open only to the most distinguished Confucian scholars.

It was cause for celebration for me as well. It meant we could finally hold the wedding that had been postponed on account of his examination studies.

He had entered our family’s fold under the name of a live-in son-in-law, but in truth, Baek Seungjo had been my husband-to-be from the day I was born. When I came into the world, our fathers had made a promise to betroth the two of us to each other.

Of course, when one party to such a promise died young, it could have been set aside as though it had never been made.

But my parents were people who held loyalty dear.

Of course, it was not solely out of faithfulness that they did not break off a betrothal made on nothing more than a spoken word.

‘Do you not wish for it yourselves?’

Looking back, perhaps one of them had not wished for that marriage.

When told to take me as his wife when the time came, Seungjo said nothing one way or the other. He was a man so naturally taciturn that he never let his feelings show, and I had chosen to take his silence as wordless consent, believing only what I wished to believe.

It was only when I grew up that the thought reached me that it might not have been so. That perhaps he disliked me but could not bring himself to refuse, indebted as he was to our family.

‘My lord!’

‘Why would I be your lord? We have not even held the wedding yet.’

It must have been around the time he was thirteen or fourteen. The Seungjo who had never once shown displeasure no matter how much I pestered him had, from some point on, begun keeping his distance from me and saying such cold things.

I had already gone blind with one-sided love, so I could not see that plain rejection for what it was. I told myself that my bashful man was just being gruff out of embarrassment, and fell deeper into my own delusion, happy all on my own.

How truly foolish I was. I never dreamed we had let a tiger cub into our home.

It was the night before the long-awaited wedding. I was too excited to sleep, thinking that come tomorrow I would share a bed with my husband-to-be, when the soldiers of the Royal Investigation Bureau came crashing into our home.

‘Seize Han Sangheon!’

My father was bound and dragged away without understanding why.

The charge revealed the next day was treason.

At the time, the bloodshed that had swept through the royal family had only just subsided, and the current king had been on the throne for less than a year.

The king’s older brother, Prince Iyang, had lost the struggle for power and been exiled to a remote village, yielding the throne to his younger sibling. And now the claim was that my father had been secretly communicating with the Jurchen people and raising a private army in order to put Prince Iyang on the throne.

It was a false charge so absurd that even a passing dog would have laughed.

My father was not a man who would ever plot treason. He had lived by the conviction that an official’s duty was not to be swept up in factional strife but to safeguard the state. He was a born official who would simply bow his head with steadfast loyalty and fulfill his duty to the country, whoever sat on the throne.

Perhaps it was precisely that unyielding character that cost him his life. When a pack of political wolves came running to destroy him, he had not a single powerful patron to protect him.

Had Baek Seungjo, too, drawn some lesson from what happened to my father?

He cast aside in a single moment the uprightness he had upheld his entire life. Without being tortured or forced to confess, he walked of his own accord to the enemy’s side and gave false testimony against crimes my father had never committed.

I tried to understand him.

Yes, it was a matter of life and death. I, too, would have wanted to live. I did not wish for that accomplished man, just as he was stepping onto a brilliant path of advancement, to be branded as one of our household and torn apart limb from limb like my father.

I spent countless nights lying awake until dawn, trying to forgive Baek Seungjo.

But what meaning could the forgiveness of a mere government courtesan hold for a man of senior rank? He had already risen to a height where my resentment could not even reach him.

By all accounts I had heard, Baek Seungjo was rising from one triumph to the next. Mixed in among the rumors were voices condemning him as a man without conscience who had sold his teacher and father-in-law to pave his way up. 

I nodded and agreed that they were right, yet at the same time, I hoped he would climb all the way to the very top without caring what fingers were pointed at him.

He had to. If he sacrificed us as offerings on the altar of his ambition and ended up a worthless idler, then what a pitiful thing it would make of me and my parents, who had once placed our trust in him only to be trampled underfoot.