Chapter 25

“What?”

“I’m telling you to get off work. I’m not that much of an evil employer.”

“But still…… there’s still time left in my shift……”

She did not know why she looked at the woman again as her words trailed off. Lee-jin quickly turned her gaze away once more, but for some reason her throat felt tight.

“I’m getting off work now too, so don’t tell me you’re planning to follow me all the way home?”

“……”

“There’s no need to go that far. There isn’t even any room left in the car anyway.”

As if to make a point, Kwon Ki-joo smiled as he pulled the woman closer by the waist.

Her throat definitely felt like it was full of dust. So Lee-jin quickly took a step back and lowered her head.

“Then I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Right.”

When Kwon Ki-joo, who answered shortly, started moving again after having stopped, the dark-clad group moved back to their respective places.

Lee-jin remained standing in front of Havana, silently waiting for Kwon Ki-joo to get into the car with the woman and disappear. Stubbornly keeping her head down and looking only at the ground.

After Kwon Ki-joo, who did not care about someone like her in the slightest, disappeared, Lee-jin slowly began walking home alone.

The reason her body and mind felt strangely exhausted was probably because it was the first day.

* * *

After that, unlike her moody employer, Lee-jin’s daily life moved in a very regular pattern.

When she woke up in the morning, Lee-jin went to Dohyang Gym and worked out. Using the excuse that if she was going to be Kwon Ki-joo’s bodyguard, she had to always keep her body in top condition in preparation for any emergency.

In truth, it was because she had suddenly become Kwon Ki-joo’s bodyguard and could no longer tail Assemblyman Jang, so Sang-pil wanted her to come every day and report in, as a way of keeping her in check.

When her workout was over, Lee-jin ate a simple lunch and went to work at A-One Finance. Then, among people who treated her like nothing more than the copy machine in the corner of the office, she waited all day long for Kwon Ki-joo.

As she repeated the same daily routine every day, there were a few more things Lee-jin came to learn.

Seen from up close, Kwon Ki-joo was a far more temperamental person than she had thought.

“I’m in a bad mood.”

Appearing at the office after 6 in the evening, Kwon Ki-joo said that, and in less than ten minutes announced that he was going right back home.

Even this temperamental man had one routine that never changed, and that was that Kwon Ki-joo stopped by this private loan office first every single day. Then he went straight to the office on the floor above.

On her first day at work, she had thought A-One Finance looked like an unremarkable place, but Lee-jin had told Wonjae that perhaps Kwon Ki-joo’s secret safe might be in that office, where she still was not allowed entry.

“Boss, today……”

“We’ll do it tomorrow.”

Manager Kang had not even properly begun to speak yet, but Kwon Ki-joo cut him off first like that. Then, leaving Manager Kang with a sigh heavy enough to sink the ground, he left the office together with Jae-hyeon.

“Later, pick someone suitable and send her to the house.”

The moment she heard Kwon Ki-joo’s voice giving that order before the door closed, Lee-jin clenched her fists without realizing it. Even if he did no work, it seemed he had no intention of skipping sleeping with a woman.

You hopeless womanizer, just catch some disease already.

Having unconsciously thought that curse, Lee-jin left the office without a word when Manager Kang told everyone to go home as well. Maybe her employer’s mood had rubbed off on her, because she did not feel very good either.

“What’s this? You’re the one asking me to drink first?”

Mimi, who had entered the beer hall, sat down across from Lee-jin and asked if she was sick or something.

Even though they had spent so much time stuck together, the number of times Lee-jin had met Mimi separately outside or had a drink with her could almost be counted on one hand. Their schedules were always separate because they did different kinds of work.

“Nothing. A celebration for getting a job?”

“That’s funny. Is that really a job? You’ve just planted yourself in enemy territory after getting ready to be stabbed at any moment.”

Speaking with a slight pout, Mimi ordered draft beer. Even in the middle of that, she did not forget to scan the surroundings to see if there were any decent men around.

“Guess today I’ll just have to drink,” Mimi muttered to herself, then picked up a piece of corn snack from the table and asked Lee-jin,

“Did something bad happen? You really don’t look so great.”

“Nothing bad happened. I’m just like this because I’ve been tense all day.”

And that was only natural. She had to spend the whole day in a place crawling with men who might realize her true identity at any moment, so being able to relax would be what was strange instead. Yes, that was right.

“What’s it like, following Kwon Ki-joo around? Now that you’ve seen him up close, doesn’t it make you want to sleep with him?”

Mimi, who had been going on for quite a while about how the newly bought clothes looked and whether she liked the dyed hair or not, suddenly asked as if the thought had just occurred to her.

Mimi’s curiosity was always like that. The moment Lee-jin told her she had become a bodyguard, Mimi had confidently declared that it would not even take ten days for her to throw herself into Kwon Ki-joo’s arms.

“Doesn’t Kwon Ki-joo slyly try to seduce you? From the way he acts, it looked like he’d start spouting nonsense about how good you smell like soap and push you down at any moment.”

“I told you, it’s joking around and mood swings. Even now, that person goes home with a different woman every day. I’ve never even gone all the way to his house once.”

“Still?”

“Yeah.”

Kwon Ki-joo still did not let Lee-jin into his territory. Every time, she had to wait outside, and she had never even gone near the President’s office above the finance office or his house.

She knew it was because he still could not trust her completely. Hiring her was something he could do out of whim as much as he liked, but in this way Kwon Ki-joo subtly let Lee-jin know that she was still not one of his people.

She understood all of it. She thought that if it were her, she would do the same.

But sometimes it made her angry. He easily took even women he only spent a single night sleeping with back to his house, so why not me. Could it be that I’m not even as good as those women? Whenever thoughts like that came to her, the feelings that Kwon Ki-joo had stirred up in her went flat with a hiss.

Kwon Ki-joo still always made Lee-jin sit right beside him in the moving car. Then he would tease her by throwing out precarious jokes.

But once the car stopped, Lee-jin’s place only extended that far. She could not get any closer to him.

“What kind of lifesaver. You should just throw your body in too.”

After gulping down the cold draft beer, Mimi said it as if it were no difficult thing.

“He said that if you spend one night with him, he’ll never see you again. So why go through the trouble of following him around as a bodyguard? Just spend one blazing night and then bye-bye.”

“What are you even……”

“If your first partner is Kwon Ki-joo, wouldn’t that be more like thank you? If it were me, I’d have no regrets just from having slept with a man like that.”

“Why don’t you lower your voice a little, Choi Mimi?”

“Lee-jin, they say you can build even the Great Wall in one night. So in that one night, do everything you need to do and then get discarded. All we need is to confirm the location of the safe anyway, right?”

Having said that much, Mimi suddenly leaned her body closer and lowered her voice to a whisper.

“The Deputy already started moving the thugs without telling us. I don’t think we need to worry about taking Kwon Ki-joo’s head anymore. I heard he told Wonjae-oppa too to hurry up and figure out where the safe is.”

That was no different from saying that Sang-pil no longer trusted the three of them.

Originally, it took a long time to work on a big fish like Kwon Ki-joo. Sang-pil was not someone who would fail to know that.

But if the client could no longer endure that dragging situation, then the story changed. They had no choice but to adjust to that.

Oddly enough, hearing that Sang-pil had indeed set gangsters in motion did not put Lee-jin at ease. From the very beginning, the goal had been to take Kwon Ki-joo’s head as well, and she had started this while knowing all of that.

And yet suddenly, the fact that he really could die caught hard in the pit of her stomach.