“There’s a fire-fire!”

Suddenly I could breathe again.

I had been on the verge of losing consciousness, but the pressure in my throat was completely gone.

Cough, cough – a coughing fit broke out.

As the air returned to my lungs, which had been constricted by the lack of oxygen, a dull pain spread through my abdomen.

But that pain was nothing compared to the lingering sensation in my throat.

No matter how hard I coughed, I couldn’t shake the phantom grip of the hands that had suffocated me.

“Where the h*ll is the fire supposed to be?”

“The garage, I think!”

“How the h*ll did it get so bad without the fire alarm going off?”

“It’s not just the fire alarm – the communications are down too! All the staff is on vacation, and only a few old janitors are around, so no one knows if the Internet is down or what. I checked the CCTV room – it is completely dead. I don’t even know when it went down. What should we do? Should we call 911?”

“We have to ask! Where are the bosses right now?”

Footsteps and shouts echoed chaotically from beyond the wall as people ran off somewhere in a panic.

A fire… there’s a fire? All of a sudden? Why?

I was stunned.

I had no idea what kind of accident had just happened.

My head was still too cloudy to even try to piece together what was going on.

The brothers seemed equally confused.

Even as the staff screamed at the top of their lungs about a fire, they didn’t do anything – they just looked around in confusion.

“What the h*ll are they yelling about? Lee Jae-kwang, go check it out.”

“D*mn, did I take too many pills? Am I hearing things…?”

Lee Jae-kwang hastily threw his clothes back on and opened the door.

“What the h*ll?!”

He immediately recoiled in shock.

The moment the tightly closed door cracked open, a wave of pale smoke and a sharp, acrid smell swept into the room.

“I come all this way expecting a good time, and what do I get instead of a woman? A goddamn fireworks show?”

“Lee Jae-hyup! Lee Jae-kwang! Where are you? The fire is spreading!”

“Hey, everyone get out now!”

“Don’t stay here and get caught in this mess, let’s go! What are you doing? I said get out!”

I could hear young men screaming in the distance. They were clearly the same people who had been yelling about the fire in the first place.

“Wasn’t that Changgyu’s voice just now?”

“What the h*ll – those disloyal bastards?”

The two brothers finally snapped out of it and ran out of the room.

All that talk about k*lling or sparing me depending on whether I revealed Eun-sae’s whereabouts – and now they didn’t spare me a single glance, too focused on saving themselves to care about the girl they’d left on the bed.

Am I… alive?

Did I survive?

I should have been relieved to be alive and alarmed that the fire was spreading right outside the door – but maybe because I’d just come back from the brink of life and death, I felt nothing but numb.

Everything that had happened since I had been brought to this mansion felt completely unreal.

Pull yourself together.

Seo-hae, you need to get out as well.

I forced myself to concentrate, pulling my thoughts together as my mind threatened to scatter again.

The fire didn’t seem to have spread too far yet, so if I could at least wrap myself in a sheet and get out of this mansion quickly…

“…Hhh…”

At least my mind worked.

The problem was my body.

Not only could I not get up and walk, but I couldn’t muster any strength in my limbs at all.

I just lay there limp on the bed, watching helplessly as the smoke slowly crept in.

A phone – I had to find a phone. I had to call the emergency services… 911… Even moving my fingertips felt like a struggle.

After nearly suffocating, I couldn’t make a sound – my voice was completely gone.

The smoke thickened and my vision blurred.

It became harder to breathe, a different kind of pain than before.

I had just felt a flicker of relief that I had survived – only to face death again, this time by fire.

I never really expected anyone to come and get me out of here.

The fact that those brothers left without even looking back meant that they fully intended for me to burn quietly here.

I never imagined that the line between life and death could be so thin.

And I certainly never thought I’d cross it several times in a single day.

It still didn’t feel real – the end that had come for me.

The flames must have gotten stronger – gray smoke now mixed with thick, black soot.

It seemed that everyone had already evacuated; all signs of human presence were gone.

I was the only one left in this huge mansion.

I closed my eyes.

When death was inevitable and there was no way to escape it, I prayed for it to come quickly.

Please don’t let the pain last long.

And please let the people who love me not suffer too much because of me.

“Seo-hae!”

…Huh?

Just now… no, that’s impossible.

It can’t be. There’s no way he’s here – no way he could be here.

I must’ve longed for him so much, kept repeating that I wanted to see him, that I missed him, that my memory conjured up that familiar voice.

“Hyun Seo-hae!”

No, that doesn’t make sense… not logically…

“Just wait, Seo-hae!”

I doubted my ears, but my eyes widened.

“I’m on my way to you – don’t lose consciousness!”

Seol-won… is that really you?

Really… you?

Because of the fire, visibility was poor – I couldn’t clearly see what lay beyond the door.

But even as the acrid smoke stung my eyes and tears streamed down my cheeks, I refused to close them.

I heard hurried footsteps rushing down the hall.

Then, through the thick smoke, a large figure burst into the room.

It felt like a miracle. A miracle had happened.

The moment he saw me, he pulled me into a tight embrace.

His trembling arms wrapped me in his cloak to protect me.

“Don’t worry. The firemen are here – the fire will be put out. You’re safe now. They got the bastards, all of them. You held on so well. Seo-hae… Seo-hae…”

Seol-won…

I wanted to say his name, but my throat hurt too much to make a sound.

I’m okay…

I tried to whisper, but it was barely more than a slight movement of my lips.

Still, somehow he understood what I was trying to say.

“You’re not okay. You are not okay at all. If by chance those bastards had hurt you…”

“…”

“Then the next place to catch fire would have been their family estate. I would have burned them all to ashes.”

He lowered his head and whispered softly for me to hear.

The next place to catch fire?

There was something strangely charged in that sentence.

It almost sounded like he was confessing that he was the one who started the fire in the garage.

No way.

It’s impossible.

He was on a business trip all the way to Yeongdong – how could he have started the fire…?

…or could he?

I wasn’t so sure about this man.

He had too many abilities that other people didn’t have.

And so I wavered.

With my thoughts tangled in a hopeless mess, I remained frozen.

Then Lee Seol-won took me in his arms and stood up.

“Let’s go home. To our home.”

That day, after the fire was reported, several bodies were discovered in the garden – unburied by the powerful pressure of the fire hoses that had swept away the earth.

It wasn’t difficult to identify them, as their clothes and belongings were buried with them.

They were all people who had been treated like toys in the mansion and ended up dead.

Among them was the woman I saw die.

From the massive amount of CCTV footage, I compiled the relevant clips and submitted them as evidence related to the crimes.

***

“Is that true? You mean Seol-won drove all the way from Yeongdong to the mansion by himself?”

I shot up in bed.

He drove himself?

The thought made my skin crawl – this man who gets nervous just going to the grocery store actually took the highway and drove all the way there?

But despite my shock, the man who almost died in a car accident before I could burn to death in a fire remained completely unfazed.

I was so stunned that it didn’t even occur to me to press the motion button on the bed to raise the backrest.

It was only when he tucked a pillow behind my back that I remembered, Ah, right. I’m in a hospital.

That’s right. I had been hospitalized.

Truth be told, I wasn’t in a condition serious enough to require hospitalization.

Sure, I had some bruises and dark marks around my neck from being strangled – but they were the kind of injuries that would fade with time.

Even the doctor had assured us that my life was not in danger.

Still, he insisted – insistently – that I be admitted to a hospital room.

“What about the organizing committee meeting?”

“That’s why I left my secretary behind. What’s the problem?”

Isn’t it usually the other way around?

Shouldn’t the person in charge stay on site and send his secretary to check on things?

“You didn’t even know where I was being taken.”

“I know how those bastards think. They’re predictable.”

“Still, that doesn’t explain everything. Seol-won, there’s something you’re not telling me, isn’t there? No – there’s probably a lot. I’m sure of it.”

The more I thought about it, the more things didn’t make sense.

Anyone who knew those brothers could have easily guessed that the mansion was where they’d taken me. After all, that’s where they committed all their crimes.

But for the fire to break out in exactly the right place, and for this man to show up at the exact moment I was on the verge of death-this timing went far beyond anything that could be dismissed as mere coincidence.

If it was all coincidence, then he must have divine powers worthy of a shaman.

After all, synaesthesia is just a heightened human sense—it doesn’t let you see the future.