Pressed by my questioning, he finally answered reluctantly.

“I had a team constantly hacking into the CCTV system to monitor recent activity.”

“I knew something was wrong…”

While I replayed old footage and immersed myself in past events, he had been preparing for the future all along.

And he had kept it all from me until now.

“You left the business trip the moment you heard that I had suddenly disappeared, didn’t you? That’s how you got here so fast.”

“Fortunately, the bodyguard who was hit by the car didn’t lose consciousness. He managed to tell me through a colleague that some unknown men kidnapped you.”

“Ah… is he okay?”

“He suffered some serious fractures, but he’s recovering well. In a narrow alley, there’s a limit to how fast a car can go – fatal accidents are rare. He was lucky.”

He was a deeply professional man, and even after being hit, he kept asking about his client-me.

When he heard I’d been safely rescued, he said he smiled with relief.

When I heard that, I too felt a weight lift from my chest.

If someone had suffered a lot because of me, I’d have carried the guilt for the rest of my life.

“By the way, those brothers said something strange – as if you were sharing my phone calls.”

“Not exactly sharing. I just blocked some of them when they came through. For a while, Lee Jae-hyup kept calling in the middle of the night asking about your sister.”

Why didn’t I know my phone was ringing at dawn?

I almost asked aloud, but then the answer came to me.

Of course I wouldn’t have known – not with how exhausted I was every night after being with him, completely worn out and going straight to sleep.

Could it be?

Could it be that he pushed me so hard on purpose, just so I wouldn’t notice?

It was a reasonable suspicion.

He couldn’t bear to see me fully conscious.

When I lay there with glazed eyes after a storm of pleasure, barely able to keep them open, he would whisper in a low voice, just once more, just a little more, softly, over and over again, until he had me trembling, soaked in warmth, and crying again.

I thought back to those nights – so many it was hard to tell when they began – and felt my face flush with heat for no reason.

“How did the fire start?”

I quickly changed the subject before he could use his synaesthesia to pick up on the inappropriately vivid memories swirling in my head.

“There was a report of an unknown electric vehicle entering the mansion grounds through the gate’s CCTV. So I hacked into the charger and disabled the overcharge protection system.”

He even told me that after receiving the call from Seoul, the surveillance team went out immediately and was already monitoring the mansion.

They were fully prepared to call the emergency services the moment the fire broke out – they had been tipped off that it was going to happen.

From the beginning, there was never a real chance that I would burn to death.

The more I heard, the more amazed I became.

But what amazed me most was this man – who had surrounded me with layers of protection, twice, three times, and yet never once let it show.

“If it weren’t for this whole incident, I would never have guessed that you had taken such extensive precautions.”

“It would have been better if you’d never found out.”

He added heavily.

“Because that would have meant that you were really safe.”

“But I’m only safe now because of you, Seol-won.”

“But you were in real danger. Do you think I didn’t know why you started the livestream?”

I found out later.

The orchestra account I used to start the livestream had already been logged out.

As soon as he got the notification, he understood my intention and immediately shut down the Mansion’s network.

That’s why nothing was ever broadcast.

That made it easier to clean things up.

I apologized to the orchestra, saying I’d accidentally logged into the wrong account, and they brushed it off as a harmless mix-up.

“I happened to be driving at the time, so I couldn’t communicate properly with the monitoring team. I still regret it.”

“Why?”

“Because it delayed the time I got to you.”

“But you also risked your life by racing down the highway to save me.”

I understood what it must have been like for him – gripping the steering wheel, filled with urgency and desperation.

Lee Seol-won was someone who couldn’t trust anything he saw, heard or felt.

And yet, with nothing but the single goal of saving me, he charged through the fires of h*ll.

“So let’s just decide to be happy. Let’s say it’s enough that we’re safe – because we both did our best, every step of the way.”

He and I had each made the choices we felt were right under the circumstances.

Looking back, there may have been moments of regret here and there, but in the end, we won.

There was no need to regret.

“I was wondering how the fire started – it turned out to be something I never could have imagined. Still, I guess it’s good that it happened because the fire also led to the discovery of the buried bodies…right?”

The fire department responded to a report of a fire at a mansion owned by a third-generation chaebol heir.

But when they arrived at the scene, they discovered bodies buried under the grounds.

A closer investigation revealed that the deaths were anything but ordinary. Signs of drugs and violence led to the unraveling of a dangerous web of secret, illegal entertainment – and the full extent of the operation began to emerge, one revelation at a time.

As a result, the names Lee Jae-hyup and Lee Jae-kwang have dominated the news for several days now.

“But seriously, aren’t they just stupid? Who thinks hiding bodies in the backyard is a good idea? Nothing about these brothers made sense from the start, but this part – this part takes the cake.”

As luck would have it, the firefighters who arrived to extinguish the fire also became witnesses to a crime scene, leaving the brothers with no excuses.

They were immediately taken into custody and imprisoned.

The power they had always flaunted proved utterly useless in the face of this incident.

On the contrary, politicians and businessmen scrambled to distance themselves from the SW family for fear of being caught up in the fallout.

Even her cousin, Lee Jae-shin, issued a public statement apologizing to the victims’ families and urging that her younger cousins be punished to the fullest extent of the law.

As a result, this entire branch of the family was completely ostracized.

Although it was never reported in the news due to strict internal secrecy, it is said that her grandfather, already weakened by age, suffered a severe health crisis as soon as the incident in the chairman’s office was brought to his attention – for a time he hovered dangerously between life and death.

“They probably didn’t dare dispose of the bodies outside, afraid someone might discover them. So instead they decided to hide them in their own little kingdom.”

SW’s stock continued to hit new lows day after day.

Everyone was predicting the demise of SW Company.

Of course, there were still successors like Lee Jae-shin and Lee Seol-won whose records were spotless, so a complete collapse wasn’t expected.

However, many believed that it would take more than a decade for the company to regain its former prestige.

In reality, SW Company was already undergoing internal restructuring, with these two at the center of it.

Those who had once been marginalized – because they were women, or because they were adopted – were now becoming the core of SW.

“But hey… did you know? About the garden? That there was something wrong with it?”

Even in the midst of the chaos – rushing to issue public apologies, negotiating compensation for the victims’ families, and working with his cousin to save SW Company from the barrage of accusations branding it a “family of killers” – he maintained a steady daily routine, shuttling back and forth between the company and the hospital without missing a beat.

This despite the fact that even his adoptive parents – long at odds over sibling inheritance disputes – had collapsed several times, to the point where a doctor was now stationed at their home.

And so a thought suddenly crossed my mind.

What if this man had known about the secret buried in the mansion garden all along?

He couldn’t have remained so calm unless he had accurately predicted what would happen – that when the surveillance team called the emergency services, the bodies would be discovered during the fire-fighting efforts.

“I wasn’t completely sure. If anything, it was more like a suspicion.”

“On the day of the party, after you entered the mansion for the first time, I walked through the garden alone. I noticed several spots that looked like the ground had been disturbed. It was the middle of winter, so it didn’t make sense for them to be planting flowers. I couldn’t think of a good reason for them to be digging up the ground in that house. But it was you who gave me the clue – when you mentioned that people had disappeared from the mansion without a trace.”

“My words led you to all this? Wow… Seol-won, you’re really scary.”

This man has an incredible sense of things.

More than that, he has the ability and drive to act on that instinct – to plan and execute it flawlessly.

I can’t tell you how lucky I am to have someone like that on my side.

“For now, don’t think about anything. Just rest. Those bastards will never show their faces to you again.”

If I said that his words sounded like a declaration – no matter how much they want to see you, I’ll make sure they never come near you – well… would that be reading too much into it?

Following his advice to take a break and not think about anything for a while, I spent my days in the hospital like a carefree grasshopper-resting, eating, sleeping, and doing nothing.

Perhaps I was more tense than I realized, because some days, to my own surprise, I slept through the day. Other days I wandered around the hospital grounds for hours.

Sometimes I’d just sit and stare out the window or watch shows I’d never been interested in before.

He told me that was okay.

Even when I woke up in the middle of the night and wandered aimlessly in the dark, he never tried to stop me.

Instead, no matter where I went or what I did, he was always by my side.

There were times when I felt a deep, hollow emptiness…when I was suddenly overwhelmed with confusion, like a lost child…when I grew anxious, like waking from a nightmare…but I was never truly alone.

The comfort of knowing that there was always someone there to support me, no matter what, meant more than I could ever say.

Of course, for everything gained, there’s always something lost.