“You, you bastard!”
Do Jingyu twisted his wrist in embarrassment, but Dowon’s grip strength was beyond imagination.
“Let go! How dare you to your grand-uncle…!”
“This is my spouse.”
As Dowon said this, he roughly pushed Yeohwi, who had been grabbed by the collar, behind his back.
Yeohwi was pushed back behind Dowon in the sudden situation.
“Ha! Spouse.”
Do Jingyu sneered as if Dowon’s fierce momentum was absurd, twisting and pulling out his caught wrist.
“Pitiful thing.”
His contemptuous gaze swept down over his nephew.
“Since the Chairman doted on you the most since you were young, you must have mistaken that you could actually covet my position.”
Do Jingyu took a step closer to Dowon.
“Look at the results, Won-ah.”
He patted Dowon’s shoulder in a friendly yet insulting manner.
“It’s time to come to your senses. Chairman Do, that old geezer you believed in, arranged a strategic marriage with just that…… a child who only has pocket change inherited in his pocket. What do you think this means?”
“……”
“It means you’ve been completely excluded from the KD succession structure.”
Do Jingyu smiled a victor’s smile.
“It’s obvious to anyone…… Now that you know, figure out your place and hand over your shares. Don’t dare interfere annoyingly in my business.”
Yeohwi held his breath behind Dowon’s back.
Dowon was receiving those insulting words without any change in expression, as if he’d heard them drummed into his ears for a lifetime.
Now he seemed to understand why he lived erasing his emotions like that, why he said he had no time to play along with a little brat’s childish games. He finally saw the root cause of the environment that had become a lonely and desolate wasteland. He was enduring life with his self killed in the middle of this hell.
“If you have business.”
Dowon finally opened his mouth. It was a perfectly controlled voice without any emotion loaded into it.
“Tell me. Don’t touch that child.”
“Ha…… You still haven’t come to your senses.”
Do Jingyu straightened his disheveled suit as if he wasn’t worth dealing with anymore and turned around.
As he headed to the entrance, wiping with a handkerchief the hand that had grabbed Yeohwi’s collar, he suddenly stopped as if remembering something.
“Ah, right. The upcoming KD Group founding party.”
He glanced back at Yeohwi and sneered mockingly.
“It’ll be worth watching, yeah. Now that you’re married, you can’t attend alone.”
“……”
“Show the world clearly. How the great Dowon has fallen to such a lowly bottom. Together with that spouse infected with rabies.”
With those final words, Do Jingyu left the mansion with a satisfied smile.
Thud. The door closed and the living room was enveloped in silence. The popcorn scattered here and there on the floor dirtied the house like evidence of the recent commotion.
Yeohwi gazed intently with brown eyes at Dowon’s broad back standing and blocking him.
‘Was he trying to protect me……?’
It looked like he rushed here really urgently from the company.
‘He could just ignore me like he’s always done. Why……’
He was surprised. To think that Dowon, who had only coldly drawn the line, had come for him.
Did Dowon really push him away judging Seong Yeohwi as only a useful value for money, just a strategic marriage partner?
Or was there another reason he couldn’t speak of?
Could it be that he pushed him away to keep Seong Yeohwi, who was 12 years younger, from getting involved in this hellish situation……?
‘He told me not to do pointless things.’
Yeohwi continued to look at Dowon’s tired-looking back.
The thoughts he was having from now on might be a mistaken delusion, or his own fantasy. But once the ideas began to branch out, he couldn’t catch and stop them again.
Perhaps.
Really perhaps.
Dowon’s life was already too difficult, and it might be hard to handle more than that.
To the extent that he didn’t even have the capacity to keep someone by his side.
Unable to comfortably have even one meal a day, so desolate and dead that it was hard to even look up at the sky once. Because right now he himself was too…… in pain. Because it was too much to bear.
‘Perhaps it might be like that.’
Yeohwi dimly thought that Dowon, whom he had considered a man much more adult than himself, now seemed a little smaller than before.
***
The night Do Jingyu swept through like a storm. That day too, Dowon ultimately didn’t come into the bedroom. Seong Yeohwi lay alone in the enormous bedroom, endlessly staring only at the laptop screen.
Dawn. With all the lights in the room turned off, only the cold artificial light leaking from the screen illuminated his face like a ghost.
In the search bar floated the name ‘KD Group President Do Jingyu.’
“Haah……”
Yeohwi closed the laptop and flopped down onto the bed.
His brilliant career continued endlessly even scrolling down. Prestigious university graduation, overseas MBA, youngest executive, and the current title of President of KD Group……
‘No wonder he was an old bastard acting crazy.’
The harsh words he had spewed today circled in his ears. Calling him a maggot, trash, an orphan. It wasn’t that the words directed at himself bothered him.
‘Chairman Do, that old geezer arranged a strategic marriage with just that…… a child who only has inherited money in his pocket.’
‘It means you’ve been completely excluded from the KD succession structure.’
Yeohwi frowned and buried his face in the pillow.
He squeezed his eyes shut and began banging his forehead against the bed.
He knew he shouldn’t do this, but he became maddeningly curious about Dowon’s past or family relationships.
Had he lived his whole life serving a human scum like President Do Jingyu as his grand-uncle and president, struggling with family and company……?
‘Should I ask Mrs. Park?’
She would know something. Since she was Dowon’s nanny.
But Yeohwi shook his head.
No. This kind of thing…… I have to ask directly.
‘There’s no way Dowon-ssi would readily tell me about his personal matters.’
Thinking that way, his chest felt stuffy.
Yeohwi began to struggle meaninglessly on the enormous bed like a restless puppy. He kicked off the blanket violently, then pulled it back over his head. Then he rolled around the king-size bed like fluffy injeolmi rice cakes wrapped in a cloth.
‘What is this, really.’
Dowon kept coming to mind.
No, just saying he came to mind wasn’t enough.
That emotionless sculpture-like face glaring at Do Jingyu. And the black flames blazing within it. Cold and intimidating so no one could approach, yet the touch that pushed Seong Yeohwi behind his back as if to protect him.
He was suffocating between contradiction and humiliation, questions and curiosity.
Yeohwi realized he kept trying to find gaps while recalling Dowon’s sharp face.
Why was that?
The memory went back 5 years, to his grandfather’s funeral.
It was a day when a downpour poured like a deluge. The young chief mourner Seong Yeohwi, who had just turned fifteen, struggled even to guard the portrait photo while wearing mourning clothes bigger than his body.
Distant relatives whose faces he didn’t know, who had rushed in aiming for the inheritance, didn’t mourn the deceased but rather grabbed each other’s collars shouting in the middle of the funeral home. Taking advantage of the gap, reporters who rushed in mercilessly fired flashes toward the face of the boy crying in terror.
It was hell. He wanted to run away. But there was no one to help.
Then, an unexpected mourner came to the funeral home that had become chaos.
Attendants in black suits lined up, and an old man in a wheelchair entered.
It was Chairman Do Hanil, the head of KD Group.
Although in a wheelchair, the intimidation he exuded instantly froze the air of the noisy funeral home.
And one man pushing that wheelchair.
It was Dowon, who was twenty-seven.
He had a face that was a little more youthful and much calmer than now.
When Chairman Do’s brow furrowed silently as he looked around the funeral home that had become a mess, Dowon opened his mouth lowly.
“It’s noisy. The Chairman has come to pay his respects.”
The voice wasn’t loud, but it had a weight that overwhelmed the audience.
At one glance from Dowon, the attendants moved in perfect order. The relatives who had been rioting were dragged out like luggage, and the cameras of the reporters who had been rude were all confiscated.
Silence came in an instant.
“So you’re the Seong family grandson…… Don’t worry about your grandfather. So that old man won’t be lonely alone in heaven, I’ll go meet him soon.”
Chairman Do spoke to Yeohwi. But Yeohwi was trembling in the corner and wasn’t in a state to properly perform his duties as chief mourner. He couldn’t even greet him.
While Chairman Do was paying his respects, Dowon strode over and stood in front of Yeohwi.
In front of the small child who couldn’t even raise his head in fear.
