We're All Doomed
We're all doomed.
Late at night.
Having finally scraped through the mountain of backlog that had been crushing her, Harin stood up from her desk, ready at last to head home.
That was when it happened.
~♪ ~♬
Her smartphone blared to life with an insistent racket.
She didn't even need to check who was calling.
Sure enough, the screen lit up with the name she had saved so that only she would ever understand it.
“Haa…… What now……”
Harin scrubbed her dry face with both hands and answered.
“Hello……”
She barely managed to get a single syllable out before the voice on the other end cut across her.
“Hey, Oh Harin. Grab a car and get your ass over here right now.”
Yuri stated her business and nothing else, as if the idea of waiting for a reply had never even crossed her mind.
Click.
The line went dead.
“You crazy bitch—! For real—!!”
Harin stood there trembling, phone still clenched in her fist.
In the end, though, she had no choice.
In the middle of the night she drove straight to the address Yuri had sent.
On any ordinary day she would have been seething with irritation, wondering what fresh nonsense this was supposed to be. But the faint, muffled groan she had heard over the line made it impossible to do nothing but complain this time.
The place she arrived at was the mouth of a secluded back alley.
Exactly as expected.
“Hey. What took you so long?”
Yuri stood waiting with her arms folded. On the ground beside her, however—
“Sihyun-ssi?”
—Sihyun sat slumped against the wall, face drained of all color, one hand clamped over his shoulder.
Whether Yuri had forced the jacket off him or not, the bare skin of his shoulder was mottled with livid purple bruises.
“Hey, Oh Harin. You just gonna stand there?”
“What—now you’re hitting people too?”
“As if! Just get the kid in the car already.”
Yuri and Harin half-carried Sihyun into the back seat and headed for the nearest university hospital emergency room.
The atmosphere inside the car was cold as ice.
Harin kept her eyes locked on the road, deliberately ignoring the glimpses of Sihyun’s deathly pale face in the rearview mirror and the murderous look frozen on Yuri’s features.
They reached the ER without further incident.
Fortunately, Sihyun’s injuries turned out to be less serious than they looked. Yuri all but ordered the attending physician to give him “the absolute best care available,” and thanks to that, treatment wrapped up quickly and he was able to rest in relative comfort.
“You’re sleeping here tonight.”
The moment the doctors finished, Yuri shoved Sihyun into a VIP room and shut the door before he could get a word in edgewise.
“……Ha.”
Sihyun looked briefly stunned, then the exhaustion hit him all at once. He had already told Seojin that Yuri wouldn’t be coming home tonight, so there was nothing for it. He lay down on the bed.
Out in the hospital corridor, an awkward silence settled between Yuri and Harin.
When she had first left the office, Harin had been fully prepared to give Yuri a piece of her mind—contract or no contract, if this slave-driving kept up she was quitting. But seeing how badly Sihyun had been hurt made worry win out over anger.
She spoke carefully.
“Representative… are you all right?”
Yuri ignored the concern as if it were so much static on the line and asked, voice flat and cold:
“……Hey. We had that project with Jinmyeong Construction, right?”
“Huh? Oh—yes. There’s an investment deal with Jinmyeong Construction. Meeting scheduled for next week, and—”
Yuri might look like she never did a stroke of work, but she always knew every single company matter with uncanny precision. Harin pulled out her phone, ready to rattle off the report, but Yuri cut her off.
“Cancel all of it.”
“Excuse me? I-if we do that we’ll take a hit on our side too… and it’s actually a really solid contract. Are you sure you’re okay with this?”
Yuri’s eyes turned glacial. She pinned Harin with a look that said further argument would not be tolerated.
“Cancel it.”
Harin had no choice but to let out a small sigh and answer.
“……Understood.”
Yuri had always been quick to anger, but tonight she was on another level. Probably because Sihyun had gotten hurt.
And then, out of nowhere, Jinmyeong Construction.
Harin didn’t know the exact details, but it was clear Yuri had somehow gotten mixed up with them, and Sihyun had been injured in the process. This was almost certainly retaliation.
Haa…… Whoever you are, if you want to kill yourself, just do it quietly by yourself. Why the hell did you have to go and poke the crazy bitch…
Harin clicked her tongue inwardly and grumbled to herself. A tiny part of her almost felt sorry for Jinmyeong Construction for having the misfortune of pissing off that lunatic… but they were also the ones who had just dumped a pile of extra work and cleanup on her desk. Sympathy evaporated on the spot.
Jinmyeong Construction.
Thirty years since founding.
CEO Lee Kangho may not yet have clawed his way into the ranks of true conglomerates, but he was proud of the fact that as long as a company didn’t belong to Cheonryong, Hanbit, or Gangsan, even the biggest corporations had nothing on his firm.
More importantly, a brand-new capital management company with absurdly deep pockets—Y Asset—had just poured investment into an ambitious project he had been preparing for years. Once that project landed successfully, he would finally be able to declare, without a shred of shame, that Jinmyeong was no longer a mid-sized company but a full-fledged conglomerate.
That was the confident thought with which he intended to start the day.
“CEO Lee!!!”
His secretary burst through the door, face paper-white.
“Secretary Choi? What’s all the noise this early?”
Kangho frowned and snapped, already thinking he would need to replace this flustered fool the moment they joined the big leagues.
“Y-Y Asset says they’re canceling the entire investment!”
“What—what did you just say!?”
Kangho shot to his feet so hard his chair nearly toppled.
“Wh-why on earth……? We haven’t done a single thing wrong! The project proposal is perfect!”
He slammed both palms onto the desk with a bang and roared. The secretary flinched, shoulders hunching.
“Th-that is……”
When the man kept hemming and hawing, Kangho barked even louder.
“Spit it out already!!!”
The secretary had no choice. Voice shaking, he answered:
“Th-they said if you ask your wife and daughter, you’ll understand……”
“What? Ask my wife and my little girl and I’ll understand?”
Kangho repeated the words in pure disbelief.
“Y-yes, sir. They wouldn’t give any further details……”
The secretary hung his head. Kangho waved him out, then immediately snatched up the phone on his desk and dialed Heejin.
Heejin was already irritated enough without this.
She had been getting ready for a high-society wives’ gathering when the phone rang out of nowhere. That alone was enough to set her teeth on edge. Then Kangho started yelling that the project had been canceled because of her and demanding an explanation, which was so completely absurd she couldn’t help but snap.
“Are you serious right now!? How am I supposed to know why your company’s project got canceled!?”
Even after she insisted she had no idea, he kept shouting and blaming her. Heejin’s temper flared.
“What is wrong with you!? Call the company that canceled the investment and yell at them! Why are you taking it out on me!?”
Truthfully, she had never cared the slightest bit about her husband’s company. All she cared about was the money he brought home. As long as she could buy designer bags and go out whenever she pleased, there was no reason to pay attention. So why he was suddenly screaming that a major project had collapsed because of her was beyond her comprehension.
That was when it happened.
Crash—!
Suhyeon, who had stepped into the living room and overheard the conversation, dropped the cup she was holding. It shattered across the floor. Heejin whirled around in surprise.
“S-Suhyeon!?”
Her daughter’s face was bloodless, every last drop of color gone. Suhyeon stood trembling so hard her whole body shook.
“M-Mom…… did you go there? What did you do?”
“What? Even you? What are you talking about—‘there’?”
Heejin was already fed up from dealing with Kangho’s nonsense. Now her own daughter was asking weird questions, and her irritation spiked even higher. She shouted into the receiver:
“Are you out of your mind? What does Suhyeon have to do with any of this? Handle your own company yourself! I’m hanging up!”
She ended the call with a vicious jab of her finger, then hurried over to her daughter, who had collapsed onto the floor and begun to sob.
“N-no… this can’t be…”
“S-Suhyeon……?”
Heejin had been about to scold her, but one look at the girl’s state made her voice turn anxious instead.
Tears streaming down her cheeks, Suhyeon finally forced the words out.
“Mom… please tell me you didn’t go to that café.”
“The café? Of course I went! After what that woman did to my daughter—”
Heejin hesitated only a second before admitting it. Suhyeon’s eyes went wide with pure horror.
“Are you insane!?”
“What is wrong with everyone today!?”
Heejin stared at her, utterly lost. Husband and daughter both were screaming at her without a single explanation, and she couldn’t make sense of any of it.
Then Suhyeon asked, voice shaking:
“……You met the woman in the suit, didn’t you?”
“Huh? The woman in the suit?”
Heejin thought of that crazy bitch for a moment and nodded.
“Yes! That psycho! The one who wrecked your face, Suhyeon!”
She spoke with sudden conviction, as if she had finally figured out why her daughter was so frightened.
“Don’t you worry, sweetheart. Mom will—”
She still had no idea what was actually happening and tried to soothe her instead.
Suhyeon only whispered, voice hollow with despair:
“We’re all doomed……”
She covered her face again and curled up on the floor, sobbing.
“Why won’t you just tell me what’s going on!? Say something!”
Heejin pounded her chest in frustration. Suhyeon forced the tears back long enough to look up at her mother.
“……That woman is from the Cheonryong Group.”
“What……?”
Heejin doubted her own ears.
Cheonryong Group……?
Surely not that Cheonryong.
Impossible. There was no way a lunatic like that could have anything to do with Cheonryong.
But Suhyeon drove the final nail home, expression utterly hopeless.
“She’s one of the Han family of the Cheonryong Group……”
The words hit like a hammer.
Heejin’s knees buckled. She barely managed to grab the arm of the sofa and keep herself upright.
Only now did the true scale of what she had done crash over her. Every drop of blood in her body seemed to turn to ice. Her mind went blank and white.
So that was why her daughter had been trembling so hard.
She finally understood the magnitude of her mistake.
This hadn’t been some trivial scuffle. She had never once imagined that crazy woman belonged to the Cheonryong Group. Not only had she dared to pick a fight with her—she had, in complete ignorance, ordered some thug to “take care” of her as well.
“We’re all doomed……”
Suhyeon’s despairing whisper seemed to echo faintly in her ears.
Heejin’s legs gave out completely. She sank to the floor right where she stood.
Everything was over.