The Marriage Proposal
Seon-a drifted in and out of consciousness beneath Yurin's merciless milking.
Even when she washed him, the moment he grew hard she ground against him again, checking whether any more semen would come — and the friction dragged him briefly back to waking.
He caught a scrap of her voice.
"Nothing left now."
She said it with something like regret, toying with his body as if it were a plaything.
Now he lay in Yurin's room, staring at the ceiling. Healing magic had restored his flesh, but the mental agony still clung to him. Tears welled without warning.
Even a dairy cow wouldn't be wrung out this brutally, he thought — but Yurin was not someone who listened to words, so once again he simply endured.
"Seon-a. I think it's about time for my parents to get home."
Yurin spoke after ending a phone call.
"Got it. I'll get ready to greet them at the door."
He kept his face carefully blank. Resist now and she would find some excuse later to make things far worse.
"There's something else I need to say… Seon-a. We've been together a long time, ever since we were kids."
"Huh?"
Her expression turned serious. She let the silence stretch a beat.
"Let's get married."
Yurin held out a marriage registration form. Every field was already filled in, dense and complete — his information, her parents', even the two witness slots. All that remained were his parents' seals and his own. It was ready to submit the moment those stamps hit the paper.
"This is awfully sudden. Why now?"
"I'm starting my mandatory service at the Hwaryong Guild, and you'll be working at the medical center. I don't like the idea of other bitches sniffing around you…"
Jealousy. The reason was simpler than he had expected.
"I think I need a little time to thi—"
He started to put it off, then stopped cold when he saw her face. The look she fixed on him was the kind that could devour a person whole. Fear locked his throat; he had no idea what she would do if he finished that sentence.
"Shouldn't we at least do the formal family meeting first?"
He changed course. Her expression brightened at once — smiling, though her eyes remained exactly as they had been. She nodded without a word, as if to say there would be no second chance after this.
"We've got about four months left before my service starts. In the meantime we should set a wedding date, send out invitations, and start planning the honeymoon."
She spoke as though every detail of the schedule had already been decided.
"Even so, the marriage registration… I think it would be better to file it on the wedding day, or the day before."
He had to stall as long as he could. If a girl this intense even on ordinary days got married, she would wring him dry on their wedding night under the banner of consummation. He needed at least a little time to build up his stamina and brace himself mentally.
"Why?"
She stared at him with eyes deader than a fish on ice.
"I'm just not ready yet… Some things you can't force, no matter what."
He had no idea how she would react, but he said it anyway. Yurin considered him for a moment.
"Well. You're going to be my husband. I should respect your opinion."
If only she'd show that same respect in bed, he thought, clutching his chest as a sigh slipped free. At least it had ended here. That was something.
When Yurin's parents returned, she and Seon-a went to the entrance together to welcome them. Standing there as a guest waiting on another household's masters left Seon-a faintly uneasy, but the couple treated him like family, and the discomfort faded quickly.
Yurin told her parents the full truth of Seon-a's kidnapping. They looked at him with pity and offered gentle words of comfort. By prior agreement, two things had been left out — the rape, and anything about Minji. What remained was still grim enough: that he had nearly died in captivity, that Yurin had beaten two assailants to death, and that she had shattered the legs of the woman who had arranged the abduction.
Yura, who had been listening to her daughter's account, spoke up.
"Don't you want to know what happened to the woman whose legs got broken?"
After hearing Yurin's story and seeing the perpetrators arrested, Yura had dug into the aftermath herself. She had uncovered the stalker's identity and the full chain of events — including the fact that Seon-a had been raped. To her, that detail was almost incidental. What mattered was how deeply her daughter loved and wanted Lee Seon-a. Anyone who had laid hands on him was beyond forgiveness.
The culprit was the granddaughter of the Daesan Group's chairman, a child of the upper class. Bribes and favors had reached even Yura, the second-in-command of the Hwaryong Guild. But the girl had harmed the man who would become her son-in-law. Legal measures were only the beginning. Yura had severed nearly every hunter-related business connection tying Daesan to the guild.
Rare resources harvested from Gates were always finite. Guilds were the suppliers; ordinary corporations, no matter how vast, were ultimately the demand side. Scarcity tilted the balance toward supply. Processing technology mattered, but winning the bids for the raw materials mattered more. In an age when supply held the upper hand, a supplier's change of heart could cripple any company that depended on it.
So Yura had arranged that the bulk of the rare Gate resources previously contracted to Daesan would, once the current agreements expired, be delivered to other firms instead. On paper it was nothing more than canceling the next round of contracts and finding new buyers. To Daesan, it meant losing nearly forty percent of the rare materials they had counted on receiving without interruption — a catastrophic volume. Their stock would plummet soon enough, and chaos would follow. Around that same time, she intended to have the chairman's granddaughter's crimes blasted across every major outlet. The girl would be driven into a misery so complete that suicide would look like mercy.
Neither of them fully recognized it, but Yura and Yurin shared a gift: a natural, almost artistic talent for tormenting someone without letting go. Both hid that talent carefully enough that others rarely noticed — yet the resemblance ran deep, as if temperament itself could be inherited.
Yura was so pleased with the thoroughness of her revenge on her future son-in-law's behalf that she had to keep swallowing smiles the whole way home, and even after she arrived.
"No. I've already decided to put that behind me, Mom."
"Same here, Mother."
For all how entertaining the whole affair had been, Yurin and Seon-a spoke as if they had lost interest. It must have been agonizing and humiliating for him, Yura thought — and resolved to find still more ways to make the Daesan family suffer.
Once the ugly talk of the kidnapping was finished, Yurin brought up marriage. The two families agreed to schedule a formal meeting. No one seemed opposed; if anything, they looked as though they had half-expected the couple to come asking someday. Since the two of them had not yet visited Seon-a's parents, they would go there first and only then set a date for the joint gathering.
When everything that needed doing was done and dinner was over, Seon-a was given an empty room for the night while Yurin slept in her own. They would leave for his parents' house first thing in the morning, so both of them rose early and began to prepare.
Seon-a's parents often spent weekends quietly at home; the couple simply liked being alone together in peace. The two lovers packed their bags and set out for his family house.
Seon-a could feel, in real time, how much sharper and more violent Yurin's temperament had become. He had assumed any talk of marriage would wait until after her service ended. Instead she was trying to lock a chain around him now — to hold him so tightly he could never be pulled away. That incident had left more than trauma; it had rewritten something fundamental in her.
At the time, and for a while afterward, the shock had hit him hard enough that he hadn't fully registered the change. He had recovered enough distance now to see it clearly. Yurin had not. She had always been stubborn, but outside the bedroom she had usually listened to him. Now the bedroom and everywhere else were becoming the same — and not in a good way.
He considered suggesting they go to therapy together, then recoiled from the thought of how society would look at them. An Awakened with a psychiatric record was treated as more dangerous than an ordinary person, so most Awakened simply pretended their mental wounds did not exist. He himself, during the psychological evaluations after the incident, had answered and behaved as normally as he could manage. If he had written and spoken the truth, things might have gone very badly.
The situation was not good. If his parents noticed how unstable Yurin had become, everything could unravel — what she had done to him, the rape, all of it. His mother, Lee Min-a, was especially sharp, with instincts that bordered on uncanny. A single loose thread would be enough for her to drag every buried secret into the light.
For the sake of both families' peaceful lives, it all had to stay hidden.
If I'm the only one who has to be sacrificed… then everyone else can be happy.