Chapter Nine: Secret Don't Stay Buried
I hadn't seen him in a week.
Not since my parents dropped the marriage bomb over a perfectly arranged dinner, their words as crisp and final as a legal decree.
Not since I'd stopped going to class, trying to swallow the bitter fate handed to me like a business transaction.
CEO Park Jihoon. Polished. Rich. Harvard-educated. A man who wore his power like a custom-tailored suit—impeccable, detached, and utterly devoid of warmth. I didn't want him. I didn't know him. But my parents did, and in their world, that was enough. My opinion was a formality, a whisper lost in the roar of merging fortunes and social climbing.
So, I shut down. I packed my textbooks into a box, erased my university schedule from my phone, and ghosted the world that had started to feel like my own. The fight had been drained out of me, replaced by a heavy, numb acceptance.
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That night, I came home late after another obligatory "get-to-know-him" dinner with Jihoon. The conversation had been a sterile exchange of polite questions and emptier answers. He'd spoken of market trends and portfolio diversification, his eyes scanning the restaurant as if assessing its assets. I was just another one.
Exhaustion weighed me down, bone-deep. All I wanted was the sanctuary of my room, to melt into the silence and the dark, to be no one's daughter, no one's fiancée, just a girl in a hoodie who was tired.
I pushed my bedroom door open, the familiar click of the latch usually a comfort.
But the room wasn't empty.
A figure sat on the edge of my bed, silhouetted against the faint city glow seeping through the blinds. He was still, a statue carved from the shadows themselves. Black shirt, dark jeans, no smile. The casual, teasing professor was gone. In his place was something else entirely—something older, darker, and intensely still.
My breath hitched, catching in my throat. I froze on the threshold, fingers gripping the doorknob as if it were the only solid thing left in a tilting world.
"How did you get in here?" I whispered, the sound barely audible over the frantic drum of my own heart.
He turned his head slowly. The dim light caught the sharp line of his jaw, the dark pools of his eyes fixed on me. There was no surprise in his gaze, only a deep, unsettling certainty.
"You've been avoiding me." His voice was low, a velvet rumble that seemed to vibrate in the quiet space between us.
A spark of defiance cut through the shock. "You broke into my room."
He stood up in one fluid motion, unfolding himself from the bed. The shadows seemed to cling to him, framing his lean form. "You disappeared."
I kicked the door shut behind me, the finality of the thud doing nothing to steady my nerves. I tossed my bag onto the floor, the action aimless, a attempt to reclaim some normalcy. "I had things to handle. Family things."
He took a step forward, and the room, my safe, familiar room, suddenly felt like a cage. "Like your engagement to Park Jihoon?"
The air left my lungs in a rush. My eyes widened. "You know?"
He let out a single, humorless laugh, a low, bitter sound that was almost a growl. "Of course I know. You think a man like Jihoon makes a move in this city without whispers reaching the right ears? Without me hearing about it?"
A cold trickle of dread traced my spine. "What does that mean? What are you talking about?"
He closed the distance between us with deliberate, measured steps. The space shrunk until I could see the faint weariness in his eyes, the tension in the set of his shoulders beneath the black cotton. The air grew thick, charged with an energy that had nothing to do with academic games.
"It means," he said, his voice dropping to a dangerous murmur, "you have no idea what kind of men you're dealing with."
"Including you?" I shot back, trying to summon the sharpness I'd used on him in the library, but my voice wavered, betraying the fear coiling in my stomach.
That stopped him. His eyes, usually glinting with amusement, darkened into something fierce and unyielding. His jaw tightened. "I have never lied to you," he stated, each word precise and heavy.
"Bullshit," I breathed, the curse sounding weak. "You were my professor. You stalked me around campus. You flirted, you teased, you played all these mind games. And now you're—what? Breaking into my house to give me a vague warning about my own fiancé? Who does that?"
He didn't flinch. Instead, he took the final step, erasing any semblance of personal space. The warmth of his body radiated toward me, a tangible force. I could smell the faint, clean scent of him—sandalwood and night air—mingling with the familiar lavender of my room. It was a disorienting, intimate collision.
"I'm warning you," he said, the words quiet but layered with a terrifying intensity, "because Jihoon isn't the polished prince your parents are selling you. He's a shark. And he isn't marrying you because he wants a wife."
My lips parted, but no sound emerged. The numbness from the dinner shattered, replaced by a chilling clarity. "Why then?" The question was a mere whisper, stolen by the tension in the room.
He leaned in. Not enough to touch, but close enough that his breath feathered against my cheek, sending an involuntary shiver through me. His voice dropped to that low, private register that seemed to bypass my ears and resonate directly in my bones.
"Because he wants leverage. Your family's connections, their… vulnerabilities. You're not a bride to him. You're a key. A very beautiful, very useful key."
The world seemed to tilt. The carefully constructed reality my parents had presented cracked, revealing a rotten foundation. I stared into his eyes, searching for deceit, for madness, for anything to latch onto to disbelieve him. All I found was a grim, unwavering certainty.
"My family… what do you mean, 'not clean'?" I managed to ask, my voice trembling.
"That's not my secret to tell," he said, his gaze holding mine captive. "But it's the truth. And I've known it—and known who you were—long before you ever bumped into me at that coffee shop."
The confession landed like a physical blow. I took an involuntary step back, my shoulder blades pressing against the cool wood of the door. "What are you talking about?" The whisper was ragged.
He followed, not allowing the distance. He caged me in, one hand coming up to rest on the door beside my head, his body a dark, protective—or possessive—barrier between me and the rest of the world. The proximity was overwhelming. I could see the faint stubble along his jaw, the pulse point in his throat, the dark sweep of his lashes.
"I knew your face, your name, your schedule," he admitted, his eyes burning into mine. "The 'collision' wasn't an accident. It was an introduction. My way in. Because someone needed to be watching over you."
"Protecting me?" I echoed, disbelief and a wild, traitorous hope warring within me. "Or stalking me?"
A flicker of something raw—pain? frustration?—crossed his features before it was schooled back into that mask of controlled intensity. "Call it what you want. But while I was playing games with you in the library, I was also keeping other, far more dangerous players away. Players like Jihoon."
"Why?" The word burst from me, laden with confusion and a rising anger. "Why me? Why would you do that?"
For the first time, his composure seemed to fray at the edges. The hand not braced against the door lifted, and for a heart-stopping moment, I thought he would touch my face. He stopped just short, his fingers hovering near my cheek, close enough that I could feel the heat from his skin.
"Because," he said, the word a soft, tortured vow in the dark, "I'm the only monster in this story who doesn't want to use you. I just… want you."
The silence that followed was absolute, pressurized. My heart hammered against my ribs, a frantic bird trapped in a cage. The air was so thick with his presence, his scent, his confession, that it was hard to breathe.
"Yours?" I finally breathed, the concept too vast, too terrifying to comprehend. "You don't own me."
He leaned in then, his lips brushing against my ear as he spoke, the sensation sparking a lightning bolt of sensation down my neck. "You've been mine since the moment I decided you were worth every rule I've ever broken. Since I saw you scowling at a six-dollar latte, armed with nothing but sarcasm and a too-big hoodie, completely unaware of the vipers circling you."
His proximity was a drug, terrifying and exhilarating. My body thrummed with awareness, every nerve ending screaming. I was pressed against the door, with nowhere to go, and a part of me—a deep, secret, shameful part—didn't want to.
"And if I refuse?" I challenged, the defiance a last, thin shield. "If I choose the safe, boring, predictable shark you're warning me about?"
The low, dangerous sound that rumbled from his chest wasn't quite a laugh. He pulled back just enough to look me in the eyes again, his gaze holding a possessiveness that stole the breath from my lungs.
"Refuse?" he murmured, his thumb finally making contact, sweeping a stray strand of hair from my forehead with a touch so gentle it contradicted everything about this moment. "You can try. But you don't get to refuse the shadow that's been following you, protecting you, waiting for you. You don't get to refuse the man who has already decided, down to his soul, that you are the only thing in this rotten world worth claiming."
He was insane. He had to be. This was madness, a dangerous fantasy spun in the dark. But as I stood there, trapped between the solid door and the solid heat of him, my carefully planned future in ashes around me, his brand of madness felt like the only real thing left.
"You're insane," I whispered, but the fight had bled out of the words.
He smiled then, a slow, dangerous curve of his lips that held no amusement, only ruthless promise. "Maybe. Or maybe I'm the only one who's finally being honest."
He finally stepped back, releasing me from the physical cage of his proximity, but the intensity of his gaze held me just as firmly. "The engagement announcement is in two days. Don't be there."
Then he turned, a shadow melting back into shadows, and was gone through the window he'd somehow entered, leaving me alone in the sudden, overwhelming silence of my room.
I slid down the length of the door until I sat on the floor, knees drawn to my chest. I was shaking. The ghost of his touch lingered on my skin, the echo of his words reverberated in my skull. The safe, numb path was gone. Now there was only a cliff edge, a dangerous, dark-eyed man in the shadows below, and a choice that felt less like a choice and more like a fate I had already, terrifyingly, begun to fall toward.
The secret was out. And nothing would ever be buried again.