My name is Kang Tae-jun. You may have heard it before, or maybe you haven't. In Korea, especially among ordinary people, the name means nothing. But in Russia, I was once known by something entirely different. Not because I lived two lives—it would be more accurate to say that I once lived in two places that never felt like home.
I was born in Seoul, but I grew up amid the snow of Moscow. The winters there taught me things no book ever could. The crushing silence. How to survive when everything felt white and empty. And the bitterest lesson of all: a person could be surrounded by thousands of souls and still feel profoundly alone.
When I was not yet twenty, I returned. At the time, I was certain I would find a place I could call my own. Instead, I found a strange world with warmer seasons but human hearts that were far more frozen. I think that's when I began to understand that some people never truly have a place they're headed toward.
Now, I'm the right-hand man of Black Hawk's leader. An organization whose name can't be spoken carelessly. I didn't build this place, and I'm not the one sitting at the top. I only stand a few steps behind him, making sure every order is carried out flawlessly.
People are afraid of me. Not because I enjoy frightening them, but because I don't believe in second chances. Betrayal is the end. Until I met her.
Han Seo-yeon. A doctor. A Korean woman with a courage unbecoming of someone who works with patients, stubborn in a way that made me want to laugh and get angry at the same time, and—most troubling of all—far too kind for the world I lived in. I didn't know who she was. She didn't know who I was. If I could turn back time, I might have chosen never to let us meet at all.
That night, Seoul's rain fell so hard the streets looked like an ocean. Blood dripped onto my shirt, and I was accustomed enough to wounds not to feel afraid. But something was different this time. For the first time in years, I needed someone.
My plan was simple: get inside, receive treatment, and leave before anyone recognized me. I failed at both of those things.
She appeared in a white coat, her hair slightly disheveled from just finishing with another patient. Her blue eyes—or maybe they were brown; I don't remember exactly—looked at my wound, then my face. There was something in her gaze that held no fear. None at all.
"You need treatment," she said.
"I don't have time."
She sighed as though she were dealing with a stubborn patient—which was exactly what I was. "Then you've come to the wrong place."
I stared at her for a long moment. Usually, people looked away first. She didn't. Even when I tried to frighten her with the stare I'd honed over years, she simply waited like a teacher waiting for a student to understand.
"Your name?" she asked.
I almost answered with the fake name I'd used all these years. For some reason, that night my mouth gave her the truth. "Kang Tae-jun."
She wrote it down, professional and unconcerned. "All right. Sit down, Mr. Kang."
I obeyed. I didn't understand why myself. Maybe because she spoke to me without knowing who I was—without fear, without any false-seeming respect, without a hidden agenda. She only saw someone who was injured. Not anyone's right-hand man. Not the man who made the underworld tremble. Just a patient.
At the time, I didn't know that the woman bandaging my wound was the daughter of the only person I had called boss for all those years. I also didn't know that I would fall in love with her. And when every secret finally came to light—because secrets always do—I would hate the fact that we'd ever met.
Not because I regretted loving her. But because I had known the thing I feared most from the very beginning.
I might be able to face my enemies. I might be able to face death. But facing the woman I loved when she finally understood who I really was? That was different. I was afraid to see hatred take shape in her eyes. And more than anything—perhaps more than threats, more than blood, more than death—I was afraid of losing her.