At home, I've managed to slow my breathing by force rather than calmly. The curtains are drawn tight intentionally, the way my mother taught me when my nervous system was still learning balance. I lie flat on my back, hands folded on my stomach, counting the steady pulse of the visual strobe on my bedside table. Soft amber. Low frequency. A setting designed for people like me. The only light in the room. White noise hums faintly in the background.

My phone buzzes.

Jiwon: Do you like the bracelet?

Something inside me fractures so sharply it feels audible. This can't continue. If I let it, it will swallow me whole. I hit the call button before I can retreat into analysis. He picks up instantly, like he has been waiting with the phone in his hand. No greeting. No breath. Just silence. Listening.

“It’s too much,” I say. My voice thins in the dark, stretched tight like a wire about to snap.

“The craftsmanship?” he asks, light, careful. I can picture him smiling, reclining somewhere expensive, shirt sleeves rolled just enough to look effortless, tattoos teasing anyone who cared to look. “I thought platinum would suit your skin.”

“The gifts at school,” I snap, heat cutting through the calm I worked so hard to build. “The couriers. The eyes. Every time something arrives, it’s like you’re painting a target on me. I can feel them looking.” My chest tightens. I swallow. “I can’t breathe when they look.”

There is a pause. Not the performative kind. The real one. When he speaks again, the playfulness is gone, stripped clean.

“I wanted the world to know someone cherishes you,” he says quietly. “I guess I didn’t think it through. Mi-an-hae.”

The apology lands faster than I expect. Immediate. No ego. My shoulders drop before I can stop them. My anger loses its edge, collapses inward. I hate how quickly it happens.

“No,” I whisper, almost embarrassed by my own reaction. “You didn’t.” A soft admonishment. For both of us.

“Then tell me what you want.”

The words settle heavily between us. No teasing. No deflection. No charm layered over intent. Just space. Just listening. That alone makes my pulse spike.

“No more gifts at school,” I say. “If you want to send something… send it here. To the house.”

I hear his breath shift. Slow. Measured.

“You don’t want to be claimed in public,” he murmurs. “You want it private.”

“I want it controlled.”

A beat.

“Fine,” he says. No argument. No bargaining. “No more public deliveries.”

“Thanks,” I add, awkwardly, the word unused to this kind of exchange.

Another pause stretches.

“You haven’t put it on yet.”

I glance at the leather bracelet resting on my desk, dark and deliberate against the pale wood. “How do you know?”

“Because the signal hasn’t moved an inch since you got home.” Another pause. Sharper this time. I can feel his focus through the speaker, intense and absolute. “Put it on for me, Jay.”

My fingers move before pride can intervene. Trembling. The platinum clasp snaps closed around my wrist with a soft, final click. The weight settles immediately. A presence. A tether. Something claimed and something given all at once.

“I’m wearing it,” I whisper.

His voice softens. “Good.”

Silence follows. Thick. Charged. I wait for him to say it. To ask for more. To invite me over. I know I'll say yes despite my conflicting feelings.

Instead, he whispers, “Sleep well tonight.”

And he hangs up.

I sit there long after the line goes dead, phone pressed uselessly to my ear, heart racing like I’ve just missed a step on the stairs. 

We move at your pace, I recall him saying, and I let out a long, heavy breath. The problem is I don’t have a pace. I only have thresholds.

On my wrist, the tracker pulses. A tiny, almost invisible green light, blinking with the steady persistence of a heartbeat.

My fingers hover over the clasp, logic screaming for the safety of my old life. I should undo it. I should go back to being the ghost I was before Jiwon Kim entered my orbit. 

My hand freezes.

Instead, I rub my thumb over the woven leather. The texture grounds me. Rough enough to anchor. Solid. Real. This does not feel like a leash. It feels like an anchor. It tells me that even if I disappear into the darkness of my own mind, someone knows exactly where I am.

This is control surrendered.
This is trust offered.

Or is this weakness dressed up as intimacy?

The light blinks again.

Part of me wants to vanish.
Part of me wants him to be able to find me every single time.

I close my hand into a fist.
I don’t take it off.
I don’t sleep either.

By midnight, I'm still at my desk, laptop open, room still dark except for the strobe and the glow of code. I study. I read everything. Jiwon Kim. His family. The conglomerate. The shell companies, layered beneath legitimate subsidiaries. The lawsuits quietly settled. The political donations, funneled through cultural foundations. A history of girlfriends and boyfriends surfaces, polished and public, mostly during his time in Sweden. He was popular there. I scroll through his Instagram without following, mapping patterns. Faces. Locations. Timing.

By dawn, I unearth something buried deep. A feud between our families, old enough that no one mentions it anymore, sharp enough to still bleed beneath the surface. 

The Asian Financial Crisis, 1998. My grandfather’s tech manufacturing firm began to fold with the rest of the market. The Kim Group stepped in publicly as a stabilizing partner. There were photographs of handshakes. Solidarity statements. Promises of restructuring and shared recovery.

Weeks later, the support vanished. Credit lines were pulled. Creditors moved in. The company was pushed into liquidation under pressure it could no longer withstand. The Kim Group acquired the core patents and production facilities at a fraction of their value. Legal. Documented. Efficient. My grandfather called it betrayal. The Kims called it strategy.

After that year, our surnames stopped appearing together in industry events, alumni boards, charity galas. The silence was deliberate. 

Why hadn't Mum said anything?

The possibility of us existing openly drops from unlikely to almost impossible. I file it away. Cold. Precise.

What now?

His phantom kiss lingers, replaying against my mouth for the thousandth time. Despite everything I’ve found, I don’t want to retreat. I want to try. Against the odds and against the limits of my body and mind.

But before I leap, I need certainty.

I stopped hacking when I was sixteen. My mother caught the signs before the police could. She cried. Told me I was too smart to ruin my life. Told me prison does not care how gifted you are. So I shifted to crypto. Clean money. Clean screens.

Tonight, I make a choice.

My fingers move over the keys, remembering codes and sequences.

The Kim residence is protected by layers designed to intimidate rather than stop someone who knows what to look for. Corporate-grade firewalls. Redundant surveillance systems. Everything is centralized because power likes efficiency. I slip in through a forgotten IoT device tied to the building’s climate control, piggyback through a maintenance contractor’s outdated credentials, and tunnel my way into the private network.

Cameras bloom across my screen.

Hallways lined with traditional ink paintings. A silent living room where hanji paper lamps glow softly. Chairman Kim is at his study desk, nursing a cigar. Woosik lifts weights at the gym. Jiwon isn't there.

I move to Jiwon's apartment address, isolating his feed with more difficulty. His apartment building system is more up-to-date. Visuals and audio follow. Clean. Unfiltered.

He is alone.

Standing by floor-to-ceiling windows, city lights reflecting off rain-streaked glass. Phone still in his hand. Jacket discarded on the sofa. Tie loosened. He exhales slowly, his shoulders sagging probably for the first time today.

His wrist pulses.

Green.

Steady.

And then he says my name out loud, low and unguarded, like a habit he hasn’t learned to hide yet.

I freeze.

Listening.

Watching.

And the feed cuts to black.

Author's Note:

One fresh chapter drops tonight.

A line gets crossed. A risk gets taken.

Someone decides to push too far to test the other's loyalty... and not everyone walks away unchanged.

See you tonight.

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Thank you for reading and staying with Jay and Jiwon.