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Chapter 2 …
As the door closed, Chagyeong shut his eyes for a moment.
Then he forcefully swallowed down the irritation rising inside him.
The Moer department store entry deal was a project he had spent several sleepless months carefully preparing.
To think all that effort would be delayed because of one ridiculous incident.
‘Could this also be because of that damned bad luck?’
While Chagyeong was trying to steady his emotions, his secretary cautiously approached him.
“Executive Director, the Honorary Vice Chairwoman and the Chairwoman of the Cultural Foundation are currently waiting in the reception room.”
Grandmother and Mother?
One of Chagyeong’s brows twitched slightly.
“Right now? They didn’t say anything beforehand.”
“They said they had something urgent to discuss and asked you to come as soon as you finished your work.”
“Understood. Tell them to wait a moment.”
As Chagyeong adjusted his suit and rose from his seat, he suddenly asked the secretary:
“Oh, and that woman who caused a scene in the lobby earlier—where is she now?”
“The security team has isolated her in the security office. What should we do? Should we warn her and let her go?”
Chagyeong paused mid-step.
“Let her go? Why would we just let her go?”
“Then what should we do?”
“Hand her over to the legal team. Organize all the risks caused by this incident, determine the extent to which we can file a damages claim, and proceed immediately.”
“Yes, sir. Understood.”
At the very least, she needed to realize just how reckless her actions had been.
A faint sneer curled at the corner of Chagyeong’s lips.
The moment he opened the reception room door, Chagyeong was struck with a terrible premonition.
Next to his grandmother and mother sat a woman dressed in a colorful striped jeogori and bright red skirt, looking less like Angry Birds and more like an Angry Duchess.
‘Thank god Gabriel didn’t see her.’
But that didn’t mean he could relax.
Grandmother, mother, and a shaman.
Whenever this trio came looking for him, there was always only one reason.
Suppressing a sigh at the thought that today would once again be troublesome, Chagyeong spoke.
“Grandmother, Mother. What is this about? And why did you bring that woman here again?”
“That woman? Apologize to the Manshin immediately!”
Despite his grandmother’s stern voice, Chagyeong lazily replied,
“Was asking the reason wrong?”
“You insolent brat…! That’s exactly why your fate stands on the edge of a blade!”
Even at the shaman’s sharp rebuke, Chagyeong did not blink once. He had never believed in superstition to begin with.
To him, superstition was nothing more than self-comfort for the weak. Instead of enduring unbearable reality, people chose escape.
And shamans were merely merchants who preyed on that psychology.
Yet starting last spring, even he began doubting himself as strange incidents kept occurring one after another.
The first was a collision with a drunk driver.
The second was an elevator crash less than a day after maintenance.
The third was a fire aboard a plane during a business trip.
Fortunately, he escaped all three without major injuries, but during the fourth accident—when the outer glass wall of the headquarters conference room suddenly shattered without warning—Chagyeong was severely injured.
A shard had deeply sliced into his shoulder, causing blood to gush out like a fountain.
Emergency surgery lasted for three hours.
He had quite literally nearly died.
And after that day, his grandmother and mother—who had once been so distant from superstition that they had even skipped the ceremonial rites when relocating the company building—became fervent believers.
“I have brought the way for you to live today!”
The shaman before him was someone his grandmother had recently brought in, famed for her supposed powers.
Two months ago, she had accidentally predicted the explosion incident in the underground parking lot where Chagyeong had been, like blindly backing into a mouse and somehow catching it.
Since then, both his grandmother and mother trusted her absolutely.
“To find your path to survival, I offered prayers at Inwangsan Mountain, and the spirits spoke. You must marry in order to preserve your life.”
Honestly, talismans or exorcism rituals would’ve been preferable.
Just imagining such a troublesome solution made Chagyeong furrow his brow.
“But it cannot be just any woman. It must be a woman capable of extending your lifeline.”
“And where exactly is a woman like that supposed to be?”
“For someone so ill-mannered, you’re strangely lucky. Didn’t you see her yourself just a while ago?”
“See who?”
“The woman rolling around on the lobby floor.”
At those words, the image of the woman who had ruined his contract immediately came to mind.
With a dumbfounded expression, Chagyeong spoke to the shaman.
“Are you trying to feed me poison or something?”
“Chagyeong, mind your tongue!”
At his grandmother’s scolding, Chagyeong barely swallowed the rest of his words.
Being told to extend his lifespan through marriage was absurd enough already—but marry who?
Yet the two women nodded seriously, as if they had finally grasped a lifeline.
“Chagyeong, meet that woman.”
“Have you all lost your minds?”
“How can you speak to your grandmother like that? What’s so difficult about at least meeting her once?”
When Chagyeong firmly shook his head, the shaman watching him said:
“If you do not marry that woman, you will die.”
“You should keep your mouth shut.”
“Yoon Chagyeong! I told you to watch your words!”
Chagyeong had absolutely no intention of getting married.
Especially not to a woman who stormed into another company with a megaphone and started screaming.
When Chagyeong refused to budge, his grandmother Gyuseon suddenly began coughing violently.
“Cough, cough!”
“Mother, are you alright?”
“Grandmother, are you feeling unwell? Shall I have the car prepared?”
Gyuseon had recently been diagnosed with thyroid cancer and was awaiting surgery.
Because of her age and the large size of the tumor, the family was deeply worried, but she herself remained calm.
Chagyeong regretted raising his voice, but Gyuseon’s next words stopped him cold.
“Chagyeong, if you refuse to meet that woman, then I won’t have the surgery either.”
“Mother!”
“Grandmother!”
Despite the cries from mother and grandson, Gyuseon remained unmoved as she continued.
“I’ve already lived long enough. What surgery do I need? I’ll simply leave it to fate and live out the lifespan given to me. Just like you.”
There was a saying within Hyunsin Group.
The chairman of Hyunsin Group may have the greatest stubbornness in the business world, but even he could not overcome the stubbornness of the lady of the house.
A low sigh escaped Chagyeong’s lips.
At this point, the answer had already been decided for him.
‘Why does everything I do end up becoming such a mess…?’
Doa sat quietly on one side of the sofa in the executive office, her shoulders tightly hunched.
She had stormed into Hyunsin Department Store to get revenge on her ex-boyfriend, only to end up trapped in the executive director’s office on the ninth floor.
The executive himself had requested to see her, so she had been dragged out of the security office and brought here.
‘An executive director must be busy, so why does he want to see me?’
She had only shouted briefly through a megaphone in the lobby, yet she never imagined things would escalate this far.
It wasn’t even a police station—it was a meeting with an executive director.
Had what she done really been that wrong?
‘Sigh… Did I overdo it…?’
Doa let out a small sigh, placing both hands neatly on her knees.
Her anxiety kept growing, one worry leading to another, while her heart pounded nonstop.
And naturally, the root cause of this entire disaster came to mind.
‘It’s all because of that bastard Woo Kyungjun…!’
Doa’s eyelids trembled in resentment.
Doa and Kyungjun had met in college and been together for seven years.
When he was in the military, she faithfully waited for him.
When he was preparing for employment, she even supported him with money from her part-time jobs.
Whenever he apologized for not being able to do anything for anniversaries, Doa always comforted him.
After all those years, Kyungjun finally succeeded in finding a job, and soon after, he proposed to her.
“Doa, let’s get married.”
“K-Kyungjun…!”
That day, Doa had been happier than anyone else in the world.
She truly believed she could spend the rest of her life with Kyungjun, and naturally, they began preparing for marriage.
Then one day, Kyungjun made an unexpected suggestion.
“Since we’re getting married next year anyway, and we’ll have to prepare our newlywed household then, how about you start buying appliances and furniture now for my apartment? We can think of it as preparing in advance.”
At his words, Doa nodded without hesitation.
Because marrying Kyungjun had seemed like the most natural thing in the world, she thought it was a reasonable proposal.
‘But then he cheats on me? And he’s going to build a newlywed home with another woman using the wedding items I bought?’
She felt furious and wronged.
No matter what, she wanted to make them pay somehow.
At first, she tried to resolve things legally, but every lawyer she consulted said it was difficult to determine whether the furniture she bought counted as wedding preparations or simple gifts, making it unlikely for her to win a case.
‘So I tried humiliating them in public just to get my wedding furniture back.’
And in the end, she alone became the fool.
She was sighing heavily in frustration when suddenly—
Click.
The office door opened.
