Sweet Tooth | k.nj. ✔

이십일: payback time

By the time Youngmi could collect herself and scram for her clinic, the murk of the night had already drained out— paving way for the amber-tinged rays to establish their hegemony for the next few couples of hours. The balmy morning sun had soon surfaced too, though quite contrary to the conventions, preferred to stay impassive towards Youngmi throughout.

But impassive tends to be a neutral connotation, and the celestial body was acting rather rancorously towards her.

Because it was sweltering hot that forenoon for some reasons.

Youngmi— still intent on closing the distance between her clinic and herself as soon as possible— perfunctorily took off the cardigan that had started to prick her arms, and fastened it around her waist as she continued to jog down the pavement. Once her line of sight had finally aligned with the structure of her destination, she hunched down, resting her hands on her knees as she attempted at focusing on her erratic breaths.

When Youngmi's phone screen had displayed the alert message that informed her of almost half of her money being transferred to someone whom she did not even recall paying, the female's ability to control her jitters evanesced into thin air too. Even a retrospection could not convince her of her involvement in such a momentous transaction in the early hours of that day. In all possibilities, the likelihood of her sending millions of Won to a stranger was completely out of question.

She had never been too fond of such perilous ventures anyway.

However, she could not afford to fritter away much of her time either. Mulling over the fortunes that she had already lost would not compensate her in any respect. The best she could do at the moment was to protect whatever assets that she was now left with. And in order to achieve that, the need to bolt for her workplace, right then, was as ineluctable as ever— for her office also retained a copy of all of her important documents.

Gazing vacantly at the closed-shut glass doors for some time, Youngmi eventually proceeded in the direction. She was then permitted the access after a thorough bio-metric identification— the technology to render which, the electronic sensor at the entrance was equipped with. Rushing headlong, she did not spare a glance at anywhere but the oak door that sturdily fortified the ingress to her chamber. Youngmi exhaled in relief when, at last, she could gird the metallic door knob with her grip. In a jiffy, she had charged into her personally customized forbidden city, lunging for the safe that preserved the records that she had partaken in the search of.

A ghost of a smile appeared on her lips when she noticed that all of them were intact, and that she was somehow saved from being put into sheer jeopardy. Youngmi fetched every single one of those papers, arranging them in a file before pressing the latter against her chest— probably to safeguard the apparent vulnerables. She rotated on her heels, preparing to head back home and wash up swiftly so as to begin the workday on time, but was rather compelled to stop dead in her tracks when she saw something unprecedented.