Oath Of The Crimson Moon

Chapter 2

Ara dreamed of the forest again.

She always had since she was a child growing up in Jeonju, waking in cold sweats to visions of silver moonlight bleeding through black pines, a fire somewhere close, a language on her tongue that she didn't speak when daylight came back. Her mother had called it an overactive imagination. Her grandmother had simply said: *어떤 기억은 뼈에 새겨진다. Some memories are carved into the bone.*

In the dream she was not Shin Ara. She was someone older, someone who wore her hair braided with copper thread, who moved through that ancient forest with the certainty of a person who had never known a locked door. The air tasted of iron and frost and something electric the particular charge of the sky before a storm, or before something worse.

She was running.

Not away from something. Toward something.

Toward him.

She woke at 4 a.m. to the sound of Seoul traffic far below and her own pulse loud in her ears. She lay in her small Mapo-gu apartment and looked at the water stain on the ceiling a stain she had lived with for three years and named "Jung-guk" after a particularly persistent project manager and tried to remember the dream's details before they dissolved.

The forest. The fire. The feeling of grass beneath bare feet. And hands large, careful hands catching her face with something that was half violence and half worship and a voice saying: *당신은 내 것이야. You are mine.*

She had always woken before finding out whether she wanted to be.

Ara pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes and breathed. The man from the subway last night Gu Serin had a voice like that. The same low register, the same careful diction, as though each word was being placed rather than spoken.

"You're losing your mind," she told the ceiling.

Jung-guk, the water stain, offered no rebuttal.

She was in the office by eight. By nine she had buried herself so thoroughly in load-bearing calculations for the Yongsan project that the subway, the man, the dream all of it receded into the background noise of a Tuesday becoming a Wednesday becoming a Thursday, Seoul churning forward on its usual merciless schedule.

Until the client meeting.

The conference room on the fourteenth floor had a view that could make you briefly believe the city was beautiful Han River silver in the afternoon light, Namsan Tower presiding over the southern hills. Ara had set up the presentation materials, refreshed the slide deck, arranged the miniature bottles of Jeju water that her sunbae Park Jiyeon always requested for clients she considered "significant."

The client for the Jungrang Cultural Complex project was significant, apparently. New money or rather, very old money that had recently decided to become visible again. The file said: *GS Holdings, privately held, established 1987, Chairman Gu Hyunwoo.*

Ara didn't look up from her laptop when the door opened.

"The Chairman sends his apologies," said a voice. "He was detained in Busan. I'll be representing GS Holdings today."

She looked up.

Gu Serin stood in the doorway in a charcoal suit that probably cost more than her monthly rent, with the same composed, watchful expression he'd worn on the subway except in daylight his amber eyes were darker, closer to teak, and the slight clench of his jaw when he saw her sitting there told her he was no more pleased by this coincidence than she was.

Or perhaps he'd arranged it.

She filed that thought carefully away.

"Mr. Gu," said her boss, Senior Partner Hwang Minjae, striding forward with his handshaking energy deployed at maximum. "An honor. Please"

"Ms. Shin." Gu Serin looked past Hwang Minjae directly at her, and her name in his mouth felt like a stone dropped into still water too precise, too deliberate, creating ripples she could feel in her sternum. "We've met."

Every head in the conference room turned toward her.

Ara closed her laptop and stood. She was professional. She was composed. She was absolutely not going to let her voice waver. "Briefly," she said. "On the subway."

"Yes." The ghost of something moved through his expression something she might have called relief, if she hadn't also read the set of his shoulders as barely contained tension. "Briefly."

He sat down across from her.

For the next two hours, Ara presented the most important project of her career to a man who spent significant portions of it looking at her as though she were something he'd been searching for across lifetimes, and she spent significant portions of it pretending not to notice.

She was very, very good at pretending.