Baeran's eyes snapped open.
A snow–white ceiling came into view, along with an opulent crystal chandelier casting fractured light across the room.
Wasn't she supposed to be dead?
After completing the organization's final mission, she had believed she would finally retire, vanish from the world, and live in quiet freedom.
Instead, what awaited her was a cold, merciless execution.
A faint, humorless breath escaped her—more a scoff than a laugh.
If they refused to grant her a path to survival, then she would simply drag them down to the underworld with her.
That night had been drenched in blood.
She unlocked the weapons cache she had spent four years secretly building.
Alone, she dismantled an underground organization whose influence spanned multiple nations and had dominated the shadows for half a century.
By the time the final gunshot faded, her strength was gone.
Blood loss numbed her limbs, blurred her vision.
She collapsed into the spreading pool of crimson, swallowed by the darkness she had created.
"Baeran… sweetheart, you're finally awake. You nearly frightened your mother to death!"
A gentle, trembling voice rose beside the bed.
Baeran turned her head and met the tear-streaked face of a young, elegant woman—soft features, eyes shining like shattered glass.
"Seojun-ssi breaking off the engagement is nothing," the woman cried, her voice breaking. "Why would you hurt yourself over something so trivial? If anything truly happened to you… how is your mother supposed to go on living—"
Her words dissolved into helpless sobs.
Break off an engagement?
Seojun?
The names stirred a faint echo in her mind.
Wasn't this the plot of that novel she had listened to absently during one of her missions?
In that story, there was a girl who shared her name—Baeran—but the resemblance ended there. The fictional Baeran was a spoiled, foolish villainess who acted on impulse and never on sense.
From the moment she first laid eyes on the male lead, Han Seojun, she became obsessively infatuated with him. Pathetic, blind adoration.
But Seojun's heart—cold, unyielding, carved from winter stone—belonged only to the novel's heroine, Do Hana.
And the fictional Baeran—the so-called villainess—existed solely as a disposable tool, a stepping-stone crafted to push the male and female leads closer together. Every reckless stunt she pulled only tightened their bond.
Her final fate had been brutal.
After nearly costing the heroine her life, Han Seojun's fury ignited without restraint. He had her thrown into an underground beast arena, where she was surrounded, torn apart, and left in a state too gruesome to imagine.
The entire Jang family was wiped out soon after, dragged down by the chaos she had created.
Baeran pushed herself upright and lifted her hand.
The sight was unfamiliar—slender, delicate fingers, skin pale and soft in a way that had never belonged to her. Only the bandages wrapped around the wrist hinted at the aftermath of someone else's despair.
So she had been reborn into the body of the foolish villainess who shared her name?
The elegant woman beside her—Shin Jinghyeon, her new mother—saw her staring at the injury. Fresh tears welled at the corners of her eyes.
"Sweetheart," she whispered, voice trembling, "you must never do something so foolish again. This kind of thing… it will cost your mother her life."
The grief in her tone weighed heavier than the bandages themselves, closing around the room like a soft, suffocating fog.
"About Han Seojun calling off the engagement—your father and I will speak to the Han family. In the end, he'll have no choice but to marry you."
Standing beside Shin Jinghyeon was Jang Yeonggwang, the head of the Jang family and father of the body Baeran now inhabited.
The moment he heard his wife making such a promise just to comfort their daughter, his brows drew together in a deep frown.
"Jinghyeon," he said, voice low but steady, "our relationship with the Han family is close, yes… but if Seojun is truly unwilling, then I'm afraid…"
His words trailed off, tension settling between them like a tightening wire.
"He must be willing!"
Shin Jinghyeon snapped her head around, eyes flashing.
"Our Baeran is so beautiful, and our Jang family is willing to marry her off to him. How could he possibly be at a disadvantage?"
Jang Yeonggwang kept his face stern and said nothing.
If he were honest, he thought this daughter was hopeless—mud that simply refused to hold form—blessed only with her mother's good looks and nothing more.
The silence between them swelled, thick with unspoken truths and misguided affection.
Shin Jinghyeon's grievance deepened, and tears fell one by one—clear, round, glistening like pearls sliding down porcelain. Her delicate sorrow made her look as if the slightest breeze might shatter her.
For all his commanding presence in public, Jang Yeonggwang was helpless before his wife's tears.
A single swipe beneath her eyes, and his heart felt as though it were cracking apart.
"All right, all right," he relented hurriedly. "I'll go speak with old Chairman Han in a moment, ask him to talk some sense into his son."
"Just talk to him?" Jinghyeon choked out, eyes widening through her tears. "Not arrange the engagement again?"
Her voice trembled with disbelief, as if mere persuasion were a betrayal of their daughter's worth.
The entire broken-engagement fiasco had begun when Han Seojun brought home a beautiful young girl from who-knew-where and openly became her legal guardian, allowing her free access to his villa as she pleased.
The original Baeran had gone mad with jealousy.
She intercepted the girl several times, stirring up scenes and throwing tantrums until Seojun finally lost his patience and ordered the engagement dissolved on the spot.
That pretty young girl, of course, was the novel's heroine—Do Hana.
She was the spark that ignited the villainess's downfall, and the one person Han Seojun was willing to shield without hesitation.
The heroine's parents had died early, and before her uncle passed away from illness, he entrusted Han Seojun with a final request: protect his niece until she reached adulthood.
Thus, twenty-two-year-old Han Seojun became the legal guardian of sixteen-year-old Do Hana.
At this point in the story, Seojun despised complications—and women even more.
His attitude toward Hana was indifferent at best, a reluctant fulfillment of basic guardian duties.
The two of them were still years away from the spark that would eventually ignite between them.
But the original Baeran, upon hearing the words "break off the engagement," had completely lost her senses.
She immediately ordered people to kidnap Do Hana
—
and then, in a final act of desperate cruelty, slashed her own wrist.
All of it was meant to force Shin Jinghyeon and Jang Yeonggwang into pressuring the Han family to reverse the breakup.
A reckless gamble.
A vicious ploy.
And the first domino in the tragedy that would one day destroy them all.