She walked into the building for the first time with ~, amazed at the luxury all around her. At that point, she was excited at the prospect of living in such a place.

She knew she had to meet her new boss on the 13th floor. Naturally, she went for the elevator. She clicked the 13 button.

“Who’s this?” asked a sharp voice through the speakers at the elevator.

“It’s Arin. I’m going to work here.”

“Why the is your hair like that? Do you ever wash it?” the guy sneered. Arin noticed the camera pointing at her on the wall. She turned to ~, who just shrugged nonchalantly, shooting her an I-told-you-so look.

Embarrassed, she put her hand over her head and said, “Uh… I have naturally frizzy hair,” she explained.

“Take the stairs, Missy. I don’t want your lice all over my elevator!” With that, he hung up on her.

~ was right. Arin definitely hated him.

-

Arin rushed to the rooftop as fast as her dizzy head could carry her. She kept looking back, worried that the monster possessing Jeonghan would come after her. When she arrived home, she shut the door and collapsed against it to keep it shut. She was crying and quaking in fear.

It took many minutes to calm down and regain the strength and level-headedness to be able to type on her phone.

Something is wrong with him, Arin texted ~. It’s like he’s an entirely different person.

Did he drink too much? ~ asked.

No. It was something else. It was like black magic was controlling him.

What did he do to you?

He pushed me and tried to hurt me. And he threatened to kill me.

I’m sorry you had to go through that, Ar. Jeonghan is a jerk and has always been a jerk. Don’t look for excuses for whatever he’s done to you.

No. You don’t understand! It wasn’t Jeonghan. Something is seriously wrong with him, and I’m scared. What if MRS got to him? What if they’re using him to hurt me?

It’s impossible for them to control him if they aren’t there with him in the building. The building is enchanted, Ar. It’ll keep you safe from MRS, so don’t worry about them. As for Jeonghan, it seems like he has some medical issue. Just keep checking up on him, okay?

It was then that Arin heard a sudden thud outside coming from the rooftop, right outside her door.

She froze, chilled to the bone. The hairs on her arm rose, and she began quaking in fear again. The vinyl door that she sat against began to shake with her.

She held her legs closer to her chest and waited for another sound, or for the door to be forced open and for that evil force possessing Jeonghan to kill her once and for all.

But there was total silence, a terrifying silence of which Arin dreaded every moment.

The next thing she heard was the sound of Woozi’s gasp. “Hey… hey,” she heard him say. “Are you alright? Jeonghan? .”

Arin froze.

“Arin!” he called out loudly to her. “What happened to him?”

It was then that Arin decided to open her door and see what Woozi was talking about.

She gasped.

Jeonghan was laying there on his back on the cold bare ground, with soil, blood, and broken glass under his head. He was completely unconscious, and his head was twisted in a weird and unnatural way.

“Jeonghan,” she called out to him softly, cautiously nearing his body. Woozi was already knelt beside him, gently shaking his body and checking his pulse.

“He’s alive, but we need to get him to a hospital,” Woozi said. “I’ll go call an ambulance and get a bandage to stop the bleeding.” With that, he rushed down the stairs, dialling the emergency number on his phone.

Arin knelt down beside Jeonghan and tried to shake him awake again, but to no avail.

“Jeonghan?” she repeated again, shaking him harder and calling his name louder. “Jeonghan!” and louder.

It was then that her phone rang. It was ~. With trembling fingers, Arin managed to answer.

“H...hello?” she said.

“Ar? What’s going on? Has he calmed down?”

“He’s not moving,” Arin said in a high-pitched voice, scared and on the verge of tears.

“What? What do you mean?”

“There’s blood coming from his head.”

“Is he alive?”

“Yeah,” Arin said weakly. “The neighbor… he’s… he’s uh, calling an ambulance.” At this point, Arin’s breathing got louder as she became more and more anxious.

“Breathe, Ar, okay? It’ll be alright. The doctors will help him. Let the neighbor take him down to the ambulance, and you just relax, alright?”

“Okay,” Arin said, gulping, calming down a little.

“I have to go now, Ar. I’ll call you back in a bit.”

Arin tried to remove the broken pieces of the pot from under Jeonghan’s head and remove and fixing the position of his head.

Woozi was there with a pillow and bandages, and he immediately went to work cleaning the wound on Jeonghan and wrapping it with gauze. When the gauze was wrapped loosely, he put the pillow under Jeonghan’s neck.

“Help me carry him down to the elevator,” Woozi called out to her. “Carry his legs, I’ll carry his head.”

Together they slowly and carefully descended down the staircase and into the elevator.

It was while they were in the elevator that Arin felt the tingle in her skin that told her the enchantment was lifted. She wondered if ~ had arrived, or if ~ was lifting it knowing that Arinhad to help Woozi carry Jeonghan outside the building.

It was also then that Jeonghan seemed to have regained some consciousness, and he began to moan in pain.

“Do you know what happened to him?” Woozi asked Arin.

“No,” Arin replied.

“Looks like he was standing on the surrounding fence to jump off the roof, but fell backward instead,” Woozi said. “I saw his footprint on the dust over the edge. He was facing out, but fell in. Probably a gust of wind made him lose his balance and land on the pot.”

Arin’s face became pale, nauseous imagining Jeonghan attempting to jump, to kill himself. She took a deep breath and tried to shake the triggering image away.

When they finally arrived at the lobby, the ambulance was already outside. A paramedic took Jeonghan from them and strapped his limp body onto the stretcher.

Seeing him like that hurt her in a way she couldn’t explain. No matter how much she hated him, he still represented something important to her, something that she didn’t have with any other person in her life: safety from her curse that ruined her life.

But now, seeing him hurt and close to dying, it felt like that sense of security was threatened. Everything felt chaotic and out of control. The curse seemed to be mocking her now as all the safety nets she had constructed the past four years of her life were torn to shreds: she thought she could be around ~, but she learned her name; she thought she could be around Jeonghan, but he was on the brink of dying.

“You should go to the hospital and make sure he’s okay,” Woozi suggested as he watched her tremble at the sight of the ambulance driving away.

Arin had always avoided leaving the safety of the building unless she really, really had to leave. She had been afraid of the outside world and all the potential dangers lurking about, but now, that fear was insignificant compared to the fear that Jeonghan would actually die. She couldn’t lock herself in the building without knowing for sure that he wouldn’t.

-

Arin was in the hospital waiting room when a nurse entered with a transparent bag of Jeonghan’s clothes and belongings.

“Is he okay?” Arin asked as she accepted the bag.

“Yes, he’s fine. Don’t worry, dear. He’s just asleep now.”

Arin let out a sigh of relief, finally relaxing. She had been waiting there for hours, having told the doctors that she was Jeonghan’s family. They let her wait as they cleaned his wounds and fixed him up with gauze and bandages and neck braces and whatever he needed to heal. Arin waited anxiously, passing the time picking her fingers. She didn’t even have her phone to distract herself; it had long run out of charge at this point.

“You’ll be able to go in and see him after just a few minutes,” the nurse told her, and Arin nodded and continued to wait.

Arin did not want to go home until she saw him. She wanted to make sure that he was actually okay, and not just physically. She wanted to make sure that he went back to the normal jerk that he was, not the suicidal, manic devil she saw earlier that day.

As she waited, Jeonghan’s phone vibrated with a message from a tenant complaining about a plumbing problem. Arin managed to get a brief glance of the notification on his phone, but just as the light of the phone screen dimmed after the notification, Arin caught sight of a previous notification from a familiar name.

Narrowing her eyes, Arin reached into the bag and opened Jeonghan’s phone, just to make sure she read right.

Choi Hyojung.

The name wasn’t even the most shocking part. The message was.

She’s starting to catch on.