SCUMBACK

Chapter 4

The Chen residence occupied the kind of address that made taxi drivers straighten in their seats — a private drive curling up through manicured hedges toward a house with more glass than seemed structurally reasonable, the whole thing lit gold against the dusk like something built specifically to be photographed. He stood at the gate for a long moment before pressing the intercom, running through everything the System's quiet cataloguing of Ryu Han's memories had given him.

Yuna Chen. Twenty-eight. Only daughter of a family whose fortune had thinned considerably faster than its pride, engaged for three years now to a man her parents had chosen not for love but for the very particular arithmetic of debt the kind that had, apparently, once saved the Chen name from a scandal Ryu Han himself barely understood. Ryu Han had loved her. That much was unmistakable in every fragment of memory the borrowed body offered up — an embarrassing, thorough, uncomplicated devotion that had survived years of her open indifference without ever once curdling into resentment.

He felt none of it. That was, he supposed, going to be a problem.

The gate buzzed open before he could press the intercom a second time. A housekeeper met him in the entryway with the particular blend of familiarity and faint pity reserved for a fiancé everyone quietly hoped would eventually take the hint, and led him through into a sitting room where Yuna Chen sat curled in an armchair with a book she wasn't reading, waiting for him the way a person waits for a dentist appointment.

She looked up when he entered, and something in her face changed before she'd even said a word.

"You're late," she said, automatically, the sentence already halfway out before she seemed to actually see him. Then she stopped. Her eyes narrowed, moved over him with a scrutiny that had nothing to do with punctuality — the set of his shoulders, the way he held himself in the doorway, the stillness in his face where she'd expected the familiar, eager warmth she'd spent three years politely deflecting.

"Ryu?" she said, and his name came out uncertain in her mouth, a question rather than a greeting.

"Yuna," he said, and inclined his head, because some fragment of Ryu Han's memory insisted this was the correct, deferential thing to do, even as the rest of him found the gesture absurd.

She set the book down slowly, straightening in the chair. "You look..." She stopped herself, visibly searching for the word, and didn't find one she liked. "Different. Since the hospital."

"I nearly died," he said, which was true enough, and simple enough, that it didn't require further explanation. "Things tend to look different afterward."

She studied him a moment longer, something wary creeping into her expression — not fear exactly, but the particular unease of a person who has spent years memorizing a face and now finds it subtly, unsettlingly rearranged. He understood, distantly, why. Ryu Han's voice had always pitched slightly higher when he spoke to her, eager, faintly pleading, the tone of a man perpetually apologizing for existing in her presence. Whatever voice he was using now carried none of that. It was level. Unhurried. Entirely unbothered by whether she approved of it.

"You're not going to ask how I've been," she said, half testing him.

"How have you been?"

"Fine." The word came out clipped, almost offended, as though his asking at all had disrupted some private expectation of the conversation. She recovered quickly, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, reaching for something more familiar to stand on. "Your mother called mine three times this week. She's worried. She says you barely speak to anyone since the accident."

"I've had a lot to think about."

"About what?"

He considered how much of the truth a woman like Yuna Chen — sharp, guarded, raised in a house where every kindness came with an itemized bill attached — was prepared to hear, and decided, correctly, that the answer was none of it. Instead he said the only thing that mattered, the thing he'd come here specifically to say, because delaying it seemed crueler than simply doing it.

"About this," he said. "About us."

Something in her posture went very still.

"I want to end the engagement," he said. Flat. Unadorned. No apology built into it, no careful softening, nothing of the desperate, placating tone the old Ryu Han would have wrapped around a sentence like that, half-begging her not to be angry even as he said it. "I don't think either of us wants this marriage. I think we both know that."

For a long moment Yuna Chen simply stared at him, and he watched something complicated move behind her eyes — not the relief he'd half expected from a woman who had spent three years making her disinterest in this arrangement thoroughly, repeatedly clear. Something closer to disorientation. As though the ground beneath a conversation she'd rehearsed a hundred times in her head had simply been pulled away without warning.

"You're joking," she said finally.

"I'm not."

"You've spent three years..." She stopped, visibly recalibrating, her jaw tightening. "Three years telling me you'd do anything for this. That you didn't care what I thought of you, that you'd wait as long as it took, that..." She cut herself off again, color rising faintly in her face, as though saying it aloud now embarrassed her more than it ever had when he was the one saying it. "And now you nearly die and suddenly you don't want it anymore?"

"I understand this is sudden."

"Sudden isn't the word I'd use." Her voice had an edge to it now, sharper than the polite indifference she usually maintained. "Do you have any idea what ending this would do to my family? The debt doesn't disappear because you've decided you're bored of me, Ryu."

"I'm aware of the debt."

"Are you." It wasn't a question. She stood, crossing her arms, putting the width of the room between them as though distance might restore some order to a conversation that had gone somewhere she hadn't authorized. "Because the man I've known for three years would never have said any of this. Not like this. Not so..." She searched for the word again, and this time found it, though it clearly cost her something to say it aloud. "Cold."

He said nothing, because there was nothing honest he could say that wouldn't complicate things further, and watched her absorb his silence as though it confirmed something she wasn't ready to name yet.

"I need time to think," she said finally, quieter now, some of the anger draining out into something closer to genuine unease. "Don't... don't say anything else tonight. Please."

He inclined his head again, the gesture feeling slightly less absurd this time, and turned to leave without pressing the matter further. At the door he paused, glancing back at her once — arms still crossed, watching him with an expression he couldn't fully read, caught somewhere between offense and a curiosity she plainly resented feeling.

"For what it's worth," he said, "I don't say things I don't mean anymore."

He left her standing in the gold-lit room with that sentence hanging unanswered behind him, and did not look back to see what it did to her face.