A lump formed in her throat, so tight and sharp it physically hurt. To her own absolute shock, hot, unbidden tears welled up in her eyes, blurring the sight of his bruised face.
The untouchable, arrogant Chief Surgeon couldn't find a single insult. She couldn't laugh. She couldn't joke. She stood there paralyzed, her chest heaving as her fierce facade cracked wide open right in front of him.
Ra-ik stared at her, his breath catching as he watched the tears gather in her eyes. The cold, lethal woman who had just verbally dismantled him through the speaker was suddenly trembling, her eyes flashing with a mixture of raw trauma, humiliation, and profound exhaustion.
"While I was in the ICU... while my heart stopped..." Ra-ik rasped, his voice dropping into a low, strained register, his fingers tightening slightly around her wrist. "I wasn't just unconscious. It was like a parallel hell... a nightmare where I was forced to re-live every single moment of my life."
Se-na swallowed hard, trying desperately to pull her wrist back, but her strength felt completely drained.
"The beatings. The cold room... my grandmother dying in that sterile hospital room when I was a teenager... the glass on the terrace... every agonizing second played back in my head while my brain was dying," Ra-ik continued, his brow furrowing in genuine, terrifying distress.
He took a slow, ragged breath, his voice shaking with a deep, unsettling fear.
"But it was different this time," he whispered, searching her tear-filled eyes. "I wasn't alone. In every memory... in every painful moment... there was a phantom presence. A soul trapped in the dark with me. Someone who was weeping when I was struck... someone screaming in terror when I looked over the ledge... someone who suffered along with every drop of blood."
He stepped half an inch closer, his dark eyes filled with an agonizing, desperate question. "I thought my brain was playing tricks on me. I thought it was a stress-induced hallucination. But then you stood over my bed in the ER... yelling about the wind... about the terrace... about the scream in my throat..."
Hearing him put her secret nightmare into words was too much for Se-na to bear. The boundary between her pride and her trauma completely shattered.
"LET GO!" Se-na suddenly shrieked, her voice cracking with raw, overwhelmed emotion as hot, flustered frustration boiled over. Ra-ik kept looking at her without doing anything.
"Let go of me," she snapped again, throwing his official public title right in his face. "Is this the stellar decorum of the 'Nation's Healer'? Manhandling a fellow physician at her own front door? Where did you get your medical ethics, Do Ra-ik shi? Out of a trash box?"
"Don't divert the question!" Ra-ik yelled back, his raspy voice cracking, a desperate glint of tears shining in his exhausted eyes. "Right now, we aren't playing doctor and patient! I am being serious!"
"So am I!" Se-na spat back, her sharp tongue cutting through his plea without a shred of mercy.
Then as if a something passed through her head and her voice coldly dropped, "I have zero desire to speak to you! I could easily call security right now and report you as a stalker at my door. A lone, disgraced man lurking outside the apartment of an unmarried woman late at night... 'Nation's Healer Turned Unhinged Stalker', who do you think tempts the media more? Who do you think the public will believe?"
Ra-ik's dark eyes widened in sheer, paralyzing shock.
The breath left his lungs in a cold gasp. Those exact words that precise, venomous phrasing, the cadence, the ruthless sarcasm were the exact words spoken in the privacy of a locked room. No living soul had been present to hear it. But hearing her scream his own nightmare back at him, a faint, bittersweet smile came across Ra-ik's face.
He moved forward, stepping across the threshold closer to her.
"My words," Ra-ik said softly, his dark eyes locked onto hers with a sudden, quiet intensity. "I said those words to protect her to keep her away from me… you are doing same."
"You..." Ra-ik stumbled back a fraction of an inch, his hand trembling on the doorframe as the horrifying certainty locked into place.
"LET GO!" Se-na suddenly shrieked, her voice cracking with raw, overwhelmed emotion as hot, flustered frustration boiled over she did say those words to indirectly tell him that she was there but that's it she didn't want anything more with him.
She violently yanked her wrist free from his grip, taking a sharp, unsteady step back toward her doorway. Her face was burning hot, her eyes blazed with intense anger and vulnerability.
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