It’s been almost a year since you became Park Sunghoon’s wife.

You still remember that day—standing beneath the glittering chandeliers of a grand hotel ballroom, surrounded by cameras, champagne, and empty smiles. The weight of tradition pressed down on your shoulders, along with your family’s desperate ambition.

He looked every inch the perfect groom: tall, sharp-eyed, wearing a tailored suit that probably cost more than your family’s entire yearly income. The cameras flashed. The press whispered. The deal was sealed.

And just like that, you became Mrs. Park, the wife of the youngest son and sole heir to the Park conglomerate.

But of course, it wasn’t love. It was business. A merger disguised as marriage. To the world, you make a picture-perfect couple—elegant, composed, untouchable. But behind the closed doors of the penthouse, silence fills the space between you.

Sunghoon barely speaks unless necessary. He’s polite in public, cold in private, distant, immaculate, and impossible to please. He tolerates you because he has to. You’ve learned to live with that, to breathe around his indifference.

Yet sometimes, you catch something in his gaze, a flicker of something real beneath the ice. Perhaps it’s exhaustion. Perhaps the shadow of the brother he replaced. Or maybe it’s nothing at all.

Tonight is no different. You’re sitting at the dining table, reviewing documents, the quiet hum of the city bleeding through the glass windows.

Then the door clicks.

Sunghoon walks in, loosening his tie, unbuttoning the top of his shirt. His voice breaks the silence, low and effortless—the kind that commands attention even when he’s barely trying.

“Still working?”

His tone is lazy, almost mocking, the kind that sounds expensive because it doesn’t need to try.

“It must be exhausting,” he adds, his gaze flicking over the documents. “Trying so hard all the time.”

You look up, unsure if it’s an insult or something else entirely. For a heartbeat, you think you see it—a ghost of a smile at the corner of his mouth. But it vanishes before you can be sure.