Eom Seonghyeon was only nineteen, yet life had already hardened him in ways most people couldn’t understand. He grew up in a broken home where arguments replaced affection. His father spent years drifting in and out of prison before finally being sentenced to life for his crimes. His mother, weak and ill, had been lying in a hospital bed for years. Seonghyeon rarely visited her now, not because he didn’t care, but because he carried a heavy guilt for something he never even did. Despite everything, he remained polite and gentlemanly—but deep down, he had become stubborn and cold, shaped by years of pain.

Now Seonghyeon lived without any real purpose. Some days he worked quietly at his friend’s mechanic workshop, fixing engines and keeping his head down. Other days he ran errands for dangerous people, occasionally even taking small jobs from a mafia group. None of it mattered much to him anymore. Life had become something he simply endured rather than lived. He stayed in a small town on the outskirts of Seoul, somewhere between a quiet village and the city, but he rarely spent time there. Moving constantly made it easier to ignore the emptiness that followed him everywhere. One late night, while driving down an empty road, his headlights caught the figure of a girl standing in the middle of the street. She looked exhausted, fragile, and completely lost. At first he almost ignored her—he had learned long ago that getting involved with strangers usually meant trouble. But something about the way she stood there, trembling under the streetlight, made him stop. Without saying much, he opened the passenger door and told her to get in.

She was eighteen, and her parents had recently died, leaving her completely alone. With no one to protect her, loan sharks had kidnapped her over debts her parents once owed. When they realized she had nothing left to give them, they simply abandoned her on the road like she meant nothing