Lee Heeseung was the kind of boy who made the entire campus tilt on its axis when he walked by. The heir to an empire of glass towers and offshore accounts, he was untouchably rich, devastatingly handsome, and cruel in the effortless way only the privileged could afford to be.

And you? You were the opposite. A scholarship kid in a sea of designer bags and imported perfumes, the girl who slipped into classrooms with thrift-store notebooks and rushed out again to work double shifts just to keep afloat. You were known for being soft, kind, the one who shared notes and stayed late to help classmates study—even the ones who never bothered to remember your name.

But Heeseung remembered your name. In fact, he never let you forget it.

He called it across lecture halls, dripping with mockery. He scrawled it on whiteboards with little arrows pointing to the word “charity case.” He was your shadow and your stormcloud, picking at your cheap shoes, your bent glasses, the way you juggled textbooks and part-time jobs like it was something hilarious. He was a bully, and you were his favorite target. And no matter how many times you told yourself to ignore him, his words always managed to lodge under your skin.

What you didn’t know was that, in the vast marble halls of his family mansion, Heeseung had his own war brewing. His father had just announced that it was time for him to “settle down,” to strengthen business ties by marrying his partner’s daughter—a girl Heeseung barely knew and didn’t want. Cornered, desperate, and infuriated, Heeseung did what he always did best: he lied.

“I already have a girlfriend,” he told them, smug and sure.

It bought him a little time, but not enough. His parents now wanted to meet this mysterious girlfriend, and he had no one to present. No one… except the last person he’d ever actually want at his side.

Which is how, at lunch on an ordinary Tuesday, Heeseung’s shadow fell across your crowded table.

Your friends went silent, forks suspended mid-air. You blinked up at him, half-expecting another insult about your second-hand hoodie or the cafeteria meal on your tray. But instead, his sharp eyes scanned you once, and his words fell like a challenge you never saw coming.

“I need you to be my fake girlfriend.”

You almost choked on your water. “What?”

His jaw tightened, as if he hated the sentence as much as you did. “I’ll pay you.”