**Chapter Nine – Baek Yuna POV**
*(Seo Minjae in Her Body)*
---
The living room was warm and well-lit and looked nothing like a crime scene.
Which was reassuring. Mostly.
Four people sat arranged around a low coffee table — a cake at the center, plates and glasses already in use, the comfortable ease of people who had been here long enough to stop performing. I scanned them fast, the way I had trained myself to do at the office: faces to names, names to desks, desks to dynamics.
Park Yunjin. Lee Mona. Shin Heejun. And—
Han Hanna.
Of course.
She was sitting closest to the cake with a glass of wine and the specific posture of someone who considered this room hers. She looked up when we entered.
Her expression didn't shift dramatically. It didn't need to. The slight tightening around her eyes said everything.
"Oh," she said. "She came."
She looked at Jaehun.
"Why did you invite her? We were having fun." She held out her hand without looking at me again. "Give me the knife. I'll cut the cake."
Jaehun handed it over.
I watched the knife transfer and felt something embarrassing happen in my chest.
*It's a cake knife,* I told myself firmly. *It was always a cake knife. You were never in danger. Dori has genuinely damaged you.*
I stood in the entrance of the living room while the other three looked at me the way you look at something you didn't order and can't send back. No hostility dramatic enough to name. Just the flat, collective assessment of people who had already decided.
Jaehun settled back into his seat. "She's here to work. Personal assistant."
Mona — Lee Mona, second desk from the window, always had her lunch at exactly twelve thirty — tilted her head and smiled. It had nothing warm in it.
"So she's our maid for the night."
Hanna laughed. Heejun smiled. Yunjin looked at his phone but his mouth moved.
Jaehun smirked.
I stood very still.
Then Hanna set down her wine glass and stood up.
She crossed the room toward me with the unhurried confidence of someone who had done this before — who had walked toward Yuna before, specifically, and already knew how it ended. She stopped just inside comfortable distance and reached up.
Touched my hair.
Played with the ends of it, slowly, like I was something decorative that had wandered in.
Then she leaned close and said, very quietly — warm breath, quiet voice, meant only for me:
"We're going to have so much fun tonight, Yuna."
Inside Yuna's chest, something lurched.
*Panic. That was panic. Genuine, animal, get-out-of-here panic.*
I felt it move through me in a wave — the specific helplessness of being in a body smaller than the threat in front of you, in a room where every face had already chosen a side and none of them were mine.
*Run,* some part of me said. *Just leave. The job isn't worth—*
Then another part of me — older, louder, the part that had survived thirty years of being Seo Minjae — cut straight through it.
*I am Seo Minjae. I have walked into boardrooms that wanted to bury me. I have smiled at men twice my size who thought I was finished. I do not run from Han Hanna in a living room.*
Then the math caught up with me.
*One versus five.*
*...In Yuna's body.*
*Which has, as previously established, the grip strength of a concerned houseplant.*
A beat.
*I can handle this.*
I stepped back from Hanna's hand — unhurried, not flinching — and smiled. The kind of smile that didn't reach anywhere near my eyes.
"Sure," I said pleasantly. "Happy to help."
*Yuna needs this job,* I reminded myself. *Yuna needs this job. I can survive one evening. I have survived worse. I have survived a car.*
---
I had not, perhaps, fully accounted for what one evening would actually look like.
It started with food.
"We want chicken," Hanna said, somewhere around the first hour. "From Bongchu. Go pick it up."
Not delivery. Pick up. On foot. Thirty-five minutes each way.
I went.
I came back with the chicken.
Then the kitchen needed cleaning — the dishes from before I arrived, stacked in the sink with the specific confidence of people who had never once considered cleaning anything themselves.
I cleaned them.
Then the chicken was eaten and the plates were added to the stack and I cleaned those too.
Then the living room needed tidying.
I tidied it.
Through all of it I kept my face neutral and my movements steady and repeated Yuna's name in my head like a mantra. *For Yuna. This is for Yuna. Yuna needs the job. I promised.*
I was doing fine.
I was handling it.
---
Then Hanna finished the last of her chicken, set the bone down on her plate, and looked at the floor.
Looked at me.
Picked up a piece of chicken — a good piece, most of it still there — and placed it deliberately on the floor in front of her feet.
The room went quiet in the way rooms go quiet when everyone present knows something is about to happen and has decided to watch.
Hanna smiled.
"Yuna." Her voice was light. Conversational. "Pick that up."
I looked at the chicken on the floor.
"With your mouth," she said. "Like a good girl."
Jaehun laughed. Short and real.
The others followed — Mona's hand flying to her mouth, Heejun turning away, Yunjin making a sound into his glass.
I looked at the chicken.
I looked at Hanna.
Something very cold moved through me.
*No.*
Not performed refusal. Not strategic calculation. Just — no. A line so clear I felt it physically, somewhere below thought.
*She does not get this. Not from Yuna. Not from me. Not tonight and not ever.*
Hanna stepped forward and put her hand on my shoulder — pushing down, slow and deliberate, the way you push something toward the floor when you expect it to go.
I didn't go.
I turned and shoved her.
Not hard enough to hurt. Hard enough to be completely unambiguous.
Hanna stumbled back a step, genuinely startled — her expression flickering through shock before it landed somewhere much colder.
Then Jaehun was on his feet.
Fast. I hadn't clocked how fast he could move until he was already across the room, hand closing around my arm, pulling me back and around until my back hit the wall.
Hard enough to knock the air out of me.
He held me there — one hand against my shoulder, close enough that I had to tilt my head back to look at him. His expression had dropped every layer of amusement. What was underneath was something I hadn't seen from him before — not cold, not calculated.
Angry. Actually angry.
"How dare you," he said quietly.
Yuna's heart was hammering in her chest. I could feel it — rapid and small and genuinely afraid, the body doing what the body does when it registers a threat it can't match.
*He's stronger than he looks,* I noted with the detached clarity of someone doing damage assessment. *Significantly.*
"She put food on the floor," I said. My voice came out steadier than I expected. "And told me to eat it. Like a dog."
"I don't care what she did—"
"I do."
His grip tightened.
*Yuna,* I thought desperately, *I'm trying. But I need you to have done literally any upper body exercise at any point in your life—*
Then he released me.
Abruptly. Completely. Like a decision made faster than he meant to make it.
He stepped back.
Looked at me for one long, unreadable moment.
Then looked away.
"Just go," he said. "We're done."
The room was completely silent.
I straightened up. Smoothed down my shirt. Picked up my bag from beside the door where I'd left it.
Nobody said anything.
I walked to the front door, opened it, and stepped out into the night air.
The gate clicked shut behind me.
I stood on the pavement outside Park Jaehun's very expensive, very non-murderous home and breathed.
*He let go,* I thought. *Why did he let go?*
I didn't have an answer.
I started walking.
*Dori,* I thought next, *is going to lose his mind.*