~Min-hee~

Min-hee hung up, what Tao had said didn't reassure her. It made her feel a little better, but, the reality was a group of men were yelling downstairs, and she could hear them banging on the door. Then she heard them come in, breaking windows, a heavy thump that sounded like the front door hitting the floor hard downstairs.

Min-hee almost screamed at the noise, and she couldn't help but think about Suri down there by herself, she could still hear her barking at the people coming in. She didn't want to lock the little dog out but...Tao had told her to move something in front of the door, so she went over to a bookshelf and started pushing it in front of the door.

Downstairs she could hear one clear voice above the rest. "Search the whole house! I want that bastard in front of me in three minutes, or someone's getting fired--permanently!"

This was one of those gangs then. Min-hee had known that, but to confirm the thought was like swallowing castor-oil, bitter and terrible, something she should know, but still hard to swallow. Worse then that, they were going to search the whole house, it was only a matter of time before they came upstairs, only a matter of time before they came pounding on the door, and if they could knock down the front door, this door would be child's play.

After Min-hee had the bookshelf in front of the door, she sat in the reading chair, just watching the door. She hoped Tao came soon, she hoped he could fix it somehow, she didn't want him to get hurt again. She wanted him to stop fighting, but the reality was that he would have to if he showed up.

She listened to her heart pound in her ears, seemingly louder then everything else, her breathing felt painfully loud over it too. This was a gang, they'd kill her without a second thought. It scared her beyond any amount of fear that she'd ever felt, and she felt goosebumps all across her skin.

She hid her face in her hands, trying to calm her breathing, telling herself that Tao would be there soon and...do something. If what she heard was anything to go by, she had three minutes or less.

She heard a hard pound on the door. Less. She had less.

"This door is blocked!" she heard someone yell.

"You know what that means, don't you? We've got a rat in the trap, let's have a little fun dragging him downstairs."

They must have thought only Tao would be in the house. Min-hee crawled away from the door sitting behind the counter of the minibar. That wasn't a good hiding place, they'd find her in no time, but it would delay it, and it was the only place to go. There wasn't even a window in the room. It was hopeless, even if Tao came right at that moment, they'd still get to her first.

Min-hee closed her eyes. She wished she could disappear. Disappear like how the world does when she took off her glasses.

The world was never that perfect though.

She heard them ram into the door, the bookshelf wobbling and barely holding it's ground, books falling from it with each hit to the door. She shivered.

It hadn't occurred to her before, she wasn't sure why, but it was very likely that when they came in, they'd kill her. They were looking for Tao, if they didn't find him, they were a gang, they wouldn't let her hang around.

She should have felt something akin to an intense sadness at that, or at least it should have made her more scared then she already was. But she couldn't be more scared then she was at that moment.

When the door opened, the bookshelf came crashing down so loud, Min-hee could hear nothing at all over it, and her heart jumped, the speed of it picking up and hammering harder against her chest, playing out a rhythm that begged her to run away. There was nowhere to go, so she stayed put, biting down on her lip so hard she tasted blood.

"Come on out, rat...!" One of the gang members said in sing-song.

"He-e-ere, Panda-panda-panda...!" Sang another.

They sounded close. Of course they did. There was only a few places to hide in the room. Min-hee hugged her knees closer to her chest, biting her lip harder to stop the shaking.

"Oh! We know where you are, would you like us to find you, or would you like to come out and take this like a man?"

Min-hee swallowed. She could hear them walking right up to the minibar.

"Playing games until the end, hmm?" One said, putting his hands right on the counter above her head, making another one chuckle.

Min-hee slowly looked up above her head, only to meet the eyes of one them, his mouth and nose covered with a black mask. She wanted to scream, but the sound caught in her throat, and she just stared.

"What the hell is this?" He asked, then reached behind the counter and yanked her up by her wrist.

Another one of them, dragging a metal bat behind him around the counter, chuckled. "Looks like we found a little female rat!" If he wasn't wearing a face-mask, she was sure she'd see him grinning big.

"I don't have time to deal with female rats." A third one said, pulling at Min-hee's hair.

She closed her eyes tight, still biting her lip to stop from screaming. What good would screaming do? None. Nothing at all, maybe attract more attention from any other gang members in the house, and she wasn't going to let them have the satisfaction.

"Well, wait, what if she can tell us where the other one is?" The first one sneered, talking to the third one like he was tired of him speaking. Then he used his grip on her wrist to push her against the glass cabinet that stored the various flutes and shot glasses. The glass cabinet door broke from the force and glass rained on her. "Well, where is he? Squeal, rat."

Min-hee winced, the broken glass had found a few ways to dig into her back, and she had shattered glass all over her hair and anywhere else it had found somewhere to rest and cut into her.

Despite that, she wasn't going to just submit. As much as she'd wanted to scream for help, as much as she feared they'd just kill her, it made her angry to be pushed around. "G-go to Hell." She choked out, the pain making it hard to speak.

He shoved her toward the cabinet, this time so hard that the glasses within came spilling out when she tipped and broke a shelf. She blinked back tears and bit back a scream.

"Then you're useless, huh?" The one with the bat said.

The next second, he swung the bat at her, hitting her hard on the head. She was surprised she was even conscious enough to register that, all she could hear was a shrill noise. The first one released her wrist, and she found herself on the floor, laying on broken glass.

She absently felt pain from the glass bits pricking and stabbing her skin, but her vision was swimming, her eyes clouding. Eventually, everything faded to black.

~Tao~

He pulled up to the backdoor, literally, right up the walkway and hastily parking in front of the door before rushing out of the car and throwing the backdoor open. It didn't matter to him so much about being quiet, he just wanted to get to Min-hee first, before someone hurt her.

Make it work with Min-hee for me? He wished he could stop hearing Chanyeol's voice.

On his way in, he ran into one of the Boss' thugs, who was about to sound the alarm before Tao first took him by the shoulders, kneeing him in the groin, then taking his arm and twisting it behind him and pushing him to the ground before he had time to react.

Tao left him writhing on the floor and ran down the hallway, the next person he encountered was in the kitchen, this one was big, at least twice Tao's size when it came to muscle structure, and outfitted with a black beanie and a black face-mask, his hands with brass knuckles, and he absolutely saw Tao coming.

He came charging at Tao, and the only thing he could do with him coming right at him like that was duck, and the momentum from running down the hall caused him to slip and fall on the tiled floor. He ended up sliding just out of the way of the blow the gang member was throwing toward his face.

He got up as fast as he could, preparing himself for the next attack. And there definitely was going to be a follow up.

"You're going to die tonight, traitor!" The gang member growled, swinging at Tao with those brass knuckles.

From the way Tao's ribs ached, from the way his chest hurt, from how he could feel bruises forming all over his body, he certainly felt like he might.

He ducked out of the way of most of the punches, but he ended up catching one or two to the stomach. The pain was like wildfire, burning from the inside. He couldn't take much of this, he knew he couldn't, not without passing out, not without causing too much damage for it to be fixable.

He took a quick look at his surroundings, backing away as he did so. It was a kitchen, he wasn't left with much as a way of injuring the thug enough to stop him from following him. If Min-hee wasn't in trouble when he got to where he left her, she most certainly would be if he brought this lug with him.

Tao picked up the closest thing he could, which happened to be a chair, he took it and put whatever he could behind it as he hit the thug over the head with it. After the blow, he stumbled for a second, then collapsed to the floor, and Tao was glad it worked, he didn't have any other plan.

Tao was breathing hard, he knew he shouldn't be breathing nearly as hard as he was, and he knew it shouldn't hurt as much as it did, but there was little he could do about that.

He stole a quick glance over at the kitchen door, knowing that to get to the stairs, he had to go through it, and between the stairs and the door was a pretty big space where he would be absolutely visible to whoever was in there, and it was best he was seen by the fewest people possible.

He sighed inwardly, then took the thug's beanie and mask. Pulling the hat on his head and tying the mask over his mouth and nose. At least then, he'd look like one of them from a glance, and if he knew the boss, he'd told them to find him within some impossible time limit, if he rushed, no one would suspect him of anything.

So with that all in place, he rushed out of the kitchen and straight to the stairs, taking them two at a time. He was right, no one had called him out on his disguise yet.

He hoped Min-hee was alright, he knew he was late, he knew he was, but he hoped it didn't get too bad before he got there. If she got hurt, it would be all his fault again. He couldn't have her blood on him too.

As he was running down the upstairs hallway, he noticed how the study's door was open, off it's hinge toward the top, a clutter of books around the entrance. It didn't look right, he was already, definitely, late. What they had done to her already, he could only imagine, and he didn't want to imagine.

He came running into the room, not caring who saw him. The room wasn't empty, three gang members stared at him, one with a bat, one with a thick chain wrapped around his arm, and the third empty handed.

The one with the bat frowned, then realization dawned, "Hey! You're not--!"

Tao didn't let him finish, having already gotten close enough to punch him in the face. Tao sent him stumbling backwards, dropping the bat and grabbing his bleeding nose.

Tao was happy to take the bat, twirling it around in circles one handed like a windmill as he advanced to the one with the chain. This one was the one that had choked him, of that, Tao was sure. He held the bat over his head, then came down as hard as he could aiming for him.

The one with the chain ducked out of the way, but by then Tao was already getting ready to hit him again, and this time he nailed him right on the head. Not as hard as the first one, the first attempt having hurt too bad to try again.

When it hit, the gang member crumpled to the ground.

With him taken care of, Tao focused on the last one, the empty handed one. All it took was a glare and he took off, along with the other one that now had a bloody nose, probably downstairs to give a report to the Boss. Tao didn't particularly care, he was just glad he was gone.

He let the end of the bat drop to the ground, holding the handle of it loosely. Just that little bit of fighting had tired him out, and everything hurt. But he walked toward the minibar where the gang members had been hanging around.

He'd told Min-hee to stay put, she should be in the room, so he swallowed, trying to calm himself down from the adrenaline rush he'd barely noticed he was experiencing and walked around to the other side of the minibar. It was really the only place to hide in the room, and it definitely looked like the gang members had broken into the room.

He dropped the bat completely. He was greeted with Min-hee lying on a bed of broken glass, absolutely unconscious. He knelt next to her, not so much caring about the glass he was putting his full weight on. He was already in pain, more pain couldn't possibly be worse.

He felt for her pulse first. She had one, at the very least, she had one. He took her by the waist and pulled her out from behind the minibar, laying her on his lap.

Some promise he'd made. She ended up getting hurt anyway, and he didn't know how to get out of this. What a stupid idiot I am. He picked glass shards out of her hair, he was entirely aware of how vulnerable he was leaving himself, but he had no plan for what to do next, so it didn't particularly matter if he moved or stayed put, either way, he'd run into someone. And he couldn't exactly carry Min-hee at the moment.

"Min-hee, you dork, wake up." He said, then kissed her forehead. "I'm here, just like I said I'd be, wake up." Already, he had splotches of her blood on his hands.

"Touching."

Tao looked up at the sound of the voice to be met with the overly toothy grin of the Boss' mask. His breath caught in his throat, he knew this was coming. The man who outright just killed his right hand man without a second thought wouldn't just let his subordinates do this job, the Boss didn't like losing.

"Know what else is touching?" The Boss asked, his voice like poison. "It's really touching to know where a person's loyalty really lies, who they'll do anything for, who they'll kill themselves for. It feels like a cold knife to the neck, like a cold reality. Like death. Perhaps you'd like to know what it feels like..." The Boss took out his gun, casually loading it. "You first, or your muse?"

Tao swallowed. This was probably it, there was no way out of this, and he knew there wasn't. "Pl-please...Jongdae..."

"What did you say?" The Boss growled, aiming the gun at Tao's forehead. "Who gave you the right?"

Tao closed his eyes for a second. It wasn't so much a right as it was he'd lost all ability to care. What did it even matter what he called the Boss now? He was likely to shoot anyway.

"You must want this to end quickly, Huang, you know the rules." He pressed the gun against Tao's forehead. "Those who say that name get a one way ticket to hell."

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A/N: LONG CHAPTER Y'ALL~

Kim Jongdae tho xD It's because of his smile, it always looks like he's up to something when he smiles--at least to me xD

~Neri