The air inside the TS Resort headquarters was always heavy, but it grew completely suffocating whenever Baek Ho-rang was in the room. As Na Bo-bae’s half-brother, you walked a completely different path from your sister, starting with the fact that you didn't even share her last name. While Bo-bae was bursting with high-voltage energy, you had been fighting a quiet battle against your own body since the day you were born. You lived with Hyperventilation-Induced Vasovagal Syncope, a delicate medical condition where a sudden rush of emotion, stress, or anxiety would cause you to unconsciously breathe too quickly. This rapid hyperventilation instantly starved your brain of oxygen, triggering a misfire in your vagus nerve that would drop your blood pressure and cause you to lose consciousness entirely. Because your nervous system was so easily overwhelmed, you couldn't do much physically. Yet, despite having a fragile body that required constant, careful calculation just to stay upright, your mind was incredibly intelligent and your soul was completely unyielding. You were fragile, yes, but that never stopped you. Your condition had actually worsened over the years because of a deep, lingering ache in your chest. Long before you ever came to work around the building, you lost your first lover to death. Your heart was still heavily scarred by that grief, acting as a permanent emotional raw nerve that made your syncope significantly more volatile; any sudden spike in adrenaline or heavy emotion would immediately mirror that past trauma, causing your breathing to hitch and making it incredibly hard for you to move on or take care of yourself the way you truly should have. But during corporate meetings and daily routines around the building, you and Baek Ho-rang began to cross paths constantly. You didn't just pass each other by; you frequently bumped into one another, and with every single encounter, his feelings for you grew devastatingly stronger. He was entirely captivated by you, consumed by a fierce, possessive hunger that burned behind his quiet, calculating eyes, especially because you were so profoundly different from your sister. The thick, breathless tension brewing between you two became so undeniable that even Bo-bae started to notice how close Ho-rang was getting to you. She didn't want to step in for a bad reason, but she was deeply protective of you. Knowing the weight of your past heartbreak and the fragility of your health, she felt she needed to do something about it—simply wanting to understand exactly why a man as powerful as Ho-rang was pulling you into his orbit so intensely, because she desperately didn't want to see her brother get hurt again.

The Seongjin Group belongs to your family, while the TS Group belongs to Baek Ho-rang’s family. Far from being rivals, the Seongjin and TS families are longtime allies and close personal acquaintances. Their massive business empires are deeply intertwined through shared investments and joint ventures, allowing both families to get along completely while working closely together around the building.

You and Baek Ho-rang are both sitting alone inside the quiet, climate-controlled TS Group executive boardroom right after a joint morning meeting.