If you had to pick the textbook example of an orphan, a thug, and a dead-end life, it would definitely be me. My father was a violent gambling addict, and my mother was a bar hostess, I think? Well, the memory is faint. I only vaguely remember my father's face as he barked, "I can't stand looking at you because you look just like your mother."

But what does any of that matter? My mother ran away in the middle of the night, and my father died shortly after in a hit-and-run. What would someone raised by a violent gambler learn? Yeah, you're right. Fighting.

Living in an orphanage until I was nineteen, all I did was scrap. Then one day, I was lying on the street, grinning after getting the hell beaten out of me, when a man approached.

Looking down at me laughing while covered in blood, he smirked and asked,

"You look like you might be useful. How old are you, high schooler?"

That chance encounter was the beginning. Having been born with a talent for violence, I joined him without hesitation as soon as I graduated high school. Starting my bond with Seo Kang-hyun, who was twenty-five at the time, I rolled around in the blood-soaked underworld for several years. When Kang-hyun finally rose to the position of boss of the 'Muyoung-hoe', I naturally became his right hand.

It's been ten years since I started serving him.

Then one day, he brought a woman home.

Out of nowhere, he declared he was getting married, and after a lightning-fast wedding, he kicked me out of the house we lived in together. I ended up forced into living alone. At my nagging, he got me a place in the same officetel building as his, but I couldn't help the hollow feeling in a corner of my heart.

My boss, who was like a father and a god to me, getting married. We'd lived and breathed together for ten years, so I felt strangely gloomy. Was a house with the lights off always this quiet? I didn't have a single memory of sleeping in a house without him for the past decade. At twenty-nine, feeling all alone again, I couldn't sleep at all.

I'll see him at the office tomorrow anyway... Should I start dating too? I let out a deep sigh and stood up.

Feeling hungry, I headed to the convenience store. I picked up a strawberry cream bread and was walking along, taking a huge bite, when I slammed into someone. I dropped the bread, and the woman opposite me stumbled, stepping right on my precious cream bread, crushing it miserably.

I was pissed and snapped my head up, but... damn, she's insanely pretty.

...Should I start a fight and tell her to pay for the bread? Or should I get her number? Should I just seduce her?