Chapter 4: The corner
Yuna’s knuckles were white around the handle of her umbrella. The downtown tower, usually a beacon of fluorescent boredom, now felt like a tomb she’d narrowly escaped. The rain had dwindled to a mist, but she shook, a fine tremble that had nothing to do with the cold.
She’d stayed late, pretending to organize files, hoping everyone—hoping Lia—would be gone. The women’s restroom was cordoned off with a yellow maintenance sign. No explanations. Just a silence that felt heavier than the hum of the servers.
She just ran. She’s probably home, crying. It’ll be okay. The mantra was thin, threadbare. The taste of artificial mint from her frantic tooth-brushing couldn’t mask the memory of that other, saltier tang. She quickened her pace, heels clicking a staccato beat on the wet sidewalk towards the relative safety of the parking garage.
A shadow detached itself from the deeper blackness of a service alcove.
“Going somewhere, Yuna?”
The voice was a melody Yuna knew, but played on a different, deeper instrument. It vibrated in the hollow of her chest.
She froze. Slowly, she turned.
Lia filled the space. Not the Lia from the office, with her nervous smiles and pastel cardigans. This was a sculpture of emerald muscle and terrifying intent. Tatters of lavender fabric clung to impossible curves. Her eyes were pilot lights in the gloom, fixed on Yuna with a focus that was both intimate and utterly alien.
“Lia? What… what happened to you?” Yuna’s voice was a mouse-squeak.
“You happened,” Lia purred, taking one slow, ground-shaking step forward. “You and your little bathroom ghost. She gave me a gift. I’m just here to return the favor.” A grin split her face, wide and full of sharp white teeth. “Pay it forward, you know?”
Yuna stumbled back, her heel catching a crack in the pavement. She fell, the umbrella clattering away. The damp seeped through her pencil skirt instantly. Before she could scramble up, a massive, green hand wrapped around her upper arm and lifted her. Effortlessly. Her feet dangled inches above the ground.
“Please,” Yuna breathed.
“Please what?” Lia chuckled, her breath warm and strangely metallic. “Please stop? You didn’t.” She began to walk, carrying Yuna like a handbag, away from the streetlights and into the loading bay of a shuttered furniture store. A metal shutter was half-open, a dark maw leading into dry, dusty darkness.
“Let me go! I’m sorry! I didn’t mean—!”
“You didn’t mean what?” Lia tossed her inside. Yuna hit the concrete floor, the air punching from her lungs. “You didn’t mean to open your mouth? You didn’t mean to swallow?” Lia ducked under the shutter, the metal groaning as her shoulder brushed it. She stood inside, blocking all light, all escape. “You meant it. I felt you. You were hungry for it.”
“No,” Yuna sobbed, crawling backward until her back hit a cold, brick wall.
“Yes.” Lia was on her in two strides. A huge hand fisted in the front of Yuna’s ivory blouse and ripped. Buttons pinged like gunshot in the empty space. The delicate fabric tore away. Another wrench and her skirt followed. Lia discarded the rags, leaving Yuna exposed and shuddering on the dusty floor.
The terror was absolute, a white noise in her skull. But beneath it, a horrifying, shameful thread of recognition. This was what she had done. The position was just reversed.
Lia loomed over her, a verdant monument. “Lesson time,” she growled, her voice dropping to a husky, pedagogical whisper. “You don’t get to start something this beautiful and then clock out at five.” She knelt, one knee on either side of Yuna’s hips, caging her. The heat coming off her green skin was immense, like pavement at noon.
“Don’t do this,” Yuna whimpered, turning her face away.
Lia’s hand, impossibly gentle, cupped her jaw and turned it back. Her thumb brushed Yuna’s lower lip. “You already did. To me. Now feel it.”
She applied pressure. Yuna resisted, clamping her mouth shut, tears streaming down her temples into her hair. Lia’s other hand moved, a blur of green. A single, claw-tipped finger traced a line down Yuna’s sternum, over her belly, not cutting, but promising. The threat was clear, explicit, and worse than any pain.
Yuna’s resolve, forged from fear and shame, shattered. Her jaw went slack.
Lia’s smile returned, triumphant. She settled her weight. “Good girl.”
The experience was nothing like the bathroom. That had been shock, a surreal violation by a phantom. This was present, physical, and overwhelmingly alive. It was not a ghost, but a force of nature claiming her. The same salt-metallic taste, but amplified, layered with a terrifying, musky vitality that was uniquely Lia. It was domination, absolute and impersonal, a circuit of power being closed. Yuna gagged, her body trying to rebel, but Lia held her in place, a low, resonant hum of pleasure vibrating through her into Yuna’s very bones.
Yuna’s fingers scrabbled at the dirty concrete, her cries muffled. She was drowning in it, in the sheer ness of the other woman, in the echo of her own sin.
A sudden click. A beam of light cut through the gloom.
“Hello? Is someone in here? I’m calling the—oh, my god.”
The voice was familiar. Sharp. Haughty. Currently dripping with disbelief.
Yeji, their department manager, stood frozen in the partially open loading bay, her smartphone’s flashlight illuminating a scene her brain refused to process. Her perfectly styled bob seemed to defy the dust in the air. Her eyes, wide behind her chic glasses, went from Yuna’s pinned, disheveled form to the massive, green-skinned woman crouched over her.
For a second, the world hung suspended.
Yeji’s survival instinct, finely tuned by a decade of corporate politics, kicked in. She took a step back, her mouth working silently. She turned to run.
The shutter door slammed down with a deafening, final CRASH, plunging the space into near-total darkness but for the bobbing light of her dropped phone. Lia had moved with impossible speed.
“No appointments without an invitation,” Lia’s voice murmured from the darkness near the sealed exit.
The phone’s light swept erratically as Yeji fumbled for it, catching the nightmare in glimpses: the gleam of green skin, the wreckage of Yuna’s clothes, Yuna’s own wide, tear-filled eyes reflecting the LED beam.
Lia emerged into the light. She plucked the phone from Yeji’s limp hand and crushed it in her palm. The plastic crackled. The light died.
A soft, phosphorescent green glow began to emanate from Lia’s skin, just enough to see. Yeji was backed against the shutter, her professional composure a shattered vase.
“You… you’re… Lia from Accounting?” Yeji stammered.
“Formerly,” Lia said. She reached out and took Yeji by the lapel of her expensive blazer, lifting her until her patent leather pumps left the ground. She carried the sputtering, gasping manager back to the center of the room and dropped her unceremoniously next to Yuna.
Yeji scrambled away from both of them, hitting the opposite wall. She looked at Yuna, naked and shivering, then at the giant green woman who now stood between them and any hope of escape.
Lia looked from one terrified woman to the other. The hunger in her jade eyes hadn’t dimmed; it had refracted, multiplied. A dark, joyous sound rumbled in her chest.
“A supervisor,” she mused, her voice a velvet threat. “Perfect. Now it’s a proper team-building exercise.” She knelt down, her gaze holding Yuna’s. “You see? This is how it grows. This is what you wanted. You just didn’t know it yet.”
Yuna, her body humming with a foreign, forced intimacy, her spirit broken against the bricks, could only stare back. In the faint green light, she saw something new flicker in the depths of Lia’s eyes—not just hunger, but a teaching cruelty. And she saw, to her utter horror, a faint, answering shimmer, a hint of mossy color, begin to trace the veins in her own wrist where it lay against the cold floor.