The Contractual Ceiling
"Logline": A brilliant but impoverished data analyst is forced into a fake engagement with her company's ruthless CEO, a man who values profit over people, only to find out that the contract's stipulations cannot govern the messiness of the heart.
**Main Characters:**
* **Kang Jihoon:** The young, formidable CEO of "Aethelgard Industries." Orphaned and raised by his demanding grandfather, he believes love is a strategic liability and human connections are a distraction from success. He is brilliant, isolated, and emotionally walled-off.
* **Park Sora:** A gifted data analyst working in the bowels of Aethelgard. She is drowning in medical debt from her younger sister's chronic illness. Despite her circumstances, she is fiercely proud, optimistic, and deeply loyal to her small circle of family and friends.
**The Plot:**
The novel begins with Sora on the brink of a major breakthrough at work, having pinpointed a serious error with a large company project, but was broken by the unrelenting calls from the debt collectors. While Jihoon has a different kind of threat: He has to be married to inherit and take over the company. His grandfather had included it in the will as a last resort from his traditional grandfather. To Jihoon, marriage is a business deal above anything else.
When he finds himself in a desperate situation, Jihoon decides he needs a fake fiancée to finally silence his grandfather and fend off the endless gold-digging socialites. He doesn't need a real wife; for him, she would be just an employee - someone he can control with a contract. His instruction to HR is to find him such a girl from a low profile employee pool of the company.
Invited to the stunning top-floor office, where she is expecting to be fired due to her recent aloofness, Sora receives, instead, a proposition too extravagant for words: to be CEO Kang's fake fiancée for a year. In return, he will pay off her debts, and the best medical care would be arranged for her sister. It's a cool, clinical transaction. For Sora, quite literally, a devil's bargain: a year of her life in exchange for her sister's future.
**The Circumstances (Why Love Should Be Impossible):**
1. **The Power Imbalance:** He is the all-powerful CEO; she is a contract employee. He dictates terms, and she is forced to accept them. Their relationship begins as a master-servant dynamic.
2. **Clashing Worldviews:** Jihoon is cynical and believes everything has a price. Sora, despite her hardships, believes in intrinsic human value. Their arguments are not just romantic spats but fundamental clashes of philosophy.
3. **The "Invisible" Girl:** In public, Sora must play the part of a polished socialite, but in private, Jihoon treats her as invisible, a pawn in his game. He never expects to see *her*.
4. **A Secret Threat:** Sora continues to investigate the flaw in the company's project, a project Jihoon is personally championing. Her professional integrity puts her on a direct collision course with her "fiancé," creating a tense secret of her own.
**Falling in Love (No Matter What)**
Love comes quietly in unexpected, small moments. Jihoon watches how fiercely Sora loves and sacrifice for her sister, a kind of loyalty he has never had from his money, while Sora gets glimpses then of a back-boy lonely, pressured by the icy facade of the CEO—the boy who will be working late not for profit but for having no home worth going to.
Their fake dates and public appearances force a proximity that the contract did not bargain for; he finds himself at a loss because she makes a passing remark that criticizes his business plans; he becomes clumsy in his really nonchalant attempts at helping her sister get back on her feet. As the weight of genuine connection crosses them, the walls they've both constructed break down.
The crisis comes one day when a flaw found by Sora threatens the collapse of the company.