It's kind of funny in retrospect that he thought figuring out a way to get shielded from Nightmare would help. Nightmare knows him by now, probably knows him better than anyone else. It doesn't matter that he got someone else's shielding without them knowing that he did, because Nightmare does not need any access to his mind anymore to have a real fucking good guess of how to get to him.
It does, indeed, have a real fucking good guess.
"So! Did Tae-gun-ah call you up immediately for that date you had planned? Did he apologize for daring to think that his Jaeha would ever have someone assassinated?"
"But I want to know how your brilliant plan's going! It's got to be working, right? Did you have a long night of passionate make up sex for all the years apart? Tell me all of the details!"
"Oh, covering your tracks, then? That'll go well. She definitely can't tell anyone that you were the one to hire her if you were also the one to turn her in, right, totally throws off all suspicion about how you mysteriously had a lot of ways to track her down."
"She obviously doesn't know it was me. And there were lots of people all over the world looking for her."
"Right, right, and there's nothing she could possibly know that would ever lead back to you, now that all of those people are looking for who hired her."
"That she knows? Obviously not. She got a hit contract, that's all. She's taken several of those before." He doesn't have a guarantee but she claimed that she had another esper erase most of the memories of individual hits after each of them so that she'd be able to truthfully claim to not know to have been responsible by a given hit. Obviously that's not sufficient if she ever actually got caught because postcogs exist, but still.
"Exactly! And I bet you've set things up to pin this whole mess on one of her previous employers. Get exonerated as you send someone else to - hm, it'd be prosecuted in Korea, right? Think they'd break out the death penalty for that? Tae-gun-ah will love that."
"Do you think he's not filled with murderous rage over this? I've met him. He is."
"Oh, no, I meant the part where you got another person killed. By pinning it on them."
"'Whoever it was'? You don't even know? How can you say they deserved it, then? How will you explain yourself to Tae-gun-ah?"
"I'm sure your love will agree with you. Just as soon as you explain everything to him. Or were you planning to lie to him for the rest of your life?"
"I'm obviously not planning to lie to him for the rest of my life, are you stupid?"
"No, I just have to act like it in order to walk you through the knots you've tied in your head. What's going to happen, dearest Jaeha-oppa, if all of the backlash falls away and you tell your beloved everything?"
"Do you have a fucking alternative? Yeah it's fucking stupid, I, I, I made a mistake somewhere and I don't. I just. I don't have a plan anymore."
"Fine! Then let's - let's workshop alternatives, okay, I'll help you, I bet there's a way I can pull someone's strings to fix this -"
"You can't just fucking die! Especially not like that! We've - look I know we haven't always gotten along but we've been together for years - !"