Chapter 4

The EDM pounded hard enough to burst his eardrums, and Jun-hyeok made no effort to hide his grimace.

“Let me show you the way myself…”

The nightclub manager, who catered only to VVIPs, stepped into his path. Jun-hyeok merely flapped a hand at him, the way you’d shoo off a bothersome fly.

“Move. And don’t make a nuisance of yourself.”

Leaving the flustered manager behind, he strode on ahead. He had probably walked this route more often than the manager had, since the man had been working here just a few years. By the time he had climbed the stairs and wound through one maze of corridors after another, the ear-splitting music had finally faded a little.

“Damn it. Making me come back to this place.”

The source of the trouble was, as ever, his mother, Madam Kim Seon-yeong. He should have ignored the call outright. Instead he’d picked up without thinking, and that one phone call had tangled him up in it all over again.

In front of a gaudy, glittering door, Jun-hyeok turned the handle and kicked it open the instant it gave. He had made his entrance as loud as he could on purpose, but everyone inside was already too drunk to be startled.

“Weeell…! Look who it is. If it isn’t CEO Han Jun-hyeok himself — the man they say is harder to lay eyes on than a star plucked out of the sky.”

The one person here still capable of holding a conversation was the very man he had come for, which was the only bit of luck in a bad business. Jun-hyeok shook out his bangs irritably and raked them back.

“Get up.”
“You see your own blood brother for the first time in ages, and there isn’t one warm word of greeting?”
“I said come out. Now.”

That was when the women tucked under Han Jun-tae’s arms, one on either side, noticed Jun-hyeok and started making a fuss.

“Oppa, that good-looking one is your little brother? But why do the two of you look so different?”
“Looks like the genes all got loaded onto that side. Oh dear.”

The women sounded every bit as drunk, cackling away and running their mouths. Han Jun-tae’s grin turned ugly in an instant, and he snatched both of them up by the hair. His hands moved so fast and so roughly that the women shrieked. Even when Jun-hyeok came over and twisted Han Jun-tae’s wrist, he wouldn’t unclench his fists.

“Let go, little brother. However fond of you I may be, you ought to know when to step in and when not to, hm?”

Han Jun-tae said it through his teeth, eyes bulging. Jun-hyeok felt a headache coming on again, but he snapped back coldly all the same.

“Hoo. Vice Chairman Han Jun-tae. I didn’t come as your brother today; I’m here on commission, as the CEO of Shield One. This is a summons from Chairman Han Dong-pyo of H Bio. Please understand that the situation is urgent.”

Han Jun-tae flinched at that flat, final tone. At last he let go of their hair and stood, though each hand still clutched a fistful of long strands.

Jun-hyeok let out a shallow breath and radioed through the in-ear mic hooked at his ear.

“Principal secured.”¹

— Alpha-1, standing by at the entrance.

Only then did Han Jun-tae’s eyes go to the tiny earpiece tucked in Jun-hyeok’s ear.

“Lead the way, please.”

At the formal address, Han Jun-tae brushed off his suit lapels, walked out, and staggered. Jun-hyeok had no choice but to grab his arm and prop him up, and an irritated groan slipped out through his teeth.

Today, as always, the only casualty was another innocent celadon, smashed to pieces.

“Darling, when a man’s in business there are hard days — some days go one way and some go another, that’s all.”

Jun-hyeok watched his mother, Madam Kim Seon-yeong, catch hold of his father Han Dong-pyo’s trouser leg and hang on, and felt nothing whatsoever. Perhaps he had simply grown as callused to the sight as a man could get. It no longer gave him even the faintest jolt…

As long as the thing being smashed was a celadon and not his mother or his younger sister Jun-hee, it could break a hundred or a thousand times over for all he cared. Since his father’s rage had turned on his older brother Han Jun-tae instead of his mother, he could just as well have stood up and left.

But today there was a reason he couldn’t.

“You out-of-your-mind bastard — you throw away an important promise and hole up in a bar for days on end?”

Golf club in one hand, Han Dong-pyo jabbed a finger at his eldest, Han Jun-tae, again and again.

“I hear Jun-hyeok went in my place. That settles it, doesn’t it?”
“Oh-ho, well said, you little bastard. And if Jun-hyeok hadn’t shown up there either? What exactly were you planning to do then?!”

At his father’s roar, Han Jun-tae glanced back at Jun-hyeok, and that one look said plenty. Mockery, sneering, contempt, dismissal…

They had long since stopped meaning anything to Jun-hyeok, and he no longer bothered answering them one by one. Still, every time he met that look, he came away feeling filthy.

“As if my beloved little brother would ever do such a thing. I did it knowing full well it would turn out this way. Knowing full well.”

Han Jun-tae turned to his stepmother Kim Seon-yeong, still clinging to his father’s leg, and beamed at her. Her shoulders trembled under that smile, and she looked away.

“A man pushing forty, and this is what he gets up to every time… Tsk, tsk.”

As if sick to death of it, Han Dong-pyo flung the golf club across the room. Han Jun-tae, who had been kneeling only because he had to, brushed off his trouser hems, got to his feet, and spoke up.

“From what I hear there wasn’t any problem at all, was there? Why is it only your children you come down on? Try living with that temper of yours dialed down a bit.”
“This bastard still hasn’t come to his senses!”

Shouts flew back and forth across the living room, and through it all only Jun-hyeok sat serenely, looking on. By now the scene was dull enough to make him yawn. Deciding he’d seen enough, he spoke.

“The defective-goods disposal crew is right here, so stop hounding Hyung for nothing² and let him go.”

That eased the furrow in Han Jun-tae’s brow a little, and, sensing his chance, he stalked off in a huff. Peace settled over the living room at last.

Kim Seon-yeong, who had been warily checking her husband’s mood, announced that she’d go make him some ssanghwa tea³, at least, and fled to the kitchen. Still unable to swallow his anger, Han Dong-pyo dropped onto the sofa, breathing hard, and kept muttering.

“Of all the sons I’ve got, every last one’s a bastard…”
“Leave me out of the ‘bastards’, plural.”

Jun-hyeok stretched out his long, straight legs and rose, and his father’s eyes followed him up. When Han Dong-pyo coughed awkwardly, like a man caught out, Jun-hyeok went on, uninterested.

“From the look of things, I’m the only one who’s going to bring you what you want, Father.”

Only then did Han Dong-pyo swallow his anger and, belatedly all politeness, broach the subject.

“Assemblyman Yun’s girl is young, so it seems best to hold an engagement ceremony first. What do you say?”

Jun-hyeok was so dumbfounded that he only just held back a snort.

“So you do know she’s young. And you still thought of matching a girl barely twenty-four with Hyung, who’s thirty-nine. Impressive.”
“Pathetic brat. As if a bit more than a zodiac cycle’s difference⁴ were any great matter. Tsk!”

A clear, pale face rose in Jun-hyeok’s mind, and he closed his eyes.

If Yun Seo-ha had had no disability…

Just imagining it was horrifying.

It was obvious why Han Jun-tae, who never turned down a young woman, had refused her. He believed, exactly as those truly pathetic creatures had babbled, that she couldn’t see. And with Yun Seo-ha’s proposal coming back to him on top of that, Jun-hyeok went dizzy all over again.

Even when they were children, Han Jun-tae had been easy to see straight through. His older brother had reigned like a king in this house and loathed anything with a defect in it. He wanted only new, perfect things for himself, so broken toys and animals born wrong always ended up as Jun-hyeok’s share.

Thanks to that, his childhood hadn’t been lonely, in its own way. Ironically, though, he had to learn not to show too much affection for anything, because seeing Jun-hyeok happy stuck in Han Jun-tae’s craw. His vicious spite always fell on the innocent things that had received Jun-hyeok’s love.

He opened his eyes to wipe away the stray thoughts and went on.

“No need for an engagement ceremony. Only…”
“Say it.”

Just as Kim Seon-yeong had said, Jun-hyeok was proving unexpectedly amenable, and Han Dong-pyo, delighted, urged him on.

“I intend to get her out of that house quickly. From what I saw that day, she’s left unattended with no security at all, and something quite dangerous nearly happened. Consider yourself informed.”
“Is that so…?”

Word had already spread quietly that the son of K Construction had been booked by the police over what happened at that venue. His father, always quick on the uptake about this sort of thing, could hardly be in the dark about it, or so Jun-hyeok judged.

“If you’re going to put the word out about it later anyway, better to make it look like the real thing than to put on a sham.”
“Ahem. For my part, if you’ll just do that for me…”
“Wasn’t that my role to begin with? Disposing of defective goods and surplus stock, that sort of thing.”

At the venue they had called him an ‘errand boy’, and they hadn’t been far wrong.

His father couldn’t hide the open delight on his face. Sneering at him, Jun-hyeok let the corner of his mouth curl smoothly upward.

“Good. Then let’s talk about the ‘price’ I’ll be taking out of this deal. Surely you weren’t planning to eat for free?”

Back when he first walked into the party hall, Jun-hyeok had had no idea things would go like this. It had all started with that woman, Yun Seo-ha.

Now that the stage was set, he meant to gather in everything he could take, down to the last scrap. He was sick of a life spent absorbing losses. With this as his pretext, Jun-hyeok intended to move up the plan he had been quietly preparing.