Chapter Text
Emerging from the shower, Logan looks at himself in the fogged bathroom mirror. He expects to see swollen eyes and his complexion toned down by years of chemotherapy. Yet in his reflection is a healthy man. He doesn’t deserve it.
A curt knock interrupts his self deprecation. Draping himself in a black bathrobe, he swings open the door.
He is met with two determined eyes.
The eyes of a woman he thought would never speak to him again.
“Let's destroy them together.”
__
He lets her inside wordlessly. He's too stunned to speak properly and they're past the point of playing games with each other. She enters clutching the strap of her bag while her eyes scan his suite.
"I didn't want to come here," she says.
"Why did you?"
She takes a sip of the drink he offers her, careful not to graze his hand.
"You can be useful." Her chocolate eyes crease imperceptibly as she studies him. "And you should be, given what you've done."
"If I told you who I was-"
She jabs her whiskey down, the glass table shuddering.
"Not now. First we make our moves."
He nods. She pulls two stacks of paper out of her bag, placing them on the table that separates them.
"The list of names from Kim’s testimony. Then this is the list of your parent's associates you gave me. We start with the common threads. Names, phone numbers, bank accounts, anything that connects the rich families to the mafia."
"How do we incriminate Sapiro with just that?" he inquires, scanning through the files.
"We start with economic ties. The people who got rich off her death must be the ones who caused it". She looks at the amber liquid in her glass, and drowns it. Her nose squints in a way he shouldn’t find adorable. “I told you that, back when you were posing as an innocent student.”
He pushes a wet strand off his eyes. "You're still angry at me."
Her response is a deadpan look.
A swell of agitation courses through him, and he gets up. His fingers clench and unclench involuntarily.
"I couldn't tell you before I knew you weren't working with them! Do you think I came to Korea telling everyone my plan? Why am I the one on trial here?"
She snickers darkly.
"Logan," she advances toward him, her steps deliberate. "If you were on trial against me," he holds his ground, and she's merely an inch away. Running a finger across his chest, he swallows, "you'd tremble even more than you are right now." She delivers a final strike, pressing the back of her finger precisely where she stabbed him last time. He conceals his wince of pain, but in the gleam of her eyes, she catches it.
She knew exactly his weak spot.
"Stop it! If we're gonna do this, you can't hold all the cards. We'll make the plan together. I have a third of my family’s money and a talent for getting into the hardest places. I'm in this with you! But only as real partners."
She studies him, her gaze adamant. He can see how she's getting through witnesses in the stand.
“You wouldn’t have come here if you didn’t want the same thing.”
He sensed her gaze during the concert, the instant he stepped onto the stage and winced at the blinding lights. Aware that all eyes were on him, he materialized next to the piano. She was the one who understood his need to shield that girl from bullying and expose the callousness of the spectators.
He turns to the glass window. “In the concert, all I could see in Rona’s eyes was Sol Ah.” He hears her gulp, and he can’t face her. “Alone, powerless while people whispered about her. My parents used to have her sing in the living room to entertain important businessmen. I heard her voice crack and I left, I rolled my wheelchair to my room and locked the door. I shut my ears and eyes to what they could be doing to her, old men leering over a girl where no one would see them.” Su Ryeon covers her mouth, horrified. “The first times, she wouldn’t fall asleep, she knocked on my door afterwards, begging me to tuck her in”. He’s hurting Su Ryeon and himself by reliving this, but he has to make her believe he wants to atone. He swallows the lump on his throat. “She wanted me to sing her a lullaby, music was the only thing that would calm her. I was on the other side of the door when she was pleading for me to let her in. And I screamed at her to go away.” He turns to her, and her face is worse than he imagined, marred by absolute horror. At him. “You were right about me, I'm guilty,” he whispers.
She hugs herself tightly, her nails digging in her arms. He slowly touches the space between her fingers and she looks up at him.
“I want to avenge Anna as much as you do. I want to find the Sapiro members and tear their limbs out one by one.” She’s ready to pounce at him, but he holds her arm. “I won't, because you'll put them behind bars and I'll do it with you. I've never been so close. You're my best shot. And I'm yours."
He takes a step back and holds out his hand for her to shake.
She gives him the files instead.
If he were in her shoes, he wouldn’t want a partner like him either. And he hasn’t told her everything about Sol Ah.
"Alright,” she accepts the partnership and he lets out a breath as she walks to the door. “But Logan,” she turns, “you will pay too. After we take them down, don't expect a happy ever after."
Out of all the things she said, this shatters him.
—
Dan Tae is waiting in the living room, perched on his leather armchair with a glass of high end scotch. She wonders if she should play the forgiving wife, kiss him goodnight and keep up the ruse. As if she wasn’t just conspiring with her student.
The choice is taken from her when he puts down his drink. “Where the hell were you?”
“I went for a walk to calm down,” she replies evenly.
“No wife of mine wanders on the streets at night, like a-”
“You know, for a moment there -just a moment- I thought you were worried about me,” she doesn’t bother to hide the hurt.
Surprisingly, he doesn’t contradict her. The stage of their marriage shakes.
“Going against Seo Jin won’t do us any good. And the twins will suffer,” he adds as an afterthought.
“I’m pulling the twins off the Academy. If this is how Seo Jin operates, I don’t want anything to do with her.” Let him think that’s why she’s angry.
“She is just her music teacher, she didn’t do this! It was-” he shuts his mouth. He will never admit how he taught his daughter to behave.
She makes her lower lip tremble, hunches her shoulders and gives him the ‘pitiful wife’ look he secretly enjoys. “For once, I wanted you to be on my side.”
She is manipulating him, but the sentence rings bitterly true.
—
The door is ajar, and the scene halts Su Ryeon in her tracks. Seok Kyun, sprawled on the floor, ripping photographs and school letters, engrossed in destruction, leaving a chaos of piles around her. A maniacal expression distorts her face.
Su Ryeon rushes to her, her instinct urging her to offer comfort , but when her hand touches her messy hair, Seok Kyun screams.
“Go away!” she fists another diploma and tears the expensive paper apart. “Why can’t you let me win?”
“Honey, the concert was for all of you, sabotaging Rona-”
“Rona, Rona, Rona,” she parrots, voice dripping with contempt. “All you care about is Rona. I am your daughter! And I try so hard for this concert, but Rona gets the sympathy points. Is it because she has no father? Seol Ah won and you cared about her. Should I be an orphan too?”
“Don’t say that.”
“Leave. You are ruining my life, mom.”
You too , she thinks bitterly.
“Get out!” She grabs a frame of the class graduation and throws it at her, the glass shattering inches away from Su Ryeon’s feet.
“Leave her be.” Seok Hoon wordlessly picks up the glass, gives a nod to his sister and takes Su Ryeon’s limp hand.
They stand in the corridor and she reaches to brush his hair, just how she did when he was a baby. It’s like she blinked and a decade slipped away , leaving her to not recognise her kids, or her husband.
“You were worried about Rona too,” she says but he moves out of her grasp.
“But I did nothing.” Seok Hoon looks torn. It’s the first time she sees him like that, not her carefree boy, not a man yet, but a person she doesn’t know.
“Because of your sister?”
His lips harden. She can handle everyone yelling at her, but Seok Hoon’s stoic silence unnerves her. He’s been the fodder for his sister’s explosions, but no one can tell what he thinks.
Still, she tries. She will always try for her son.
“Your heart was in the right place,” she comforts him. Is a teenage infatuation enough for her son to be a better person, when four months prior he locked Seol Ah in a burning car? She’s always believed he was more like her than Dan Tae, but maybe that’s what she tells herself to not be a complete failure of a mother. “Do you want mom to tuck you in?”
It’s more for her benefit than his. She needs the comfort of another body in the bed. Sleeping next to a loved one like she hasn’t done in years.
“Ugh, no.”
She goes to sleep alone, in the huge bed that grows emptier every day. She takes a pill from the box on her bedside table and after a few agonizing minutes, darkness pulls her in. The same nightmare tortures her. Seol Ah, falling from the balcony to her death, rivers of blood pooling around her still warm body. How can she see that scene so clearly in her mind, when it didn’t happen? Seol Ah was killed in her house, while Su Ryeon was dancing in her pretty pink dress with her rich friends in her luxury palace.
She wakes up with a scream.
Someone moved the body.
—