Chapter 15

“Do I really need to go inside and look? This is the kind of thing you all should be able to handle yourselves.”

“But the Chief Prosecutor is coming in person…….”

“I’m going to show my face again later anyway. There’s no reason I need to check the preparations too, so I’m just going to go eat. Why, do you want me to inspect every single liquor glass too?”

“N-no, Sir.”

The man, answering in a hurry, quickly stepped back with his hands clasped behind him and lowered his head. Then Kwon Ki-joo jerked his head toward Lee-jin as if telling her to come here.

Once again, Lee-jin hurried over like a thrilled stalker.

“Manager Kang will be here soon. He’ll take care of things himself, so don’t bother me.”

“Yes, understood.”

When the gathered men bent at the waist to greet him again, Kwon Ki-joo started walking slowly. Lee-jin followed just behind him at a slight distance.

But her anxious heart would not let her take her eyes off the pile of garbage getting closer and closer.

“The breeze feels nice, so should we walk? It’s not that far from here.”

“Yes.”

“The menu stays the same? I don’t mind eating something else.”

“Ah, samgyeopsal is fine with me, but is there something else you want to eat, Boss?”

“I said I was going to eat samgyeopsal, and Manager Kang had something to say about that. He asked why I was eating something like that that would leave a smell.”

Kwon Ki-joo was saying something more, but by then Lee-jin’s attention was completely fixed on the pile of garbage now right in front of them.

At least there were six more men following behind the two of them, so even if someone suddenly jumped out from there and swung a knife at Kwon Ki-joo, it did not seem like anything too serious would happen.

Even while comforting herself like that, she still could not look away in her unease, and then her gaze suddenly reached deeper into the alley. And she ended up starting violently.

Wonjae was there. Half hidden beside the building where there was an indoor food stall with plastic tables set out all the way onto the sidewalk because of the crowd. As if he had been waiting for Lee-jin to notice him.

The moment his eyes met hers, Wonjae disappeared completely into the darkness.

Since Lee-jin had heard absolutely nothing in advance about Wonjae appearing near Havana, she was thrown into confusion.

“What is it?”

Seeing Lee-jin suddenly stop walking in surprise, Kwon Ki-joo turned his eyes in the direction of her gaze. He swept his eyes once over the crowd of people, then looked back at Lee-jin.

Praying that the corners of her mouth, smiling as if nothing were wrong, would not tremble, Lee-jin spoke as slowly as she could.

“Ah, I th-thought I saw a friend, but when I looked closely, it wasn’t.”

“A friend?”

“Yes, a friend I worked part-time with…….”

At that moment, it came back to Lee-jin like a bolt of lightning who the man in the building across from Havana Club was.

He was Wonjae’s friend. A friend he had met on the dark web, who also belonged to the same secret connection that made homemade firearms and bombs.

The man named Han-gyeong, who had come to the Vigilante Group office once or twice last year to help with Wonjae’s work, had always kept his head lowered in a stooped posture, so the only time Lee-jin had properly seen his face was when he greeted them while leaving after the job was done.

The moment she remembered who the man was, Lee-jin quickly looked toward the pile of garbage where Han-gyeong’s gaze had been resting.

On the surface, it did not seem like anything had changed, but somehow one white bag at the very back looked as though it were slowly swelling.

The moment Kwon Ki-joo, ignoring the fact that Lee-jin had stopped, moved forward first and came close to the pile of garbage, everything happened in an instant.

With bangs and booming explosions, the white bags began to burst. Not all at once, but one after another with split-second intervals between them.

“Kyaaak-!”

While a scream sharp enough to shatter something shook the street, and while the illusion that the ground underfoot was trembling passed through, Lee-jin, taking the hot fragments pouring onto her back, looked at Kwon Ki-joo pinned beneath her.

His eyes, looking slightly startled, were gazing up at her with a confused light in them.

She did not know what came first. Whether the explosion came first, or whether she herself had shoved Kwon Ki-joo with all her strength.

Normally he would not have budged, but Kwon Ki-joo, having relaxed his body without any suspicion, was knocked over just like that by Lee-jin’s tackle, powered by every bit of strength she had.

Amid the noises ringing in her ears, the two of them met each other’s eyes. While Kwon Ki-joo’s black, matte, glass-bead-like eyes searched Lee-jin, weights piled down over her back. Kwon Ki-joo’s underlings, trying to protect him, had thrown themselves over Lee-jin too.

She did not know how many there were, but under the weight that had come crashing over her, Lee-jin could barely even breathe.

Under the bodies piled on top of one another, a black shadow fell, and through the gaps only piercing screams and the angry shouts of men yelling toward something seemed to seep in.

But somehow, Lee-jin felt as though she could see Kwon Ki-joo’s gaze as he looked up at her. He had been a little startled, but she had the illusion that Kwon Ki-joo’s eyes, with not even his breathing disturbed, were crawling over her face.

Even amid the chaos, Lee-jin thought that this moment seemed to be passing very slowly.

[If you’re going to throw your body in either way, wouldn’t it be better to become his benefactor rather than a wh*re? It’ll also be easier to use that way.]

At that moment, the words Wonjae had whispered to her earlier as she left the Vigilante Group office came back to her like a revelation.

It seemed that this, in the end, had been Wonjae’s way of helping Lee-jin, who had looked troubled under Sang-pil’s pressure for the past few days to bring back anything at all, by any means necessary.

[If you want to deceive the enemy, you have to deceive your own side first.]

When even the words Sang-pil always said like a habit came to mind, Lee-jin ground her teeth. Sticking together with Wonjae, even he seemed to be becoming like him.

She was angry at Wonjae for not giving her even the slightest hint, but that was not something she could reveal here.

Lee-jin thought about whether it had been thanks to her athletic reflexes that she had, in that instant, shoved Kwon Ki-joo’s body, or whether from the moment she heard those words from Wonjae, she had instinctively known this would happen.

And also about why she had not simply left alone the man she had approached in order to kill.

“Are you all right, Sir!”

It could only have been a few seconds, but to Lee-jin, after a moment like several hours had passed, she heard the savage voice of a man, and finally the layered weight piled over her began to disappear.

Only now at last did Lee-jin force out the breath that had been pressed down inside her, and she tried to lift her body off Kwon Ki-joo, whom she had been lying over.

“Leaving already? But this is nice.”

But even in a situation like this, Kwon Ki-joo’s arm, smiling calmly, wrapped around her waist and would not let go, and Lee-jin’s face turned bright red. At the moment she had pushed him, it seemed Kwon Ki-joo had fallen backward and pulled her into an embrace.

“Boss!”

Manager Kang’s voice, breath caught up to his throat, came from above their heads. Lee-jin tried once more to pull her body up, but instead Kwon Ki-joo’s arm only tightened around her.

When Lee-jin looked at him with a troubled gaze as if telling him to stop fooling around, Kwon Ki-joo let out a short laugh and slowly raised his body while still holding her. And so, still awkwardly wrapped up together, the two of them ended up sitting overlapped right there on the road.

“Stop making a scene. You’re noisy.”

“Are there any places where you were hurt?”

“Thanks to my brave champion, I had my life saved. Did you happen to see it, Manager Kang?”

“No, that…….”

“Song Lee-jin, who’s only half my size, threw herself at me to save me. She’s my lifesaver.”

For some reason, the smile on Kwon Ki-joo’s face as he lifted only one corner of his mouth sent a chill down Lee-jin’s spine.

Could he have noticed something, had she perhaps pushed him before the explosion even happened—her head was noisy with thoughts like that, but Wonjae’s voice saying that a benefactor was better than a wh*re kept cutting in and disturbing her thinking.