Chapter 22

“Kid, do you know what this is?”

The man holding out a white sheet of paper right in front of her asked with a smile. Lee-jin stared at the paper swaying dizzily back and forth for a long while, but she could not read a single thing.

It was not because she could not read, but because the letters were shaking wildly on their own.

“This is a certificate saying that your adoptive parents have transferred all rights over you to me. They sold you to me.”

For a long time, Lee-jin could not understand what the man was saying. She had been adopted just last year and had only barely lived with her adoptive parents for four months.

They had not been affectionate or especially warm people, but they had at least not starved her or beaten her, so it had only just started to seem to her that if things were like this, she could live well enough too.

“Why…… did they sell me?”

“Who knows. Why do you think they sold you.”

The man’s eyes as he looked at her were sharp, as though he were judging the value of merchandise. The idea that a person could be bought and sold was far too difficult for ten-year-old Lee-jin to understand.

The man’s name was Go Sang-pil. He was a familiar face, because he had suddenly appeared once at the taekwondo gym Lee-jin attended and had made her do this and that.

According to the taekwondo master, he had once been a welterweight champion. Lee-jin had not known what that meant, but since she was told it was something impressive, she had assumed it was.

“Your adoptive father took on a debt of 130 million won, and since he had no way to repay it and was wearing himself out over it, I gave him that money on the condition that I would take you. Those people are not your parents anymore.”

It did not even take two full days for Lee-jin to forcibly accept Go Sang-pil’s words.

Leaving the house of her adoptive parents, who had disappeared overnight, Lee-jin moved into a place Sang-pil had arranged for her. There, besides Wonjae, who had arrived first, there were several other children too.

“Get along with each other, everyone. You’re going to be siblings from now on.”

Staying awake through the entire night, Lee-jin tried to look coldly at the situation she had been thrown into. Why she had suddenly ended up among these irritable children.

Her adoptive parents had said that, even after turning forty, they had no children of their own and had adopted a child at a relative’s recommendation.

Even as a child, Lee-jin could not bring herself to understand that her adoptive parents, who had at least cared enough to send energetic Lee-jin to a nearby taekwondo gym, had sold her.

The year Lee-jin turned fifteen was when she learned the secret of her fate. It was when Sang-pil first told her to learn self-defense.

“You really got dealt a rotten hand in life too.”

The old gangster, who had been teaching her how to hold a knife and about the human body’s vital points at Sang-pil’s order, clicked his tongue. Saying that it was bad luck that she had caught that bastard’s eye.

Only then did she understand. About the man called Go Sang-pil. She had thought he was merely some idle gangster punk who had once been a boxer, but he was a far more vicious and cruel man than Lee-jin had ever guessed.

I was a fool not to realize it, even while watching the children who had lived together in that chicken-coop-like house disappear one by one.

“He said he’d marked down someone quick on their feet. Said she moved fast, so if he trained her up, she’d be fairly useful. And since she’s a girl, he could use her for other things too.”

When the old gangster said that while puffing harshly on a crumpled cigarette, Lee-jin briefly thought of the faces of her adoptive parents, now already fading from memory.

Even until then, Lee-jin had not believed Sang-pil’s words that they had sold her.

“It’s easy to get someone going in and out of gambling dens. In this neighborhood, the moment you step one foot outside your house, places like that are everywhere. Debt? If you put your mind to it, setting someone up for 130 million wouldn’t even take three days.”

As the foul-smelling white cigarette smoke poured out around her, Lee-jin understood everything that day. How Sang-pil, who had taken notice of her, had arranged it all.

But unexpectedly, Lee-jin accepted her fate calmly. Because she thought that if she had remained at Somang Orphanage just as she was, her life might have sunk even lower.

So Lee-jin did not think there was much difference between her adoptive parents and Sang-pil.

Of course, that was nothing more than a daydream from a time when she still did not know the real reality.

When she learned that Sang-pil, whom she had thought merely threatened people to take what he wanted, truly did kill people, and when he ordered her to do it too, Lee-jin ran away.

In less than four days she was caught, dragged back, and beaten half to death, yet she ran away again. And even after being dragged back and beaten until she was a wreck, she recovered and ran away yet again.

In the end, when Lee-jin finally tried to die outright, Sang-pil had no choice but to revise his plans for her. Only then was Lee-jin able to put on boxing gloves instead of holding a knife.

“F*ck, I should’ve known from the start, from the moment you took a knife in someone else’s place trying to save some rag-like b*tch. I cherished you without even knowing you were rotten stock.”

Whatever Sang-pil did, whatever way he made money, Lee-jin did not care. She was already living in a mire where such things happened all the time, too often to bother talking about morality.

So perhaps that was why she stood out even more, struggling so desperately because she did not want to live that way.

After that, Sang-pil kept loosening and pulling the reins on Lee-jin as if taming her. Even so, he never again did anything like putting a knife directly in her hand. He knew she was the kind of person who would simply stab herself with it.

At times, Lee-jin thought she wanted to run away, but no matter where she looked, there was nowhere suitable to leap toward. So little by little, she learned how to submit to her life.

It was not all that bad.

* * *

“Are you really going to keep her by your side?”

When Manager Kang, seated in the front, repeated the same question he had asked a few days earlier, Ki-joo, who had been looking at his phone, raised his eyes. The car leaving the airport had just entered Incheon Bridge.

“What.”

“I’m talking about Song Lee-jin.”

“If she changed her mind while I was in Macau, then forget it.”

“As if she would. It’s a chance to openly follow you around.”

As Manager Kang sneered, openly showing how displeased he was, Ki-joo let out a short laugh.

Thinking about how fully Lee-jin would probably start nagging once she began following him around as his bodyguard was tiresome, but he had no intention of avoiding it.

“No, seriously, why on earth would you need a bodyguard, Boss?”

Apparently unable to hold it in any longer, Manager Kang, who had been polite just moments ago, even twisted around in his seat to look back as he questioned Ki-joo. His face held not just frustration, but outright irritation.

“Why would a man like you, who can deal with more than a dozen people on your own, need one?”

“She asked to do it. She’s my first stalker and my life-saver, so can’t I grant her one little request?”

“You should be figuring out what she’s really after. What woman says she wants to be the bodyguard of a man she likes? It would make far more sense for her to ask to become your girlfriend.”

At Manager Kang’s words, Ki-joo let out an “Ah,” as if he had only just realized it.

But Manager Kang was not fooled. Kwon Ki-joo was not the sort of man who would fail to think of something like that. He was surely the kind of man who, when alone in that hotel room with Lee-jin, had already understood everything and still offered her money, or shamelessly teased her about spending the night with him.

“I know you’re enjoying this, but if you keep it up, you’re going to get hit hard in the back of the head.”

At Manager Kang’s warning, Ki-joo suddenly turned around to look behind him. At that ridiculous act, Manager Kang let out a long sigh, and Ki-joo laughed aloud.

“You went off without me, so just what did you do in Hong Kong and Macau to become this humorless?”

“Don’t make it sound so serious. Like you said, Manager Kang, I’m someone who can handle more than a dozen people alone, so do you really think I’d get hit in the back of the head by some girl?”

Even while listening to Ki-joo’s supremely relaxed voice, Manager Kang shook his head from side to side. When it came to Song Lee-jin, it seemed Ki-joo himself was the only one who did not realize that he had already been acting strangely several times.

What kind of person was Kwon Ki-joo. He was someone who acted as if nothing in the world interested him, while wanting to seize more than anyone else in the world. So until now, he had run forward like a madman with his eyes fixed only ahead.

Even at the very moment when the time finally came and, after serving that man since the age of fourteen, he drove a sashimi knife into his neck, Ki-joo had never once looked elsewhere.