Chapter 5

Lee-jin quietly recalled Kwon Ki-joo’s face, which she had already been seeing to the point of exhaustion for several days now. She had thought people only said someone looked much better in person about celebrities, but apparently it also applied to ordinary people who were incomparably handsome.

He’s handsome, so why doesn’t he become an actor, or with that height, a model, instead of acting like a gangster? That had been what Lee-jin thought when she first saw a photo of Kwon Ki-joo.

But the moment she actually saw him right in front of her, Lee-jin found herself thinking, what did it matter what he did.

He was, in himself, ‘Kwon Ki-joo.’ A man so perfect that no modifier could fully describe him. A man burdened with loud rumors, yet even those shone on him like medals. That was Kwon Ki-joo.

Lee-jin wondered if there was really any woman who could resist him once he set out to seduce her.

Along with the foolish thought that even Mimi, the moment she stepped into the bedroom with Kwon Ki-joo to install a camera, would fall completely for him and end up confessing every one of her own crimes.

“Yeah, he’s handsome. So much so that you wonder if a person is even allowed to look like that. I even thought, why is someone with a face like that acting like a gangster.”

“Really? I heard he’s tall and has an amazing body too. These days, Sohee-unnie works at Havana. They say whenever Boss Kwon Ki-joo shows up, the whole floor turns upside down. The girls working there and the customers alike apparently all lose their minds.”

“Yeah, I can believe that.”

“Ah, what a shame. If you hadn’t been caught, I’d have been the one diving into Kwon Ki-joo’s bed.”

“It’s still not too late. It’s probably just a whim anyway, so you do it according to the original plan.”

At Lee-jin’s words, spoken with no sign of interest at all, Mimi giggled and cast a sidelong glance at Wonjae. As if teasing him, since he was restlessly hovering beside Lee-jin.

But Lee-jin did not have the room right now to care about things like that.

Kwon Ki-joo had given his permission for her to keep up the stalking, but that did not mean she could happily go on following him around. She only had one life, so she had to back out at this point. The real issue was how desperately she could appeal that to the deputy leader, who did not care in the slightest about anyone else’s safety.

Lee-jin wondered what kind of expression Go Sang-pil would make if she asked whether she could hide somewhere for a few days until Kwon Ki-joo’s whim died down.

Maybe Sang-pil would get rid of Lee-jin, who had become unnecessary. For good.

* * *

But Lee-jin’s pointless worries vanished cleanly in less than two days.

“Hello?”

Kwon Ki-joo had personally shown up in front of the shabby five-story building where the Vigilante Group rented space.

Leaning against a sleek black luxury sedan, he greeted Lee-jin warmly as she hurried down in a panic. With four cars trailing behind him in a row like a tail.

“H-how did you…… come here…….”

“Since you weren’t showing up at all, it felt empty. People say you may not notice when someone moves in, but when someone’s gone, it shows, right?”

White cigarette smoke drifted toward Lee-jin on the calm curve of his smile. As the smell of cigarettes, as familiar as the air itself, suddenly seemed to tighten around her throat, Lee-jin did her best to pull up the corners of her mouth.

After being released from the warehouse by the reservoir, Lee-jin had not been able to summon the courage to follow Kwon Ki-joo again at all, so after talking with Mimi and Wonjae at the Vigilante Group office, she had holed herself up at home. She had wanted to do the same today, but Sang-pil had called for her, so she had no choice but to come out.

And yet, as if he knew Lee-jin was here right now, Kwon Ki-joo suddenly appeared.

The moment she heard that he was downstairs looking for her, Lee-jin had practically lost her soul and run all the way down from the third floor.

“I was curious where you were and what you were doing, but if I went directly to Roxana, I figured Boss Kim might interpret my intentions differently. And on a nice day like this, it wouldn’t do to spill blood.”

As Kwon Ki-joo said that and looked up at the sky with a shameless expression, Lee-jin also lifted her gaze without thinking.

A nice day, my foot. The sky was thick with clouds, as though rain might start pouring down at any moment, and it seemed to be mocking her.

“I checked the time and figured it was about when the neighborhood watch activities would start, so I came by here. I heard you had a part-time job too, so have you just been here the whole time?”

Kwon Ki-joo, who had been looking at Lee-jin with a face as deeply troubled as the gloomy sky above, let his gaze drift past her shoulder.

After looking around the surroundings for a long while, as if appraising them, or perhaps merely casting his eyes there meaninglessly, Kwon Ki-joo looked back at Lee-jin.

“What kind of part-time job did you do today?”

“Well…… there wasn’t any work, so today I was just resting.”

“And even so, you didn’t follow me? Don’t tell me your feelings already changed just because I scared you a little?”

All sorts of unreadable things clung to Kwon Ki-joo’s smiling lips as he acted as though he were hurt.

She could not tell whether he was joking, or probing her again. She could not even figure out why he had come all the way here and thrown this whole area into tension.

“Did you really come here…… to find me?”

“I told you, didn’t I?”

“Why?”

“I said so already. Since you weren’t showing up, I felt disappointed. After I went so far as to say I’d play along, don’t you think it’s a bit cold of you not to show even a shadow of yourself?”

“Well, there’s a match in four days…… and I have to practice, and I need to manage my stamina…….”

Lee-jin, who had been rambling on, abruptly stopped. The eyes of Kwon Ki-joo, who had been listening to her, had suddenly started to gleam as if he had just discovered something interesting.

Unease filling her, Lee-jin unconsciously took a step back, and Kwon Ki-joo smiled brightly like a painting.

“No wonder I felt like not stopping by Roxana today.”

The words ‘What the hell does that mean?’ rose all the way up to her throat, but afraid of hearing the answer from the grinning Kwon Ki-joo, Lee-jin swallowed the question back down hard. An uneasy feeling began to creep over her that something was truly going wrong.

The Kwon Ki-joo she had watched all this time was a very self-willed man.

Just from watching him, it was obvious that he was extremely capricious, and perhaps because of that, he was not a man with anything like a routine. If it were not for Manager Kang pressing him along, there were even days when not even his shadow could be seen.

Even so, Lee-jin knew very well that Kwon Ki-joo was an incredibly busy man. After charging in alone with nothing but a sashimi knife and taking the head of the boss Lee-jin had once served, earning himself the nickname that infamous son of a wh*re, he had been too busy swallowing up everything around him as if he had been waiting for it.

Kwon Ki-joo met people almost every day. He always drank with a new woman by his side, and sometimes he showed generosity by putting up betting money at gambling dens. There were also plenty of days when he would invite people into the luxury room salon he ran himself and part from them with a smile.

She did not know exactly what happened behind closed doors, but once the night grew deep and he disappeared with a woman, it was not uncommon for the next day to reveal yet another business site turned into a bloodbath, newly belonging to Kwon Ki-joo.

Kwon Ki-joo was absolutely not an idle man. Which meant he was not the type of man who would personally grace a shabby alley like he was out for a stroll, just to see one dull woman.

Then what he was doing to her now must also be just one more of Kwon Ki-joo’s countless whims in the end.

“Whose turn is it to win this time?”

Kwon Ki-joo asked in a gentle voice when Lee-jin only stared at him in silence. For a moment, Lee-jin blankly wondered what he meant, then realized he was talking about Roxana’s boxing match.

“What do you mean, who’s going to win?”

“I’m asking who’s going to win this match. Out of you and your opponent.”

“…….”

“The fact that you can’t answer makes it seem it’s not you?”

At Kwon Ki-joo’s words, spoken as though he clearly understood how things worked, Lee-jin showed no reaction at all. The one who would lose this time was her. Thanks to the wealthy sponsor backing her opponent.

On the lower floor of Roxana Club, there was an octagon. On that ring, where illegal fights with betting money changing hands took place every day, women’s boxing matches were also regularly held as a kind of event. Lee-jin was one of the fighters who fought there.