Screech.

“We’ve arrived.”

A villa with a private garden, holding its place in the middle of Gangnam.

A large imported car came to a stop in front of a villa worth well past twenty billion won a unit.

“Fucksake.”

A man in the back seat, thoroughly drunk, barely opens his eyes and puts out a curse.

Sprawled where he is, he shows no intention of getting out.

He hangs back like an ox dragged into a slaughterhouse.

He looked at the house through heavily tinted glass.

He looked at the terrace with its soft light leaking out, his eyes gone slack.

“Director……”

“Shut it, you little shit! I heard you!!”

He twisted his heavy body about, poured out one more curse and opened the car door.

The driver got the driver’s door open in a hurry and moved quickly, and——

Bang!

He had already shut the car door and was walking toward the house.

“Rest well.”

As though this had happened more than once or twice, the middle-aged driver folded himself to ninety degrees at the retreating back.

Whip.

A few cheques came flying down in front of the bowing driver’s feet.

His head down and his back bent, his body gave a faint tremor.

Every time he takes the wheel he suffers the abuse, and he cannot give the work up.

There are university fees to find for his eldest daughter, who started this year, and a great deal of money going out one way and another.

Perform the part of an emotional bin faithfully and it puts tips above his salary into his hand.

“Hoo.”

It comes round now and then, and it is hard to get used to.

The driver swallowed a short sigh and picked up the fallen cheques.

He straightened up, and his eyes went to the man opening the door and disappearing.

A bitter smile spread at the driver’s mouth.

However hard a day he has, when he gets home a good wife and children like little rabbits welcome him with laughing faces.

And the superior he serves holds wealth beyond imagining, and——

“There’s nothing much to a life. A warm back and a full belly, and that’s enough.”

It is what comes to him every time he watches his superior struggling not to go into his own house when the day’s work is done.

Better to be himself, poor and happy, than a pitiful soul with money in the bank.

The driver turned without a backward look, drove off and headed home.

Beep.

Baaang!

A man opening the door roughly and going into the house.

There is no warmth to be felt in the wide living room.

A space with a home help managing it every day, nothing out of place and not a speck of dust in it.

An Italian leather sofa worth several hundred million holds its place like the master of the house.

Here and there along the walls, paintings that fetch large money welcome him brightly.

He poured billions into the interior, dreaming of a warm place of rest.

And what there is, is desolate past describing.

A house with not one person to welcome him when he comes home from work.

“Fuck.”

Ha Donggeon twisted his face right up in irritation.

Home is not a happy place for him.

Ha Donggeon too had once had a woman he loved.

A woman doing music, of the sort his father despises.

A working singer, at that.

Her circumstances were ordinary, an educator’s family.

Ha Donggeon cared for her sincerely.

The stress he took from his house and from business both, she comforted him for.

In those days he could have laid down his life for her.

But the group was facing a great many difficult problems at the time.

A block of flats Haryun Construction was leading the building of came down for being badly built.

Some ten construction workers lost their lives on that site.

Public feeling turned bad over the shoddy-work controversy, and a line of power to stand as a shield was badly needed.

Talk of a marriage went back and forth with the house of a three-term legislator of the ruling party, one of the real powers of the administration at the time.

Ha Donggeon was settled on as the party to the trade.

It was a trade the politician’s side wanted.

His father, having caught the chance, ordered him to clear away the woman he was seeing and answer the marriage of convenience at once.

His father Chairman Ha Cheolgon knew everything about Ha Donggeon’s private life.

Ha Donggeon had to save the group, and had no grounds for refusing the trade.

He hid the tears of blood and a swift-strike marriage was brought off.

And.

“Sit down.”

A sofa placed with its back showing.

From the sofa, where he had thought nobody was, came a cold woman’s voice.

“Oh! Wife~ Waiting up for your husband? No engagement today, by the look of it.”

Ha Donggeon, who had looked drained of everything, flashed both eyes wickedly, like a hound that has found something to eat.

The female body that goes by the name of wife.

Before they are a family who love each other, the two of them are nearer to enemies.

The two who married on a trade have two children between them.

His wife Song Jinhui graduated from a university in America and married Ha Donggeon.

Her looks, seen at the first meeting of the two families, were worth looking at.

The problem was the character, which could not be checked at the time.

It was at a level that could not be compared with the women he had dealt with.

It was no joke.

Song Jinhui had lived freely in America with nothing to check her.

She too had thrown herself into a marriage of convenience for her father’s political advancement.

The other party was a fairly decent man, so she felt more warmly toward it from the start.

Up to the marriage there was no problem.

And afterwards she came to know the whole of his past.

He could not forget the woman he had loved.

One day, when the two children had been born and the two of them were living together.

She saw him in the study, looking at the things he had hidden away, and weeping.

They were photographs of the old woman, and the letters the two of them had exchanged.

He had not been a man she loved from the start.

But at the moment she saw a husband shedding tears of blood over an old lover, even the feeling she had built up over the years dropped clean away.

And that was not all of it.

Her husband met women constantly, as though making a point of it.

Song Jinhui had lived fairly freely through her studies in America.

It was a shop-window marriage in any case, so she did not bear it either.

Like somebody running for the end of a thing, she met men too.

The two of them, having seen the end of the relationship, talked seriously one day over a drink.

There were the families to consider, so they could not part.

Instead they drew up a written agreement not to touch each other’s private lives.

Time had run on that way and was going past ten years.

There are many eyes watching, so they still live in one house like a married couple, and they never exchange a word that intrudes on the other’s life.

The two children went abroad to study early.

Only the daughter came back to Korea and went to university.

She lives on her own in a serviced-apartment block, away from the chill of the house, naturally.

Flump.

Ha Donggeon staggered and sat down opposite the female body that goes by the name of wife.

Shff.

Her husband sat down on the sofa, and Song Jinhui, in her middle forties, looked at him without expression.

In one hand she holds a beautifully curved glass with blood-coloured wine in it.

There is no feeling at all in the look.

A look like a bottomless pit, with not even love-and-hate left in it.

Fucking bitch!

The look in her eyes is not unfamiliar to Ha Donggeon.

His newly married life with her was decent enough.

He got two children he loves out of it as well.

She found the household life stifling now and then, and she did not want to be an obstacle to the political life of her father, a senior legislator of many terms.

She acknowledged too that living outside as she pleased could smear ink on her father’s face.

That the wife who had been like that changed was a thing that happened suddenly, one day.

The look in her eyes that day he still cannot forget.

A desperate, blazing look, as though she despised him!

After that day she gave him nothing of herself.

The question was never answered, and he bore it as long as he could bear it.

And in the end he took another woman in.

He was at an age when the blood boils, at the time.

The fence that was the family came down slowly.

Now he knows that each of them has a relation with somebody else.

They did not hide it, and it is not for the sake of wounding each other either.

When his father Chairman Ha Cheolgon dies, the inheritance procedure follows after.

They drew up a written agreement on the condition that the marriage would be kept up until that procedure was finished.

On the condition, of course, that neither would touch the other’s private life at all.

One single condition was attached.

Sleep at home!

“Are you a fool?”

“Wh— what?”

“I asked if you’re a fool.”

“What are you talking about, with nothing before or after it?”

Song Jinhui passed the line over abruptly, as though sneering, and Ha Donggeon flared.

Ha Donggeon’s face, with the expression not hidden, changed into something like a devil’s.

However much he fears his father, an insult like this he could not bear.

Anger like an active volcano, pressed down and down, came boiling up.

“Ha Tae-ung!”

“……??”

To a man holding his anger down, Song Jinhui put out an unfamiliar name.

“You don’t know?”

“What bullshit is that! Who the fuck is Ha Tae-ung!!”

“Your nephew.”

“My…… nephew?”

At one short answer Ha Donggeon began to stammer.

Song Jinhui is a clever woman.

She does not throw out remarks idly to a man she is on worse than stranger’s terms with.

“It went right round the upper-class mainstream today. That a Haryun Group royal family member enrolled at Cheonghwa High School as a charity case, lived his school life like a parasite, and got found out.”

“What bullshit is that! There’s no such name in our house——!!”

Ha Donggeon, denying it with a shout at Song Jinhui’s statement, flinched and stopped.

A thing came suddenly across his mind.

A matter his secretary reported at the start of this month.

What the secret inheritance his mother left actually was.

And Attorney Kim Jeongryul, who was worked on for trying to pass it quietly to Ha Donghwi’s son.

Kim Jeongryul got a billion won to Ha Donghwi’s son in the end.

“…… You know something.”

Song Jinhui asked it back, quick to read him.

“Mm……”

“It’s going to reach your father’s ear before long, so what are you going to do! This is exactly the work you’ve been given in the group!”

Song Jinhui drove at him as though pressing a charge.

Her own father, who has withdrawn to be an elder of the political world after a fifth term.

The only power left to their family was the paltry money of her husband’s house.

The problem is that to Chairman Ha Cheolgon her husband is a marked child.

Which is why, at the years he has now, he has not been given one proper affiliate and is sitting on a directorship at a construction company.

Song Jinhui, whose pride was hurt and who has been bearing it.

When her father-in-law Ha Cheolgon dies the crumbs left are considerable.

Bear it until then and after that each of them can live their own life, coolly.

In exchange, the family business her husband is given to handle has to be handled cleanly.

“We should have struck him off the register that time…… and buried him.”

Regret over what had passed came in on Ha Donggeon.

That his mother, while she lived, prevented it absolutely, and so no further action was taken over Donghwi, has brought about a situation like this one.

A thing that had sat badly with him all along has gone off in the end.

“He seems to have money.”

“Money?”

“Jo and Jang attorneys came out to assist him, they say.”

“Kh……”

At Song Jinhui’s remark about money, Ha Donggeon broke into a sneer.

“What is it? Let out what you know.”

The look in Song Jinhui’s eyes shone like snakes and scorpions.

The two of them, a community of fate that cannot be refused while Chairman Ha Cheolgon lives.

“About a billion went across, out of Mother’s estate.”

“A billion? Is that all?”

“I know the whole of it and I’ve dealt with it. Take your mind off it.”

“Have you?”

At her husband’s confident manner Song Jinhui’s raised voice came down a notch.

Shff.

Song Jinhui crossed one leg over the other and turned her body.

For a moment the skirt of the silk nightdress fell to one side and her white thigh showed.

“……”

It is a long time since he has seen his wife’s skin.

Ha Donggeon’s heart went hot, past any managing.

Whatever else, the two of them were a pair who satisfied each other in bed.

“Hn……”

Song Jinhui caught Ha Donggeon’s reaction at once.

She raised the corner of her mouth slightly and smiled.

“Shall we…… go to bed? It’s been a long time.”

The sweet scent of wine came out of Song Jinhui’s mouth and mixed all at once into Ha Donggeon’s breathing.

(End of Chapter 75)