Five and a half years was, for anyone in business, an enormous stretch of time.

It was long enough for companies to rise and fall several times over.

Tak-hyeon Lee set his thoughts aside and looked up at Do-beom Hwang.

“What figure did the secretariat come up with for the projection?”

He’d already asked Seong-ho for both the forecast and his real target. But Tak-hyeon wanted it from the secretariat he trusted above anyone else — that, he felt, was the only way to arrive at an accurate answer.

“The second-half results shouldn’t differ much from Director Kim’s estimate,” Do-beom said.

“That’d be right. There’s only a few days left in the second half anyway. Short of the heavens splitting open, it’ll come in as projected. So what about Director Kim’s claim of 250 billion for next year? Does that look achievable?”

Do-beom hesitated.

He’d run the projection through the secretariat, but he hadn’t believed it — he’d checked it over and over. Because even he couldn’t quite trust the report, he balked at saying it to Tak-hyeon’s face.

Tak-hyeon read it on him at once.

“The numbers the secretariat came back with overshot the estimate, I take it. It’s fine. Say it. Knowing you, if an unexpected figure came up you’d have run it again a dozen times, and if it still came out that way, then it’s correct. So what on earth is this number that has you hesitating?”

Long years together had taught Tak-hyeon his man’s temperament, and he didn’t suppose for a moment that Do-beom’s figure was wrong. He waited for the answer with a light heart — because he expected the surprise to fall on the good side, not the bad.

But the number out of Do-beom’s mouth vaulted clean past anything Tak-hyeon had imagined.

“By the secretariat’s estimate… at this pace, I’d expect it to come in near 300 billion.”

Tak-hyeon wondered whether he’d misheard, and asked again. “How much? 300 billion?”

“Yes. And that’s the most conservative figure — 300 billion. If the rooms hold up and even the suite-class rooms fill to capacity, there’s a strong chance it climbs to 350 billion.”

“350 billion? Ha.” A dry laugh escaped him. He looked up at Do-beom. “So Kim, my son-in-law, was telling the truth when he said even 250 billion was conservative.”

“Yes. It appears so.”

Two hundred fifty billion had struck Do-beom as an absurd number to begin with — and it had turned out to be, exactly as Seong-ho said, merely a conservative one. The secretariat’s projection, calculated and recalculated, came out north of 300 billion, and with everything breaking favorably it reached as high as 350.

“Director Kim took over the hotel when its annual revenue was around 30 billion, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. A shade above 30 billion.”

“I told him I’d give him a gift if he so much as doubled annual revenue. He answers by hitting 250 billion, so I go and announce it in front of the presidents — and now the projection is 350 billion at the ceiling?”

Turning it over again, Tak-hyeon seemed almost dumbstruck. The corner of his mouth curled upward.

“That being so, there’s no need to wait until next year.”

“Chairman, then you mean to—”

“I’ve something particular to say. Tell the children not to go anywhere at year’s end. Have them all gather.”

“You intend to announce it at year’s end?”

“I do.” Tak-hyeon nodded, and the corner of his mouth climbed higher still. “I’m going to seat Kim, my son-in-law, as president of Ilhyeon Hotel.”

Do-beom had not been blind to where Tak-hyeon was heading — but the moment he pictured everything that would come crashing down once it happened, the need to stop it began to fill his head.

“Chairman. Perhaps you might reconsider, just once more?”

“Reconsider?” The upturned mouth flattened; Tak-hyeon’s eyes narrowed. His expression said plainly that he did not care for anyone trying to spoil his fun.

Do-beom pressed on anyway, laying out what Seong-ho’s presidency would bring down on them. “Chairman. Give him some other gift instead. If you seat Director Kim as hotel president, every one of the children is certain to push back, and it could well turn into a family war.”

And family war, to his mind, was the gentle way of putting it.

“Chairman. For the sake of Ilhyeon Group’s peace, I’d urge you to reconsider. Rather than the presidency itself, something equal to it would be—”

“Do you mean to make a liar of me?”

“Chairman.”

“Enough.” Tak-hyeon waved a hand as if he’d heard all he cared to. The gesture carried a warning: cross me here and there would be consequences.

After a silence, he smiled — something knowing in it.

“Mun-jong and the others won’t sit still, you say? Wouldn’t that be all the more entertaining?”

The look on his face left Do-beom with nothing to say.

Tak-hyeon’s smile deepened. “A fight? I think I’d like that too. Rather than only swallowing what I toss them, if they fought tooth and nail to win it — how lovely would that be?”

“Chairman. If in the course of it Mun-jong were to be wounded—”

A family war inside the group never ran clean. Do-beom didn’t want Mun-jong — already more or less settled as the next chairman to lead the group — to have his authority scarred in the brawl. If he came to the throne less than whole, those beneath him might start entertaining other ideas. That was why Do-beom fought so hard to keep the fight from breaking out at all.

Tak-hyeon saw it differently.

“If Mun-jong can be shaken, then that’s all he ever amounted to.”

“Chairman.”

“To lead the group, you can’t dodge a fight for fear of a wound. You have to know how to use it.”

“And if someone wounds Mun-jong deeply in this fight — what then?”

“Then that someone has promise.”

Do-beom’s face darkened. A situation like that, he felt keenly, was precisely the moment the succession tipped into chaos.

“If a fight’s coming either way, I’d sooner see it soon. So I ought to be the one to beat the drum that starts it.”

Only then did Do-beom grasp what Tak-hyeon truly wanted.

He wanted to watch his children fight over the succession.

That, and nothing else, was Tak-hyeon’s real heart.

Do-beom left the study to carry out the order, a shadow on his face. Out in the living room, Seong-ho caught sight of that face and smiled thinly.

Looks like he’s seen the chairman’s true intent.

From Do-beom’s expression alone, Seong-ho grasped in an instant what had passed inside the study. He knew Tak-hyeon every bit as well as he knew Mun-jong.

Then — shall I go and see the vice-chairman?

Seong-ho had no intention of dancing to Tak-hyeon’s tune. To keep himself out of the picture the old man was trying to paint, he would move first.

I’ve no wish to be swept up in your fight.

On the living-room television, coverage of the Korea–China FTA played, Chinese dignitaries filing into the hotel.

A car pulled up at the hotel.

The doorman studied the plate and frowned. “3884? Who’s that?”

Nothing about 3884 was filed away in his head. He opened the door carefully and simply bowed in silence. He was supposed to deliver the usual line — Welcome, President So-and-so — but with nothing surfacing, the doorman only looked at the ground.

A secretary and a man who looked to be the boss stepped out and went inside, and the doorman quietly shut the door. Then, as his relief happened to arrive for the shift change, he asked about the 3884 car.

“You happen to know which company’s president plate 3884 is? It’s not coming to me at all.”

“3884?”

The colleague tilted his head and searched the plates lodged in his memory. Ever since Seong-ho promised a bonus for every plate memorized, the doormen had committed something like a thousand of them to memory. They hadn’t all learned the same ones, so cross-checking might well turn up the owner of 3884.

After a long think, the colleague shook his head. “3884 — I don’t know it either.”

“No? Then who on earth is it?”

The doorman cocked his head. “Driver, an attending secretary, and the car itself was a luxury model. Whoever it is, they’re clearly someone well known. I didn’t know it this time, but next time I’d want it memorized so I can greet them.”

“If the car looked worth making a point to remember… Hold on. 3884?” Something clicked, and the colleague’s eyes went wide. “3884 — that’s the vice-chairman!”

“Vice-chairman? Which company’s?”

“Which company’s, nothing — our Ilhyeon Group’s vice-chairman!”

“Our vice-chairman?!”

Startled, the doorman’s eyes went as wide as his colleague’s, and he turned toward the door Mun-jong had gone through.

“Back before I came here, when I was at the Meyers Hotel, the vice-chairman used to drop by now and then, so I had him memorized. But since he never showed at our place, it slipped my mind.”

“I’ve worked here over half a year and this is the first I’ve seen him. He’s never once come — what’s brought him?”

“Not here for a meal, surely. Probably something to take up with Director Kim.”

“That’d be it, right?”

The two of them looked on in wonder at a group vice-chairman who’d never once shown his face in half a year, now appearing at the hotel in person.

And Mun-jong — absent long enough to leave the doormen marveling — made for the coffee shop on the hotel’s top floor, irritation stamped across his face.

“Welcome—”

As the coffee-shop staffer moved to greet him, Mun-jong’s secretary cut the greeting short and asked, low, “Please show us to Director Kim.”

At the mention of Seong-ho, the staffer registered who was standing before him and hurried to lead Mun-jong inside. Deep within, at the door of a private room set apart from the rest, the staffer bowed. “The director is waiting for you inside.”

Still thoroughly put out, Mun-jong jerked his chin at the door. “Open it.”

At his order the secretary opened it, and Seong-ho — who’d come ahead to wait — rose and greeted him warmly.

“Brother. You’ve come.”

Mun-jong strode straight up to him and growled, “This is the last time I come because you called for me.”

He drove a raised finger into Seong-ho’s chest. “The gall — the very youngest, ordering your elder brother come here, come there? Have you lost your mind?”

Even so, Seong-ho didn’t lose the smile. He drew out a chair instead, so Mun-jong could sit comfortably, and gestured for him to take it. “Let’s sit and talk first.”

Mun-jong glared at him a long moment, then sat.

Seong-ho returned to his own seat and spoke first. “I’m truly sorry I couldn’t come to you and had to make you come out here yourself. But there was no other way, given the circumstances.”

“No other way? Right — our great Director Kim is a busy man, so naturally there’d be no other way.”

Before answering the sneer, Seong-ho took a careful look at him. He’d faced this man to the point of nausea in that former life, yet since returning, this was the first time they’d sat down one on one.

Alone with Mun-jong, Seong-ho felt fury boil up from somewhere deep in his chest. At the sight of the one who’d ordered his death, the instinct to pour out every ounce of banked anger surged toward the surface.

No. Not yet. I have to pay it back tenfold — no, a thousandfold.

What he’d been handed, he would return — and with interest on top.

Seong-ho settled the anger lodged in his chest as far down as he could, and set about the work of dragging Mun-jong down into the pit.

(End of Chapter 51)