Click. Tsssss.

The outdoor car park of the Jeongseon casino.

Yang Susan struck a lighter and put the flame to a cigarette.

The last one in the packet.

“Son of a bitch……. A million won, and that’s the shakedown?”

He was given one million-won chip as the share for the losers.

The loser of a game can say nothing.

A share that has to lean on the winner’s generosity.

“Hooo…….”

He drew the smoke deep into his lungs.

With the nicotine in him his blank head seems to clear.

And the heart that had felt ready to burst with rage seems to settle too.

Yang Susan digested the anger down, eyes closed.

His stomach turned sour and burned with the rawness of his nerves.

He has blown the whole of the company’s money, which is like blood to it.

It was money that had to cover the bills coming due before long.

The stake had been pulled out of what sat in the company account and thrown down.

An enormous sum has broken the last hope and vanished.

“Fuck. The opening luck was good…….”

The last hand hovers in front of his eyes.

A rare ranking that could not possibly lose.

“Where do I get money? Every won those mug bastards have is mine.”

Even beaten, Yang Susan has not given up.

He turned his head over on where to find money.

Given a stake, it is money he can take back.

“Chief Yang~~~!”

Just then a thick, loose voice called him from behind.

“……!!”

Yang Susan’s body set solid by instinct.

That man’s voice, which he had been forgetting!

Yang Susan’s body gave a faint tremor.

“Chief Yang Susan~~~!”

The friendly form of address came again.

Yang Susan turned his shaking body and faced him.

“……!!”

A man in the middle of his forties had come up close in front of him.

Evenings in Jeongseon are still chilly.

And the man stood there in a skin-tight short-sleeved top, a handbag tucked under one arm, looking at Yang Susan.

A black dragon wound round and round a knotted forearm, writhing as though it were alive.

“P— President Kang.”

President Kang’s snake’s-tail eyes make an impression.

He is…….

“Tuesday. The day the interest goes in. Did you take anything today?”

Kang Hongdong, the well-known private lender working out of Sokcho.

Shff.

The morning of 6 June 2022, the sixty-seventh Memorial Day.

Ha Donghwi and Han Jiyun, husband and wife, raised the national flag on the veranda of the flat.

The two of them bowed their heads a moment in silent tribute.

“Darling.”

Ha Donghwi called his wife.

The pair of them had drunk somaek hard with their son the night before.

Their son had gone back to Seoul early and in a hurry, out of a worry that the roads would jam.

And so the house had only the two of them left in it.

“What is it? Has something happened?”

Han Jiyun looked her husband’s colour over.

He is a man who chose her and set down a place as crown prince of a rich chaebol house.

Thanks to him and to the son she loves, a life existed for Han Jiyun, who had been lonely.

She believes her departed parents marked him out for her.

When she first saw him, walking on Sokcho beach, it felt like being struck by lightning.

Eleven at night.

The middle of November, and the air already cold on Sokcho beach.

A man standing on the shore at an hour when few people pass, looking at the sea without a word.

The skirt of his coat and his hair flying in the sea wind.

Han Jiyun had drunk a beer that night, thinking of the parents she missed.

She saw the man for the first time and took a shock.

Because he was good-looking?

No.

He was tall and broad in the shoulder, and why he should have looked so sad…….

Her body shook at the strength of the sameness she felt.

Han Jiyun spoke first, as though drawn.

It seemed a thing she had to do.

The conversation the two strangers had that night she still remembers vividly.

—You look lonely.

—Yes.

—So am I.

—I see.

A conversation with no particular meaning in it.

And on those few words alone the feeling went through between them.

A night at the shore with the waves standing up high and the stars close-set overhead.

That night the two of them shared each other’s loneliness.

It was the first time.

Han Jiyun had never known a man.

The next morning Ha Donghwi said that today was day one.

And so the two of them became lovers.

Every moment they loved and were happy.

They went out together every day.

They ate their way round the good places and sat in coffee shops whispering love.

Han Jiyun did not know the man’s family circumstances.

She thought only that he had graduated and joined Haryun Group.

She thought they would love ordinarily and marry.

That expectation broke into pieces before long.

One day the chief of the Haryun Group chairman’s secretariat came to see her.

He told her the standing of the man she was seeing.

A message was delivered from the chairman’s office that she was to part from him.

The shock she took then Han Jiyun cannot forget.

That her ordinary boyfriend was chaebol blood…….

At first she made up her mind to part.

The trouble was her boyfriend Ha Donghwi.

He held her tight and said it.

That the sort of bad man who throws the woman he loves out into the world did not suit him, not in this life!

Their love went deeper.

After that Han Jiyun carried on a life that was frightening and happy at once.

Before long the fruit of it came as well.

And at the same moment Ha Donghwi was put out of the house.

After being released from Haryun Group he could not get taken on at any company.

Her husband’s family followed him doggedly and blocked every move he made.

Then Han Jiyun learned a chaebol house’s cruelty, wretchedly.

Her husband threw himself into a sales post at a small firm in a field Haryun Group’s hand did not reach.

They lived more ordinarily than ordinary people.

They had their son, and the two of them put their strength together further and got a small rented nest.

They carried the marriage on with soju and makgeolli and pajeon in place of wine.

The son grew thick and fast too.

It was a life extremely ordinary, with nothing running over and nothing short.

And now and then a sadness showed in her husband’s face.

The bond with the house cut, he got clear of the fighting between brothers and lost his mother with it.

Her cold father-in-law, Chairman Ha Cheolgon, cut the mother and son apart as well.

He blocked any meeting entirely.

Being the youngest, her husband was unusually close with his mother.

At news of her illness he took his wife and son and went to the family home.

Ha Donghwi took it for the last chance, and wanted to show his mother his wife and his child.

What happened at the gate of the family home that night, in the rain, she could not forget if she died.

Her husband wailed with the rain coming down in sheets on him.

A little after that her mother-in-law died.

They could not go to the funeral hall, of course.

Her husband shut himself in the bathroom of the rented flat, sobbing with the sound held down!

She cannot forget that day even now.

The most terrible thing of all was the blow to the back of her small son’s head!

It was a warning from somebody, sent from her husband’s family.

A frightening warning that if he claimed his mother’s reserved portion they would kill the boy.

Her husband sent a letter to his sister.

A letter asking her to hold his brothers back, since he would make no claim of any kind on the inheritance.

Han Jiyun’s heart tore to shreds at the sight, never seen before, of her husband on his knees in front of his brothers, pleading.

A man who had held out on pride alone was disarmed to protect his small son and his wife.

And that was the peace they got.

Because of it their son was out of school for two whole years.

Treating what it left behind took a great deal of time.

By good fortune he came right as though by a miracle and went back to school like any ordinary child.

Apart from the stubbornness he showed over going up to Cheonghwa High School, he grew smoothly for them.

And now he has become a dependable grown man.

By the look of it he put the inheritance his grandmother left into coin and made a considerable result of it.

They did not ask for specifics.

The two of them were grateful simply that their son had grown up dependable.

“We must be getting older.”

“……??”

“Already living off what our son does…….”

Ha Donghwi said it looking out of the window at the sea.

The voice was full of being sorry.

The instinct of the head of a house who still wants to be his son’s prop came through in it.

“He’s of age.”

Han Jiyun said it standing beside her husband, looking at the same place.

Thanks to her son she has come safely through a crisis in which something vile was very nearly done to her.

No — a crisis is an opportunity, they say, and an entirely new life has begun.

“That Tae-ung has changed a great deal, somehow…….”

“How so?”

“The way he works, he carries on exactly like somebody with ten years out in the world behind him.”

“He’s your son.”

“……That’s a compliment?”

“Of course! My two men are the finest in the world to me.”

It was what Han Jiyun meant.

Not money made by a swindle, but a return got by proper investment.

“Jo and Jang…….”

Before their son left, Ha Donghwi had been given a Jo and Jang attorney’s card.

A card, to be rung at once if anything urgent should arise.

Ha Donghwi is not ignorant of Jo and Jang’s enormous power and its secrecy.

“Darling.”

Han Jiyun called her husband.

Ha Donghwi turned to her.

“What will you do if it turns out the way Tae-ung says?”

“Says how?”

“He’s going to make you…… a chairman.”

“……!!”

Ha Donghwi blinked, because Han Jiyun’s question was not a light one.

Strength went quietly into his hands.

“If it really turns out that way……. I’ll take a turn at being a chairman, such as it is, off my son’s back.”

The Haryun Group blood sleeping inside Ha Donghwi answered hotly.

“Then I’d be a chairman’s wife?”

Han Jiyun, to whom it is not yet real, smiled brightly.

And at this moment too, the two of them did not know.

That the conversation they were trading like a joke would soon…….

(End of Chapter 92)