"I never thought it would end like this… not like this. Ma did everything she could. She taught for years, came home with her hands shaking from the overtime—always smiling for the kids, always pretending we were okay."
"Fuck."
—Flashback: One week earlier—
Jang Seok-Hyun sat on the thin mattress, watching the single bulb swing above the small kitchen table. Outside, rain slapped the cracked window like someone knocking a hundred times, demanding they open and let the world in. The apartment smelled of instant noodles and cheap detergent.
His mother hummed softly as she folded another worn sweater. Her cough hitched between breaths; when she laughed it sounded like someone clearing away dead leaves. Seok-Hyun reached for the last piece of kimchi without looking up, trying not to show the way his hands trembled.
"Ma," he said, voice barely louder than the whisper of the rain. "How much longer…?"
She looked at him and that practiced smile—one she reserved for parent-teacher nights and classroom photographs—faltered for half a second. "Not long, son. Just a few more interviews. The assistant position is next week, I think. We'll be fine."
He wanted to believe her. He had to. But the numbers on the unpaid bill had turned into a cold animal that crouched in the corner and watched them sleep.
—School, same day—
Seok-Hyun moved through the hall like he was trying not to wake anyone. His shoes had been patched with duct tape; one lace frayed and barely held. Kids shoved past, backpacks slamming into his ribs. He kept his head down. Survival in the hallways meant being invisible.
"You look like trash, Seok-Hyun," a voice hissed from behind a cloud of lockers. The two boys who always waited for him were there, grinning like predators.
"Drop the act, loser. Gave your mom a load of homework to do for you, huh? Teacher's pet." Laughter chopped the air.
They pushed him against a locker. The first punch was a shock—quick, practiced. The second made stars explode behind his eyes. A paper cup of something sticky hit the floor. Someone filmed it on their phone.
Seok-Hyun's palms opened and closed until his knuckles whitened. He wanted to fight. Wanted to shove teeth into faces and scream; wanted to show them that bone doesn't break as easily as they thought. But his body remembered being smaller, getting the door slammed on him, the nights he lay awake listening to his father drink to forget.
"Stop. Please," he muttered, but the words were small. No teacher came. The bell rang and everyone left like nothing had happened.
—That night—
His father came home late, his jacket smelling of cheap liquor and humiliation. He stared at the bowl of barely boiled rice and pushed it away.
"They called me a thief today," his father said, voice flat. "Said I took money from the company. They searched my bag. The foreman laughed in my face."
Seok-Hyun watched the man who had read him picture books and tied his shoes shrink inside himself. "They lied," Seok-Hyun said. But the words had no weight.
"Why didn't I do better?" his father whispered later, alone on the bathroom floor, hands pressed to his head. "Why couldn't I—"
The next morning the apartment was quieter than any silence Seok-Hyun had known. His father's chair sat empty. There was a note folded on the table, the ink smudged where tears had fallen.
"Take care of your mother," it said. "Forgive me."
When the police left and the neighbors offered awkward condolences, Seok-Hyun realized his chest had been hollowed out by something that would not heal. The world had taken every anchor he had.
His mother held on for a while. Medical bills, unpaid rent—each one carved at the ribs. The cough became a constant machine that ate away at her body. She laughed less and slept more. The bills piled like knives on the kitchen counter.
One night she coughed so hard she couldn't breathe. Seok-Hyun, hands shaking, tried to call an ambulance but the phone line froze in his throat. By the time help came, breath had gone from her chest. Her last look at him was a smile so faint it could have been a memory.
"I should have been stronger," he said into the darkness, but the words were for the hole that had been left, not for anyone who could answer.
—A week after—
Seok-Hyun sat in front of the mirror and watched a boy he barely recognized. His face had been beaten down in all the ways a world can: humiliation, poverty, grief. Scars bloomed faded white across his forearms from where fists had landed. He flexed his fingers and felt the tremor.
He thought of the bullies who filmed him. He thought of the shitty lectures the teachers gave about "resilience" while they turned their heads. He thought of the foreman who had spat in his father's face. He thought of the sound his mother made the last time she coughed.
The rage that had been a whisper had grown into a plan. Not the stupid kind of plan that ends with police lights and regret. A careful, cold thing.
"If the world is a stage where they play king," he whispered, "then I'll be king where it matters. Behind bars. They kept hiding in the sun—I'll chase them to the dark."
—Flash forward: The making of the lie—
He began to learn the language of violence without letting it own him: how to fall, how to take a hit and keep the heart steady; how to read the way a man moves before his fist connects. He found an old boxing gym three subway stops away, paid for by stealing pennies from change jars. The coach there didn't ask questions—just put gloves on his hands and showed him how to breathe through pain.
He let the world see him break. He collected bruises like evidence, trained until his ribs felt like iron but his rage was coiled and patient. The plan took shape: a burglary that would leave a man hurt, a crowd's eyes, a confession he'd write and sign. Enough to land him in a place where the bullies, the complicit adults, the ones who'd laughed while his life bled out, would one day be found.
He would not go in as a victim.
He would enter with a crown made of his own fractures.
—End of chapter one—
Seok-Hyun folded the confession into his pocket and looked at the photograph of his mother on the fridge, her eyes warm and soft. He pressed his forehead to the glass as if he could feel the warmth through it.
"Forgive me, Ma," he said. "I'm going to build something they'll remember."