The dress was a lost cause.
Back in her apartment's harsh bathroom light, Ha-eun examined the damage. The silk, once the colour of fresh snow, was now a Rorschach blot of burgundy, the edges of the stain already setting into a rusty brown.
She felt no sentimental attachment to the garment. It was a tool that had failed its purpose.
She folded it neatly, the stain hidden inside, and placed it in the trash bin. A clean, final motion.
The grey silk handkerchief was another matter.
She ran it under cool water in the sink, watching the water spiral pink down the drain.
She used a drop of unscented soap, working the delicate fabric between her fingers with a clinical care she usually reserved for handling evidence.
The stain lightened but refused to vanish completely, leaving a faint, ghostly watermark.
She pressed it between two clean towels, smoothing it flat. Once dry, it felt different—stiffer, the memory of the wine woven into its fibers.
She didn't fold it.
She opened a drawer in her bedroom, one that held spare charger cables and passport copies, and laid the square of silk inside. She shut the drawer.
It wasn't a trophy. It wasn't a memento. It was data.
A physical record of an interaction whose parameters she hadn't yet fully calculated.
She didn't let the question—Why keep it?—coalesce into a full thought. Some data points required further observation before they could be categorized.
Sleep was a currency she was unwilling to spend. The city's nocturnal glow was her lamp.
At her steel desk, she split her screen: on the left, the financial phantom trail from Haneul Legacy Fabrication; on the right, the digitized, painfully reconstructed archives of Yoon Tech's final eighteen months.
Two tragedies. One personal, one professional.
She was looking for a shared grammar of disaster.
It was grueling, eye-aching work. She compared vendor codes, payment schedules, invoice templates.
She looked for stylistic tics in financial obfuscation—the preference for certain numeric rounding, the use of particular freight forwarders, the cadence of delay and excuse.
For hours, nothing. Just the hum of her laptop and the distant wail of sirens far below.
Then, a pattern emerged. Not in the vendors or the amounts. In the gaps.
Both Yoon Tech and the Haneul phantom subsidiary utilized a three-tiered payment system for major outsourced contracts.
A reputable local bank for the initial, legitimate-looking deposit. A second transfer to a smaller, regional bank in Southeast Asia.
And then, a final, smaller sum would be routed, after a specific forty-five day delay, to an institution that appeared on paper as 'Pan-Caribbean Trust Ltd.'
A shell. A ghost.
Her Crysalia algorithms, given a scent, dug deeper. 'Pan-Caribbean Trust' was a matryoshka doll of obfuscation.
But at its core, nestled in records from a different audit trail she'd compiled years ago in a fit of obsession, was a routing number.
A number that traced back to a single, obscure private bank in the Cayman Islands. A bank called 'Meridian Safe Harbour.'
Yoon Tech had made a single, desperate payment to a 'safety compliance consultancy' through Meridian Safe Harbour, two months before the fire.
The Haneul phantom had made eleven separate payments to various 'logistical support' entities through the same bank, over seven years.
The connection was a thread of spider-silk, but it was tangible. It was a shared secret handshake in the world of hidden money.
It didn't prove Seo Min-jun ordered the Yoon Tech sabotage.
But it proved his empire and her father's ruin spoke the same dirty financial language. It placed them in the same dark room.
Her heart, that steady metronome, began to beat a hard, fast rhythm against her ribs.
It wasn't excitement. It was the primal thrill of a predator locking onto a scent trail.
The air in her apartment felt thinner, charged.
This changed the calculus. She could follow the money forever, but money was a coward; it hid. She needed to look into the eyes of the man who might have commanded it.
At 4:17 AM, she drafted an email. Not to a secretary, but to the office of the Chairman himself.
The tone was flawless: respectful, professional, unyielding. 'Consultant Yoon, in her final analysis of structural liabilities, requires a brief discussion with Chairman Seo to clarify legacy strategic priorities, to ensure the renewal plan honors the Group's foundational intent.'
It was corporate-speak for 'I'm in your house, and I need to see the blueprints.'
The reply came at 8:05 AM, not from the Chairman, but from his senior executive secretary.
It was a masterpiece of frigid politeness, granting a fifteen-minute window the following afternoon.
The location: the Chairman's private office at the apex of the Haneul Tower.
It had the solemn finality of a summons to a throne room, or a principal's office before an expulsion.
The day stretched, taut and slow. She attended other meetings, her mind a partitioned hard drive.
One partition ran the usual diagnostics on Haneul's logistics division. The other replayed every piece of data she had on Seo Min-jun.
His rise from scrap metal to empires, his reputation for ruthless pragmatism laced with sudden, brutal sentimentality, the whispers of the old guard who still feared his temper.
She saw the photo of the signet ring every time she blinked.
Preparation was armor.
That evening, she laid out her own. A tailored black trouser suit, wool and cashmere, severe in its cut.
It was not mourning black. It was the black of a starless night, of deep water, of camouflage. She paired it with a simple shell the colour of a bruise.
She stood before her mirror, not seeing Ha-eun, but constructing Elena.
She practiced the smile that wasn't a smile, the one that touched only the muscles around her mouth.
She adjusted her posture—not aggressive, not submissive, but perfectly balanced, rooted.
She met her own eyes in the glass, the dark brown depths that held a decade of frozen grief. The reflection was a stranger, a beautiful, hollow weapon.
Ha-eun leaned closer to the mirror, her breath fogging the glass for a second before vanishing.
She whispered to the ghost of the girl underneath, the one who still sometimes flinched at loud noises.
"Don't show them the void," she murmured, her voice a dry rustle in the quiet room. "Show them the ice."
The Haneul Tower's executive zenith was a different species of space from the floors below.
Here, the noise of business was silenced by layers of money and intimidation.
The carpet was thicker, swallowing sound. The air was cooler, smelling of lemon polish and, faintly, of aged paper and cigars that hadn't been smoked in years.
The reception area outside the Chairman's office was a gallery of power. Modern Korean art, all sharp angles and somber colours, hung on walls of sandblasted granite.
A single, immense window looked down on Seoul as if it were a circuit board.
A severe woman with a headset nodded Ha-eun towards a low-slung leather sofa. "The Chairman will be with you shortly."
Ha-eun did not sit. She stood, her hands loose at her sides, and took in the room.
It was designed to intimidate, to make visitors feel small and transient.
Her gaze traveled over the awards in crystal cases, the model of a long-decommissioned steel freighter on a pedestal.
Then it landed on a series of framed black-and-white photographs arranged on a shelf.
They were candid shots from a different era.
A younger Seo Min-jun, his hair dark, his face unlined but his eyes already holding that familiar, calculating sharpness, standing on a factory floor.
Another of him shaking hands with a politician.
And then, a third photo.
It was smaller, the edges slightly curled. It showed two men, arms slung around each other's shoulders, laughing into the camera.
They were on a boat, squinting against the sun. The man on the left was unmistakably Min-jun, looking shockingly relaxed, a beer bottle in his hand.
The man on the right was taller, lankier, his smile wide and open, his hair a messy sweep over his forehead.
Ha-eun's breath stopped.
The air vanished from the plush, silent room.
Her eyes refused to blink, scanning every pixel of the image. The shape of his nose. The way his shirt collar sat. The familiar, beloved crinkle at the corner of his eyes.
It was her father.
Younger than in her own memories. Vibrant. Alive.
And standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the man she had spent half her life believing was his murderer.
A cold, sick nausea, entirely separate from the Dom, rose from the pit of her stomach and clawed its way up her throat.
It was a physical punch, a wrenching twist of her internal organs.
The ice she had so carefully cultivated cracked, and for a terrifying second, she felt the raw, howling void beneath.
The door to the inner office opened with a soft click.
The secretary's voice sounded like it was coming from the end of a long tunnel. "Consultant Yoon? The Chairman will see you now."
Ha-eun stood frozen in the gallery of power, the image burned behind her eyes.
The man she had spent half her life hunting wasn't a monster in the shadows.
He had been standing beside her father in the light.
And now, he was waiting for her behind the door.