Seoul, 11:47 PM | Aurora Grand Hotel, 44th Floor
The sirens came first.
A distant wail, then another, multiplying like wolves catching a scent. Red and blue lights painted the rain-slicked windows of the forty-fourth floor in frantic, bloody strokes.
Jin Tae-seong stood perfectly still in the center of the hotel suite, the scream still echoing in the marble-tiled bathroom where it had begun. His hands hung at his sides, fingers slightly curled. A prosecutor's hands. A surgeon's hands. Hands that had spent a decade dissecting evidence, building cases, stitching together narratives of guilt from fragments of truth.
Now they were empty.
The envelope—the thick, cream-colored envelope containing Lee Dong-wook's sworn affidavit and the encrypted drive that would bury Kang Yo-han, the White Tiger—was gone. Vanished from inside his jacket sometime between leaving this room and hearing the scream three minutes later.
Tae-seong didn't search for it. He knew.
He knew the way a chess master knows the board has been tipped over mid-game. The way a surgeon knows when the tumor has already metastasized.
Movement at the door. Hotel security, two men in tailored black suits, their faces pale as ash. Behind them, the first uniformed police officer, hand on his holster, eyes wide and scanning.
"Don't move!" the officer barked, Korean sharp and panicked.
Tae-seong didn't move. He was already somewhere else.
His mind had split like a cleaved diamond—one facet trapped in this gilded room with the dead accountant, the other already racing down branching paths of consequence, motive, trap.
Who?
Why?
How did they know?
His eyes drifted past the officer, past the shaking security guards, to the body on the floor.
Lee Dong-wook lay on his back on the cream carpet, a dark halo of blood already seeping into the fibers around his head. The garrote wire was still embedded in his neck, a thin, vicious line of silver. Professional. Silent. The kind of kill that spoke of contracts, not crimes of passion.
But it was the placement of the objects on his chest that made Tae-seong's blood turn to ice.
Not thrown. Not dropped.
Placed.
Left of his sternum: a titanium disc, the size of a silver dollar. Brushed metal, gleaming under the chandelier lights. Engraved with a coiled, serpentine dragon—one eye a chip of blood-red ruby. The Paemyon, the White Tiger Syndicate's Dragon Mark. A token of membership, of authority. A thing never left on a body unless it was a message.
And beside it, centered neatly as a funeral offering, a hotel notepad.
On it, in handwriting Tae-seong recognized from three months of encrypted messages and signed agreements, were two words in Hangul:
그는 알고 있었다.
He knew.
"Hands where I can see them!" The officer was younger than he sounded, his voice cracking at the edges.
Tae-seong slowly raised his hands, palms out. The gesture of innocence. The gesture of surrender.
He was still looking at the notepad.
He knew.
Who knew?
Dong-wook? Did he know his killer?
Or was it Tae-seong they were accusing of knowing?
Footsteps in the hall—heavy, purposeful. Two detectives in rumpled trench coats entered, their eyes missing nothing. The older one, a man with a face like worn leather and eyes the color of a frozen river, stopped just inside the door. His name was Inspector Park. Tae-seong knew him. They had clashed over jurisdiction on a loan-shark case two years ago. Park had wanted a quick closure; Tae-seong had wanted the whole pyramid.
Park's gaze moved from the body to the Mark to Tae-seong's face. A slow, terrible understanding dawned in his expression. Not surprise. Something colder. Something like confirmation.
"Jin Tae-seong," Park said, his voice flat. "Of course it's you."
"Inspector," Tae-seong said, his own voice calm, detached. The lawyer-voice. The voice that cross-examined witnesses and addressed judges. "The victim is Lee Dong-wook. He was a witness under my protection. I was with him fifteen minutes ago. He was alive."
"And now he's not," Park said, stepping closer. He didn't look at the body again. His eyes were locked on Tae-seong's. "And you're here. And that is here." He jerked his chin toward the Dragon Mark.
"It was planted."
"By who? The ghost that garroted him?" Park knelt, gloved, and picked up the Mark with a tweezers from his pocket. He held it up, the red eye catching the light. "You know what this is."
"A syndicate token."
"Not just any token." Park's lips twisted into something that wasn't a smile. "This is a Juryeong. A Dragon's Command Mark. This isn't left on foot soldiers. This is left on traitors. On people who break the Accords." He leaned in, his voice dropping. "People who talk to lawyers."
Tae-seong said nothing. The Dragon Accords—the mythical peace treaty between the Nine Dragons of Seoul's underworld. He'd written them off as gangland folklore. But the way Park said it… like it was a real document. Like it was law.
"Where's the file he gave you?" Park asked.
"I don't have it."
"Right." Park stood, slipping the Mark into an evidence bag. "You just happened to be in the room with a dead informant, a Dragon Mark, a confession note, and no file. Convenient."
"It was taken from me. Between this room and the elevator."
Park laughed, a short, harsh sound. "Taken. By who? The Tenth Dragon himself?"
The words hung in the air.
The myth. The ghost. The arbiter.
The story Tae-seong had spent his career mocking.
He felt the first true prick of fear then—not of prison, not of scandal, but of something deeper. The fear that he had been playing a game whose rules he had never bothered to learn.
More police flooded the room. Forensics in white suits began photographing, measuring, bagging. Tae-seong was guided to the side, watched by a young officer whose hand never left his baton.
From his position, Tae-seong could see the bathroom mirror. Reflected in it was the hallway, and the open door of Suite 4401—the Presidential Suite.
A man stood there, silhouetted against the warm light of the room behind him.
Seo Jeong-ho.
His uncle.
The man who had taken in two orphaned children. The man who had paid for Tae-seong's law degree. The philanthropist. The hotel magnate.
He was holding a crystal tumbler of amber liquid. He wasn't watching the chaos. He was watching Tae-seong.
And on his face was an expression Tae-seong had never seen before: not worry, not shock.
It was assessment.
Calm, calculated, surgical assessment.
Their eyes met in the mirror.
Jeong-ho gave the faintest, almost imperceptible nod.
Not of reassurance.
Of acknowledgment.
Then he turned and closed his door, softly, just as Inspector Park walked back over to Tae-seong, holding a tablet. On it was a financial record.
"Jin-ssi," Park said, his voice now chillingly formal. "We've just received a flagged transaction report from the Financial Intelligence Unit. Over the past eighteen months, nine separate deposits, totaling approximately 2.3 billion won, have been made to an offshore account registered to a shell company. That shell company is owned by you."
Tae-seong stared at him. "That's impossible."
"The deposits," Park continued, his eyes cold, "came from nine different banking entities. Tracing suggests links to businesses affiliated with… let's see." He scrolled. "The White Tiger Syndicate. The Jade Viper Network. The Iron Ox Brotherhood. All nine major syndicates, in fact."
The room seemed to tilt.
Nine deposits.
Nine Dragons.
The Tenth Dragon's cut.
"That's not my account," Tae-seong said, but the words sounded thin, even to him.
"It has your biometric verification. Your digital certificate." Park lowered the tablet. "You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to an attorney—though, given your profession, I assume you'll serve as your own." He paused. "Jin Tae-seong, you are under arrest for the murder of Lee Dong-wook, and on suspicion of organized crime affiliation, bribery, and operating as a criminal intermediary."
The cuffs were cold.
The metal clicked shut around his wrists with a finality that echoed in his bones.
As they led him out, past the forensics team, past the hotel staff who wouldn't meet his eyes, Tae-seong looked once more at the body.
At the Dragon Mark, now sealed in plastic.
At the note: He knew.
In the elevator descending to the lobby, Inspector Park spoke without looking at him.
"You've made a lot of enemies, Jin-ssi. Putting away their soldiers. Exposing their fronts." The elevator dinged for the lobby. "But you know what they say about the Nine Dragons."
Tae-seong said nothing.
Park smiled, a grim, knowing thing. "They only unite against one thing. A threat to all of them. A breach of the peace." He pushed open the elevator door. The hotel lobby was a swarm of media, cameras flashing like a thunderstorm. "They say you're that threat now. They say you're the one who's been playing both sides. The lawyer who busts the gangs by day… and the Tenth Dragon who arbitrates for them by night."
They stepped into the chaos. Microphones were shoved forward. Reporters shouted questions.
"Jin Tae-seong! Did you kill Lee Dong-wook?"
"Are you the Tenth Dragon?"
"Did you take bribes from all nine syndicates?"
Tae-seong kept his head up, his face a mask. A mask he had worn in court a thousand times. A mask of competence, of control.
But inside, the diamond-clear mind was shattering.
The trap wasn't just around him.
It was him.
Every piece of evidence, every lie, every financial thread—they weren't just pointing at him.
They were woven from him. From his career, his victories, his life.
They passed the giant lobby aquarium.
Inside, the weedy sea dragon, a creature of myth made flesh, uncoiled from behind a coral spire. It drifted across the glass, its black eye seeming to hold his reflection for a long, cold moment.
A master of camouflage.
A predator that looked like part of the scenery.
Then the police pushed him through the revolving doors, into the rain, into the blinding flash of cameras, and into the back of a waiting van.
As the doors slammed shut, cutting off the shouts and the light, Tae-seong finally understood.
This wasn't a frame job.
It was a promotion.
And the trial had already begun.