She nods, satisfied, and turns her attention back to the screen. But my expression must give me away more than I anticipate, because after a few seconds, she glances up at me.
“Everything okay? You seem distracted.”
I clear my throat. “There’s a meeting I need to attend tomorrow evening. I’ll be missing dinner again.”
The flicker of disappointment that crosses her face is brief, but I catch it. She tries to mask it with a nod and diverting her gaze, but we know each other too well.
It upsets her that I’m so often saddled with work after hours.
“That’s okay. Business is business, right?”
“The night after, we’ll finish this.” I wrap my arm tightly around her shoulders and press her up even more against my side. “I want to see if So-yi ever escapes from behind that fern.”
Monroe laughs, though it sounds duller than usual. “Sounds good. I won’t watch any more without you.”
I kiss the top of her head, doing my best to ignore the guilt settling in my stomach like a heavy stone.
The underground boxing arena in Yeongdo-gu is a cramped and dimly lit warehouse that’s been transformed for the illegal matches.
Exposed pipes line the ceiling, sweat and condensation dripping from them onto the concrete floor below. The air is thick with cigarette smoke and sour from the soju being consumed. Both smells pair badly with the tang of fresh blood being spilled.
In the center of the room is a makeshift ring where two men beat each other senseless.
The first is a hulking brute called Gwan the Hammer. He sports a shaved, tattooed head and cauliflower ears, and he has some of the deadliest fists in all of South Korea.
His opponent is leaner and quicker, with a face that might have been handsome before it was rearranged by years of taking punches. They call him Viper.
Right now, Viper is losing.
Gwan lands a vicious right hook that snaps Viper’s head back, blood and saliva spraying from his split lips.
The crowd roars, drinks sloshing as men surge to their feet, screaming for more violence. More blood to be spilled.
Meanwhile, scantily clad working girls saunter through the crowd in search of wealthy men to be their sponsors for the night.
It’s a reminder why I’ve always hated events like this and mostly avoided them.
I sit among my men, the only one who has declined a cigar and barely touched his soju.
To my left, Nam Joo-wan is drunk. Not just tipsy butproperly, sloppily drunk, his once-slicked hair falling into his face as he shouts at the fighters. Beside him, the pot-bellied Lieutenant Hwang Do-gil is in similar condition, his cheeks flushed red and his words slurring together.
This is why they loved Kim Jae-hyun.
The former Baekho-je indulged in every vice imaginable—drinking, smoking, gambling, prostitution, and porn.
His lieutenants adored him because hewasone of them. A man of excess and appetite, never above wallowing in the same filth as his subordinates.
I am not that kind of leader.
I watch the match coldly detached, cataloging the fighters’ weaknesses out of habit. As a skilled fighter myself, that is about the only interesting aspect of these matches.
Gwan is powerful but clumsy and slow. Viper is quick but he lacks strength and muscle.
Neither would last five minutes against a trained killer. Against a strategic and varied fighter like me.
Nam Joo-wan nudges me with his elbow, accidentally sloshing soju onto his lap.
“Jin-tae,” he says, gesturing across the arena with his glass. “The commissioner. He’s just shown up. There, in the box.”
