A week ago: December 27th, South Korea
Sevastyan slammed the brakes on the four-wheeler. Snow was falling hard and the roads would be shut soon, if they hadn’t already closed behind him. Most people conjured neon metropolises in their minds when they summoned an image of South Korea, but there was a realm beyond the gleaming subways and towering Lotte shopping centers. Mountains. Ski slopes. Trees. Tracts of almost nothing. Places where the wealthy evildoer might go to be alone with their spoils.
Sevastyan jumped out of his vehicle, adjusting his gloves. Depending on what he found, he wasn’t going to leave evidence of his passing. Not a print on a glass or a knob. This client had gone off script, and they were going to pay the fines for this stop. Sevastyan wasn’t a foot soldier who made casual emergency visits. He should have been halfway back to Russia by now, only hours away from Rei and their temporary headquarters on the island of Sakhalin off the eastern coast.
Instead, he was here, doing something he wouldn’t want Rei to know about. Sevastyan’s lip pulled back in a snarl. He raked his eyes over the mountain lodge. Built in traditional hanok style, its half-circle roof tiles were laid down in orderly rows with circular end caps on the upturned edges. The walls were treated wood, no paint. To the right was a long wing surrounded by a wrap-around covered porch. There were lights on in that room but the rest of the visible windows were dark. An air of stillness hung over it all. Unnatural quiet. He knew this resort. The client would be in that wing and a handful of attendants would be waiting to be summoned from the basement at the other end of the building, where the service rooms were. All the better to not witness what might be taking place.
If all the lights were off except for the entertainment wing, then preparations were finished.
Pizdec. Damn. He’d come too late.
Tire marks in the falling snow, partially filled in, revealed that several people had recently left. The few vehicles remaining looked like they were close attendants and security. Too bad the greatest security breach was the client himself.
Sevastyan walked through the strip of ornamental garden and circled the wing. There were shadows inside, but no sound. It was too cold to smell anything. He was too late. By how much remained to be seen.
He eased open the side door.
A familiar man in his twenties knelt in a puddle of alcohol spreading across the wooden floor. In his hand was the broken neck of a green bottle. Half torn from his shoulders was a black hanbok, the cut modern, the fabric expensive. The front two panels, meant to be wrapped one over the other and tied closed, were torn apart, leaving his shoulders and chest on display. Chinese characters in black ink had been written down his ribs and smeared across his skin with bruising force. Blood from the young man’s nose and lip dripped down to stain the pool of spirits beneath his knees.
Halfway across the room, the client in question, a prominent member of regional law enforcement, was sprawled out on his back, half of a wooden table resting on his chest. It looked like the corner had hit the center of his chest with force and the table had shattered. Closer to the kneeling young man, a larger man lay half on his face. What could be seen of his visage was a mass of broken glass and cuts. He wasn’t dead, but he wasn’t moving.
Sevastyan was late–for a tableau vivant that should never have been set. He took it in, letting his heartbeat slow. His mission was to defuse, not to have to kill the merchandise.
“It’s always the quiet ones,” he said.
The young man spun on his knees, dropping the remnants of the bottle and grasping chopsticks from the mess of a dinner that had been strewn across the floor. They were Korean style: long, made of heavy metal, and deadly in the right hands. Like the hands of someone who had just used a glass bottle and a table to fell two men.
Even bloodied and injured, Gang Junseo moved as beautifully in person as he did on screen. Like Rei. After all, they had gone through the same training.
Sevastyan left his hands in his pockets, his shoulders relaxed. His heartbeat stayed slow. He breathed through his nose. “The ones raised by dogs. Timid to the hand that broke them, demon to any new master. Bak made one mistake with you.”
“What was that?” The young man’s voice was hardly recognizable compared to his famous smooth tones. It was harsh now, guttural. Like he’d been choked.
He was speaking, though. Not all would be capable. Most in his position were catatonic.
“He didn’t teach you to submit to just anyone. He just made you afraid of him. But something was already in you. Your mother, maybe.” Sevastyan leaned against the doorway. He had to keep talking, had to bring this cornered predator back down to the realm of rational thought, or barring that, to something biddable. Right now he was dancing with a dragon, one that shouldn’t have been able to take out two men but had done so despite the odds. He took his eyes off the young man and checked the room again. “There are those who break, those who make you kill them because they will never bend the knee even as a lie, and there are those who break you if you try to break them.”
And then there are the cowards and the hopeless. No reason to mention them now. Gang Junseo was neither. Had never been. Would never be.
Junseo was breathing more regularly now. Blinking. Coming back, just a little. Sevastyan moved his hands slowly out of his pockets, showing empty palms. “I don’t normally make house calls, but I was the closest. You, Mr. Gang, are too hot to keep. Now this . . .” He gestured at the room at large, “Is a mess. But a smaller mess than what your lover is about to make. I see you’ve made erudite points.”
Gang Junseo frowned. “I don’t understand.”
“Damian Sathers finds you more valuable than all the money his company makes in this region. In the last few hours, he’s already cost the city millions of won in policing expenses and agency overtime hours. And he’s communicated to some people, who communicated to those I work for, just how much further he is ready to go. He’s proven he’s capable. My job was to come here and tell the police chief to get his rocks off elsewhere and let you go. Obviously, you let yourself go.”
“There’s still a household full of people,” Gang Junseo said.
Rei had always said Gang Junseo was intelligent. Turned out he was observant as well.
“Five,” Sevastyan said, making an educated guess. “The food service staff left already. So now we have a problem.” They had a lot of problems, but mentioning them one at a time was prudent. They were only just now getting to a place where he could trust Gang wasn’t going to deploy those chopsticks against him.
It would have been simpler to put a bullet between those fiery eyes. His bosses would have approved. Dead K-pop stars didn’t testify.
But he couldn’t do that and face Rei. His caged bird knew there was blood on Sevastyan’s hands and still came to his call. If it were Gang’s blood, though, Rei would never answer.
Gang Junseo narrowed his eyes at Sevastyan. “What, exactly?”
Ah, yes, the problem.
