The air in the studio instantly turned to ice. Ji-won’s blood ran completely cold, the room spinning around him as Min-jun’s words hung in the suffocating silence.
Forty minutes. They logged the car.
Min-jun’s hand remained firmly on Ji-won’s chin, his thumb applying just enough pressure to keep the boy from looking away. His dark, analytical eyes were fixed on Ji-won’s face, searching every micro-expression, every involuntary twitch of his eyelids, every frantic heave of his chest.
"I'm waiting, Ji-won-ah," Min-jun murmured, his voice deadly quiet, laced with a terrifying edge of quiet fury. "Who came onto our property?"
Ji-won’s lips parted, but no sound came out. His mind raced frantically, trying to string together a coherent lie, but his throat felt as though it were stuffed with sand. He was trapped. The lies were catching up to him, the net closing tight, and there was nowhere left to run.
"I... Hyung, it was—"
BANG.
The studio door swung wide open, slamming back against the wall with enough force to rattle the glass in the high arched windows.
"Min-jun! Have you lost your mind?!"
Do-hyun stood on the threshold, his tie loosened, his sleeves rolled up to his forearms, his usually easygoing face contorted in rare, furious anger. He stormed into the room, his dress shoes striking the hardwood floor like thunder, and stepped directly between Min-jun and Ji-won, roughly shoving Min-jun’s arm away from their younger brother.
Ji-won stumbled back against the mahogany desk, gripping the edge of the wood for support as he gasped for air.
"What the hell are you doing interrogating him like he’s a corporate spy?" Do-hyun snapped, towering over Min-jun with his shoulders tense and fists clenched. "Look at him! He’s pale as a sheet and shaking! You’ve been barking orders at security all evening, and now you come up here to terrorize Ji-won?"
Min-jun didn't flinch. He slowly adjusted the cuffs of his dark jacket, his expression smoothing into a mask of cold, unyielding authority.
"Step aside, Do-hyun," Min-jun said coldly. "This doesn't concern you. A Lu Conglomerate vehicle bypassed our outer gate this morning. Someone inside this house let them in, and Ji-won was the only one on the ground floor during that hour."
"Because he was having breakfast and studying!" Do-hyun yelled back, throwing his hands up in frustration. "Did it ever occur to your paranoid mind that Lu Sheng’s people are deliberately driving near our perimeter just to mess with us? To provoke you into acting like a tyrant in your own home?!"
Do-hyun turned around, his expression softening instantly as he looked down at Ji-won. He reached out, wrapping a warm, protective arm around Ji-won’s trembling shoulders and pulling him against his side.
"Come on, Ji-won-ah," Do-hyun said gently, his voice a stark contrast to the venom he had just spewed at Min-jun. "You’re coming downstairs with me. Chef made the seafood soup you like. You’re not staying up here in the dark with Mr. Prosecutor."
Ji-won let out a shaky, desperate breath, clinging to Do-hyun’s suit jacket like a drowning man grabbing a lifeline. "H-Hyung... thank you..."
"He isn't leaving this room until he answers me," Min-jun said, his voice dropping an octave, heavy with a lethal, warning tone.
Do-hyun stopped, turning his head to glare over his shoulder at their older brother. "If you want to interrogate someone, interrogate the security guards at the gate who let the car sit in the lane. Leave Ji-won out of your corporate war. If I catch you cornering him like this again, Min-jun, I swear to God I'll move him out of this estate myself."
Without waiting for Min-jun’s response, Do-hyun guided Ji-won out of the studio, his arm firmly wrapped around him, shielding him as they walked down the long, dim hallway toward the grand staircase.
As they walked away, Ji-won glanced back over his shoulder for a fraction of a second.
Min-jun was still standing in the center of the studio, silhouetted against the fading evening light. He hadn't followed them. Instead, his dark, sharp eyes were turned away from the door, looking directly toward the side table—staring straight at the half-used tub of dark indigo oil pigment where Lu Sheng's pen lay buried.
The dining room of the Kang estate was usually a palace of serene, ridiculously lavish comfort, but tonight it felt more like an interrogation room with a silver cutlery set.
A massive crystal chandelier beamed golden light down onto the polished dark oak table, illuminating an absurd feast. The head chef had prepared three different soups, steamed snow crab, and hand-cut glazed beef simply because Do-hyun had texted the kitchen that Ji-won looked "a bit sad and underfed."
Ji-won sat in his usual plush leather chair, nursing a porcelain bowl of ginseng soup. To his right, Do-hyun was aggressively piling succulent crab meat directly onto Ji-won’s plate, his suit jacket discarded over his chair as he glowered at the empty seat at the head of the table. Min-jun hadn't come down for dinner yet. He was still upstairs in the studio, which only made Ji-won’s stomach twist into tighter, more agonizing knots.
"Eat up, sweetie," Do-hyun said loudly, clearly still trying to drown out the lingering tension from their earlier argument upstairs. "Don't pay any attention to Min-jun. He’s been breathing too much corporate smog lately. His brain is turning into a spreadsheet."
Sitting across from Ji-won was his second-eldest brother, Ji-ho—a brilliant, somewhat eccentric linguistics major who had just returned from an international academic conference in Switzerland that afternoon. Ji-ho was usually the quietest of the three older brothers, buried under stacks of vintage leather-bound dictionaries and theoretical grammar papers. He wore round, wire-rimmed glasses, a soft cream cardigan, and had a habit of observing people as if they were ancient manuscripts waiting to be decoded.
"Min-jun is remarkably high-strung today," Ji-ho remarked calmly, carefully buttering a warm dinner roll. "Though I suppose running a global shipping empire while fighting off hostile bids from the Lu Conglomerate isn't exactly a relaxing hobby."
Ji-won flinched at the mention of the Lu Conglomerate, nearly dropping his silver spoon back into his soup. He caught himself quickly, forcing a small, tight smile onto his face as he took a tiny, suffocating sip of broth.
"I'm... I'm really fine, Hyung," Ji-won murmured softly, his voice raspy from a day of holding back tears. "Min-jun Hyung was just worried about perimeter security. It’s my fault for wandering around the rear bay this morning."
"It is not your fault," Do-hyun insisted firmly, dropping another piece of crab onto Ji-won's plate. "You're twenty years old! You're allowed to breathe fresh air without being questioned like a criminal mastermind! Besides, look at you—you're working yourself to the bone with those advanced economics modules. Your brain must be fried."
"It's true," Ji-won agreed desperately, seizing the excuse with both hands. He wanted nothing more than to shift the conversation entirely away from corporate security, black sedans, and anything remotely related to his secret life. "The financial trade models are just... incredibly complex. Especially the international currency hedging strategies."
Ji-ho tilted his head, his dark eyes sparkling with quiet interest behind his round glasses. "Oh? Are you studying classical trade structures or modern derivative markets?"
Ji-won panicked slightly, searching his overworked, terrified brain for any piece of financial jargon to throw out to sound intelligent. His mind was a chaotic blur of fear, the image of Lu Sheng hovering over him in the back of that dark car overlapping with the memory of Lu Sheng’s deep, gravelly voice dictating economic theories during their private penthouse sessions.
"Well," Ji-won blurted out before his brain could stop his mouth, "the professor was explaining how top-tier conglomerates manipulate market liquidity using 'L'étreinte du serpent'—you know, to wrap around a competitor's credit lines before they even realize they're being squeezed."
The dining room went dead, terrifyingly silent.
The only sound was the faint, rhythmic ticking of the grandfather clock near the mahogany sideboard.
Do-hyun paused mid-chew, looking utterly confused. "The... serpent's what now? Is that some French banking nonsense?"
Ji-won’s heart stopped beating. The blood drained from his face so fast he felt dizzy.
The phrase had slipped out without a single second of thought. It wasn't a standard textbook term. It wasn't taught in university lectures. It was an archaic, obscure French mercantilist idiom—a dark, cynical metaphor for predatory corporate strangulation that Lu Sheng had whispered against Ji-won's ear while tracing a calloused thumb over Ji-won's collarbone just two nights ago. “It’s called the serpent's embrace, little angel,” Lu Sheng had purred into his skin. “You strangle the prey gently so they don't scream until it's already over.”
Ji-ho set his butter knife down onto his plate with a tiny, sharp clink.
He slowly pushed his round glasses up the bridge of his nose, his brow furrowing into deep, analytical lines. His soft, academic posture vanished in a heartbeat, replaced by the razor-sharp scrutiny of a language scholar who had spent his entire life studying obscure idioms and dialectical origins.
Ji-ho's eyes narrowed, fixed directly on Ji-won's pale, trembling lips. "That's an interesting idiom, Ji-won. Where did you pick that up? It's not common at all."
Ji-won’s throat clamped shut. He clutched his cloth napkin beneath the table so hard his nails bit into his palms. "I... I..."
"In fact," Ji-ho continued, his tone eerily pleasant yet dripping with intense, academic curiosity, "'L'étreinte du serpent' isn't in any modern economics curriculum in Asia. It’s an 18th-century French privateer term, revived almost exclusively in the private legal briefs of European trade syndicates. Actually..." Ji-ho paused, tapping his finger against his chin as a sudden realization dawned on his face. "...there's only one prominent corporate figure in this city who routinely uses that exact phrase in his executive speeches. Lu Sheng’s grandfather brought it over from Paris, and Lu Sheng himself quoted it in Forbes Asia three years ago when he bankrupted the Han Maritime Group."
Do-hyun’s fork clattered loudly onto his porcelain plate. "What?!"
Ji-won felt as though the floor beneath his chair had opened up, threatening to swallow him whole into a pitch-black abyss. Panic, hot and blinding, flooded his nervous system.
"N-No!" Ji-won stammered, his voice rising an octave in sheer, frantic terror as he accidentally knocked his water glass over, spilling cold water across the pristine white tablecloth. "That's—that's not where I heard it! I—I must have read it in a forum! A blog! An online study guide!"
"A study guide?" Ji-ho repeated softly, leaning across the table, his dark eyes locked onto Ji-won's flushed face like an owl eyeing a cornered mouse. "Ji-won-ah... that phrase doesn't exist in digitized Korean study guides. I wrote my master's thesis on romance-language loanwords in East Asian corporate jargon. Where did you really hear that?"
"I... I..." Ji-won scrambled out of his chair so fast it screeched violently against the marble floor, almost tipping over. He backed away from the table, his chest heaving, his hands trembling uncontrollably as he clutched his high sweater collar tight against his neck. "I don't feel well! My stomach hurts! I'm going to my room!"
"Ji-won, wait!" Do-hyun called out, standing up in alarm.
"Leave me alone!" Ji-won cried, tears of humiliation and terror finally spilling over his lashes as he turned on his heel and fled the dining room, his frantic footsteps echoing loudly up the grand marble staircase.
Ji-ho didn't chase after him. He remained seated at the dining table, staring quietly at the puddle of spilled water soaking into the linen tablecloth. Slowly, Ji-ho reached into his cardigan pocket, pulled out his smartphone, and opened a private messaging chat with Min-jun.
‘Min-jun,’ Ji-ho typed with cold, precise speed. ‘You were right to be suspicious. Ji-won isn't taking standard university modules. He is quoting Lu Sheng verbatim.’