“Sign here and here, please. Then put your stamp here, and then here.”

Chaerin and Jiyong sit in his office, a pile of papers and folders in between them on the table. He quietly signs and stamps the papers she hands to him, avoiding any eye contact. For the hour she’s been in his office he hasn’t looked at her once and Chaerin knows he’s still upset with her.

“Are you going to talk to me?” She asks but he ignores her. He makes her feel so frustrated, always avoiding problems. She snaps in annoyance. “Are you just going to be immature or are you going to talk to me?”

He responds to her with a glare and she sighs. It’s always like this.

“At least let me talk.”

“You won’t stop talking.” He grumbles as he continues to read papers and sign and stamp.

The office door swings open and Mr. Lee walks in with a big smile. He jokingly bows to the king and queen of GD Group as he notices them stiffly sitting next to one another in the office chairs. He’s not around often but he knows how his daughter and Jiyong can get every once in a while.

“Appa, stop playing around.” Chaerin chastises him with a smile.

“Hello, abeoji. We didn’t have a schedule.” Jiyong greets more formally without looking up from the document he’s signing.

“I’m aware,” Mr. Lee smirks. “I’m actually here to see Chaerin-ah. Would you mind if I took my daughter to lunch?”

“Please get her away from me.” Jiyong answers hastily with a wave of his hand. Chaerin and her father look at him in shock and he quickly corrects himself. “Please feel free to take her away, I mean.”

Chaerin frowns as she gathers her belongings and follow her father out the door. At the restaurant, Mr. Lee leans across the private table to whisper to her.

“Is Jiyong angry because of your man on the side?”

“Appa, I think you’ve misunderstood something about Taeyang-ssi and me.” She answers him with an eyeroll. “The two of us have nothing going on. We barely know one another and there’s certainly no affair.”

Mr. Lee laughs at her loudly and she looks at him wide eyed.

“Whatever you need to tell yourself.”

“Appa. I’m being serious and you really need to respect that.”

“It wouldn’t be a completely bad idea to date Park Taeyang.” Her father muses as he sips his tea. Chaerin hits him from across the table and he winces. “I’m sorry, sorry. I won’t make anymore jokes.”

“Thank you.” She says with a frown.

He’s about to say something else but their food arrives and he’s quiet. After the waiter has left and they had started eating, he looks at her.

“Do you remember your little friend Youngbae?” He asks and she looks up but she’s carefully practiced hiding her shock.

“Of course I remember him, we were best friends.”

“Don’t you think that Park Taeyang and Youngbae are just a bit similar?” He whispers as he leans in.

“I’ve thought about it before.” She leans back. “They only look similar, there’s nothing that’s actually the same about them.”

“Are you sure?” He asks and she nods.

“Why are you asking this, appa?” Chaerin wonders as she sips her tea, eyeing her father suspiciously.

“I’ve looked into it and I’m pretty sure that Youngbae and Park Taeyang are actually the same man.”

“You’re being ridiculous.” She says with a nervous laugh but he looks at her seriously.

He leans in again and Chaerin begins to panic inside.

“Stop lying to me.” He tells her in a scarily quiet voice. “I know that you know, Chaerin-ah. You can date Taeyang and marry Kwon Jiyong but never forget that your loyalty is to me. Your loyalty should always be to your family. Our Jiyong-ah is an easily controllable idiot. I’m still studying and watching Park Taeyang but I’m sure that his goal is to take over GD Group.”

“Stop telling me all of this. I don’t want to know.” She tells him as she looks away. “I don’t know what’s going on and I don’t want to ever know.”

Mr. Lee studies her for a moment before his eyes widen in shock.

“You know a lot, don’t you?” He asks in surprise. “How much do you actually know?”

Chaerin shakes her head, refusing to answer him.

“You may think the best way to protect yourself is to pretend that you don’t even know about the game. That’s wrong. The only way to survive is to play the game yourself.”

Chaerin continues to look away from him, not speaking as she slowly drinks her tea.

“Are you scared of Mr. Kwon?” He asks but she doesn’t answer. “He’s like large and scary dog with big fangs and a horrific growl. Kwon is a strong and powerful beast and he won’t hesitate to attack. But you can’t forget that he’s just a dog and all attack dogs have someone pulling the leash and yelling ‘bite!’”

“I don’t understand.” Chaerin says quietly after turning back to look at her father.

“You will understand everything in time.” He reaches into his briefcase and takes out a large white envelope, handing it to Chaerin over the table. “Don’t read the contents until you’re at home.”

“What do you want me to do with this?” She asks in confusion as she handles the large envelope carefully.

He smiles at her.

“Once you read it you can do whatever you think would be best.”

Chaerin rushes out of the apartment building as she sees the cab that she called. She opens the door and gets into the cab, telling the driver where to go. Looking out the window for a few moments, she turns to look at the driver.

“Could you hurry please?”

When the cab arrives at its destination in front of a luxury high rise apartment building, she gives the driver the fee along with a generous gratuity. She throws open the door and runs into the building, going toward the elevators. Seeing police officers in uniform waiting for the elevators, she turns and goes toward the stairwell. Running up the stairs, her high heels cause her to stumble. Her ankle bends and she stops to take off her shoes, holding them in her hands as she continues to run up the flights of stairs.

Chaerin makes it to the thirteenth floor and opens the door as she breathes heavily. She walks into the hallway, slowly feeling tired and weak. When she sees Detective Bang Yongguk and his partner, she stops. The two detectives knock loudly on an apartment door and when its resident opens, they arrest him. Chaerin starts to feel dizzy as she watches as Teddy is arrested. He looks at her in shock as he notices her face get more and more pale. The world around her begins to spin and she falls slowly like an autumn leaf.

Teddy tries to run to her side but the police hold him back. She looks up to see him struggling with the detectives before everything goes black.

Chaerin sits at her desk in her room in the dim lamplight with a glass of wine. She picks up the white envelope from the desk and carefully slicing it with a letter opener. She cautiously slides the contents from the envelope and studies them. Her eyes narrow as she reads what looks like receipt orders for blood tests from a genetics clinic. One of the tests is for a man in his fifties and the other two are for 25 year old men.

She looks at the date for when the tests are expected to be completed and is surprised that they should be ready by the next day.

The next document is a hospital copy of a birth certificate. She knows before even reading it that it belongs to Dong Youngbae. Her fingers trace over the small footprints on the paper. The next paper is a copy of a money transfer a week after Youngbae’s birth.

Chaerin sets the documents down quietly, not sure what she’s supposed to think. She doesn’t know why her father gave her all of this information. She knows that he wants her to contact the genetics clinic to hear the results of the test. Her father is a man of dramatics, she has to give him that. Instead of just giving her the information himself he finds it much more interesting that she has to be the one to uncover it.

She’s about to put the papers back into the envelope when she notices something. Stuck in the corner of the heavy reinforced envelope is a mahjong tile. She takes the tile out and holds it in her palm before making a painfully tight fist. It’s a wan tile with the character ju and she knows that this is her father welcoming her to the game.

What she holds in her hand is the potential to completely ruin GD Group.

She laughs bitterly, knowing that her father has given her this power just to see what she will do with it.

When Chaerin wakes up she’s laying down in a private hospital room. Her head pounds painfully and she can feel the bright light shining against her eyelids.

“Kwon Jiyong,” She calls out as she reaches for him with her eyes still closed. A warm hand holds onto hers. “Could you turn the light off? It’s too bright.”

The hand lets go of hers and the lights in the room begin to dim. Slowly she opens her eyes and sees Jiyong sitting next to her. He’s looking at her with tears in his eyes.

“How did you know I was here?”

“Who else would it be?” She asks as if it’s an obvious answer and Jiyong laughs softly.

“You’re right,” He tells her softly as he looks at her with a strange expression on his face.

“What happened?” She asks groggily and he sighs.

“That’s what I want to know,” He says as he holds back onto her hand. “Do you remember going to Park Hongjun’s apartment building?”

Chaerin shakes her head weakly, barely moving.

“I don’t remember.”

“You showed up while he was being arrested and then you fainted in the hallway. The police drove you to the hospital.” He hands her a glass of water and she sips it gently as she listens to him. “You drank too much and overexerted yourself while being malnourished. The doctor says that your red blood cells are small, you’re anemic. You somehow even sprained your ankle. The police wanted to speak with you but Lee Soohyuk talked them into waiting until you were feeling better.”

“I really don’t remember wanting to speak to Teddy oppa.”

Jiyong flinches at her use of the nickname and Chaerin gives him a small smile in apology.

“I called apeoji but he said that he knew you’d be fine so he wasn’t going to waste his time by coming to the hospital.”

Chaerin laughs weakly.

“That’s fine, I understand.”

Jiyong looks at her in confusion and she squeezes his hand that she’s still holding.

“I fainted a lot when I was a child. If I worried about something or I was anxious I would stop eating and then become anemic. My dad isn’t even surprised anymore.”

Jiyong nods, wondering silently how he had never noticed something like that.

Park Bom sighs as she steps out of the interrogation room. Teddy is led back into the holding cell by a police officer shortly afterward as Youngbae watches.

Youngbae brings back coffee for himself and Bom as the two sit in the hallway of the police station. She takes her coffee from him and smiles as she thanks him.

“There’s so much evidence against him that I almost believe it.” Bom says, breaking the silence. “I’m really worried for oppa, I might not be able to even help him.”

“Please don’t think like that, noona. Hyung really doesn’t need us to be thinking like that.” Youngbae answers solemnly as he drinks his bitter coffee.  

“Someone really wants our brother to be a murderer.” Bom sighs. She’s quiet before speaking again. “Are you sure that this is the work of Mr. Kwon?”

He nods.

“It couldn’t be anyone else. We don’t have any other enemies.”

Youngbae’s angry that his brother is being blamed instead of him. He knows that his loved ones are being attacked in order to hurt him. He doesn’t understand the kind of evil it takes to kill your wife for no reason other than that so you can frame someone else. Bom gently pats his knee with her manicured hand.

“I’m scared for you.” She admits in a childish voice. “I don’t what the two of you are involved in but I want you to be safe and not get hurt anymore.”

“I’ll be safe, noona,” He tells her as he puts his hand over hers but he knows that he can’t really promise her anything. The stakes of the game have changed and he’s not even sure what he’s up against anymore. “You don’t need to be scared, I’ll protect you.”

Bom smiles and is quiet before suddenly remembering something.

“Ah, that’s right! Oppa told me something the moment I saw him. He said he wanted you to know that Lee Chaerin was at the apartment building, she fainted in the hallway and was taken to the hospital.”

Youngbae’s eyes widen.

“Hyung told you this?”

“Yes,” She answers, looking confused. “He told me that before I could even walk into the room.”

“I have to go.” Youngbae tells Bom as he gets up from the bench. “Take care of hyung and I’ll be back soon!”

- - -

Author's Note: I didn't expect to update this as quickly as I did haha. Thank you as always to all of my new subscribers and to everyone who has been supporting my story. I hope you enjoyed this chapter, I feel like with each new chapter everything gets so much more dramatic and crazy. Whose side is Chaerin's father on anyway? lol Everything changing and Chaerin keeps learning more and more, she hasn't forgetten why she went to see Teddy did she? What do you all think will happen now that Chaerin is no longer able to pretend she doesn't know anything? Whose side will she take? Please comment, I love to hear what you are all thinking and what you thought of the story!