For You

Chapter Two: Leverage

Youjin’s POV.

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I suppressed a tired sigh, pinching the bridge of my nose between forefinger and thumb.  This was turning out to be a much longer night than I had anticipated. An irritated growl, not unlike that of a dog, drew my attention from the door I had been watching to the skulking teenager currently dragging his feet down the hall in my direction. 

“What do you want? It’s two in the ing morning.” My eyebrows rose at the ugly display of immaturity, coming from one who had just slept for four hours. I bit back the urge to remind him that I hadn’t. 

“Guard the door Heejun and shut up,” I said instead, moving from my chair across the door so he could take it. A yawn paused his eye-roll and he obeyed, taking the chair without thanks. Entitled brat.  

“Who’s in there?” One of his gangly legs flopped over the other as his head nodded towards the thick, wooden door. I sighed, not wanting to be in the same air space any longer. He was juvenile. And irritating. 

“A girl.” His eyes opened wider, suddenly no longer appearing to be so sleep deprived. “Don’t let her go anywhere.” He nodded, eager. “And I suggest you don’t go in there either. She could probably rip your head off.” 

Mulling over how nice that actually might be, I my heels and headed back in the direction of Seungjun’s room. Jae, my thoughts wandered back to the girl. I highly doubted that was her actual name - not even she looked convinced when she spoke it. But it barely mattered. There were a lot of people in our line of work who preferred aliases to protect themselves. If push came to shove and we needed a real name, there were always multiple ways to get it out of a person. 

Seungjun had noticed it a week ago - the small, grey toyota parked discretely across the street or around the corner. Since then we had been prepared for some form of break in or standoff, from one of our competitors. Consequently I had switched around my hours to nights mostly, sitting the the back corner of Seungjun’s room as I worked on some paperwork just for that extra level of protection. He hadn’t requested it. I had insisted. 

What I wasn’t expecting however, was for a single girl to come silently climbing through the window. I had no idea how she did it. I might have even missed her presence entirely if the moonlight beaming through the window onto my paperwork hadn’t been disturbed. She was so quiet. It caught me off guard at first, and then I found it amusing, watcher her crawl - looking so determined - and then the hallucinogen? I was expecting a gun or knife.

She was clever and unnervingly good at what she was doing. Practiced. Trained?

Of course had I not known Seungjun was awake the moment she came through the window, I would have stopped her myself, but I knew that he was. Years of work in the mafia had amplified his senses to the point where now the man had a way of just knowing.There was no need for me to have guarded him other than my own emotional sanity. He was far too reckless. A slight shift in his breathing alerted me to the fact that he was indeed as aware as I was of the intruder and simply enjoying letting it play out -much like a cat batting a helpless mouse around before it eats it, just for entertainment. 

It was slightly morbid, but then so were most things we did. 

I knocked quietly on the door - as forewarning rather than as a request - and entered at the distant, “Come in,” that filtered through the door. As I stepped into the room, I found my boss sitting back at his desk against the window, a pile of paperwork displayed in front of him. He was still wearing his evening clothes. 

I sighed, suppressing the urge to demand he go back to bed. Seungjun wouldn’t listen anyway. He was rebellious like that. Had been since the day I first met him five years ago. It was his tireless worth ethic and refusal to cut corners that had built KNK from nothing into the empire it now was and for that I was proud. As his friend however, often times I was worried. He never slowed down. Fast and blindingly fast were the only two tempos he knew... and he never indulged himself in anything he wanted. I couldn’t help but wonder how long he could maintain it, but in all the time I had known him he had never shown any signs of exhausting. 

Instead of reminding him he hadn’t slept a wink in two days, I went to his bar and poured him a glass of brandy, leaving it on his desk and stepping back over to my own to finish looking over a new deal that had come in from China. 

“Did she resist at all?” My eyes glanced up at his back, still turned away from me and working. 

“No.” There was a beat of silence as I watched him open a new folder, waiting. 

“Place the girl in Seoul High.” He spoke, answering the unasked question that had been floating in the air since the girl’s entrance. I nodded, only moderately surprised by his decision. Seungjun did everything out of instinct and experience had taught me they were rarely wrong. If he had decided to recruit the trespasser, I would not question him. Plus, it was fairly obvious that she couldn’t just be allowed to go home. Not after how far she had managed to make it past our security, presumably by herself. 

It was easy to surmise Seungjun’s reason for putting Jae undercover in Seoul High.

EXO was the leading mafia in South Korea, partially because of the people they recruited: kids. Brilliant, impulsive, and talented mostly around the high school age, and mostly still in high school. EXO’s former leader: Chin-Hae, had apparently preferred quality over quantity, though their mafia sect also happened to be the largest in Korea. It was for this reason he had kept some of the members in their studies, though with his recent passing a little over a month ago, there was a possibility things had changed. We would need to find that out for sure. 

Seoul High had the only public, advanced courses available in the country. As such, there were thousands of exceptionally talented students constantly coming and going. It was perfect recruitment territory and we could comfortably assume many of EXO’s trainees would be there. It would be easy to slip a girl in and be of great benefit to us to do it. There was a massive hole in our intel about the exact number of EXO members and their identities, and that hole had cost us once before. Now with things changing within their chain of command, it had suddenly become a priority to fill it. 

We had already been planning to send Inseong and Heejun in, but a girl would help spread out their circles of impact. We hadn’t had one before. Now we did.

Though we knew almost nothing about her, there was a distinct fearlessness to Jae as well as drive and a sort of masculinity. She was tough and capable - that much was apparent simply by the fact that she had managed to slip through all of KNK’s defenses down to the very last bedroom. But there was something else... defiance. It had been in her eyes when she faced Seungjun. I had my own reservations about her- whether or not she should be trusted -but I couldn’t deny the thought that any girl crazy enough to climb through a mafia boss’s window and stare him down, regardless of motive, would be capable of capturing EXO’s attention in a school that was bound to be crawling with them. She could be very useful. 

We just needed the right leverage to convince her. 

A thought crawled its way into my mind. “The girl she was looking for?”

Seungjun had left his desk and now stood next to the window, peering out in seemingly disinterest while slowly sipping on the brandy I had left him. He’s assessing how she climbed in, I guessed. 

“I’m not exactly sure,” a slight frown graced his features. “Another mafia group perhaps.” He looked bothered by the idea and I knew why. Taking another sip, his eyes returned to me. “Look into it for me please Youjin.” I nodded. 

There was something unnerving about the way she had described it - like she knew it was KNK that had taken her friend. Her eyes hadn’t been questioning. But it wasn’t us, and there was no reason for an incident like that to have looked like us either. Unless, someone had wanted it to.

Leverage...

* * * 

For You. 

Chapter Two Completed.

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Note from RedNight: 

Please go checkout my other fic: 'What He'll Never Have'