[Blacklist - Hyuna ft. LE]
 

IF YOU HAVE NOT READ THE DISCLAIMER, READ IT HERE. I CANNOT EMPHASIZE ENOUGH HOW IMPORTANT THIS IS. 
 

Byul is confused. She furrows her eyebrows as she watches Mina from the other side of the one-way window in the interrogation room.

Mina throws off her handcuffs, sprints to the other side of the table, and slides into the chair that would normally be taken by the officer. She continues to move back and forth, pretending to be both the officer and criminal. She repeatedly latches the handcuffs when she’s playing the suspect, and she yells and slams her hands on the table when she’s playing the officer.

Junmyeon is next to Byul outside the interrogation room, his lips curling up in amusement.

“Does she normally do this?”

Junmyeon laughs at her question. “She’s the best interrogator in the department.”

On the other side of her, Minseok nods. “Don’t know how she does it.”

Byul swears that if Mina continues, she’ll get dizzy. “I—I have a lot of questions.”

Junmyeon and Minseok crack into identical smiles. Minseok nudges Byul with his shoulder. “Says the one who nearly flicked off a man who has likely been harboring fugitives.”

Byul mumbles under her breath, “I just didn’t like the way he talked to me, okay?”

Junmyeon turns to her as if about to question her quiet statement. But he doesn’t ask any questions, instead choosing to knit his eyebrows together, and she can feel his gaze tracing her face.

In reality, she’s a little worried. If there isn’t enough evidence to sentence Chen without a lengthy trial and Mina doesn’t get enough information and evidence from him, then dealing with Chen instead of Sehun could eat up all of their time. Maybe that was the Kyrie’s real purpose. She hadn’t been the only one to think that, and Junmyeon had sat the team down and explained that only half of them would be uncovering evidence on Chen and the other half would briefed in order to not lose precious time.

Junmyeon sighs a little, combing his fingers through his hair. The team has been busy over the last day and half, and she knows that he’s barely slept. They’re all sleep-deprived, and Chanyeol fell asleep an hour ago, drooling over paperwork and his own analysis. Irene had quietly slipped the sheets out from under him, and Donghae had covered him with a blanket.

But Byul gets it. Chanyeol’s job as a criminologist means that he’s supposed to understand why Chen, or Kim Jongdae (they found out his real name four hours ago), chose to associate himself with criminals and have stacks upon stacks of documents showing trillions of won in transfers.

But Chen is a rabbit hole that Byul doesn’t want to go down. Minseok and Junmyeon agreed with her during the meeting, and that’s why the three of them are pushing forward on the case. Junmyeon’s splitting up of the team is smart, she realizes, because only Irene is organized enough to communicate the evidence in an effective way. She has the ability to distinctly summarize and link important details together.

“Mina can get all the information, right?” Byul asks, and it feels a bit unnecessary. She knows Mina’s reputation, and despite her faith in her teammates, Byul knows that she’ll have lost two days if Mina can’t extract more information. The money transfers don’t link to Oh Sehun, or at least the team doesn’t think they do.

Kyungsoo is still doing a clean sweep of the scene because he’s incredibly thorough. He had murmured something about him missing something and stared blankly at the bar. And if there’s anything Kyungsoo has, it’s good intuition.

“Mina can get the information,” Minseok affirms, his eyes trained on the female figure that’s somehow still running circles around the table, handcuffs dangling from her wrist. “Give her twenty minutes max to get everything we need.”

Junmyeon shakes his head. “Shouldn’t we wait for Kyungsoo to be sure? Even then, we should get back to the case we actually need to solve.”

Minseok frowns a little at the other male. “Is this you saying we should play it safe, or is this you saying that this isn’t important?”

Despite their good relationship, Byul knows that they voice their difference in opinions. To some, it looks argumentative. To Byul, it looks they’re helping each other walk down the right path to the case.

“It’s me saying that it’s been less than twenty-four hours since we arrested Chen. And we have no idea what Kyungsoo may find.”

“Or may not find.”

“Or may not find,” Junmyeon agrees rather easily. “But after seeing his money transfers, I know something is not right.”

Minseok exhales. “Fine. But that holds us back a few days.”

“We don’t even know where the crime is going to be committed.” Byul rubs at her forehead. At the very least, she had been hoping to find which object will be stolen. “Or where.”

Chanyeol is convinced that it’s going to happen somewhere in Korea. And after seeing how arrogant Sehun can be, Byul agrees. Sehun is clearly Korean, and committing his final crime in his origin country would be the ultimate slander and impact to the government and public safety. He is the empty piñata at children’s birthday parties, the wrong password alert, and the pennies left in an almost-empty bank account. He makes a mockery of the rules and what’s accepted to be right.

Committing his final elaborate crime in Korea? That seems like it will be his ending fireworks.

Sehun’s phone vibrates, making him frown and turn away from the book balanced over his crossed legs. The flames in the fireplace cast a warm glow over his face and parts of the room. To some, it could be considered eerie. To Sehun, it feels comfortable.

The phone vibrates, and he has to wonder what makes phones sound threatening sometimes. It’s the same vibration no matter what call he gets, but sometimes, the ringtone makes him jump or makes his heart beat a little faster. Right now, it’s almost ominous as the flashing of the screen clashes with the sparks from the fire.

His fingers turn over the phone, and his eyebrows raise at the unknown number. He swipes to accept. “Hello?”

“They took Jongdae.”

“What?” Sehun isn’t sure that he’s hearing Yixing correctly over the connection with the burner phone. Yixing’s good at not leaving traces.

“He was arrested. At his bar. I don’t know why.”

“Does Luhan know?” Sehun could laugh. He feels amusement bubbling up from inside.

“I was going to tell him next.”

“Do we have a way to get any more information?”

“Jongdae was the information hoarder. We get our information from him.” Yixing is right. Sehun isn’t particularly sad that Jongdae is in trouble. He doesn’t feel much at all.

Other than amusement, that is.

He wasn’t sure what the outcome would be when mentioning Chen’s name to Byul, but he certainly didn’t expect such aggression and for her to jump on any sort of clue so fast. The name drop was more out of curiosity rather than anything else; why would Kim Jongdae, a man deep in the underground of Korea, know a simple girl who chose to be a police officer? It isn’t love, or even any sort of care. Jongdae doesn’t love people. He grows fond of them and their existence around him, but he doesn’t love people.

And Sehun is sure that he isn’t that different. He doesn’t particularly care either.

“Keep me updated.” Sehun ends the call with a smile stretching across his face.

An Byul. Byul, Byul, Byul. It’s clear that he’s missing a piece of the puzzle, and his curiosity has earned nothing but a ticket to Kim Jongdae’s arrest. The bar has an obvious enough connection to Sehun, but he doesn’t have anything to worry about unless someone is trying to incriminate Luhan, Yixing, or any other frequenters of the secret space.

If the police are smart, they will find the door that led to the area underneath the bar, but after so many years, Sehun knows one thing. The police aren’t smart. They miss clues right under their nose. Sure, he’s gotten lucky, but unless the people on his case have radically changed, it will be the same old cat and mouse game that he would ultimately win.

No, the only thing that has really changed is the leadership of the team. Kim Junmyeon has taken over his case, and that is rare for someone so young. But if the officer wasn’t a good and influential subordinate in the prior years, then there’s very little of a chance that the man would be able to sniff Sehun out now.

An Byul on the other hand, might be a bit of a surprise. Jongdae’s long list of crimes aren’t connected to Sehun, so he’s more interested to find out what exactly she has been able to find. It’s too late though. The criminal system means that the trials would be held several times over the next few weeks, and a verdict wouldn’t be declared until after Sehun dusts his hands of the dirt of his final crime. If she’s sniffing in Jongdae’s direction, she’s going the wrong way. Nothing could serve as supporting evidence against Sehun.

After all, Sehun works alone.

He puts his book aside, lifting up his laptop and opening it. No matter how much research he did on Byul before he saw her for the first time, he had found no good reason for her to know Jongdae.

But his fingers pause on the keys. She was quite a little case solver before she was transferred to Seoul headquarters, and he doubts that the two of them met after her transfer. No, she must have met Kim Jongdae before. Sehun knows what she’s done in the past, but not exactly where.

And given the fact that Kim Jongdae had briefly mentioned local crime rate going down, there’s a good chance that An Byul was previously stationed down the street from his bar.

He laughs. That means that Byul would have probably be his customer. She was so eager to solve the case that she went out and arrested a person she was possibly friends with. She’s supposed to be one of the good ones, but even she has to question her own morals if she’s arresting someone she knows. It’s easy to throw people in jail if she has no idea who they are.

Sehun hasn’t killed anyone. He doesn’t think he’s even physically hurt anyone. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that he’s a criminal, and a good one at that. He finds the word a little funny.

Criminal.

What does being a criminal really mean? At its core, it means that Sehun commits crimes. But there’s such a large range of crimes that the word is almost meaningless to him. Does it mean that he’s a drug user? Does it mean that he’s a serial killer? Or does it mean that he’s succumbed to a human behavior and likes to have a little fun?

After all, it’s just a giant game. Maybe not for the police, but for him, it shows just how messed up the system is. And this is a system that every civilian is supposed to have faith in.

The game isn’t as fun if there isn’t any resistance though. So for the first time in years, Sehun thinks he’s having fun.

If there’s one thing that Byul hates, it’s the impending feeling of that something is going to go wrong. And as she sips from her second mug of coffee of the day, the dark cloud over her head grows darker.
 

Minseok ruffles through his hair and Junmyeon is scrolling through documents on his laptop, trying to find more possibilities of the object the Kyrie is going to steal. Byul doesn’t like the list.

Minseok thinks it could be another National Treasure, but Byul is with Junmyeon. That would be too easy, and there are so many National Treasures of Korea that represent the cultural heritage. Some are more important than others, and the Kyrie has already gotten his grubby hands on the more significant ones.

No. Whatever Oh Sehun is going to try to steal, it will be bigger, more important, and invaluable. Why? His ego demands it.

“Junmyeon?”

“Hm?”

“Are there any museum exhibits coming to Korea in the next month?”

Minseok frowns, “You don’t think that it could be a foreign artifact, do you?”

“It could be anything.” Junmyeon responds with a cryptic answer. “It could be the screens from the Korea Stock Exchange and I wouldn’t even be surprised.”

“Not his style though,” Minseok adds. “He seems to like things that make him feel important.”

No. He doesn’t seem to just like things that make him feel superior. It’s more than that. He knows he’s superior in almost every sense of the word. Intellectually, socially, and educationally, he is better than a large majority.

He likes making people feel like a fool—like he will always sit on a throne high above the rest of society as everyone else represents the peasants at his feet.

“There’