"Who are you?”

Jinki stood over a person, a rat son of a who’d been playing both sides–The Kim family and more importantly him–for far too long.

There was a man in the alleyway, one who’d been unfortunate enough to see Jinki carry out the dirty work that he normally left to his enforcers. He was shrunk into a corner, his face covered by his hands and his body drawn into himself. He hadn’t realized the man was that close until he’d gasped loudly–the sharp ‘sweehwip’ of a silencer echoing off the brick walls of the alley probably scaring him.

Jinki glanced at him, an expectant look on his face. He repeated his question. “Who are you?”

“P–please don’t kill me. I just wanted to help.”

That caused Jinki’s brow to lift to his hairline. “Help who, exactly?”

“J–Jonghyun said you would know I was coming–that–that my presence would explain everything.”

It did although Jinki made a show of thinking about it. Most of it had been explained in a phone call he’d received this afternoon. Jonghyun–mostly cryptic and nonsensical for no reason—had said only two words.

CRUISE control.

“You’re the hacker.”

“Not hacker. Computer programmer,” the man said. Despite his fear, he could still feel the disapproval in the man’s voice.

Jinki scoffed. “Tell him to be less cryptic next time. Our little Dongwoon almost got in the way.”

Minho lowered his hands from his face but kept his eyes firmly shut. “He said you–you would say that. He said you were impatient. But he said Dongwoon isn’t the only one. Chang’s son? I don’t know what he meant by that but all I know is I’m the only one who can get you the information you need to hide your …stuff.”

Jinki’s bows rose to his hairline. Not Chang’s son. Changsun. Jonghyun found out the other mole.

Jinki chewed on that information for a moment. His thought process was interrupted by a loud pained moan. Jinki glanced down at Dongwoon. “All it took was the sound of a silencer to make you faint? You’re worthless.”

“Onew,” the man moaned. “Please don’t do this.”

Jinki smiled. “Do what, Dongwoon? If I was going to kill you, you’d be dead. The bad news is I do want you dead. The good news for you is you’re more useful to me alive. You’re gonna help me and you’re gonna enjoy it.” Although what he’d just said was true, that Jinki did need Dongwon alive, Jinki couldn’t help the glee he felt when his calm slipped. That momentary lapse of composure got Dongwoon a Mezlan Belucci Alligator Boot to his ribs. “Don’t move unless you really want to die,” Jinki hissed.

Once he was sure Dongwoon wasn’t stupid enough to actually defy him–again– he moved to where the man sat in the corner. The man shrank away from him with every step Jinki took, trying to move back further but the grungy brick wall prevented him from doing so.

Slowly, Jinki dropped to a squat, tilting his head to look the man in the face. “Look at me.”

The man shook his head, hard. “I’m not stupid. I look at you and you’ll kill me.”

“Maybe,” Jinki said softly. He reached out and pushed the man’s hair behind his ear. “But if you don’t look at me, I will definitely kill you.” He tapped the man under his chin. “You’re here to help me right? You’re gonna have to make yourself useful to stay alive and that means at some point you’ll have to open your eyes,” Jinki pressed quietly.

The man didn’t move for a few beats and Jinki reached to tap the other's thigh with his gun. “C’mon. It’s okay. Look at me.”

Slowly, the man turned towards him, his face still partially hidden in the shadows. His eyes fluttered open and Jinki used his smile as a bargaining chip hoping to urge him out of the darkness like a frightened doe.

It was when his face hit the light, that Jinki wished he’d stayed hidden.

He sighed. Last thing he needed was a pretty boy to take care of.

.

.

“Who’s that,” Taemin asked around a toothpick in his mouth.

Jinki slapped the back of his head and Taemin had to rush to spit the toothpick out before he accidentally swallowed it.

“What was that for?!”

“For sitting on the back of my couch. For having a toothpick in your mouth while you talk–I told you about that. And finally, for having a toothpick in your mouth while sitting on the back of my couch asking questions you don’t need to ask.”

“I can’t ask who the froggy looking motherer is sitting in the corner like the boogey man is going to molest him?” he drawled, his brow raised. “Fine. Don’t tell me.” Taemin turned to the object of his inquisition. “Since I can’t ask who you are, I’ll just call you Kermit.”

“My name is Minho,” the man said quietly.

“Minho.” Taemin turned to Jinki with his hands out. “Now was that so hard?”

Jinki smacked him again.

“WHY do you keep doing that?”

“Because you’re still on the back of my couch.” Jinki thumbed towards the door. “Tell Key that he can officially start slapping the out of Dongwoon. Angle him towards the door. He knows we’ll have a visitor. Although I’m quite sure where he’s at, we still need Changsun’s location. He knows about our plans for the offshore accounts. Either way, roughing Dongwoon should be fun.”

Taemin’s eyes lit up and sometimes Jinki wondered if that boy’s head was wired right–nobody should get this much pleasure out of physical violence. “Not you, though. Stay away from the basement.” Taemin deflated. “Get down to the docks. Keep an eye on Dongwoon’s place. If you see  Changsun, contact me immediately.” Jinki paused to glare at him. “I don’t have to remind you to use your burner and not your cell phone, right?”

Taemin flashed his eyebrows before rotating the brim of his hat from the back of his head to the front. “I got it boss,” Taemin said smoothly as he backed towards the door. “What are cousins for?”

Once the door closed behind Taemin, Jinki turned to Minho, who was worrying his nails, clicking his thumbs back and forth against one another. He sat on a couch against the far wall. A grungy torn poster of Jesus hung above him; tawny skin and epicanthic eyes, the words written in an excited rush of white kanji letters, like Jesus was a Japanese action star or something. But he needed someone to watch his back and it didn’t hurt that this Jesus looked like him a little bit. Wrong but satisfying.

If Jesus Saves, the Minho looked like the angel here to deliver his salvation. The light casting over his nervous form seemed more halo than halogen. Minho looked worthy of worship but it was that recognition of attraction that pissed Jinki off. Jonghyun should have known better. Jinki had a weakness for pretty faces and he had a weakness for men with brains. Choi Minho had both.  .

On the ride over, Kibum had given him the backstory on this Minho while Jinki’s driver maneuvered them from one end of the city to the other. In hindsight, he was lucky Minho was riding with Jonghyun because Kibum was set on embarassing him.

“He’s a convenience store clerk, works the night shift. Doesn’t have a lot of friends, which is surprising with his looks and personality. At least that’s what the woman who owned the store said.”

Jinki’s brow rose at that news. “How is a convenience store clerk able to hack into anything? Where did Jonghyun find this guy?”

“He did a job for the Han family without realizing they were the Han family. Same we need him to do but on a larger scale.”

“So we’re putting our trust in a store clerk and our only referral is the ing Han family? Big Han has his own grandaughter on the corner just to spite his weasel son. He’s a ing animal and that’s who–”

“Minho has a master’s degree in programming.”

That shut Jinki up. “What?”

“Sooo,” Kibum drawled. “That led me to wonder why a kid who graduated top of his class would be ringing up banana milk at 2 in the morning and living in an apartment so ty it should be condemned. The kid’s done time. Not hard time—six months in juvie for, get this—taking down their schools entire power grid so he could skip school. It was the fourth time in two months. It’s a wonder he got accepted to school at all. The guy’s a little ed up,” Kibum laughed. “The good thing is he still has a way to break into CRUISE. You’d think after he broke into the first time, the banks would tighten their security , but nah. Nothing.”

Jinki hummed. “Wish someone had told me what he looked like.”

Kibum chuckled. “Well, what’s the fun in that? It’s like someone clipped him out of a magazine just for you."

“Not funny, Key,”

“Who said anything about it being funny. It’s gonna be fun. All work and no play makes the big bad crime boss’s balls blue.”

.

.

Silently, Jinki approached the taller man, ignoring the how he shook in his chair.  That bothered him.

“You’ve been watching too many mob movies. I’m not a brainless mobster. I have enough common sense not to hurt you. So you need you to relax.”

Minho tried to straighten his back, maybe give some semblance of calm and composure. “I’m relaxed…”

“Yeah, sure you are.” Jinki pointed to the computer.  Wordlessly Minho rose and took a seat, folding his long legs under the desk and getting comfortable on top of the cheap metal fold out chair. He tapped on the keys and the screen came alive.

“This is encrypted?”

Jinki nodded. “You’ve got 5 minutes to get past it.” Jinki crossed his arms and watched as Minho’s fingers began to fly over the keys. “That is, if you’re as good as Jongyhun–“

“I’m in.”

Jinki blinked. “Impossible.”

Minho shrugged. “You need a stronger password system.”

“Is that how you broke into CRUISE?”

Minho smiled. “I didn’t break into CRUISE. I helped invent it. A central database for all banks to converse with each other, with information cruising from place to place, bank to bank database to database. We modeled the idea off of foreign bank ATMs, just larger.”

Jinki gave him a weird look. “You helped invent CRUISE yet you work as a clerk.”

Minho shrugged. “Life likes to throw you fastballs and I don’t play baseball.” Minho cracked his knuckles. “Give me an hour, maybe half an hour and I’ll get into CRUISE’s mainframe. Then I’ll move your assets into over 100 dummy ones spread out across a few off shore accounts. Untraceable. It’ll be established under your liquor company. Assets will be instantly accessible.”

Jinki nodded again. “That’s was the plan, right?” Jinki reached in his pocket and withdrew a thin plastic card. It was Minho’s ID.

“Since you’re a friend of Jonghyun’s I figure you wouldn’t make any stupid plans to escape. If not I know where to find you.”

Minho frowned. “Are you going somewhere?”

Jinki grinned. “A shower. I worked up a sweat in that alley.”

.

.

Minho rubbed the bridge of his nose as the last bit of Jinki’s asset were transferred to the last offshore account. Normally this would be perfectly legal. The illegal part came doing this without the bank’s permission and doing it in a way that didn’t draw suspicion. There was still a sizable amount of money still left in Jinki’s account and in the account of a few of his smaller “businesses” but the majority of it was spread out as he had promised. Just like that the money literally disappeared from CRUISE’s database and they had no way to track it down. In the case Jinki went to jail and they confiscated his assets, they would only get that portion. Not the bulk.

Minho laughed to himself. He’d literally just helped a mob boss keep his fortune as insurance. It violated his probation in about a million ways but Minho honestly doesn’t care. He didn't care about anything. Going to jail wouldn’t be so bad. Three squares and a cot, right? It wouldn’t be so much different than what he was doing now. Simply existing to work, simply existing to wake up and eat and go back to sleep.

This was probably the most exciting thing he’s done in years.

When the computer whirred—and indication of the completion of his job—Minho stood and stretched. He was smart enough not to try an escape—not that he wanted to. So instead of eyeing the door, which was probably guarded anyways, he wandered around the loft space. It was on the top floor of the building—the building in which Jinki owned in its entirety, something he’d learned when he read the real estate deeds contained within Jinki’s assets–and was spacious and very finely decorated. Either Jinki had brilliant taste in décor or had brilliant taste in interior decorators.

He slunk over to the kitchen and opened the fridge. His dinner had been interrupted. Finding his way into that alley after following Jinki had been stupid but all he was doing was following Jonghyun’s directions. Following those directions had ended up with him witnessing Jinki kicking the out of some dude named Dongwoon and almost murdering him.

If Minho wasn’t as damaged as he was, that would have scared him.

He was closing the fridge when he felt a hand clamp down over his mouth.

“Shhh,” Jinki hissed in his ear. Jinki placed his arm over Minho’s shoulder and Minho came face to face with a gun.  

Minho panicked. He’d been careless, stupid. Nobody lives after helping mobsters. Once their jobs were done, their lives were expendable.

, , .

Minho looked at Jinki out of the corner of his eyes, pleading. Then a sense of awareness hit Minho. The gun was not pointing at him, but past him. Minho’s eyes shifted in the other direction, now only seeing the reflection of the man against the shiny surface of Jinki’s refrigerator.

“He’s here for you. Changsun. He killed Dongwoon. You were always the target.”

Those words terrified Minho because he didn’t know what they meant. So Minho nodded and tried to speak, his lips brushing against the inside of Jinki’s palm, but Jinki clamped down harder. “Don’t make any noises. Get behind me.”

Minho expected a lot of things when he moved behind Jinki but all of them were short circuited when he realize Jinki was standing in the middle of his kitchen, in nothing but a pair of briefs, his skin still damp from his shower. It took the edge off his fear for some unknown reason–to know that if an almost Jinki wasn’t worried, maybe he shouldn't be either? Oh, what was he saying? He had every reasons to be worried!

“Get down.”

Minho did as Jinki said, trusting Jinki to keep him alive. He ducked low on command but paused when his entire vision was filled with Jinki’s brief covered . This was not like any mob movie he’d seen. Before he could mentally comment on how this was actually better than any mob movie he’d ever seen, the slick “sweehwip” of a silence caught his attention followed by the anguished cry of a man.

With a thud the person’s body hit the floor. Jinki left Minho by the fridge to approach him.

“You know, you’re pretty ing stupid, falling for a trap like this,” Jinki said as he toed at the person’s chest, their hands wrapped around a busted knee, blood all over Jinki’s floor. “Imagine how pissed off the Kim’s are going to be when they find out you not only killed their prodigal son, but you did it and failed? That you’ll have nothing to show for it.” Jinki aimed his gun and shot out the man’s other knee. A scream echoed off the walls and Jinki rolled his eyes. “Shut up. I would kill you but I don’t want to. I want you to crawl back to your family and tell them that Minho is mine and if they want him they’ll have to fight my entire syndicate for him. CRUISE belongs to The Lee’s. And so is all of their money.”

Minho frowned. That’s…that’s not what he was told.

“Chanyeol,” Jinki barked.

Moments later a tall youth entered. “Drag him out of here,” Jinki said, gruffly. Chanyeol did as he was told, dragging Changsun’s bloodied up body out the door. As soon as the door closed, Minho stood, his face full of accusation.

“You don’t have control over CRUISE.”

Jinki tilted his head as he unscrewed the silencer from the tip of his glock. “No. No, I don’t. But I have you.”

Minho straightened and pulled his chin in. “I’m only here for this one job. I’m not–I’m not yours.”

Jinki looked down at chest and saw a spot of blood. Disgusted, he went to his kitchen sink and turned the tap on, running a dish rag under it. “For a genius, you’re stupid as .”

Minho gasped. “Excuse me?!”

“This, this whole entire thing? It was all planned. Jonghyun sending you over here. You “finding” me in that alley. Keeping Dongwoon alive. It was to root rats out and it was declare financial war on my …competitors. My people have been following you for days,” Jinki said as he wiped the blood off his chest.

“I don’t care what your plans are,” Minho said, sounding more brave than he actually felt. “I’m not helping you take control over all of CRUISE just so you can have control over the banks–“

“Not the banks. The Hans, the Kims, the Swans, the Aar–“

Minho held his hand up, interrupting Jinki. “Please take me home. I don’t want to do this.”

“Do what? Return to your one bedroom apartment as big as my bathroom? Return to your dead-end job, return to your loneliness? You can do that and I’ll let you do that eventually. Or…you could join a family. A family that will take care of you. Join me… where I’ll take care of you.”

Minho was silent because somewhere in the back of his mind, he was excited, this was the most exciting thing that has happened to him for years and somewhere in his head he knew that returning to his apartment, his loneliness would be worse than death. However, that was HIS decision to make, not Jinki’s.

Jinki dropped the towel in the sink and approached Minho in slow steps. “You’re very pretty, Minho.”

Minho took a step back but faltered a little bit because of weak knees. Stupid weak knees brought on by stupid attraction brought on by 'he wished Jinki would put on some damn clothes'. “I’m not a foreigner at the market. You can’t lure me to buy weave baskets with sweet words.”

“That was poetic.” Jinki grinned, but he didn’t stop prowling forward. He didn’t stop until he was right on Minho, his warm breath ghosting over Minho’s chin and lips. “Don’t you want me to take care of you, Minho? Don’t you want that?”

“I-I-don’t need-need to be—“ Minho stuttered.

Jinki’s hands shot out and caught Minho’s hips, bringing them flush with his own. Minho’s eyes fluttered at feeling Jinki’s body against his. “I would take such good care of you,” Jinki whispered and Minho saw the hard glint in his eyes, mixed with a hint of possessiveness and a wash of lust.

Suddenly Jinki captured Minho’s bottom lip, hard on it before tugging on it with his teeth. He released the appendage with a rude sounding pop. Jinki took a step back, a devious grin on his lips. Minho’s stood there shocked, his thumb rubbing his bottom lip like he couldn’t comprehend what had just happened.

“You can have my bed. A cleanup crew will be here soon and the smell of bleach will keep you up all night if you’re not used to it.”

“So I’m not free to go?”

Jinki tilted his head. “You’re free to go, but I’ll just come get you again.”

Minho frowned at that and crossed his arms.

“Sleep tight, Choi.”