Chen approached the factory on foot. The industrial area around him was run-down and silent, the concrete of the wide streets cracked and litter blowing against chain-link fences. The neighbouring buildings towered above him, shattered window panes and boarded over gates telling him that little activity happened here even in the daylight hours. The large gate to the factory grounds was modern, incongruous in its setting, and electronically locked. Chen took a running jump at the gate, caught the top bar and used his momentum to pull himself over. He landed on the other side in a light crouch and glanced around. There were a couple of cars parked in the concrete forecourt, and Chen guessed that they belonged to Suho and Jwi. Jwi must still have access to unlock the gate, as he’d been Bakwi’s man before he was Suho’s.

Unlike the gate, the metal access door in the concrete front wall of the factory was unlocked, the handle turning easily beneath his careful hand. He slipped inside and found himself in a long corridor, eerily lit by green emergency strip lighting. He walked silently down it, every sense on high alert. He listened for sounds or voices, anything that would give him a clue where Suho and Jwi might be. A safe would likely be in an office, but Chen still wasn’t completely certain that the files Suho had mentioned actually existed. Suho had tried to trap him with lies often enough. This whole thing could be an attempt to finish what he’d started the day before.

Take Joohyun, Suho’s voice breathed into his ear. Leave the country. Be free.

Chen crept forward, past rooms that were empty and dusty with disuse, obviously undisturbed for months, if not years. The corridor ended in a short flight of steps leading down. Hard white light shone from the bottom. He heard the faint hum of male voices speaking, but the words were too distant to make out.

Chen went down the steps, keeping to the shadows as the lights from the bottom grew closer. The staircase opened into a large basement filled with equipment-covered workbenches, partitioned off from each other with hanging sheets of thick semi-transparent plastic. Toxic waste containers were stacked up against the walls. Chen knew now that whatever other games and lies were going on here, one thing was true. This place was a meth lab if he’d ever seen one. It had to be Bakwi's.

The voices were coming from the far end of the room. He needed to get closer. He slipped silently between workbenches in a crouch until he reached the row nearest the back wall. He looked carefully around the edge of the bench. In the centre of the back wall was a metal emergency exit door opened by pushing on a horizontal bar. The back of the land the factory was built on must be lower than the front. His attention fixed on the two men standing just in front of the door.

Jwi and Suho stood facing each other, a couple of metres apart. Jwi gripped a metal briefcase in his left hand. The files for Gwangju must be inside it. Suho and Jwi had already emptied the safe, wherever it was. Perhaps it was kept down here in the lab, as the rest of the factory appeared abandoned.

Chen looked at Suho. His once-mentor was standing at ease with his hands in his pockets, the picture of unconcern as he smiled, but Chen knew him well enough to see the tension held in his shoulders, the way his lean, muscled core was constantly engaged. The slightest threat of danger and the slouching, smiling man in front of him would explode into a deadly whirlwind.

“Hand them over, Jwi,” Suho said. His smile didn’t touch the coldness in his eyes. “I hope you haven’t forgotten where your loyalties lie. Don’t you remember that night, back at the school?” He gave a laugh that had Jwi flinching. “It gets boring, repeating lessons, but I’ll do it if I must.”

“I haven’t forgotten,” Jwi muttered sullenly. “That’s why I called you in. But Heechul asked me to bring them personally, and you know what the kid is like. He’s even more bat crazy than -” he broke off, swallowing. Suho raised an eyebrow.

“Than me?”

Jwi took a small step sideways, towards the door. Suho, as if he had known exactly the move Jwi was going to make before he even made it, took a matching step, keeping their eyes in line.

“That was an interesting day,” Suho continued. His tone was light, might have been mocking if Suho had sounded a little more like he cared. “It’s been playing on my mind, Jwi. Why did you do that, back then? Betray me on the meth deal? You said you wanted to sit in the boss chair yourself, but the more I think about it, the less it makes sense. You aren’t the type. You don’t have the courage to be the one everyone wants to take down. You’re an underling, a natural scum. You need to be told what to do and let the big men protect you.”

Jwi’s eyes were darting about. Chen watched his ropy throat convulse as he swallowed.

“So I was wondering, Jwi, who it was that told you to betray me? Who were you obeying?”

“Why do you care?” Jwi asked. “I’m yours now anyway. You ought to know that, or I wouldn’t have called you in on this. I could’ve gone straight to Heechul myself and cut you out completely.”

“I have an interest in the cop who died that night,” Suho said. “I have a...well, let’s call him a friend, who’d quite like to know why that officer died. In fact, he’d like that very much.”

Chen’s heart stopped beating in his chest, then started up again, far too fast. He gripped the leg of the workbench with a hand that was suddenly ice-cold. Suho meant him. Suho was asking for him.

Suho had no interest in Baekhyun for his own sake.

Suho knew Chen was here. Knew he was hiding, listening in.

This was why he’d lured him here. He didn’t know why, but Suho was guiding this conversation, for Chen’s sake. He was asking Jwi these questions for Chen.

Jwi. Chen remembered Jwi being there. He remembered the warehouse by the old school, beside the river, following Baekhyun’s staggering figure in, though he hadn’t known yet it was Baekhyun. He remembered Jwi, with a gun to Baekhyun’s head in the gloom. He'd taken Jwi down, and then Baekhyun had turned Jwi’s gun on him. Chen had forced him to walk backwards out into the courtyard until his face was illumined by the harsh white floodlights, and he'd lost track of Jwi after that, because then, because then...

A slight movement in the corner of his eye made his head jerk around. His eyes fixed on the workbench two across. There was a plastic sheet hanging between them, but behind that sheet, someone had just shifted. Chen wasn’t the only person eavesdropping on this conversation. All his senses went on hyper-alert. He kept focusing on the conversation playing out between Jwi and Suho, and at the same time he began to shift himself very slowly backward, so that he could see around the hanging plastic and get a look at the person on the other side.

“Ah,” Jwi said, and his voice had changed a little. There was less fear in it now. More control. “Yes. Officer Byun Baekhyun.”

Chen felt sick at hearing Baekhyun’s name from that man’s greasy lips. The person on the other side of the plastic made another small, abortive movement. Chen eased himself back just enough that he could see the back of a tall, broad-shouldered man, dressed in black jeans and a thin grey sweatshirt, both hanging too loose on him. Chen recognised him immediately, even without seeing his face. That raw, scraped look, like his bones were too big for the amount of flesh left on them. Park Chanyeol was behind the other workbench, less than five metres from Chen, fists clenched tight as he listened to Jwi and Suho talk.

How, how had Park Chanyeol known to come here?

Now Chen was worried on two accounts. He needed to know the information Suho was trying to get out of Jwi, but he could see how Chanyeol flinched and twitched with every word. Chanyeol was close to losing his grip. He was too emotional. He’d fly out there at any moment and wreck everything. Chen couldn’t let that happen.

Light-footed and swift as a cat, he crossed the gap between the workbenches and laid a careful hand on Park Chanyeol’s arm, praying the man’s police training would hold up, that he wouldn’t shout out in shock and give them away.

Chanyeol, to his credit, did stay silent, though he jerked his arm away from Chen’s touch, face going wide-open with shock as his hand reached automatically for the gun belt at his hip. Chen touched his arm again to get his attention, put a finger to his lips and shook his head. Chanyeol could now see both Chen’s hands, knew he didn’t have a weapon in them. Chen stared into Chanyeol’s startled eyes, trying to let the extended eye contact show what he couldn’t say in words. He wasn’t a threat to Chanyeol. They needed to work together right now.

Chanyeol got no less tense, but he stopped reaching for his gun. Chen jerked his head towards Suho and Jwi, then shook his head again. He thought Chanyeol got the message. There’d surely be questions later, but Chen knew he could escape from Chanyeol if he needed to.

“What do you know about Byun Baekhyun?” asked Suho, and both men behind the worktable reacted. Chen, usually so controlled, could not hide the way his fingers convulsed on Chanyeol’s arm. He knew Chanyeol noticed, was surely piecing things together in his mind, but he could only listen to Suho and Jwi, and watch them from between the legs of the workbench.

Jwi took another step towards the fire exit door. “It was such a of luck,” he said. “I’d been after Byun Baekhyun for months. I was only at the hotel to keep an eye on the deal between you and Miss Bae, but instead of sending Luhan in like we'd planned, the cops went and replaced him with Byun Baekhyun. When I saw it was him, I couldn’t let the chance pass by. I grabbed him before Miss Bae’s people could approach him.”

“So you were after Baekhyun, not the drugs?” Suho asked. If Chen had known Suho even slightly less well, he would have thought Suho was mildly curious. But Chen did know Suho well. Suho wasn’t mildly curious. He was furious.

Another step towards the door. Jwi was close enough now to put a hand on the horizontal bar. Beside Chen, Chanyeol was trembling. Chen gripped his arm a little harder. He’d watched Chanyeol fall apart over Baekhyun that night. He’d seen how the man had degenerated in the following months. He knew how much Baekhyun meant to Chanyeol. Perhaps as much as Baekhyun had meant to Chen.

“Not me personally,” Jwi said. “I’d been ordered to get rid of Baekhyun, but you caught on too fast, though you thought I was after the meth. But the car crash you set up to stop me didn’t kill him outright, and then you wouldn’t even let me dump him somewhere, even though I offered.”

“I thought you were a bit ing eager to finish him off, even after I’d told you he was a cop,” Suho said, and now, finally, the anger was there in his voice, clear enough for Jwi to hear, too.

“Yes, well.” Jwi said, sounding nervous again. He pushed his hand down on the bar. The door swung wide open, and Chen glimpsed a dark concrete yard. Jwi took a step out into it, and Suho followed him. “I couldn’t let the opportunity pass. You found Baekhyun’s tracker but you never checked me. I had a wire out to my...an associate. I knew if I could get Baekhyun into the open, he’d finish him off for me. The gang fight would have been a perfect cover, but the idiots holding him lost him, so I ended up chasing him into the warehouse. Then Chen turned up. I knew I didn’t have a chance against Chen, so I had to let him go. When Baekhyun got Chen at gunpoint out in the yard, I told my associate up on the hill which one Baekhyun was, and he finished him off in one shot.” Jwi snapped his fingers and gave a leering smile. “Job well done.”

Chanyeol made a lunging motion, and Chen was only just in time to grab him and haul him back. It was lucky Jwi and Suho had gotten several steps out into the yard now, or they’d surely have heard the scuffle. Chanyeol was white with fury and grief, eyes tormented as he stared at Chen.

Chen leaned forward, put his mouth to Chanyeol’s ear an