Mergers and Acquisitions
Islay Airport, United Kingdom.
We'd flown in from Paris.
We could have taken the Eurostar, I thought.
But this was an island. Short of flying, there was no fast way to get here.
"You—you son of a bitch…"
Sora was in pain. Even with a brand-new bra chosen for comfort, she still looked miserable.
Well. They are that big.
The plane's descent had hit her hard—gravity doing its worst on the way down.
"Sora."
"What."
"I like a girl who looks pure on the outside and filthy underneath. Right now, you're exactly that."
"That's your fault!"
She blamed it on something else entirely. The new accessories I'd bought her still hadn't settled in.
Isn't this what people mean when they say their chest got blown wide open?
I'd heard the expression before. Sora might have been feeling something similar.
"It really did get blown wide open!"
"Doesn't it look wild? Kind of cool, right?"
"I'm so embarrassed I can't live with myself."
"Overseas, this is basically standard."
Sora's set of filthy little accessories. What had started with a necklace was coming together piece by piece.
I'd been wondering how to get the chest done.
Fortunately, she'd walked into it of her own free will. I'd seen her try them on—genuinely pretty, and they suited her perfectly.
"It still hurts."
"Which is why I'm not touching them."
"God, the things I end up doing because of you, sunbae."
I'd figured Sora could pull it off. On the right person, something like this wasn't trashy—it was sexy.
Blood before milk. That's where we are now.
And the fact that she was still going through with it meant she wasn't entirely sane either. Pride had made her say yes.
"They're yours, so I don't have much room to talk… but please treat them carefully."
"Obviously. You're my girl."
"I am not your girl yet!"
She was the type who kept her word once she gave it. That stubborn streak made conquering her twice as satisfying.
I pulled her into a tight hug and she flushed with embarrassment—this, from a girl who already had filthy marks carved into her navel and her chest.
I'm the one developing her original technology here.
Awakening the raw sex appeal she'd been born with. Enough that an ordinary man would finish just from looking.
"You two—the couple…"
That same quality became a liability at the immigration counter.
The officer eyed us with open suspicion.
I'd be curious too, if I were him. What's she got in there?
The body scanner hadn't flagged a thing—despite the fact that each of those was big enough to hide a whole bottle of Samdasoo.
"Traveling together?"
"Yes."
"Why are you coming to the UK?"
"Tourism."
"Tourism for three whole days?"
British immigration was notoriously thorough—on par with the infamous American process.
Usually it goes fine, though.
Sora's chest was apparently too much for him. And there was more.
"We wanted to see the coast, have a few drinks…"
"Why drink in the UK? The coast takes two hours, tops."
Sora shot me a look of pure distress. This was basically a pressure interview.
He's got a problem with something.
That was when they started digging. And what the officer had latched onto was this:
"What's your occupation in Korea?"
"I'm a student."
"A student. Right. You do realize you don't look remotely like a student?"
They were usually lenient with students. But neither the chest nor the luxury brands she was wearing looked anything like student life.
She should have stopped growing at a reasonable size.
She had only her own overdevelopment to blame. Unfortunately, I wasn't getting a free pass either.
"And the man with you."
"Me?"
"You brought a rather peculiar laptop. Why would a student be carrying something like that?"
"…"
An investor's laptop. A regular notebook with two auxiliary monitors bolted on—it did look bizarre.
Hmm.
I could just tell the truth. The problem was that immigration was never that simple.
"Because it's my job."
"Isn't your job being a student? So you were hiding something."
"It's a job a student can do."
Once suspicion took hold, they picked at every detail. Get tangled up and answer wrong, and you might not get in at all.
Which is why you cut it off in one stroke.
Don't get drawn into the officer's rhetoric. Sever it cleanly at the core.
Tap. Click.
I pulled up the HTS—why I used this laptop, and why my spending didn't look like a student's.
No long explanation needed—it was all right there.
The moment I showed him the account and the HTS trade history, the officer's entire demeanor flipped.
"Ah—just a moment…"
He took the laptop and huddled with the other officers, murmuring among themselves. The market wasn't open, so it didn't matter to me.
It clearly matters to them, though.
The immigration staff seemed to have plenty of free time. They passed my laptop around one by one.
When it finally came back:
"Ahem. There appears to have been an unavoidable misunderstanding during the screening process."
"Has that misunderstanding been cleared up?"
"Opinions are still somewhat divided, but as far as I'm concerned, there's no real issue…"
The high-handed attitude had become remarkably open-minded. He'd decided the small stuff wasn't worth fretting over.
There's something else he's more interested in.
He glanced at me, then asked carefully. Show someone stock profits and nine times out of ten, you get this reaction.
"You made all of this from stocks?"
"It's called trading. Keep buying and selling and even small money can grow into something large."
"Like the rich people on Wall Street or in the City of London?"
"Yes—just on a smaller scale."
The City of London was Britain's answer to Wall Street. Before the Second World War, it had been the center of global finance.
God, he's clinging.
The questions had taken on a different kind of stickiness. But I'd clearly won him over—immigration proceeded like water downhill.
"You just buy low and sell high. That's how you make money."
"And you'd recommend American stocks?"
"America is the safest."
"Then why are you trading Korean stocks?"
"I'm Korean, for one. And the volatility is high enough that they're easy to strip clean."
All the way through, he kept asking how I'd made the money. He was unusually curious about how stocks worked.
Knowing that isn't necessarily a good thing.
In the short time we had, no explanation would stick. I just answered whatever he asked, more or less.
"What was the name of the stock you bought?"
"Osung Biologics."
"Osung Biologics… Osung Biologics…"
One more person about to get bag-held by K-stocks.
Whisky was the most reappraised spirit of the modern age.
"You know why distilleries sit right by the sea?"
"I have no idea."
"So they can take the ocean's influence head-on."
"The ocean?"
Whisky came in every flavor imaginable. But for a food product called liquor, that variety was a double-edged sword.
Back in the day, quality control was a disaster.
Even now, elderly Frenchmen still thought of whisky as cheap swill. And in their youth, it really had been.
"Whisky that tasted like shit. Whisky that tasted like vomit. Plenty of that going around."
"Ugh…"
"Like the lambic we had in Germany—wildly hit-or-miss."
"I was a miss."
Off-flavors beyond imagination had soaked into the stuff. Made by rule of thumb, the taste had been impossible to control.
These days they can reproduce good flavor scientifically and statistically.
Which was exactly why the distilleries here on Islay stood on the shore. Sea wind worked a briny note into the spirit.
"Does that actually make sense?"
"Sense or not—it's been scientifically proven."
"If that's real… okay, that is kind of amazing."
The same way beef splits into mold or dry-aged meat depending on how you age it, liquor worked the same way. That was how whisky had evolved.
Which is why it got reappraised.
How you aged it changed the taste entirely. Cognac and Armagnac had grown far more varied too. That was one reason brandy had fallen and whisky had risen.
And beyond that, the factors that could drive the price up were piled mountain-high.
"The peat whisky Islay is famous for is made by burning peat—a kind of coal. With environmental issues heating up lately, production's getting harder and harder."
"Hmm…"
"And you can't leave out sherry whisky either."
Wine from before the nineteenth century was absurdly expensive. The phylloxera blight had forced a change in grape varieties.
Anything that becomes harder to make goes up in price. That's the law.
Whisky had its own versions of those events. Future price increases were practically written on the wall—and speculative demand was pouring in. One of the more interesting investment assets to watch.
"Fine, whatever about that."
"Hm?"
"You're going to talk nonstop the whole time we're here anyway."
"True enough."
Sora cinched the coat she'd bought in Paris tight around herself. The cold sea wind was getting to her. But her cheeks had gone bright red, and her lips were pushed out in a little pout—something she wanted to say.
Why does she keep sex-appealing at me like she wants to be sucked on?
She was the only one who didn't know. How filthy her body looked. How much raw sex she was leaking.
"Sunbae. What do you want to do with me?"
"Obviously I want to fuck you."
"You absolute turn-signal bastard."
The truth had slipped out. She already knew enough—no point dressing it up.
Dress her up pretty and she'd be unreal.
If she put real work into beauty, goddess-tier wasn't out of reach. For a woman like this, I'd spend whatever it took.
Slap.
And sometimes that "whatever" had no upper limit at all.
Sora pressed both ice-cold palms against my cheeks.
"I told you what happens if you fuck me, right?"
"…"
"I'll go straight into a hostile takeover. Consider yourself warned."
Sora grinned and dragged a wicked tongue across her lips—an expression I'd never seen on her before.
Must be my imagination.
I genuinely hadn't expected her to change.