Interference (3)
"Hey, Eun Ga-young! What the hell do you think you're doing? Who do you think you are to—!"
"Quiet."
"But Father, that bitch doesn't know her place—"
"Quiet!"
A crack split the air. Father's spoon came down on the table as if he meant to drive it through the wood, and every breath in the room died at once.
"The deeper you dig into SC Electronics, the more the damage spreads to the Group as a whole. The futures of those players you are so eager to protect are no different."
I could not back down. No — I must not back down. If I gave even a single step here, the documents Chief Kim had given me would be reduced to so much scrap paper. And without those documents, my agency was still nothing but a pebble at the foot of the mountain that was SC Electronics.
I lifted my gaze and met my father's eyes without flinching.
"What I'm hearing, Father, is something else entirely. If you dig any deeper, your players have no future. That's how it sounds to me. Have I misunderstood?"
"And if you haven't?"
"When I left this house, you made me a promise. That even if there would be no support, there would be no interference. And I promised you, just as clearly, that if my company failed, I would quietly return to your shadow and live as you wished."
Father's face remained as unyielding as stone.
"Was the word of the Chairman of SC Group so light?"
"You damned bitch—!"
Sung-joon shot up from his chair.
"Sit."
"Ha—but Father! That mongrel—"
"Last warning, Eun Sung-joon. Sit."
At Father's warning, Sung-joon dropped back into his seat like a marionette whose strings had been yanked.
"Ga-young."
Father's voice had dropped. It was a dangerous sound.
"Are you telling me this matter is so important that you dare lecture SC Group on the weight of its word? If I so much as wished it, a company like yours could vanish without a trace in an instant. It seems you still do not understand. There is nothing SC Group cannot do in this country."
I smiled, bitter and thin. How could I not know? I had grown up standing at the elbow of that power. I knew exactly how formidable SC Group was in this country called Korea.
"No. I know it well. A single word from you, Father, and my agency would be gone by morning, without a trace. But you promised you would not touch it. And that promise included your companies — which is to say, my brothers as well. The one who broke that promise first was you."
The air in the dining room froze solid. Even Ki-joon, who would ordinarily have slipped a blade of a remark into a moment like this, kept his mouth shut and watched Father's face. Sung-joon looked as taut as a powder keg one spark short of going up.
"What do you want?"
"I would like you to reaffirm that promise. And… I would also like a fitting compensation for having broken it first."
The moment I make SC Electronics' corruption public, Father will bring every ounce of his power to bear. This is as far as I should go for now.
I had never intended, from the beginning, to use those documents to drag my brother down. I only wanted fair compensation, and to have Father's promise confirmed once more in front of everyone. If he made that promise publicly, then the instant my brothers laid a hand on me, they would be going against Father's word.
Strangely, there was something like satisfaction in Father's voice. I dismissed the thought at once.
Impossible. Satisfaction is an emotion you feel toward someone you actually expect something of.
"I have lost my appetite. The rest of you may eat as you please and be on your way."
The moment he finished speaking, Father rose and left the dining room.
"You've finally lost your mind."
Sung-joon spat the words like ice and walked out. Ki-joon stood without a sound. He looked at me for a moment, gave a slight nod, and went out after him.
"Hah… my heart's pounding…"
Out in the world I was a formidable agent they called the Queen of Two Faces. Inside this house, I was still nothing more than the unloved youngest daughter.
"Driver, please prepare the car."
"Did I have it wrong all along…"
Eun Kang-hyuk, Chairman of SC Group, was a man cold enough to be called Iron Blood even inside his own family. And yet he stood at the window now with a rare, distant look on his face, watching a car pull away from his house.
Anyone who knew him, catching this moment, would have doubted their own eyes. They would not have believed that a face like a glacier could hold an expression so plainly human.
Only after the car had passed through the gates and dwindled out of sight did he open a desk drawer, reach deep, and draw out a single photograph. In it, a woman who looked exactly like Eun Ga-young stood beside a much younger Eun Kang-hyuk.
"You've grown up to look exactly like her…"
He murmured it to the old picture. The woman's unflinching smile overlaid itself on the Ga-young who had stood against him today. That same bold light in the eyes. That same refusal to bow. It was as if he were looking at her.
Cherry blossoms had been falling. She had left him those words with her last smile. He had been holding her hand as it grew cold, and his own hand would not stop shaking. Tears he had never once in his life allowed himself ran down his face. And somewhere in the same room, a baby only a few days old — a baby who had already lost her mother — was crying.
Neither the vast power of the SC Group chairmanship nor the long road of crushing every enemy in his path had ever once made his heart falter. That day, it shattered.
That was why. That was why he had taken her to every social gathering since she was small. He had wanted to build her a different kind of shelter — one equal to SC Group, and not SC Group itself.
But the world had refused to run as he wished. Every plan had come to nothing, and in the end she had chosen a path of her own, not his shadow. When Sung-joon had gone after Ga-young's company, the reason he had not particularly stopped it may have been this: a wish that she would remain safely beneath that shadow in a world this harsh.
He knew perfectly well that this was a twisted kind of love. But as the man who understood the cold reality of SC Group better than anyone alive, he could not help but worry. He too had cleared away, without mercy, anyone who stood in his way on the climb to this chair. Even if they were family.
And his sons resembled him to a degree that made his skin crawl.
"Father…"
The memory rose unbidden, and Eun Kang-hyuk gave a bitter smile. He had become no different from the father he had once so resented and so hated. The difference, if there was one, was this: he truly wanted to protect Ga-young. Even if the way he went about it was warped beyond recognition.
He placed a call to his only true friend.
"Chairman. I've got your call."
"Handle it as you always do. As always…"
"Ahem… so this is about Ga-young, then?"
"Yes. I have a favor to ask."
"A favor, you say…"
"Yes. I know you've retired, but… I would like you to look after Ga-young, even if only from time to time."
"Tsk, tsk… you hopeless old fool. You could just show her how you really feel…"
"What are you hiding it for? Why dress it up?"
"You know as well as I do… to Ga-young, my true feelings would be nothing but excuses."
"Tsk…"
"Sometimes that one excuse is the thing that matters most. I'll look after Ga-young anyway, so don't you worry. It's no small thing, a child building a company like that with her own family trying to stop her."
"Yes… I'm counting on you."
He hung up and looked at the photograph once more, speaking only to himself.
"You idiot… if it were that easy, I'd have done it long ago."
Jung Tae-woo.
At first, the name was a simple one. An Asian prospect who flashed at the Olympics and crossed into the Premier League. Nothing more. Nothing less.
But time changed that. One by one, people began to pin their hopes on those three syllables, until at last he rewrote the history of Manchester City with a run of achievements that belonged to legend. He surpassed the record of the legendary goalkeeper Leo and forged a new legend under his own name.
Seventeen consecutive clean sheets.
The streak ended when he conceded to Liverpool in the eighteenth match, but the consecutive shutout record he holds now will not be broken easily. No — if anyone ever does break it, it will almost certainly be Jung Tae-woo himself.
Nobody saw it coming.
When Manchester City signed an Asian goalkeeper in the Premier League transfer window, most pundits wrote it off as a commercial decision. Jung Tae-woo was something else. His wonder saves are no longer wonders. These days, the shocking thing is when he makes a mistake.
The concentration he brings to the biggest matches is, frankly, staggering. The Manchester Derby in which he produced fifteen world-class saves and still found the net from a free kick has already passed into Premier League folklore.
People have started to ask: Where, exactly, is his ceiling?
Honestly? I don't know. What I do know is this: we are watching history being written in real time.
Season's first-half finale: Manchester City vs. Chelsea
At last — Park Seo-joon vs. Jung Tae-woo. Who wins?
Who takes the Korean Derby?
In Europe, it was nothing more than an ordinary clash between two giant clubs. Back in Korea, though, this match carried a rather special meaning. It was a derby of its own.