The Final Toll
Thirty minutes before messages and chat notifications began flooding Han Chae-kyung’s phone—
At the outskirts of Annam City, a commotion erupted on the stone steps leading up to Lee Ik’s grave.
“Mr. Kim, wait… wait! Listen to me…!”
“Push her.”
“Wait…!”
A fifty-year-old woman in a business suit stood precariously on the steps.
The stone steps, slick with morning dew that had fallen all night. A man instructed by someone shoved the woman’s body a short distance.
She wore shoes, and her flesh was plump and firm. It was an almost unfair position for maintaining balance and resisting.
“Kyaaaah!!”
The fall was instantaneous.
Thud, smack.
Ankles and knees slammed into the edge of the steps.
“Uep! Hwaaat…!”
Thud-crumble, crack-crunch, smack, plop!
Shoulder, waist, hips colliding in sequence, the dull impacts spreading like ripples.
Thud-crack!!
“Hweua… hic.”
In the end, she was pinned to the ground.
The time from falling to hitting the bottom was three seconds.
“Cur… hek.”
Yet the victim’s body, after the brutal toss, was in serious condition.
A forehead imprinted with the edge of the step. A right wrist bent at an awkward angle… A rib was likely dislocated; even after being slammed down, she twitched and could not stand for some time.
A pitiful sight. But the man who had ordered her being shoved showed no emotion.
Only his complexion was extremely poor. Jaundice, perhaps.
“President. What should we do?”
“Bring her.”
“Yes.”
The man’s name was Kim Ho-chang.
A husband of Han Chae-kyung who had left the hospital private room wearing only his patient’s gown.
The purpose of his outing was to meet a school senior who had once introduced him to his then-modest and intelligent wife.
The location was Lee Ik’s grave. Honestly, Kim Ho-chang had no idea who Lee Ik was.
But he knew that no one would be around at this hour.
Moreover, a grave. The perfect place for a senior and junior to meet.
“Mr. Kim! I—I’ll explain everything…!”
“You people love this. Explaining, covering up.”
“You, you people?”
“Whores, madams. The lot of them.”
Kim Ho-chang stared at the high-school senior kneeling before him…
At the female lawyer who had introduced Han Chae-kyung to him nine years ago, Im Eun-kyung.
She had been his senior.
Unlike other regions, Annam City had only co-ed schools after the late 1980s. Im Eun-kyung, one of the few lawyers produced by his own alma mater, which had produced almost no good students. He had given her senior treatment, but…
Now Kim Ho-chang considered her a madam.
That was correct.
She had naturally introduced him to a whore who had washed her identity—Han Chae-kyung.
Not to make her his wife, but to arrange a mutually beneficial sponsor relationship, just to shower her with money and take advantage…
The senior’s intentions were none of Kim Ho-chang’s concern.
“Senior Im. Have I ever asked you to arrange a sponsor girl for me?”
“That’s right. I assumed you knew.”
“Then you should have said something before the wedding. Did you introduce Chae-kyung to someone else besides me? I want to know their names.”
“Mr. Kim, just a moment… If I tell you that, it’ll be really troublesome. It’s not like that kind of thing, right!? The real introductions… Don’t you see? Someone who sets things up like me won’t get caught… You know roughly how it works too, Mr. Kim.”
“Push.”
“Yes, President.”
Kim Ho-chang spun the school senior who couldn’t understand the hint once more—Im Eun-kyung.
“Uwaaaaah!!”
Thud-thud! Smack, crack-crunch!
Im Eun-kyung’s appearance became even more tragic.
Shoes somewhere in the distance, right cheek torn during the collision, dislocated shoulder, short and rough breathing, and a hand clutching her left side.
In her broken state, Im Eun-kyung knelt before Kim Ho-chang once more.
“Senior. The list.”
“Rrrk.”
“A rib is dislocated. Let’s stop before it gets worse.”
While shaking her head and spitting out bloody coughs, Im Eun-kyung…
But seeing Kim Ho-chang’s stern expression, she finally gave up.
Immediately, she began scribbling something in the small notepad thrown in front of her. Her head had hit something, making her vision swim, and a sharp pain accompanied the sharp noise from her wrist holding the pen, yet Im Eun-kyung forced herself to endure and wrote.
What she wrote were the names of six people. And their contact details.
“This is… this is all…!”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“I see… Joo Sung-hyun mentioned something yesterday. Chae-kyung used to do web-based whore work while she was a college student, but after getting her head straight, she started receiving ‘introductions’ through brokers. So that means the senior is that scam broker?”
“……?”
Kim Ho-chang looked at the six names and let out a chuckle.
They were all recognizable names.
Some were even people he had reached out to occasionally.
“These bastards. They were my seniors.”
Kim Ho-chang sent short messages to the six.
[This is about my wife. I know what kind of relationship you had.]
And added. Stay away until we contact you later.
Otherwise, something bad will happen.
It was truly mad.
The six men listed by the senior Im were, of course, human beings who earned money, had connections, and were a bit short on loyalty compared to Kim Ho-chang himself.
Normally, he would not have resorted to such blackmail.
“Mr. Kim… Please don’t… This will make things hard for me.”
“I’m already in trouble.”
Now Kim Ho-chang had no reason to hold back.
He was impotent, childless, his wife a whore, and his whole family idiots.
“Last time, one more time.”
“Aaaah!!”
The final shove. Brain concussion and an ankle fracture were added to Im Eun-kyung’s injury list.
A whore introduced…
And a reward to the school senior who had hidden the truth until the end.
The six men who received a message from Kim Ho-chang were just as busy.
The sponsor men who had the fire lit under their asses contacted the woman they had once had a good relationship with—councilor Han Chae-kyung.
“HAN CHAE-KYUNG! Why aren’t you answering the phone!”
***
Han Chae-kyung was nearly at her breaking point.
The men she had maintained friendly relations with during her serious preparation for entering politics in 2014–2016…
The reason was the barrage of calls from the men she had received as a sponsor.
[Chae-kyung. Can I call you Chae-kyung? I’ll call you Councilor Han Chae-kyung if you don’t like it. Not that, but you have an E-Class I leased in 2015, right? Just tell your husband it’s a test drive when he asks. I’m begging you, please. We had a good time.]
[Councilor Han Chae-kyung… It’s been ten years. What is this? How did you get caught by your husband? I never treated you rudely back then. Even during the last policy debate, I pretended not to know.]
“I don’t know why you’re doing this, but stop it. I’m not afraid of you or your husband.”
There were six of them.
All powerful men in the Annam, Siheung, and Hwaseong areas.
Owner of a used-car auction house, concrete business owner, hotel owner, former provincial councilor…
The men she had met in the last year of her sponsor life, before meeting her current husband.
She still occasionally crossed paths with some of them at official events. Of course, even then they tacitly ignored each other.
There was no point in pretending to know each other.
Yet suddenly they were all going crazy. Saying they had received Mr. Kim’s message.
‘How did he find out?’
How? Honestly, it was obvious.
She had probably received the list of sponsor men from Im Eun-kyung, the lawyer who had once slept with her during marriage, and contacted them. It was done extremely fast.
It seemed her action capacity was unusually high for someone whose body was not in good condition.
Han Chae-kyung would soon learn just how furious her husband was. Thanks to the news that Im Eun-kyung, her former broker, had been rushed to the hospital with severe compound trauma.
“So far as to do this…?”
With trembling pupils, Han Chae-kyung stared at her smartphone, then silenced it.
She flipped the phone over because she did not want to keep seeing the endless chat notifications. It was not a wise move, but there was no answer to be had anyway.
How had it come to this?
“Nothing was wrong back then.”
The fact that she had sold her body in her youth was something she herself admitted.
The view that being a sponsor was somewhat different from a full-time whore was Han Chae-kyung’s personal opinion… but she could understand her husband calling her a whore. Honestly, the numbers were a bit high. In the days when she knew nothing, sponsor work had gone hand in hand with conditional meetings.
But that life ended in 2016.
And she had never been in crisis because of the past. There had been minor, subtle crises, but upon checking, they were nothing serious.
Joo Sung-hyun had said that “long tails get caught,” but in truth, almost no one had been hanging off her tail.
…Until the sudden disaster struck.
She had hurriedly handled one accident (believing she had) and caught her breath, only to have an even larger misfortune crash down on her.
Why now of all times. It felt as if she were being played with on someone’s palm.
“What did I do so wrong?”
As nausea rose, Han Chae-kyung muttered to herself, but no one answered.
In the cold silence of the 50- pyeong penthouse extension apartment in Annam City—the most expensive in the city—only silence flowed.
At that moment, a thought brushed across Han Chae-kyung’s mind.
That this house belonged to her husband. That all the privileges she had enjoyed had come from him.
If she stayed still, everything might be taken from her.
Whether recovery was possible or not, she needed to do something to at least reduce the damage. If her husband kept raging like this… She wanted to believe it would not go to the end, but she could not be certain.
She had to assume the worst-case scenario.
Property, political life, image, interpersonal relationships…
Especially property.
She had no time to stand by if she wanted to keep her husband from chasing her out naked, or if she wanted to protect anything.
‘Move. Right now.’
Fortunately, she still had one card she could play.
After barely tidying her haggard appearance, Han Chae-kyung ran out of the house.
The destination was the Annam City Council building.
There was someone she needed to meet urgently.
Joo Sung-hyun.
The man who had destroyed her family, the Joo Sung-hyun in the administration and legislation team.
An unpleasant man…
But there was no other choice now. Using his talent and that strangely effective cunning that was impossible to dismiss with simple intuition might open a breakthrough.
‘He can do it. If I just give him coordinates.’
Han Chae-kyung had decided to ask Joo Sung-hyun to obtain her husband’s information… to secure the private details she could use as a weapon.
Her husband’s past was just as dirty. If Han Chae-kyung was a whore, then her husband was a man who bought whores. Sometimes he even bought non-whores for money. He had done overseas sex trade many times.
Of course, she had no intention of gently asking for help from Joo Sung-hyun.
If he did not help, she would blackmail him by telling her husband about the office affair she had been having.
It was a suicide move for Han Chae-kyung. But it was also a disaster for Joo Sung-hyun.
How Kim Ho-chang would accept the fact that he had a high-sex-drive man like him—his reaction would be too obvious. It was a desperate gamble, but there was no other way.
The council building arrived shortly after. Han Chae-kyung had urgently summoned Joo Sung-hyun.
“Councilor. You’re later than I expected.”
Joo Sung-hyun greeted her as if he had been waiting.
Han Chae-kyung now feared this man.
***
Looking at me in a daze.
I only thought that she had come at a good time.
“……” (73 / 887 / 1 year and 7 months ago)
It was because there was one more thing prepared for a clean finish.
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