The Unbreakable Principle
There were more than fifty photographs in all, and two videos besides.
Ji Hye-in had saved every one of them carefully on her phone.
They were scenes of herself with the construction worker, Mr. Kim — stark, explicit poses, coupling like beasts. Photographs and footage that Eom In-soo had taken while he sat and watched it all.
Ji Hye-in did not do threesomes. But letting someone watch her with another man — that was a different matter. Separate from her life at the cafe, she had already done it several times with Eom In-soo, the man she used to meet on her own.
She lived as a public sub at the cafe, and yet she had never once permitted anyone there to film her having sex with a man. The photographs on the cafe's bulletin board — even the ones that showed her face — were not pictures of her in bed or undressed. They were ordinary snapshots of everyday life.
In all this time, Ji Hye-in had allowed only two men to film her during sex.
The first was Eom In-soo, the man she had gone down to the provinces to meet this time. Eom In-soo was an unusual man — a Dom who also carried a netorare fetish. He took a peculiar pleasure in showing his woman to other men, or having her sleep with them, and watching it happen.
Her connection with him stretched back a long way. Five years, maybe six. At first they hadn't met in person at all, communicating only through chat for over a year — nearly a year and a half. Because of that, Ji Hye-in's trust in Eom In-soo ran deep.
She had allowed him to film her because she was certain he was a man she could trust. He had never leaked a single uncensored photograph of her face. Whether stills or video, he had always thoroughly pixelated her features. That was why she had believed in him.
And then there was the other man. The man who had forbidden her from cafe activities, who had forbidden her from seeing Eom In-soo.
That man was Yeom Seong-bong.
He had gaslighted Ji Hye-in with vicious persistence, trying to make her his and his alone — and he had failed. Yeom Seong-bong had filmed her as he pleased. His pixelation work was every bit as skilled as Eom In-soo's. But in the end, Yeom Seong-bong had sent an uncensored sex video to her husband, Yoo Kang-soo, and plunged Ji Hye-in into crisis.
Those two men, and those two men alone, had been permitted to film her naked body. The truth was, there hadn't been that many men who had even tried. Those two had needed photographs of her body, which was why they had taken so many pictures so diligently, and why they had pixelated her face with such care.
In any case, all of that was in the past now. To Ji Hye-in, they were nothing more than old memories.
Complaints began to erupt among the members of the netori cafe.
When public sub Hye-in dramatically increased the frequency of her activities, everyone started applying to meet with her. Meanwhile, applications for the most senior member, Yang Ji-hwa, plummeted. The same went for the other public sub, Yoo Mi-ran. Every request in the cafe was flooding toward public sub Hye-in.
She was taking on at least one man a day as a rule — usually five or six a week. Except for Sundays, Ji Hye-in was determined to see at least one member every single day. If she couldn't meet someone during the day because of work at the association, there were now days when she would run two sessions before the night was over.
And so a post had gone up on the anonymous board, demanding that the rules for determining the order of meeting the public subs be made public. A vicious, no-holds-barred scramble was unfolding as everyone fought to spend time with public sub Hye-in first. She was being passed from member to member, continuously, without pause.
The management hastily convened a meeting. There was the matter of the flood of booking requests for public sub Hye-in — but another problem had erupted as well. Namely, what to do about Ma Yoon-hee, the youngest of the public subs, thirty-eight years old.
"The rumors have been confirmed as fact. Ma Yoon-hee has already filed for an uncontested divorce with her husband. We've also confirmed additional reports that she's been quietly taking money for commercial work at several other cafes. And most decisively — last month, she reportedly worked in secret as a paid pet dog at a party thrown by the CEO of a mid-sized company. That's been confirmed verbally, at least. We don't have hard evidence on that part yet."
"Getting Ma Yoon-hee out of the cafe isn't the problem. But if we do, that leaves us with only three public subs. And recruiting new ones isn't going well at the moment, as you all know."
"That doesn't mean we can destroy a principle this cafe has upheld for the past eight years, no matter what. If she sells her body for money, she isn't a sub. She's a whore. We cannot allow ourselves to be the ones who tear that principle down."
Another manager spoke up.
"And what do we do if Hye-in breaks that same principle and starts doing commercial work behind our backs?"
At that, the room went silent. Not a single person had an answer.
Jeong Soon-tak, the cardiovascular specialist, had been sitting with his mouth shut, listening to the other managers talk. He opened it slowly.
"Let us handle them one at a time. Public sub Ma Yoon-hee, in any case, has not even been performing her role properly. Those of you who have heard already know — she has no-showed appointments with members. That woman is not in her right mind right now. Let us not conflate one thing with another. Ma Yoon-hee is Ma Yoon-hee. Ji Hye-in is Ji Hye-in. There is no reason to connect the two."
"I think it would be best to end this here. I spoke with Dr. Hwang Jeong-geon late last night. He is quite concerned as well. But he was clear — the principle must not fall. Even if we are left with only Yang Ji-hwa, the way it once was, we must uphold the principle. There are still many subs in this world whose identities have not been revealed."
The other managers slowly nodded at Jeong Soon-tak's words.
"He's staying in a provincial city right now. Y Insurance says fifty-three percent of all their suspected insurance fraud cases are concentrated in that region and the areas around it. It's a neighborhood full of local thugs and local organized crime — they're all connected in one way or another — and it's notorious as a place where cases are hard to close."
"Our company's ratio for that region shouldn't even be thirty percent. So how is it that only Y Insurance is like that?"
Park Young-ho, executive director at M Insurance — the company Yoo Kang-soo had left — tilted his head as he spoke. Jang Ki-tae, nominally the branch manager of an outsourced insurance sales office under M Insurance, but quietly working as a broker on the side, answered with a careful expression.
"That's because over the past four years, Yoo Kang-soo cleaned up all the big-ticket insurance fraud cases in that region. Before he came on, we weren't any different from Y Insurance."
Park Young-ho let out a deep sigh. Jang Ki-tae went on.
"Honestly, even though he's already quit — he was a talent we hated to lose. He was an NCO, not a commissioned officer, but the guy attended the prestigious K University Law School for a year, then gave up his studies because he couldn't afford it and chose the path of a career soldier to make money. Anyone who's worked with him even once says they were amazed at how fast and clean his instincts are. I've seen it myself a few times, so I know. Then again — with skills like that, of course he lasted over twenty years as a military police investigator."
"But he crossed the line. After that many years in the service, you don't cross the line. I've already got everything prepared. If you give the okay, Director, I'll just teach him a lesson he'll feel."
"We're not talking about killing him, right?"
"Killing him — honestly, that's impossible in Korea. The statute of limitations on murder has been abolished. There aren't many countries with a murder clearance rate as high as ours. It'll just be a matter of breaking a few bones here and there. Enough to snap him awake."