The End of a Fifteen-Year War
And then it happened. A low murmur rippled through the lobby, and the air inside shifted. The doors of the grand conference room — sealed shut for so long — were beginning to open.
"Ah, one moment, please. The conference room doors just opened. It looks like the vote results are in!"
"God, you're nauseating. Every time I think you're dead, you crawl back out. Every time I think I've stomped you dead, you twitch again."
I lifted my head and looked at my cousin — Kang Jin-ho, chairman of Sunjin Motors.
That face, drunk on victory. An expression so giddy with joy it turned my stomach.
"I honestly thought I'd never get to wear the title of Sunjin Group chairman until I was in my coffin, just like my father. All because of you, Kang Seon-woo."
Sunjin. The great name my grandfather had founded and used to bend Korea to his will for eighty years. But as it passed to the second generation, then the third, that name had been torn to ribbons.
"Honestly, when my father risked everything for that hollow shell of a headquarters, I didn't get it. No — I thought, what is that pile of debt even worth, that he'd bury money in it like that?"
"……"
"But once the car business landed in my hands, I understood. The best of our Kang family is me — and yet some mangy stray of a mutt keeps playing at being the bloodline. It makes my skin crawl, you know?"
Kang Jin-ho looked down at me the way one looks at an insect.
"So I thought it over. What was it I lacked? Ah — that title of Sunjin Group chairman you've been clutching, Kang Seon-woo. That's what was missing. So that's why the old man hung his neck on that empty hat for so long."
"The old man was terrible at his job, so it figures he'd settle for an empty hat."
BANG—!
Kang Jin-ho kicked the table in a fit of temper. The massive slab of furniture screeched across the floor, and I didn't so much as blink.
"You little punk. You lost. Kneeling and begging wouldn't be enough — and you still can't read the room?"
"Is that why? Because you were terrible at it too, Kang Jin-ho. That must be why you had to slam a whole trillion won into this pathetic Sunjin Group just to swallow a handful of resorts."
"All that bravado, from the guy who lost."
From the day my mother took the chairman's seat, through all the years I inherited it and held the line — we hadn't been running a company. Those were the years spent doing nothing but calculating how to parry an unending barrage of attacks. I never got to grow the business. All I ever did was layer another coat of stone onto a wall that kept falling. That was the Sunjin I had protected. And now, at last, it was over.
"If it were me, I could've brought down Sunjin Group with half of half the money you spent. The weakest point was never headquarters — it was the trade business. You should've choked the cash flow."
My words hit the button. Kang Jin-ho's hand flew up, quivering, primed to come down on me — and then, trembling, he lowered it.
"Fine. Keep barking. No matter how you thrash, Sunjin belongs to me now."
"That was always your problem."
"What?"
"You flinch at the moment you should land the killing blow. Your father, Kang Tae-yong, was the same. Maybe Grandfather knew it all along — that cowards never deserved the name Sunjin—"
THWACK—!
Before I could finish, a blunt impact cracked against my jaw. The taste of briny blood flooded my mouth as if it had split open.
"You punk! I show you a shred of mercy and you climb all over me!"
"That stings. If you'd hit like this from the start, I might have actually lost."
I wiped the blood running from the corner of my mouth across the back of my hand. Kang Jin-ho huffed, dropped heavily onto the sofa across from me, pulled a cigarette from his breast pocket, and lit it.
"……You vicious little bastard. No wonder you've survived this long sweet-talking the white knights with that mouth."
Through the long plume of smoke, I could see the contempt in Kang Jin-ho's eyes.
"Persistent punk. Stomp on you and stomp on you, and you spring back like a weed — you and your mother both. Anyway. Hand over Sunjin Group. You understand it's over now, don't you?"
I knew. Of course I knew.
Three hundred billion won in bonds maturing tomorrow. Until now I had ground my soul down to hold them off, but the man before me had bought up every bond the market's banks held and wrapped his hands around my throat. There wasn't a single hill left to dig in on.
"I have a condition."
"Oh, for God's sake. That tongue of yours. What condition? The whole thing's in my hands the day after tomorrow anyway. Don't drag it out with some pitiful court rehabilitation filing — just hand it over."
"Leave Seon-ah's resort alone. Even if you take it, there's nothing you'd do with it."
I had to protect my little sister.
"Ooh, look at you, always looking out for your baby sister."
Kang Jin-ho flicked his cigarette to the floor and ground it out under his heel.
"Eh, that decrepit old resort would be nothing but a headache anyway. But I still don't want to leave anything behind in your family's hands. Why would I?"
"Then let's go to court tomorrow. File for rehabilitation and fight it to the end. When I start playing the press, your inauguration is going to get plenty noisy too."
"Ha. Is that a threat?"
Kang Jin-ho's eyes narrowed. For a moment he seemed to be running the numbers, and then the corner of his mouth curled up.
"Fine. Take the rotten little resort. It's Seon-ah's. But."
"……"
"Strip the name. Sunjin."
My heart plunged.
"What?"
"Take the Sunjin name off the resort's sign. Do that, and you can keep it."
I had given up everything over the years to protect the name Sunjin. Love, friends, an ordinary life — all of it, surrendered, because I refused to create anything else I'd have to protect. What I was responsible for, what I had to defend, was Sunjin and nothing else. And now, to save the last of my family — my sister — the price he demanded was that name itself.
"It's embarrassing, that's all. How am I supposed to look at a collapsing corner shop still wearing the Sunjin name?"
Kang Jin-ho snickered.
"You're actually thinking it over? Then let's just go to court."
"……I'll do it."
The answer came easier than expected. Sunjin could no longer be saved. The only thing left that I could protect was my sister.
"Huh. And here you answer that easily."
"I take the name off, and you leave us alone?"
"Yeah. As long as you don't get in my way. Picking up a half-dead resort would just earn me abuse from the board."
Saying this, Kang Jin-ho walked over to the table he'd kicked moments ago and picked up the documents lying on top of it. Then he tossed them at me.
"Sign it. Add a clause at the bottom — Sunjin Resorts stays untouched."
The papers stated that Sunjin Motors would assume every last debt, and in exchange, Sunjin Group would pass to Sunjin Motors.
I stared at the documents for a long time, dazed. It was as if the thing lying before me were a report card grading everything I had ever lived for.
"Hurry up. We don't have all day."
Kang Jin-ho pressed, and I let out a long breath and took out my fountain pen. The moment I finished signing, he snatched the documents away.
"Disgusting bastard. Well, at least the people prattling on about the 'genius of management defense' will finally shut up about you. Let's never meet again. Wipe the blood off your nose, punk. Strutting at your hyung like that — you're lucky I only cracked your jaw."
Kang Jin-ho gave a sour smirk and walked out of the room.
Left alone in the empty room, I sank deep into the back of the chair.
The fifteen-year war was over. Before any sense of defeat, a bitter, bone-deep exhaustion washed over me first.
"……Ha."
The moment I tried to exhale that long sigh—
EEEEEEEE—
A piercing ring tore through my ears, and with it, a vertigo struck my head as if the world itself were spinning. At the same time came a pain like someone seizing my heart and crushing it in their fist.
"Ugh……"
My stomach churned, and my vision darkened rapidly. I raised my hand to steady my head, but my arm refused to obey my will. Scalding liquid kept pouring from my nose. My body tipped over, losing its center, and collapsed to one side.
THUD!
Cold marble met my cheek.
I have to…… get up……
But my body was heavy as waterlogged cotton. It felt so empty. Fifteen years I'd wielded a single shield and lived like a dog, all to protect the name Sunjin. And I'd been wrong. Completely wrong. I'd believed that if I just held the line, I would win. But that was wrong — I should have been tearing at their throats all along.
The bulb hanging on the wall flickered, dimming and flaring like a dying light. The shrinking glow…… that was the last thing I ever saw.
"……"
Sounds drifted in from the darkness — muffled, indistinct murmurs, as if rising from deep underwater.
"……Seon-woo-ssi? Kang Seon-woo-ssi?"
Someone was calling my name. I forced my heavy eyelids open.
"Ngh……"
The instant my eyes opened, a blinding pain surged through my skull, as if it were being split apart. A throbbing ache at my temples. The exact pain I'd felt right before I collapsed.
I survived?
I'd been certain I was dead, yet somehow I'd made it, and it seemed I'd been carried to a hospital. The blurred view slowly sharpened. A white ceiling — and a man in a white gown peering down at my face from inches away.
Shining a penlight into my pupils, the man asked in a flat voice, "Are you with us?"
"Where am I?"
"Sunjin Hospital."
Just as I was thinking, thank God, I made it—
"Seon-woo-ssi, you collapsed during the mourning period, so we brought you to a private room—"
"I'm sorry — during the what?"
The doctor said something I couldn't make sense of. During the mourning period? Whose mourning, if not mine—
"You've been overworking yourself. I understand your feelings as the chief mourner, but you must rest. When the heart suffers, the body is always the first to break down."
"Hold on. Chief mourner? Whose? And you're telling me I collapsed as the chief mourner?"
Just as I was pressing the doctor over his incomprehensible words—
Click.
The hospital room door slid open, and someone with a familiar face walked in.
"Seon-woo, are you all right?"
"Mo……ther?"
It was my mother. But she wasn't the mother I remembered. The mother in my memory was an old woman — hair gone white from a merciless management dispute, deep lines carved around her eyes. But the person standing before me now—
Black…… hair?
Raven-black hair. A face full of worry, yet alive with vigor. It was exactly my mother's face from thirty years ago, from that time.
"Yes, it's your mother. Are you back with us? I thought I'd lost you too, right after your father."
"……My father?"
My father had died thirty years ago. And she'd thought she lost me, after him?
Only then did I truly see what my mother was wearing. Coarse black mourning clothes. And pinned at her chest, a chief mourner's ribbon.
Mourning.
The doctor's words from before slashed through my mind like a knife-sharp ring in my ears.
The chief mourner was me — Kang Seon-woo, who had presided over my father's funeral. With a trembling hand, I touched my own face. It was unharmed — the face that should have been shattered by Kang Jin-ho's fist. No bandages, no stitches. Instead, my fingertips found the rough texture of a hempen mourning hood.
No. It couldn't be.
My heart began to pound like mad. I whipped my head around and searched the wall of the hospital room. A white wall, and dead center on it, an electronic clock.
The date on the display met my eyes.
August 6, 2003
My breath caught in my throat. It was that exact day, thirty years ago — the day my father died, the day I buried him.