Bitches in Uniform (4)
She was a woman suspicious beyond all reason.
A beautiful spy, the kind who might have stepped out of some espionage film. Her sense of style was exceptional at a glance, and her skin was so pale that she seemed a bewitching creature no man could help but fall for.
"A secret about my father's death?"
Woo-joo threw the question back at that distrustful stare. His tone had an edge to it—perhaps because he had only just laid his family to rest. He couldn't help it. She hadn't even come to the funeral to pay her respects, yet she had appeared out of nowhere, and the name she offered up in the guise of an introduction carried not a shred of sincerity. There was more than one thing about her that didn't sit right.
"Are you interested?"
"If you're not just toying with me, how could I not be?"
Gaehwagi laughed, bright and tinkling, as if to say she felt exactly the same.
"Then I'll take that as your consent."
Beep. From somewhere came a faint, artificial mechanical tone—nothing at all, and yet the sort of sound that stole the mind away. Woo-joo swept his gaze around in search of its source, and then he froze. The landscape that only a moment ago had been Calvary Cemetery had become a diner.
"Th-this? No—how..."
Gaehwagi sat across from him with a white table between them. She was stirring stevia into a hot coffee, and she spoke without so much as glancing up. She knew it from experience. At times like this, a person overwhelmed by a situation they had never heard of—let alone seen—couldn't even think to meet her eyes.
"I'm not sorry, but shall I apologize anyway? I imagine that wasn't a pleasant feeling. Still, do try to understand. People usually won't listen at all unless they live through it themselves."
"Who in the world are you...?"
"I used to be the direct superior at the place where your mother worked. People call me by the nicknames Gaehwagi, or Guhanmal. You seem displeased that I won't give you my real name, but you're better off not knowing. The world I belong to isn't so easy a place that some half-baked human can go poking around in it."
She let the rather caustic words fall in a clear, sweet voice, then gave a soft scoff. Woo-joo loathed being looked down on, but before this woman, with her strange spell over him, even he could only sit like a docile lamb and listen in silence.
"Is this another scheme of Cheryl Kim's? That damned bitch...?"
"Pfft. That whore? No one impersonates me lightly. In that sense, you're quite lucky. You'd do well to listen closely. This will be a major turning point in that shabby little life of yours."
The strong like those who submit to them. Ask how he knew, and the answer was simple: he was the same. Woo-joo sat up straight and looked Gaehwagi dead in the eye, doing his best to seem like a man intent on taking the conversation seriously.
"Understood. Please, go on."
"Oh, I like that attitude very much."
Delighted, the woman clapped, then lifted her cup and took a sip of coffee.
"Mind if I call you Woo-joo? I do like males like you. Maybe because you remind me of my husband back when we were dating. Desire swollen out of all proportion, experience thin as paper—moths that crumple and burn the moment they meet the flame. So fleeting, and so beautiful."
"Call me whatever you like. In exchange, tell me plainly what you mean by a secret behind my father's death."
"Have you ever heard of a neurotoxin called MPTP?"
He hadn't. Woo-joo was a product of the Wharton School, one of the most prestigious business schools in America. A dropout, granted, but a dropout all the same—and stone blind to the sort of knowledge a pharmacy student might possess.
"It's a substance that induces brain pathology similar to Parkinson's disease. Even taken by mouth, acute symptoms appear within days, or weeks. A silent assassin, you might say. Robert Seo didn't contract Parkinson's. He suffered neurodegenerative damage from MPTP."
"...You're saying the cause of my father's death was murder by poison? By whom! And where is the proof!"
"Who else but that woman, Cheryl Kim? A pretty stepmother who crawled in from God knows where and swallows the family fortune whole—it's an ancient cliché. You already know that, Woo-joo. Why act as if it's news?"
It was true the doubt had never quite left him. Accepting it outright was another matter. The story was simply impossible to believe.
Robert. Cheryl. MPTP. Poison...
The founder of a mega law firm takes an assassination threat or two in stride. In the course of mergers and of rooting out every kind of corruption, how many people must have wanted that mouth of his shut? There had even been someone who kidnapped Woo-joo as a child and used him as leverage.
"You expect me to believe the great founder of Surh & Krueger was taken in completely by that filthy slut's scheme and died for it? My father was a wise man!"
"A man that fluent in the law—why did he remarry a paralegal who had nothing to her but a pretty face and a fine figure, without writing so much as a single prenup? Have you truly never once wondered?"
"What are you trying to say!"
"Calm down. You've gotten rather worked up."
Snap. Gaehwagi flicked her fingers and summoned the diner's waitress. From beyond the bar, where she had been waiting, a blonde, blue-eyed woman approached. A snow-white apron was tied at her waist, her hair bound neatly in a ponytail. She was Dana—because the name tag on her waitress uniform read Dana.
"More coffee?"
"Your name's Dana? What a pretty name."
"Oh my, thank you. Though I don't think it's as pretty as yours."
Gaehwagi offered an amiable smile and fiddled with a smartphone in her left hand. She appraised the girl's looks as quite fresh—and then, without preamble, set about sexually harassing her.
"Dana, honey? The gentleman in front of me went through something very unpleasant, and his anger just won't settle. From the look of you, you've got some volume. How about cooling him off with a titjob?"
"Wait—Ms. Gaehwagi! What is this—"
"Oh my, of course! Shall I suck his cock as well? I'm quite good at blowjobs, you know!"
"Hehe. Honey, you were born a filthy slut. Go on, show us what you can do."
Dana popped the buttons of her white frilled blouse and thrust out a pair of full, plump breasts. Startled, Woo-joo glanced around, afraid someone might be watching, and in that moment she leaned forward and whispered at his ear in a lewd voice.
"Sir, I couldn't say what's made you so angry, but please let that anger go. Dana will see that you feel good. Don't think of anything else—just relieve yourself, nice and free, the way you'd piss all over a toilet in a public restroom."
"This is insane..."
The waitress smiled shyly, then sank to her knees and crawled beneath the table. With practiced hands she undid his belt buckle and drew down the zipper. In one motion she yanked his pants and trunks to his thighs, and pressed her lips to the cock that had risen in spite of him.
"Please take care of me... mm."
Blood began to rush into the half-erect shaft. Delighted by the cock swelling before her eyes, Dana traced the precum beading out in little drops with soft lips. She worked her mouth as if painting on a heaven-sent lip gloss, and once every preparation was finished, she lifted her breasts and nestled the shaft snugly between them.
"Mmph... please don't mind what's happening down here, and enjoy a comfortable conversation..."
In place of lube she let a long strand of spit fall, then massaged Woo-joo with her lips and her body. The moans leaking out little by little, the loud wet friction—there was no way the other customers could fail to hear. And yet the people eating their meals and drinking their drinks went on as if nothing at all were amiss, absorbed in their own affairs.
"Well, Woo-joo? Feeling a little better now?"
"What the hell are you? Some kind of superpowered freak...?"
"Wrong question. What you ought to be asking me is this."
He was already a wreck, pleasure and rage tangled until he couldn't tell one from the other. To him, brow furrowed, Gaehwagi quietly held out the smartphone in her left hand. The word Moonlight was engraved on the back cover. Judging by a design he had never encountered anywhere, it was no off-the-shelf product.
"—Then, Gaehwagi. Is this what they did to my father, too?"
"......!"
"This smartphone is one of my masterpieces. Depending on the apps installed, it guides the user's life in a better direction. I originally developed it to hand out to young men who caught my eye. I wanted to watch, you see. To watch them indulge their youth to the fullest."
Irritated past patience, Woo-joo clicked his tongue and pressed down hard on the back of Dana's head. She choked under the sudden pressure and coughed, but he paid her no mind and only bore down harder. He even rapped her a few times, a wordless order to shut up.
He was adapting quickly.
It was like looking at her husband in his youth. Inwardly satisfied, Gaehwagi went on. She was growing certain she had chosen well. Just the sight of him turning his mind over without rest, trying to tease out the implication hidden inside her careful phrasing, was enough. Woo-joo was a winning lottery ticket.
"A few years ago, though, I received intelligence that several employees who worked under me had deliberately made off with multiple units. One of them was Cheryl. Your stepmother—the one who hacked Robert Seo with Mind Hacker."
"Hacking a person, not a machine... You're talking as if it's some hypnosis app."
"Well, excuse me! Would you mind not comparing my masterpiece to mass-produced junk that hasn't a speck of aesthetic sense? Do you have any idea how much time I pour into balance patches every single day? Instant conquest isn't bad, I'll grant you. But it can't compare to the true pleasure of conditioning—singling out a girl you fancy and breaking her down, slow and sticky."
The Moonlight smartphone held all manner of applications, each kind suited to its purpose. Mind Hacker, for its part, was a tool that analyzed a target's present psychology and assisted in gaslighting. Its danger was relatively low beside the other apps, but the clever Cheryl, she said, seemed to have made good use of it.
"And besides—you've already experienced it as thoroughly as anyone could. No need to doubt, is there?"
She was right. Woo-joo yanked Dana's ponytail. The waitress choked on the sudden facefuck, and even then she never thought to shove away the man before her, or to escape.
"Enough digression. Let's get to the point. You've more or less figured out why I asked to see you."
She had only accepted, meekly, the fate laid before her.
The same way he himself was sliding under the offer of Gaehwagi—a woman possessed of some unknowable power.