The first head rolled before dawn.
A mid-tier Kang subsidiary CEO—Park Joonbae, the kind who kept offshore accounts and offshore girlfriends—was found in his penthouse pool, wrists slashed, water turned the color of old wine. Yoochan read the report over black coffee while Seoul blinked awake outside the penthouse windows.
"Suicide?" Minwoo asked, lighting a cigarette.
Yoochan didn't look up. "Message."
Minwoo exhaled smoke. "From who?"
"Someone who just realized the rules have changed."
The room was quiet except for the soft hum of data streams from their open server. Yoochan swiped through his hitlist—"restructuring candidates," as the press release would call them. Five names had already been purged. Three had fled to the Philippines. One had turned state's witness.
And someone—somewhere—was getting nervous enough to send blood back up the pipeline.
"We need to accelerate," Yoochan muttered.
Minwoo smirked. "You say that like we haven't already burned half the empire."
"We're not burning," Yoochan said. "We're pruning."
---
The next move was surgical.
Yoochan and Sooyoung walked into a meeting at Mirae Construction flanked by legal counsel and a new ethics officer flown in from Sweden. Cameras clicked. Executives sweat through their designer suits.
"Effective immediately," Yoochan announced, "Mirae's slush fund operations are dissolved. All pending bribe contracts annulled. Unpaid worker settlements will be processed by end of quarter."
A board member, white-haired and quivering, stood up. "This is suicide."
"No," Yoochan said, smiling thinly. "This is strategy. Suicide is waiting for prosecutors to do it for us."
Afterward, in the elevator, Sooyoung watched him in silence.
"You planned the photographer," she said finally.
"I planned everything."
"So the headlines read, 'Heir Cleans House,' instead of 'Corpse Found in Rooftop Pool.'"
"Optics are power."
She didn't disagree. But her silence was heavier now, like she was carrying something she no longer wanted to drop in his hands.
---
The retaliation came that night.
A package was delivered to Yoochan's private elevator—an unmarked box, no fingerprints. Inside: a single severed finger, still wearing a bloodied class ring from Hyejin's university.
Yoochan's breath caught.
Minwoo arrived ten minutes later, looked at the box, then at Yoochan.
"They hit Hyejin?"
"No," Yoochan muttered, checking the metadata from the ring's RFID chip. "They hit her lover."
Sooyoung entered moments later, saw the mess, and paled.
"They're not just coming for you anymore," she said.
"I know."
Yoochan picked up his phone.
"Get me Joonho."
---
The brothers met in a soundproofed suite in the basement of Kang Tower. No aides. No guards. Just tension and a bottle of scotch old enough to remember the IMF crisis.
"You want my help now?" Joonho asked, pouring a glass.
"I want the names of your contractors in Busan. The ones who specialize in psychological warfare."
"You're cleaning house by hiring the rats?"
"I'm declaring war on the ones still hiding in the walls."
Joonho chuckled, swirled his drink. "You sound like Daehyun."
Yoochan didn't blink. "Good."
Silence stretched. Then Joonho leaned forward.
"You know what's funny, Yoochan? I used to think you were just angry. Now I see it—anger's not the fuel anymore. It's the frame. You enjoy this."
"I enjoy results."
Joonho raised his glass in mock salute. "Then here's to the monster I made."
Yoochan didn't drink.
---
By morning, three shell companies registered in Jeju had vanished from public record. Their offshore servers were scrubbed. A fourth exploded in a quiet part of Busan—a "gas leak," according to the news. Yoochan watched it all from his tablet as he sat in his mother's garden, now barren with winter.
He held the vial of ash in one hand. In the other, the photo of Hyejin's lover. The one who had kept her safe. The one he'd failed to protect.
Sooyoung knelt beside him, holding a dossier. Her voice was quiet.
"She begged them not to send the photo to Hyejin."
Yoochan didn't respond.
"She said… if you saw it first, maybe you'd do something. Maybe you'd care."
Yoochan's fingers curled around the vial.
"She was wrong," he said. "I don't care."
Sooyoung's breath hitched.
"I don't care," Yoochan repeated. "I act. That's the difference between survivors and martyrs."
"You're becoming something you can't walk back from."
"I never planned to walk back."
---
Back in the Tower, Yoochan added another name to the list.
Then he tapped on Hyejin's profile.
A note popped up: Pending loyalty.
He stared at it for a long moment before deleting it.
Some people, he knew, had to be left untouched. Not out of mercy. But because they needed to watch.
To understand.
To remember