The name echoed in his mind like a curse: Jiwoo.
Yoochan stood in the glass-walled infirmary, watching Yuna sleep through the drip of painkillers and sedatives. Her lips had been stitched shut with surgical thread—a message, not a mutilation. Her voice had been taken, but not her will. Even in sleep, her fingers twitched, like she was trying to speak in silence.
Sooyoung stood at the edge of the room, arms folded. "Jiwoo. Does the name mean anything to you?"
"No," Yoochan lied.
But it did.
The Kang family archives—those dusty, coded files Daehyun kept locked away in an analog vault—once mentioned a failed affair, a hidden child. It was a name Yoochan dismissed as rumor, a whisper from an older generation too drunk on legacy to differentiate myth from memory.
And yet, Yuna had said it.
Right before she blacked out, she mouthed it like a prayer.
Jiwoo.
---
Back at the Tower, Yoochan summoned Minwoo, Sooyoung, and his private archivist to the war room. The lights dimmed. The holographic family tree unfurled again—but this time, Yoochan opened the encrypted side files marked "Contingencies."
Only the patriarch had access to these.
But Yoochan was no longer just a son.
He was the empire.
And the empire answered to him.
A hidden branch flickered into view: Kang Jiwoo, born 2003, mother unknown. "Status: Expelled."
"What the hell does 'expelled' mean?" Sooyoung asked.
"Cut off before legitimacy," Yoochan replied. "Erased before he could claim blood."
Minwoo leaned in. "So he's real?"
Yoochan nodded slowly. "Real, and back."
---
Security footage from the Jeju site came in two hours later.
Grainy. Obscured. But the man who dragged Yuna out of the van had Yoochan's height, Yoochan's build—and Yoochan's face.
Minwoo swore.
"Is that you?"
"No," Yoochan said coldly. "But someone wants them to think it is."
Sooyoung magnified the frame. "It's not a disguise. This looks like—"
"A brother," Yoochan finished.
He stared at the footage with a tightening jaw.
Not just a brother.
A mirror.
---
Three days later, the first leak hit the net.
An anonymous video titled "The Forgotten Kang" uploaded to several dark web forums. In it, a masked figure with a voice modulator accused Yoochan of engineering the collapse of the factory in Gyeongnam, manipulating markets, and silencing dissenters within the family.
The footage included unreleased details—details only someone with inside access could know.
Yoochan threw the tablet across the room. It shattered against the wall.
"This is war," he muttered.
Sooyoung picked up the pieces, face calm. "He's not after the fortune. He's after your soul."
Yoochan's phone buzzed.
A single message.
"You are the imposter, not me." — Jiwoo.
---
That night, Yoochan couldn't sleep.
He walked the hallways of the Tower like a ghost, passing portraits of Kang ancestors with eyes that judged him with every step. In the mirror by the spiral staircase, his reflection looked wrong—slightly off, slightly hollow.
He punched it.
Glass cracked. Blood ran down his knuckles.
Sooyoung found him like that, silent and bleeding, staring into his broken face.
"He's not stronger than you," she said.
"But he's smarter," Yoochan muttered.
"You don't know that."
"I do. Because I would've done the same thing."
He turned to her. "If I wanted to dismantle a legacy, I'd start by turning the heirs against each other. I'd dig up every buried secret. I'd let the empire rot from the inside."
"And?"
He smiled coldly. "He's doing it beautifully."
---
At dawn, he gathered the remaining siblings—Minwoo, Soomin, and Hyejin—at the table for the first family council in weeks.
Seojun: gone.
Yuna: hospitalized.
Joonho: reclusive and growing unstable, unreachable since the last board meeting.
"I'm declaring a lockdown on internal operations," Yoochan announced. "No one moves funds, contacts outsiders, or takes meetings without clearing through me."
Soomin scoffed. "This isn't a military coup, Yoochan."
Yoochan leaned in. "It is now."
Hyejin's face was pale. "We're being hunted, aren't we?"
"Not hunted," Yoochan replied. "Replaced."
Minwoo lit a cigarette in defiance of the no-smoking rule. "So what's the play?"
"We smoke him out."
Yoochan dropped a dossier on the table.
Inside: names of orphanages, off-books financial trails, and one photo—blurry, old, taken in a rural fishing village. A teenager, maybe seventeen. The same eyes.
"I'm going to find him," Yoochan said. "And if I can't turn him—"
"You'll kill him," Sooyoung finished quietly from behind.
He didn't deny it.
---
Later that night, Yoochan returned to his mother's old room.
He hadn't stepped inside since she died.
Dust lay on everything like a shroud. Her perfume still lingered faintly in the air.
He opened her wardrobe, finding it empty—except for one thing: a tiny cassette player hidden in a pocket of her hanbok.
He pressed play.
Her voice crackled through.
"If you find him... if he finds you... remember, I only had one son. But he may believe he is you."
The tape stopped.
Yoochan sat on the floor for a long time, heart thudding like a drum.
He wasn't sure what terrified him more.
That Jiwoo existed…
Or that part of him already believed they might be the same person