Lee Young-jin remembered the harsh words spat out by Seo Seung-hyun on a speeding train.
‘How many times have you done something like last time? Who asked you to do it?’
‘Something like last time…’
‘The job you call a task, stealing something, extracting information, hacking into servers to manipulate data and decode codes, all of it.’
Ah.
Lee Young-jin finally realized.
Seo Seung-hyun had known.
Who the item originally belonged to, where it came from, who had taken it out.
Compared to what Lee Young-jin himself knew, what was it?
‘I don’t know…’
How foolish did that answer sound?
He was like a machine. An artificial intelligence without free will, a robot without even Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws, an automatic input system that spit out predetermined answers when given a code. When Teacher ordered him to hack into Seoran Defense’s internal system and extract information, Lee Young-jin had no idea what that system he was breaking, the firewalls, the security codes, and even the information that was the target, were about. He didn’t even question it.
When Teacher told him to find Park Eun-young.
When Ji Jung-hoon went missing.
When he heard from Choi Yoon-seok that Teacher had asked him to find a hitman.
And Seo Seung-hyun’s questions.
‘Do you know what you’ve done? Do you even know what the item you’ve stolen is? Are you doing this with me knowing?’
Lee Young-jin knew nothing.
‘You’ve crossed a line you shouldn’t have on your own.’
And indeed, he had.
He had long crossed that line.
His vision blurred. It wasn’t because of tears. His brain was overloaded. Not even when decoding millions of lines of code had he ever felt this way.
“CEO Seo.”
Lee Young-jin barely moved his lips.
“CEO Seo is not at fault. It was me, I did it. But CEO Seo didn’t ask me to do it. CEO Seo didn’t know anything then….”
His mouth was dry, and his words eventually trailed off.
Kwon Shin-woo looked down at Lee Young-jin with an unfazed face. That unvanishing smile was eerie. At the moment Lee Young-jin’s chest heaved with a large throb, Kwon Shin-woo gently opened his mouth.
“It’s impossible that CEO Seo didn’t know anything.”
The voice carried a hint of amusement.
“That man always knows everything. Otherwise, why would he have gone to such lengths to hide your identity?”
“CEO Seo…”
Lee Young-jin mumbled stupidly. Once again, the conversation they had in the clattering train car flashed through his mind. What had Seo Seung-hyun said to the ignorant Lee Young-jin?
‘It’s okay. I can handle that much.’
Kwon Shin-woo’s emotionless, calm eyes oppressively bore down on him. Under that gaze, Lee Young-jin trembled. What Seo Seung-hyun had been avoiding wasn’t the prosecutors. What he had been avoiding was this alpha standing in front of Lee Young-jin now.
That realization cut deeply into Lee Young-jin, just as his phone vibrated sharply in his hand. The sharp vibration tore through the suffocating atmosphere.
Lee Young-jin abruptly lifted his head.
His eyes met Kwon Shin-woo’s.
Those eyes were as lifeless as an inanimate object’s, showing no hint of light. Even the fact that he was facing the person who had stolen the company’s utmost secrets, for which billions, if not trillions, had been spent to retrieve, seemed to leave no impression on him. His eyes resembled those of a tropical fish in an aquarium or a reptile reacting solely through autonomic nerves. Metal-forged eyelids blinked once, covering those eyes before rising again. A smile flickered across his lips.
“Please take it.”
Lee Young-jin couldn’t move.
Sweat slowly pooled in his palm, causing the phone to begin sliding downwards.
The phone wobbled through his fingers, which had stiffened awkwardly.
Though the penthouse was precisely set to 24 degrees, he felt a chill.
Kwon Shin-woo waited for him. Patiently. For a very long time. Until Lee Young-jin, tense with nervousness, finally slowly raised his hand.
In his barely lifted hand, the screen of the smartphone displayed the new message: [Teacher]. Lee Young-jin stared hard at those three characters.
“Please take it.”
Kwon Shin-woo repeated the command in an identical voice, without the slightest difference from before.
Lee Young-jin took a deep breath. His mouth felt prickly as if he was rolling sharp crystals on his tongue.
“…Teacher.”
From the phone held to his ear, the voice that had dominated half of his life gently called out to him.
[Young-jin.]
His throat tightened. He tried to respond, but only a hissing breath came out. Instead, Teacher spoke first from the other end of the phone.
[Young-jin, there’s something urgent you need to do tonight.]
“But, I.”
He rolled his tongue incoherently.
“I haven’t found Sister Eun-young yet…”
[Let that go.]
Teacher cut him off, somewhat hurriedly.
[There’s something that needs to be moved, Young-jin.]
“Moved? What needs to be moved?”
[The item you brought.]
Teacher answered in a gentle voice. Lee Young-jin’s heart lurched. His gaze, fluttering in confusion, looked up at Kwon Shin-woo. The alpha, likely having heard the entire conversation with his alpha-class hearing, remained calm.
[A person will come to pick it up, so have it ready by 10 o’clock. The details will be explained by them. You’re at home now, right?]
Lee Young-jin’s shoulders twitched at the probing question. His chest heaved. He steadied his breath and fumbled for the digital clock next to the bed. Then, he lifted his eyes to meet Kwon Shin-woo’s again. The calm face nodded slightly with a smile.
“…Yes.”
[Good. I always trust you, Young-jin. Just this one more time, okay?]
“…Yes, Teacher.”
Lee Young-jin managed to squeeze out a response.
The call ended first, as it always did.
The phone slipped limply from his grasp.
Kwon Shin-woo smiled. It was the first sign of pleasure he had shown since entering the house.
“That’s fortunate.”
He extended his hand slightly to catch the sliding phone from Lee Young-jin’s grip.
“Let’s do this.”
He politely handed the phone back to Lee Young-jin’s trembling fingers. The flimsy fingers barely managed to grasp the sleek smartphone. The alpha’s hand temperature, adjusting the fingers over the phone, was neither hot nor cold, as if it was precisely the temperature of a machine at 36.5 degrees.
His hand softly wrapped around Lee Young-jin’s clenched fist.
“You’ll be returning the item you stole from me, with your own hands. How about it?”
Though the question seemed to offer a choice, it wasn’t really giving Lee Young-jin any option.
Lee Young-jin shook his head.
“After all… CEO Seo went to make the deal. Even if I don’t do anything, eventually, CEO Seo will buy it and bring it…”
“Do you expect me to trust CEO Seo in this situation?”
“Then do you trust me?”
“Haha….”
Lee Young-jin’s retort was met with Kwon Shin-woo’s dry laugh.
“That’s correct.”
At the same time, Kwon Shin-woo’s hand, which had gently enveloped the back of Lee Young-jin’s hand, tightened slightly before his other hand slipped inside his suit to slowly pull something out.
“I don’t trust people.”
It was a slender ampoule injection pen, smaller than a segment of a finger. Lee Young-jin’s gaze was fixed on that syringe.
Kwon Shin-woo was not in a hurry.
He leisurely and slowly brought it over to the back of Lee Young-jin’s hand, in a demonstrative manner. A firm thumb gently pressed the button of the injection pen. Lee Young-jin intently watched for that second as the micro needle, just 2 millimeters long, barely caused a tingling sensation as it penetrated the bluish vein on the back of his hand.
“I trust machines.”
Kwon Shin-woo finished speaking.
The injection pen dropped from the back of the hand.
“I’ll give you a generous twelve hours.”
Kwon Shin-woo’s hand slowly withdrew from Lee Young-jin. The exact 36.5-degree Celsius body temperature, like the 2-millimeter micro needle, left no trace. He tapped the empty injection pen with the tip of his index finger.
Lee Young-jin slowly lifted his head to look up at the indifferent, unblemished face of the Alpha, as cold as steel. Kwon Shin-woo met his gaze without any disturbance.
“I believe it’s enough time to finish what was started.”
Lee Young-jin stared at those unshakable eyes with his lips dumbly parted.
Cold eyes.
They became a sharp and precise reality, piercing him.
He asked Kwon Shin-woo nothing. Not what he had stolen, nor the identity of what was injected into him. As always. He only knew one thing.
Kwon Shin-woo was right.
This was something he had started. It was something he had to finish.
***
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