Mirae wasn't looking for him.
She wasn't searching, hoping, or waiting.
Not anymore.
She was scrolling through the news with the bored detachment of someone who had spent too many months pretending she was fine. Her thumb moved lazily, politics, celebrity scandals, some new pharmaceutical trial that promised miracles no one would ever feel.
Then her phone froze for a heartbeat.
A headline cut through the haze, sharp as a blade:
Interpol Arrests Key Accomplice in Kang Empire Scandal, Suspect Captured in Zurich
Her breath stilled.
She didn't blink.
The article opened, loading line by agonizing line, like the universe wanted her to suffer millisecond by millisecond. Then the photo appeared grainy, blown-up, taken through a car window.
But clarity is sometimes cruel.
She knew that face.
Even blurred, even hollowed, even bowed under the weight of handcuffs and a life unraveling.
Eun-woo.
Her phone slipped from her fingers and clattered onto the floor.
The sound echoed in the room… and inside her.
Her heartbeat felt like an apology she no longer owed anyone.
Interpol had been chasing him across borders, across time zones, across the fragments of his own guilt.
Zurich was where he ran out of luck.
He had crossed into Switzerland under a forged identity, using offshore accounts traced to Kang Industries, accounts Mirae once heard him joke about with a smile that now felt like a warning she had ignored.
Charges scrolled down her screen like a list of unfinished betrayals:
Obstruction of justice
Destruction of evidence
Financial fraud
Aiding and abetting in memory suppression protocols
Memory suppression.
The phrase struck her harder than all the others.
He had once held her face in his hands and said, "I remember you even when I try not to."
Now she wondered how many memories he had destroyed for others.
A quote from the lead investigator sat in bold italics:
"He wasn't just running. He was hiding what he helped build."
Mirae reread the sentence until the letters blurred.
Her fingers shook.
"Why… why would you do this?" she whispered to the empty room.
But silence has a way of sounding like an answer.
________________
The trial didn't drag on.
Truth rarely does when evidence is suffocating.
The courtroom felt like a graveyard, cold, reverberating with whispers that refused to die.
President Kang sat in the front row beside lawyers who had once believed he was untouchable. Now they watched him like a man whose kingdom had finally turned to ash.
Eun-woo sat two rows behind, his body still, back straight, eyes fixed on nothing.
Or maybe everything.
He didn't flinch when the judge entered.
He didn't look up when flashbulbs went off.
He didn't search for her in the crowd.
Not even once.
The judge's sentence fell like a slow, heavy avalanche:
"President Kang is hereby sentenced to life imprisonment without parole for conspiracy, psychological manipulation, and corporate homicide."
The words shook the air.
Everyone inhaled, a collective gasp the city would remember.
Then came the second hammer:
"Eun-woo is hereby sentenced to 5 years in prison, with parole possible after 3, for obstruction of justice, destruction of evidence, and financial fraud. His cooperation is recognized, but the severity of his involvement cannot be dismissed."
Five years.
Three if life was merciful.
She waited for relief, for rage, for something.
But all she felt was the cold.
Not the chill of winter.
The chill of disappointment.
No applause followed.
No cheers.
Justice had been given, but justice does not feel like victory when the people you once loved stand on the wrong side of it.
As the judge lifted his gavel for the final time, chaos cracked through the room.
A strangled gasp.
A thud.
A cry.
Joon-ha's mother swayed, her hand clutching her chest before her knees buckled. She would have hit the floor if Joon-ha hadn't caught her mid-fall.
"Mom! Mom, look at me!"
His voice broke, raw, desperate.
People screamed for medics.
Reporters scrambled for angles.
Lawyers stepped back as if grief were contagious.
Kang did not turn.
He did not lift his head.
He did not move.
Joon-ha held his mother's trembling hand as paramedics worked around him. Her eyelids fluttered, tears slipping out as though escaping her before she could swallow them.
"I didn't know," she whispered, breath shallow. "I didn't know what he'd become."
Joon-ha didn't answer.
Some truths don't need words.
Sometimes the greatest punishment isn't a prison.
It's watching the person you built a life around turn into a stranger you never met.
Outside the Courthouse
The world outside was unnervingly calm, too calm, as though the sky itself didn't dare move.
Reporters swarmed the steps like vultures circling a battlefield.
Areum stood a few meters away, her hands stuffed into her coat pockets, staring at nothing with an expression too tired for her age.
Mirae approached her wordlessly.
No one spoke.
Ara and Choi appeared soon after, their faces carved with a mixture of relief and sorrow, because what do you call justice that comes too late to save anyone?
But Joon-ha never came out.
He stayed inside with his mother, refusing to let go of the only thing he had left.
Areum didn't ask where he was.
She knew.
Some wounds don't bleed.
They just keep reopening every time you breathe.
And some forms of justice don't feel like justice at all.
They feel like survival.
_______________
The visitation room smelled like disinfectant and endings.
She told herself she wasn't going to see him.
She told herself she didn't owe him anything.
But there she was sitting behind a glass wall, staring at a version of him she didn't recognize.
Eun-woo entered in a prison uniform too real, too sharp, too final.
He sat.
He didn't lift his gaze.
He didn't search for her.
He didn't even flinch when the guard said her name.
Her heart cracked quietly.
No scream. No explosion.
Just a soft, painful breaking, like the last page tearing from a book you never finished writing.
"You said you'd protect me," she whispered, her voice barely audible even to herself.
"But you were protecting a lie."
He did not respond.
The silence between them stretched, thin and fragile like the glass separating them.
He still didn't look up.
Not once.
And that hurt more than the sentence.
Because betrayal is loud.
But disappointment… disappointment is quiet.
Sharp.
Precise.
Final.
When the guards called time, she stood.
She didn't wait for him to acknowledge her.
She didn't hope.
Some heartbreaks don't demand closure.
They demand distance.
So she walked away.
And for the first time in months, the world behind her felt heavier than the world ahead.
Chapter 38 / 47
Note : My new novel "velvet devotion" is coming out on 17th November 2025
It's not the book 2 of this novel but it includes some characters from this novel which are, Kim Ara and Detective Choi.