She returned the lighter via a neutral courier service, the kind that moved art and confidential documents between offices.
No note. No signature required.
It was a calculated move in the silent chess game they were playing: not personal enough to be an opening, not hostile enough to be a provocation. Just a reset.
The object was gone from her desk, but the psychic shockwave of its discovery remained, a low-grade tremor in her foundation.
The Dom had retreated to its usual background hum, a distant transformer on a wet night.
But the memory-fragment—the signet ring, the dark stain—refused to dissolve.
It sat in her mind like a piece of grit in a shoe, a small, abrasive detail that made every step towards her larger goal feel slightly off-kilter.
She found herself searching for it in archives she shouldn't be accessing, running image filters for 'eagle signet ring' through patent databases and old society photos.
It was a pointless exercise. The vision had no date, no context.
Just a feeling of profound dread, and the smell of his tobacco.
Three days after the lighter incident, an invitation blinked onto her phone.
Not an envelope. A pixelated butterfly emoji followed by a location pin and a time. It was from Kang Tae-sik.
Veridian Labs product launch. Boring tech, open bar, excellent view of the vultures. Be my date? (The view is better with a beautiful distraction.) – KTS
She almost deleted it.
Then she remembered his offer in the lobby. Enemy of my enemy. And he knew things.
He swam in the gossipy, venomous waters where the Seo family's secrets sometimes surfaced.
Attending was reconnaissance, not a social engagement. She typed a single character: K.
The launch was held in a converted warehouse in Seongsu-dong, all exposed brick, holographic displays showing DNA helices dancing, and a deafening, bass-heavy soundtrack meant to convey 'the future'.
The air smelled of dry ice, expensive perfume, and the faint, greasy odor of canapés circulating for too long.
Influencers in absurdly avant-garde outfits posed with lab equipment props, their faces lit by the glow of their own phones.
Tae-sik found her near a towering sculpture of twisted glass that was meant to represent a protein fold.
He was wearing the same leather jacket over a black turtleneck, looking like a amused bruiser who'd wandered into a spaceship.
"You came," he said, handing her a glass of something clear and fizzy with a sprig of rosemary in it. "I'm touched. Really. I was preparing to drink alone and heckle the keynote."
"I'm here for the vulture view," she replied, taking the glass but not drinking.
"Ah, a fellow ornithologist."
He leaned against the glass sculpture, scanning the crowd.
"See that cluster near the champagne fountain? The one with the overly tight tux? That's the younger son of the Lotte Group's third wife. He's here because he invested in Veridian to launder his gambling losses from Macau."
He took a sip of his own drink.
"And the woman in the silver dress, talking too loud? She's the mistress of the justice minister. She gets invites to everything because no one dares uninvite her."
He gestured with his glass.
"This is not a party. It's a zoological park of pathologies. And we're all in the cage."
His cynicism was a performance, but an accurate one.
"And the Seos?" Ha-eun asked, her voice casual.
Tae-sik's eyes gleamed. He'd been waiting for the question.
"The old eagle isn't one for these little tech nests. Prefers his perch at the top of the tower. But the fledgling…"
He nodded subtly towards the far side of the room, where a floor-to-ceiling window opened onto a dark balcony.
"He makes an appearance. Duty. Keeping up appearances. Though between you and me, he looks like he'd rather be getting a root canal."
Ha-eun followed his gaze.
Jun-ho stood alone on the balcony, a silhouette against the glittering grid of the city.
He held a drink, untouched. His other hand was raised, and he was slowly, rhythmically, turning the heavy signet ring on his little finger around and around.
The gesture was absent, unconscious. A tell.
"Word is," Tae-sik murmured, moving closer so his words were just for her, "the little sister, Soo-jin. Sweet kid. Sickly. Always has been. But the medical bills… they're not for treatments you find in a hospital brochure. Experimental stuff. Offshore clinics. The kind of money that disappears into a Bermuda bank account and leaves behind maybe a few months of hope."
He paused.
"Rumor says it's the old man's guilt money for something. Or Jun-ho's life debt. Either way, it's a leak in the hull. A very personal, very expensive leak."
He was offering her ammunition. A pressure point. The sick sister.
Ha-eun stored the information, a cold, hard pellet in her gut. It felt exploitative. Ugly.
She drank the sparkling water, the rosemary tasting like pine needles.
"And the debts?" she asked.
"The other debts? The ones not related to a sick girl?"
Tae-sik smiled, a shark's smile.
"The Legacy Fabrication hole you're poking at? That's a puddle compared to the ocean. Let's just say the Patriarch's love for certain… high-stakes hobbies in his youth didn't vanish with age. It just got more expensive. And better hidden."
He watched her face.
"See? Fun. I told you we'd have fun."
She didn't answer. Her attention was pulled back to the balcony.
Jun-ho had lifted his hand, pressing the heel of his palm against his forehead, the ring catching the light for a second.
His shoulders, usually held with rigid control, slumped just a fraction.
The pose wasn't that of a predator surveying his domain.
It was of a sentry, exhausted, guarding a fortification that was crumbling from the inside.
For a single, perilous second, Ha-eun didn't feel the cold spike of strategic assessment or the hot wire of remembered hatred.
She felt a pinch of something else, sharp and unwelcome—a pang of recognition.
The recognition of a solitary weight.
It was a dangerous feeling. She crushed it.
Turning back to the crowd, she intended to ask Tae-sik another question.
But the universe, or perhaps the sheer artifice of the event, intervened.
A woman in a cascade of pink feathers and too much champagne stumbled backward, shrieking with laughter at something her companion said.
She collided with Ha-eun with the full, uncoordinated force of inebriation.
The cold, shocking splash of red wine hit Ha-eun's torso first, followed by the shatter of the glass on the polished concrete floor.
A deep, spreading stain, the color of old blood, bloomed across the pristine white silk of her blouse.
Silence rippled out from the epicenter. The music suddenly seemed obscenely loud.
The woman in pink blinked, her laughter dying as she registered the disaster.
"Oh, my god! I am so, so sorry! Your… your top…"
Ha-eun looked down at the ruin. The cold wetness seeped through to her skin.
A hundred eyes were on her, a mix of horror, schadenfreude, and pity. In this world, a public stain was a minor social death.
She felt a hot flush of something primitive—embarrassment, anger—rise in her throat, and she forcibly swallowed it down, building a wall of ice behind her eyes.
Before she could formulate a words, a movement cut through the spectators.
A hand, holding not a napkin, but a folded square of grey silk.
It was extended towards her, but carefully, its owner not attempting to touch her, just to offer.
She looked up.
Seo Jun-ho stood there, having moved from the balcony with silent speed.
His face was unreadable, a mask of polite neutrality, but his eyes were dark and intent on the stain, not on her face.
The scent of him—sandalwood, tobacco, the night air—cut through the smells of the party.
"Here," he said, his voice flat.
She took the handkerchief, their fingers avoiding contact by a millimeter. The silk was shockingly fine.
She pressed it against the stain, a futile gesture. The wine had already set.
"The white," he said, his tone conversational, as if commenting on the weather, "is a brave colour."
His gaze lifted from the ruined silk to meet hers. There was no warmth in it, but a kind of bleak acknowledgment.
"But in Seoul," he continued, the words dropping lower, "everything ends up stained eventually."
He held her gaze for a moment longer, the statement hanging in the air between them, vast and terrible in its implications.
It was about the wine. It was about her quest. It was about his family. It was about everything.
Then he gave a slight, almost imperceptible nod, a punctuation mark.
He turned to leave, blending back into the crowd as quickly as he had appeared.
But he didn't get far.
He paused after two steps, half-turning his head back towards her.
He didn't look at her again. He just spoke the words to the air, a final, quiet bullet aimed at her core.
"Even the truth."
And then he was gone.
Leaving her standing in the middle of the buzzing crowd, clutching a piece of grey silk soaked with red wine.
The weight of his ring and the weight of his words pressed down on her with the force of a coming storm.