The paperwork took three days.
Three days of statements, evidence logs, forensic reports, and meetings with prosecutors. Three days of phone calls to families who had waited years for answers. Three days of watching news crews camp outside the station, waiting for any scrap of information.
Kang Young-soo was transferred to Seoul Detention Center on the fourth day, his smile finally gone, replaced by the blank stare of a man who had told his story and had nothing left to say. The bus that carried him away was surrounded by police escort, as if he might still try to escape despite everything.
He wouldn't. Dae-hyun knew that. The fight had gone out of him somewhere on that mountain, surrounded by the ghosts of twenty-two women.
---
The bullpen was quiet on the evening of the fourth day.
Jin-young had finally stopped running searches, his monitors dark for the first time in weeks. Min-jun sat at his desk, staring at nothing, a cold cup of coffee beside him. Shi-eok stood by the window, watching the city lights flicker on. Hae-rin had her head down on her desk, exhausted. Soo-ah was curled in her chair, a blanket someone had found wrapped around her shoulders.
Dae-hyun walked in from his office and looked at them.
"Go home."
Six heads lifted.
Min-jun blinked. "Captain?"
"Go home. Sleep in your own beds. See your families if you have them." Dae-hyun's voice was quiet but firm. "The case is closed. The evidence is filed. The prosecutor has everything they need. There's nothing more to do tonight."
Soo-ah's voice was small. "But Captain, what about—"
"I'll handle it. Whatever's left, I'll handle." He looked at each of them in turn. "You've done enough. More than enough. Now rest."
For a moment, no one moved. Then Min-jun stood slowly, grabbing his jacket.
"He's right," Min-jun said. "We're no good to anyone dead on our feet." He looked at Dae-hyun. "Are you coming?"
"Later."
Min-jun nodded, understanding in his eyes. He clapped Shi-eok on the shoulder as he passed, and one by one, the others followed.
Jin-young shuffled out, his laptop bag dragging. Hae-rin straightened, gathered her things, and walked out with quiet dignity. Shi-eok gave Dae-hyun a long look, then nodded once and left. Soo-ah hesitated at the door.
"Captain, are you sure you don't want—"
"Go, Soo-ah. Your family's waiting."
She bit her lip, then nodded and disappeared.
The bullpen was empty.
Except for one.
Yoon Seo-ah still sat at her desk, organizing files that didn't need organizing, her face carefully blank.
Dae-hyun watched her for a moment. "You heard me. Go home."
"I don't have a home to go to." Her voice was quiet and matter-of-fact. "Not really. My apartment is just... a place. And I'd rather be here."
Dae-hyun said nothing for a long moment. Then he moved to his office door.
"Then you can help. I need to finalize the reports for the prosecutor's office. Two sets of eyes are better than one."
Seo-ah looked up, surprise flickering across her features. Then she nodded and stood.
"I'd like that, Captain."
---
They worked in silence for the next hour.
Dae-hyun at his desk, Seo-ah at the small table in the corner of his office. Papers shuffled. Keyboards clicked. The clock on the wall ticked past nine, then ten.
At ten-thirty, Dae-hyun's phone rang. He glanced at it, then answered.
"Yes?"
"Captain, it's Min-jun. Just checking in. Are you still at the station?"
"Yes."
"Seo-ah with you?"
Dae-hyun glanced at her. "Yes."
A pause. Then Min-jun's voice, softer. "She's taking this hard. Harder than she shows. The case, I mean. Her first big one, and it was... this."
Dae-hyun's eyes moved over Seo-ah, noting the tension in her shoulders and the way her hands gripped the files too tightly.
"I know."
"Take care of her, Captain. She's one of us now."
The line went dead.
Dae-hyun set down his phone and stood. "I'm ordering food. You eat."
Seo-ah looked up. "Captain, you don't have to..."
"I'm hungry. You're hungry. We will eat." He pulled out his phone and ordered before she could argue. "Thirty minutes."
They worked in silence until the food arrived.
---
Dinner was tteokbokki and fried chicken and rice cakes, spread across Dae-hyun's desk like a small feast. They ate in silence at first, the only sounds the clink of chopsticks and the distant noise of the city outside.
But the silence wasn't uncomfortable. It was... something else. Companionable, maybe. The kind of quiet that comes between people who don't need to fill every moment with words.
Halfway through the meal, Dae-hyun noticed.
Seo-ah's chopsticks had stopped moving. She was staring at her food, her face pale, her eyes distant. Her breathing had changed—shallow, uneven.
He set down his own chopsticks. "Seo-ah."
She didn't respond.
"Seo-ah." Louder this time.
She blinked, coming back to herself. "I'm sorry, Captain. I was just—"
"You were somewhere else." His voice was quiet, not accusing. "The case."
It wasn't a question.
Seo-ah looked down at her hands. "Twenty-two women. Twenty-two lives. And I sat with their families. I looked at their photos. I watched them dig up..." She stopped, her voice catching.
Dae-hyun said nothing. He waited.
"I keep seeing them," she whispered. "The bodies. The way they were curled. Like they were sleeping. Like he was putting them to bed. " Her hands trembled slightly. "I've played monsters on screen. I've pretended to be afraid. But this—this was real. And I don't know how to stop seeing it."
The office was quiet.
Dae-hyun leaned back in his chair, his eyes on her. When he spoke, his voice was different—softer, but still steady.
"When I was fourteen, I found a body."
Seo-ah looked up.
"A man. He'd been stabbed in an alley, left to bleed out. I was looking for a place to sleep, and there he was." Dae-hyun's voice was calm and distant. "I sat with him for an hour before anyone came. He was still alive for part of it. He looked at me, tried to speak, but nothing came out. Then he died."
Seo-ah stared at him.
"I saw his face every night for years. In dreams, in shadows, in the space between waking and sleeping. I thought it would never stop." He met her eyes. "It did stop. Eventually. Not because I forgot, but because I learned to carry it."
"How?" Her voice was barely a whisper.
"By remembering why I was there. By turning the memory into fuel instead of poison." He leaned forward slightly. "Those women—they're not just victims. They're the reason we do this. The reason we keep fighting. They deserved someone to find them. Someone to speak for them. That's us now."
Seo-ah's eyes glistened, but she didn't look away.
"You're not weak for feeling this," Dae-hyun continued. "You're human. The day you stop feeling it is the day you become like him. But you can't let it consume you. You have to use it."
She was quiet for a long moment. Then: "How do you do it? Carry it, I mean. You've seen so much more than me."
Dae-hyun almost smiled. "I have a team. People who understand without needing explanations. People who sit with me in silence and don't ask me to be okay." He paused. "People like you."
Seo-ah's breath caught.
"You're one of us now," he said quietly. "That means you don't carry it alone. Not anymore."
The words hung in the air between them.
Then Seo-ah did something Dae-hyun hadn't expected. She reached across the desk and took his hand.
"Thank you, Captain."
Her grip was warm and steady. Dae-hyun looked at their hands for a moment, then back at her face.
"Call me Dae-hyun. When we're not on duty."
A small smile crossed her face—the first real smile he'd seen from her since the case began.
"Dae-hyun."
They sat like that for a long moment, hands still touching, the weight of twenty-two women somehow lighter between them.
Then Dae-hyun pulled back gently and picked up his chopsticks. "Eat. The food's getting cold."
Seo-ah laughed—a small, surprised sound—and picked up her own chopsticks.
They finished their meal in comfortable silence, and when they finally left the station at midnight, they walked out together.
Something had shifted between them.
Something that felt like the beginning of trust.
Like the beginning of more.
---
The next morning, Team Zero gathered in the bullpen.
Min-jun was the first to notice. He looked from Dae-hyun to Seo-ah and back, a small smile playing at his lips.
"Something different about you two," he said.
Dae-hyun ignored him. Seo-ah hid a smile behind her coffee cup.
Soo-ah bounced in her seat. "What? What's different? Tell me!"
"Nothing," Dae-hyun said flatly. "We have work."
But as he turned to the whiteboard, as his team settled into their rhythm, as the city outside woke to another day—something was different.
They were closer now. All of them.
And Team Zero was stronger for it.