The early morning air smelled crisp and clean, a stark contrast to the sterile, pressurized atmosphere of the glass tower the night before. Son Oh-gong entered the school gates with a deliberate, slow pace. The adrenaline that had fueled his audacity was gone, replaced by a deep, bone-weary exhaustion. He was no longer running from his grief, but running with a purpose, and that was heavy work.
He found Jin Seon-mi by their shared desk. She was not cheerfully chatting with other students, nor was she organizing her notes. She was sitting perfectly still, hands folded neatly in her lap, watching the door. The moment their eyes met, her expression shifted. The fear that had tightened her face the night before was replaced by relief, quickly masked by a forced calm.
He sat down, placing his backpack quietly beneath the desk.
"Good morning," she said, the greeting soft and low—a private word instead of her usual public declaration.
"I apologize," he began, surprising himself with the sudden need for articulation. "For scaring you. For being strange. For pushing you away yesterday."
"I'm used to strange," she said, a faint, almost rueful smile touching her lips. "What I'm not used to is watching you look like you're carrying the entire world on your shoulders, and then refusing to let me help carry the straps." She paused, looking down at her hands. "I understood why you told me to eat the egg rolls and focus on my work. You were drawing a line. But I need to know why. Are you in trouble?"
Oh-gong opened his black notebook, not to show her the contents, but to use it as a silent boundary. He had to be truthful enough to earn her trust, but guarded enough to keep her safe from the names he couldn't speak.
"I am involved in a dispute over the management of my mother's trust fund," he explained, keeping his voice strictly factual. "My father is attempting to use legal and extra-legal methods to gain control of my inheritance. He did, as I feared, use corporate funds to pay for surveillance—the photographs. He intended to create documented proof that I am 'unstable' or 'easily distracted' by undesirable elements, to justify moving me and seizing control."
Seon-mi inhaled sharply. "Undesirable elements? You mean… me?"
"Yes," he confirmed, the bluntness intended to convey the serious nature of the threat. "Last night, I confronted the people managing that surveillance and suspended their activities. The photographs of you have stopped. But my actions have consequences."
He met her gaze, his dark eyes intense. "He knows I have started fighting back. He is calculating his next move, and it will be devastating. If he cannot touch the money directly, he will try to destroy my reputation, my relationships, or my security."
"Then… why do you want me near?" she whispered, her brow furrowed with worry. "You are telling me I am the target, yet you ask me to stay?"
Oh-gong hesitated, searching for the right words to define their bizarre, essential connection. "I used to think my solitude was my strength. If I had nothing, I had nothing to lose. When my mother died, I was truly alone. I was 'fine' to 'not fine,' because no one noticed the difference. Then you came. You didn't leave. You brought breakfast."
He touched the sleek black cover of the notebook. "I need control. I need focus. But I cannot fight a war of silence and calculation if I am truly alone. You are not a distraction, Seon-mi. You are my home base. My anchor. The place I return to so I can remember what I am fighting for."
He looked at the small, clear patch on his hand where she had cleaned the abrasion days ago. "I need you to be my proof that there is something good and normal left in the world. I need you to stay, but I also need you to trust my silence when I pull away. Can you do that? Can you trust me, even when you don't understand?"
Her eyes, usually so bright with easy emotion, were now clouded with the weight of the promise he was asking. She slowly reached out and placed her hand over his, resting on the notebook.
"I don't want to be protected from you, Oh-gong," she murmured. "I want to be protected with you. I'm not strong in your way—I can't face down corporate lawyers—but I am strong in my own way. I am resilient. If you need me to be your camouflage, your proof of sanity, I will be. But when you are tired, you have to let me be your home. No more pushing away."
He felt a physical release of tension in his shoulders. "Agreed. A partnership."
She smiled, a small, genuine victory. "A partnership. Now, for the partnership's first order of business: I brought you a small thermos of hot milk tea. You look like you haven't slept in three days."
The rest of the morning passed in unsettling quiet. The absence of action from Son Gyeong-cheon was, to Oh-gong, the loudest alarm. He checked his phone. No calls from his father, no threatening messages, no lawyers requesting an urgent meeting. The silence was the perfect strategy: it forced Oh-gong to expend mental energy constantly anticipating the blow, distracting him from the legal research he needed to do.
He knew Gyeong-cheon wouldn't attack the K-I company directly, as that would confirm his connection to J.H.K., which he needed to keep hidden. The attack would be indirect, aimed at disrupting Oh-gong's legal standing or his immediate environment.
During lunch, Oh-gong used the library computer again, focusing on the legal statutes surrounding minors' inheritance rights and asset management within shell corporations. He copied key legal precedent names into the back of his black notebook.
As he was about to print a dense legal brief, a familiar shadow fell across the screen.
"I told you to go to the tower downtown," Jeon Yeo Been said, leaning over his shoulder.
Oh-gong immediately clicked out of the document. "And I went. And I thank you for the warning about the surveillance."
"You shouldn't thank me," she replied, her voice cool and detached. "I wasn't helping you, specifically. I was following instructions to ensure a certain party acted on time. You were merely the catalyst."
"And what is the name of that certain party?"
"That is for you to earn, young master," she said, echoing Gyeolsa's clinical tone. "But I can tell you this: she is concerned with your lack of proactive defense. You keep waiting for the wolf to attack. You should be building the cage."
"I am building the cage," Oh-gong retorted, gesturing toward the screen. "I am learning the laws."
Yeo Been scoffed, pulling up a chair and sitting beside him. "The law is only the cage's foundation. The cage needs bars. Physical barriers. For example, your father controls the physical documents of your trust fund, which are stored at his private off-site vault. If he can alter them before your majority, your legal knowledge is useless."
Oh-gong's breath caught. He hadn't considered the physical security of the documents. "How do you know about the off-site vault?"
Yeo Been only offered a tight, knowing half-smile. "I know that if you go home and check the second drawer of your mother's writing desk—the one with the velvet lining—you will find the code sequence for the vault's external security panel etched into the wood. The last layer of protection she left you."
She stood up abruptly, her mission complete. "You have bought three days of silence. The cage must be complete before the silence breaks."
Oh-gong stared at the screen, his mind churning. The constant, chilling guidance from Gyeolsa's proxies was both invasive and absolutely necessary. He felt like a puppet whose strings were being guided toward survival. But the survival was his own.
He rushed back to his classroom. Seon-mi was packing her bag.
"I have to go," he said quickly. "I have to go to the old house. I need to check something important."
"Oh-gong, wait," she said, catching his hand before he could rush off. "The partnership includes letting me know you are safe. If you are going into danger, I go with you."
"No," he insisted. "It's not danger. It's... research. I promise, I will be back before sunset. And I promise I will check in. Just wait for me at the café near the school gate. I'll bring the cake."
He rushed out of the school, leaving the image of Seon-mi's worried, waiting face etched into his mind. He needed to verify the code, but he was driven by another, more profound need: he needed to know that the physical safety of his future—the actual documents—was secured by his mother, not just her mysterious protector.
He drove to the old house. The air was heavy, the scent of lilies almost palpable. He went straight to the locked master bedroom, to the velvet-lined drawer. He removed the postcards and the photo of Jeong Hae-kyung.
He ran his fingers along the inside back edge of the wood. It was smooth, but then his nail caught a small, almost invisible fissure. He used his phone's light. Etched into the dark mahogany, meticulously, painstakingly, was a sequence of twelve numbers and letters.
The vault code.
The realization hit him with staggering force: his mother had foreseen every contingency. She hadn't left Gyeolsa to clean up the mess; she had left Gyeolsa to train him to use the tools she had already secured.
The loneliness he felt wasn't a punishment; it was the condition of his inheritance. He realized then that he was truly not alone. His mother was still fighting for him, one coded step at a time. And now, he had a co-conspirator waiting for him—an anchor that reminded him he could be a person, not just an heir.
He copied the code into the back of his black notebook, securing the physical key to his defense. Now, he had to figure out how to use it before the silence broke.