The ghost of his touch lingered on her skin for hours.
A precise, five-fingered brand around her elbow that no one could see but which hummed with a persistent, low-grade heat.
In the sterile quiet of the Crysalia temporary office—a converted conference room on a lower floor of the Haneul Tower, a concession she'd demanded—Ha-eun found herself rubbing the spot absently as she stared at the cascading numbers on her screen.
The financials of the Haneul Group were a Gothic cathedral of numbers, all soaring pillars of revenue and dark, hidden crypts of loss.
She was mapping the tributaries of capital, following the money as it flowed from healthy, modern divisions into the stagnant pools of the old steel and chemical subsidiaries.
But there, in the quarterly reports of a minor holding company called 'Haneul Legacy Fabrication,' she found it.
Not a hole. A fissure.
A line of fire.
It was a discrepancy so small most auditors would have filed it under 'accounting variance' and moved on.
A recurring monthly transfer, always a different amount, always to a different beneficiary listed as 'Logistical Support & Consultancy.'
The amounts were crumbs from the Haneul banquet table.
But the pattern was flawless, a metronome of misdirection stretching back seven years.
The trail, when she teased at it with her algorithms, didn't vanish into a shell company.
It dissolved. It went nowhere, which was impossible.
Money, like energy, always went somewhere. This money hit a digital event horizon and vanished.
A phantom subsidiary, feeding on the dying body of the patriarch's oldest vanity project.
It wasn't embezzlement. It was a parasite.
And the line of financial poudre led straight to its hidden maw.
Her fingers stilled on her arm. The phantom warmth from Jun-ho's grip was gone, replaced by the cold, clear focus of the hunt.
This was a thread. Frail, perhaps.
But threads could be pulled.
She summoned her team with a two-word message: Conference Room. Now.
Then she drafted a request, formal and ice-cold, to the Haneul board's audit committee and the CFO, Director Kwon.
She demanded immediate, unrestricted access to the sealed, physical ledgers and server logs for Haneul Legacy Fabrication for the last decade.
The legal justification was bulletproof, buried in the consultancy contract's fine print.
The professional implication was a declaration of war.
The emergency meeting with the Haneul steering committee was not in the lavish boardroom.
It was in a smaller, colder chamber on the fifty-eighth floor, a place where bad news was traditionally delivered.
Director Kwon was a man in his late sixties, his face a roadmap of old loyalties and newer anxieties.
He had the pallid complexion of a man who lived under fluorescent lights and the ghost of Seo Min-jun's shadow.
"This is highly irregular, Consultant Yoon," Kwon said, his voice a dry rustle of papers he wasn't actually reading.
"The Legacy Fabrication ledgers are archival. Pre-digital. Access requires the Patriarch's personal sign-off for historical… sensitivity."
"My contract," Ha-eun replied, her voice calm in the tense room, "grants me authority to examine all financial records pertaining to loss-making divisions. 'All' does not have an archival clause. The sensitivity is irrelevant to the bottom line. The bottom line is bleeding, and I need to find the wound."
A younger, more ambitious director—Lee, from the tech division—leaned forward.
"If there's a discrepancy, our internal audit—"
"Your internal audit missed a seven-year pattern of obfuscation," Ha-eun interrupted, not raising her voice.
She let the statement hang.
"That either indicates incompetence or instruction. I am here to assume the former, until the data proves otherwise. I need those ledgers by end of business today."
Director Kwon's lips thinned to a bloodless line. The resistance was a physical thing in the room, thick and bureaucratic.
"The process will take time. Protocols must be followed."
"Time," Ha-eun said, standing up, the motion silencing the room, "is the one resource your group is actively running out of. I will have the ledgers. Or my next report will have a single, underlined finding: systemic obstruction of a turnaround mandate, with recommended personal liability reviews for the responsible executives."
She left them in that cold room, the threat settling over them like fine ash.
Back in her borrowed office, the silence felt aggressive.
She was reviewing casualty reports from a Legacy Fabrication plant accident two years prior when the presence at her door registered.
Not a knock. Just a shift in the light, a filling of the frame.
Seo Jun-ho stood there, having bypassed her assistant with the unspoken authority of a prince in his own castle.
He was impeccable again—a navy suit, hair ruthlessly styled—but the facade had a hairline crack.
A faint, persistent pulse beat at his temple, a tiny engine of anger or stress thrumming under the skin.
He didn't enter. He just looked at her, his dark eyes taking in the sparse, functional space she'd claimed.
"Consultant Yoon," he said, his voice quieter than in the jungle garden, but with a sharper edge.
"You've been digging."
She didn't stand. She met his gaze across the room.
"It's in the job description."
"There's digging for foundations," he said, taking a single step inside, the door swinging shut behind him with a soft click that felt terribly final, "and then there's digging graves. You're swinging a pickaxe in a very old cemetery. People can fall in."
She finally rose, not in deference, but to meet him on level ground.
Her height in heels brought her almost eye-to-eye. The air between them tightened, charged with the unsaid things from the garden, now overlaid with this new, professional menace.
"I don't dig holes, Mr. Seo. I follow the trail of a collapse. If someone falls, it's because they were standing on ground already riddled with tunnels."
She paused, letting the metaphor, so close to the truth of burning buildings and hidden crimes, hover between them.
"My interest is in the stability of the entire structure. Not in who happens to be standing on the worst of it."
A smile touched his lips, a cold, mirthless stretching of skin that didn't reach his eyes. It was a predator's smile.
"How very noble. The white knight in a tailored suit."
He took another step closer. The scent of him—sandalwood and that undercurrent of tobacco—invaded her space.
"But knights in stories often get impaled on their own lances. Or they trip on the very rubble they create."
His gaze dropped to her hands, resting on the desk, then back to her face.
"Be careful you don't step on a mine, Consultant. Some of them are very, very old."
The threat was clear. A warning about Legacy Fabrication. About secrets older than her tenure. About his father.
"I watch my step," she said, her voice flat.
He held her gaze for a beat longer, a silent, furious communication passing between them.
He wasn't just trying to scare her off. He was… warning her.
The realization was as unsettling as the threat.
Then, with a curt nod that was neither agreement nor concession, he turned and left, the door sighing open and shut behind him.
The room felt larger, emptier, and somehow more contaminated.
Ha-eun let out a breath she hadn't realized she was holding. Her hands were steady.
She walked around the desk, needing to move, to reclaim the space his presence had compressed.
That's when she saw it.
A small, glint of polished metal on the charcoal-gray carpet, just beside where he'd stood.
A platinum lighter, simple and heavy, caught in a sliver of afternoon sun.
He must have pulled it from his pocket during their confrontation, a nervous habit, and dropped it.
She knelt, not touching it at first. It was warm, as if recently held. She picked it up.
The metal was smooth, engraved with a single, minimalist line that might have been a wave or a mountain ridge.
Her thumb found the strike wheel.
Without thinking, she flicked it.
A single, perfect flame leapt to life, blue at the core, yellow at the edges.
And with it, the smell—rich, pungent, unmistakable.
The specific, expensive blend of black tobacco he smoked. It wasn't the generic scent from the garden.
This was the essence of it, concentrated and volatile.
The smell hit her sinuses like a physical blow.
A wave of nausea, sudden and violent, roiled in her gut.
The Dom in her skull didn't hum—it screamed. A silent, internal shriek of sensory overload.
The smell of black tobacco. The taste of chemical smoke. The heat, incredible heat, on the back of her hands.
A man's hand, large, reaching past her, the flash of a heavy signet ring on his little finger.
The ring was gold, engraved with an eagle. But the engraving was blurred, smudged.
Not blurred. Stained. Stained with something dark and wet that wasn't oil.
The vision was a strobe light. A single, horrifying frame.
The lighter tumbled from her suddenly nerveless fingers, clattering on the desk, the flame extinguished.
Ha-eun stumbled back, bracing herself against the wall.
She breathed in through her mouth, gulping the scentless, sterile office air, trying to purge the memory-that-wasn't-a-memory from her lungs.
The image burned behind her eyes: the signet ring. The eagle. The dark, viscous stain.
It wasn't proof.
It was a line of fire.
And it led straight back into the man who had just warned her to be careful.