What Are You Up To, You Brat?

"……What?"

"That's what I'm going to make happen."

With those words, Ji-hoon glanced casually across at Chang-shin.

The man stared blankly into the air like someone who had lost the power of speech, and then at last his dry lips moved.

"That's impossible."

He shook his head helplessly.

"Once my father has decided something, no words from me can change it……."

Ji-hoon understood what he meant. No matter what Ji-hoon did, he could never beat Yeon Ho-nam, so he should give up. Don't waste time on a game whose outcome was already fixed.

But that attitude only made Ji-hoon angrier.

He found himself wondering what really went on inside the man's head—that he would put his father's interests above his own daughter's life.

"Then let me ask you, Teacher. Do you honestly think it's normal to marry your young daughter off to a man older than you?"

Chang-shin couldn't answer.

But as the silence stretched on, his face began to twist little by little, and he spoke in a voice racked with anguish.

"We were never a normal family to begin with."

One of Ji-hoon's eyebrows curved slowly upward.

"Then just let a third party handle it. I-eum's an adult now, isn't she?"

Neither response was something a father could accept with an easy heart. Ji-hoon rose from his seat without a trace of regret, his gaze sinking into disappointment as it settled on Chang-shin, who sat frozen like a soldier routed from the field.

"I hope I never have to see you again over this matter."

His silhouette as he walked out of the café was resolute, as though he would never look back.

Chang-shin's eyes lingered on that departing figure for a long, long while.

Seongbaekjae—where stately hanok houses gathered like a village unto themselves around a sprawling garden.

A single sedan pulled up to this place, the ancestral home of the Haeseong heirs and the residence of the group's chairman, Sung Hyun-do.

The driver's door opened to reveal Ji-hoon, looking thoroughly worn.

He strode past the bowing servants and into the main compound, where his mother, Madam Jo Hae-soo, resplendent in a beautifully arranged hanbok, greeted him with delight.

"My son!"

She would turn fifty the day after tomorrow, yet her skin was still as white and supple as polished jade, and she came running with a beaming smile.

"Do you have any idea how long it's been since I last saw your face? Come by more often. Your mother gets bored, you know. Hmm?"

"I've been busy. Where's Father?"

"Talking with the Chairman. They've been at it two hours already."

Diligent as ever. What could they possibly have so much to discuss from first thing in the morning?

"Dinner's being prepared—you didn't eat before coming, did you? I gave the cook special instructions. Told her to make plenty of soybean-paste jeon and seasoned greens, the dishes you love."

The moment Hae-soo laid eyes on her son, she refused to leave his side, chattering away like a sparrow.

It reminded him of someone.

At the face that popped unbidden into his mind, Ji-hoon let out a wry, involuntary laugh—and Hae-soo's eyes went round.

"What are you smiling at all of a sudden?"

"You're the one who told me to live smiling."

"That is not what I meant by timing."

Ji-hoon left his mother behind, saying he would pay his respects to his grandfather and father first, and headed for the inner quarters.

To reach the inner quarters from the main hall, one had to pass through a small back garden.

Walking the quiet wooden veranda, Ji-hoon let his gaze rest on the little garden where the first snow had yet to fall.

It's been a while since I've been here, too.

This was the house where Ji-hoon had been born and raised.

True to Chairman Sung Hyun-do's philosophy that what is Korean is what is world-class, every roof wore grand tiled eaves and every ceiling was finished with exposed rafters.

Ji-hoon had grown up playing all manner of games in this small garden. Looking up at the tall ginkgo tree that had grown alongside him, he sank briefly into reminiscence.

As he approached the inner quarters, the executives' secretaries and servants standing guard at the entrance bowed their heads low to him. Ji-hoon answered with a slight nod to announce his arrival.

"Chairman. Managing Director Sung Ji-hoon has arrived."

At length, the doors opened.

The double-swinging doors, too, were finished in traditional patterns and changho paper, emphasizing a distinctly Korean beauty.

Ji-hoon stepped inside and bowed his head respectfully.

"It is an honor to see you in good health."

And there he was—an old man in a modernized hanbok, not a single hair out of place, seated like a man who commanded the very space around him.

His enormous presence would not have yielded an inch even beside men half his age, and it overwhelmed the room utterly.

He had seen his father Sung Gil-joon only recently, but this was his first meeting with Chairman Sung Hyun-do since his demotion to Haeseong High School.

"I trust you have been well, Chairman?"

"If you were that curious, you could have made a single phone call."

Others trembled at the mere shadow of Chairman Sung, but Ji-hoon smiled with perfect composure.

"I should have. I assumed you were angry with me all this time, so I kept my head down."

It was the ease that only a grandson who had grown up basking in the old man's favor could afford.

True to form, Chairman Sung accepted his grandson's greeting with a click of his tongue.

Only then did Ji-hoon move to take a seat at the Chairman's side.

"So. How have you been keeping yourself?"

Chairman Sung Hyun-do regarded his grandson with lofty eyes.

"Very well, at the school you so generously placed me in."

"You don't look like a man who's doing well."

Reports would have reached him long ago—that Ji-hoon was refusing his matseon arrangements, and what had happened with Assemblyman Park besides.

And yet the old man had merely watched. There had to be a reason for that, and Ji-hoon knew full well that the reason would by no means work in his favor.

"I've had a lot on my mind lately."

"Must be nice, school life being so leisurely. Gives a man plenty of time for idle thoughts, I see."

"Then would you call me back to the company?"

Just as Ji-hoon seized his opening, Sung Gil-joon spoke up between his son and the Chairman, who was watching Ji-hoon with a razor-sharp gaze.

"Father, as a matter of fact I was thinking it's time to bring Ji-hoon back. He's left the Managing Director's office empty too long—it doesn't look right to the staff……."

"Denied."

Chairman Sung was having none of it.

"In my company, only men who submit to my will get to work."

Gil-joon made a troubled face, but Ji-hoon only raised his eyebrows with an air of perfect lightness.

"Can't be helped, then. I'll just live comfortably at the school, letting my mind wander."

"Why, you little……."

Just as Chairman Sung's wrinkled brow began to furrow, a knock sounded and the Chairman's secretary entered.

Ji-hoon had assumed she was bringing his share of tea, but she went straight to Chairman Sung and lowered her upper body to whisper in his ear.

And then—an eyebrow of the Chairman's, a man whose expression almost never changed, twitched and moved.

Watching this, Ji-hoon's eyes narrowed. What on earth could make his grandfather wear such a face?

Having finished her report, the secretary for some reason glanced back and forth between Ji-hoon and the Chairman before asking in a low voice,

"What would you like to do?"

"Show her in."

"Understood."

The secretary departed with a bow, and Chairman Sung's sharp gaze came to rest on Ji-hoon.

"Sung Ji-hoon."

"Yes, Chairman."

But something was off. The Chairman's eyes, fixed squarely on the grandson who had answered his call, had changed entirely.

"What in the hell have you been up to?"

I-eum stepped out of the taxi.

As she glanced around with a face taut with nerves, a middle-aged man in a black suit approached her.

"Miss Yeon I-eum?"

"Yes. Are you Chairman Sung Hyun-do's secretary?"

"I am."

Only then did her stiff face begin to thaw.

She had been so wound up on the way here that her shoulders had gone rigid as boards.

"I want to meet Chairman Sung Hyun-do. No—I have to meet him."

At first the secretary had dismissed her calls as prank calls, but the moment she heard the girl was Assemblyman Yeon Ho-nam's granddaughter, her attitude changed. Riding that momentum, I-eum had gone on to tell her how Ji-hoon had rescued her from Assemblyman Park just days ago.

And that was how she had come all this way.

She had taken a taxi to the address she'd been given, but when the road turned out to run through the middle of a strange district and her unease began to swell, the secretary had appeared at her side.

"If I get in this car, I'll really get to meet the Chairman?"

"Yes. Please, get in."

I-eum carefully settled herself into the large sedan.

The car wound through Seoul's congested downtown and then began to climb a quiet hillside road. As they passed one luxurious estate after another, an entirely new face of Seoul unfolded before her—one she had never known existed.

Her lips fell open in a daze as she stared out the window.

It was as if this were a different world altogether.

She was still marveling that a neighborhood this exotic and beautiful could exist in Seoul when at last the sedan came to a stop.

Before her eyes rose a wall, staggeringly high and long.