The Same Bloodline

Tae-oh knew all too well the shallow schemes of those who held power. Top of his class entering the police academy, top of his class on graduation. Since his commission as a lieutenant, he had proven himself day after day—first in arrest rates in the criminal division, picked for the agency's premier investigation team—walking the so-called elite track without a single misstep. Fast-tracked to inspector before he was even thirty, he was now routinely mentioned as a future commissioner in the making.

That was why he understood the swamp that festered in the deepest reaches of the human heart. No one who grasped power was ever content with what he held; sooner or later, he hungered to climb higher still. It was plain enough to see even within the narrow world of the police agency. The commissioner himself—how many rivals had he quietly cleared from his path on the way to that chair, how many useful connections had he cultivated along the way?

Tae-oh had watched the whole process with his own eyes, and though he considered it filthy, dung-smeared business, he had never seen fit to raise a banner against it. Humankind was a wicked species by nature, and he was, after all, part of the organization too. His eyes were not blinded by ambition, but neither was he foolish enough to throw away a paved road.

And yet even he had met people whose presence he could not keep the distaste out of his face for.

"The imperial family is dispatching a royal to help manage the aftermath of this accident. Inspector Kwon, you'll take charge and keep a close watch."

Summoned at the crack of dawn and handed the commissioner's instructions, Tae-oh curled his lip. Royals. Tumors on the body of the state—beings who flaunted the prestige of their noble blood to the fullest while shouldering none of the duties that came with it. This was not some premodern age. The world had moved on, and they ought to have moved with it, yet there they were, noses held high, trying to reign on lofty pride alone.

Tae-oh's loathing of the royals had a simple origin. He was one of those anointed as elite, which meant he had won the trust of the men above him. He had watched far too many superiors bask in a sense of superiority while cleaning up after minor royals with titles like Prince So-and-so or Duke Such-and-such—only to grovel before those same royals when it mattered. Some of them skipped the chain of command entirely and came to Tae-oh directly. Creatures who carried on as though they occupied the highest place on earth, yet turned despicably humble the moment the law stripped them of their power and they came begging for help.

When Tae-oh had gone to receive Princess Cheongyang Yi Seon, he had carried that same contempt with him. Her name came up often in the press, and always favorably, but he was certain the essence underneath would be no different.

"Honestly. Did everyone actually bring these materials believing they made sense?"

The task force had been assembled for appearances only. The royals were, naturally, too noble to be laid to rest like commoners; only after a special investigation had run its course would the formal funeral proceedings begin. In all his years on the force, a royal of this stature had never been in an accident before, so this was his first time attached to a task force like this one.

Even to his eyes, there were oddities. For one, the Crown Prince being in a traffic accident of this magnitude was not a story that sat easily in the mind. And he found it suffocating that a task force this threadbare was expected to investigate anything at all. But when he voiced the question, the commissioner had told him plainly: this was all for show. There was no need for a real investigation.

He had his small grievances, but he hadn't thought it worth losing sleep over. The cases already stacked up in the criminal division would cost him several all-nighters as it was. The odds of a personage like the Crown Prince being entangled in an attempted murder were surely lower than the odds of him dying in a traffic accident. It was easier to think that way.

"The CCTV footage from the road the Crown Prince's car was traveling on is missing five full minutes. Are we truly prepared to write that off as remarkable bad luck?"

But the woman standing before him now was different. Different from every royal Tae-oh had ever met.

It began with those eyes, which gleamed like gunmetal, and carried through her bearing—confident without ever tipping into arrogance—and the even, unhurried timbre of her voice. At moments it felt manufactured, and yet it was precisely that polish that made her authority feel all the more real.

I'm sitting here having thoughts like this about a royal?

Watching Seon press her objections through the entire meeting, Tae-oh raised a hand to cover his mouth. The laughter kept threatening to escape, and at this rate he would be found out. He had known her for barely an hour, and already she was beyond comparison with any royal he had ever dealt with.

A woman with eyes like that did not look like someone who would come to the police agency just to beg them to bury her own corruption.

And still. At the end of the day, they're all cut from the same bloodline, aren't they?

Tae-oh studied her with wary eyes. She did not shrink an inch even with the commissioner—a man in his early sixties—sitting across from her; she met his gaze head-on. Her voice was unusually distinct, restrained without ever becoming excessive, delivering each point clearly and without hurry.

"Besides, why has not a single officer from the Gyeonggi Southern Provincial Police Agency—the ones who actually responded to the scene—been added to this task force?"

"Investigations involving the royal family have always been handled by the Seoul Metropolitan Agency, so—"

"And isn't this case different?"

Even the way she cut the commissioner off mid-sentence managed to look graceful. Her round eyes, like polished glass beads, held nothing but innocent inquiry. Tae-oh suspected even that was calculated.

"Surely they weren't left out over some jurisdictional friction."

"Of course not."

"Then I would suggest adding the officers who responded to the scene to the task force."

At some point Seon had taken hold of the conversation, and now she was tying it off with a bow. Anyone who pushed back at this point would have looked like the unreasonable one.

She's completely steamrolled him.

This was the commissioner who had declared, bold as brass, that the investigation was nothing but theater. Now he was sweating through the weather, dabbing at the back of his neck with a handkerchief, and the anxiety showed.

"As Her Highness says, we should bring the responding officers into the task force."

Perhaps sensing the commissioner's silent cry for rescue, the middle-aged woman seconded from the Office of the Inspector General cut in. Red lipstick, horn-rimmed glasses in the same shade of red—she had a sharply cut face. The woman who had been introduced earlier as Inspector Park Tae-hwa twisted the corners of her mouth into something that wasn't quite a smile and spoke.

"The overall course of the investigation will, of course, be led by the police. The imperial family's participation in the task force exists for general oversight."

"Are you saying I've been meddling too much?"

Seon asked it with a smile of her own. Nothing aggressive showed on that gently curving face, and yet Tae-oh could feel the blade hidden in the exchange between the two women.

As far as Tae-oh knew, the Office of the Inspector General was the most independent organ within the Imperial Household Agency, and the one with real political teeth. There was a standing saying that no Imperial Household official rose quickly without passing through the Inspectorate at least once. And yet the attitude the Inspectorate's dispatched investigators showed Seon now fell short of even basic courtesy. A subtle contempt, worn just inside the line of insolence. Was it that she was a famous royal, but one with no purchase on the imperial family's inner circle of power?

"I only meant that the situation may be disconcerting for the Commissioner. Please don't take it the wrong way."

Inspector Hong, seated beside her, chimed in to back her up. Seon looked almost lonely, as if not a single soul in the room were on her side.

Watching it all unfold, Tae-oh caught the commissioner's face growing triumphant. This, from a man who had been taking one-sided fire from a woman half his age not five minutes before. One small assist, and he had found his rhythm again.

Tae-oh knew perfectly well that a smooth life required knowing when to look away, and that this was one of those moments. The intent of the men above who had pulled a man as busy as him onto a royal special investigation task force was surely the same—a silent order to go with the flow, as he always had.

And yet, looking at Seon, set apart like an island in the current, a whim stirred in him. She was a royal, so in the end she would be no different from the rest of them. But until she showed him her true, filthy colors—until then, while she was still a piece he could toy with on his open palm—what was the harm in moving as he pleased?

Having decided, Tae-oh quietly raised his hand. The commissioner's eyes lit up, and he waved the remark through at once. That expression, as if the man had stumbled upon a heavenly host of reinforcements, only made Tae-oh more contrary. He was happy enough to humor the commissioner and stroke his ego, within reason—but he was not so pathetic a creature as to pile onto one woman five to one.

"Let's take a short break and pick this up after."

"No, that is—haven't we covered enough for today's meeting?"

He had been certain the man would read it as an act of rescue. When Tae-oh delivered something far short of that, the commissioner's face darkened in an instant. A transparent man, through and through.

Tae-oh lowered his hand slowly and shrugged. In the meantime, Sergeant Yun, who had been carefully reading the room, was quick to declare a recess. Feeling the eyes that turned toward him, Tae-oh rose quietly from his seat. Apparently that royal had sharper instincts than the rest of her kind, too.