Unhealthy - Chapter 41

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Team. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Chapter 41. That House’s Daughter

Taejun pulled the collapsing Hae-yeong even deeper into his embrace.

Rough breaths passed between their hotly pressed lips.

Facing the destruction that was to come, the two indulged in each other’s warmth, filling this cruelly beautiful moment.

Taejun’s rough touch wrapped around Hae-yeong’s slender nape, and she clutched his shirt hem even more desperately as if craving salvation.

***

In the dim early dawn, Hae-yeong, who had fallen asleep as if fainting after crying her heart out, slowly pushed up her heavy eyelids.

A cool ice pack was placed over Hae-yeong’s swollen eyes, puffy from the tears she had shed all night.

“…What time is it?”

Though she wasn’t fully awake yet, Hae-yeong asked in a cracked voice.

He had said she needed to board a plane in the afternoon, and morning was already breaking outside the window, so there wasn’t much time left.

“Sleep more. There’s still time.”

Hae-yeong grasped Taejun’s hand that was pressing against her forehead.

“Did you get some sleep?”

Though Gi Taejun was always neat and composed, today his expression was sharp like a blade and his complexion had sunk to an ashen pallor.

“I rested.”

It was probably a euphemistic way of saying he hadn’t slept.

Hae-yeong pulled Taejun’s hand, which had given only a vague response instead of a proper answer, and pressed it to her cheek, taking a long breath.

“When I was very young. On nights when my father came home after staying out, he would stroke my cheek like this while I was sleeping.”

“…”

“Actually, I was awake then. I wanted to hug my father and cry, telling him how much I missed him, asking if he couldn’t come home at night to sleep together no matter how busy he was.”

Hae-yeong’s faintly trembling voice drifted precariously through the quiet air.

“…I couldn’t do it. I was afraid of burdening my busy father.”

“That’s a good child complex. What’s wrong with a little kid acting spoiled?”

Unlike his coldly scolding voice, the hand that carefully smoothed her disheveled hair was infinitely gentle. The disparity made Hae-yeong feel like tears would burst forth.

“I should have done that. I should have. I regretted it a lot in life. After my father passed away.”

Watching Hae-yeong swallow her tears as she was swept away by the tidal wave of emotions, Taejun recalled fragments of memories he had long suppressed.

Even though he didn’t want to remember, even though he tried thousands of times to cut them out, the events of that night came back vividly.

No matter how many times he went over it, extending his hand to Hae-yeong, who had lost everything overnight and was isolated, was because he knew his father, who had committed terrible acts, would try to kill her too.

“Yeah, I handled it. The Vice Chairman’s side is all cleaned up too, right? Keep a close watch on that house’s daughter. Depending on the situation, we’ll handle that side too.”

It was an undeniable fact that the “that house’s daughter” that Gi Chairman had mentioned in his hoarse voice, casually ordering murder through the thick cigarette smoke, was An Hae-yeong.

Even if he confessed his father Gi Chairman’s crimes right away, it was a time when Hae-yeong’s safety couldn’t be guaranteed.

The only choice Taejun, who was just a college student at the time, could make was to somehow keep her alive by using Hae-yeong’s utility value to blind Gi Chairman’s eyes.

What was it that he had wanted to protect, even while placing her before his father who had taken away everything most precious to Hae-yeong?

He couldn’t bear to abandon that warmth of her innocently clasping his hand, trying somehow to overcome her grief while thrown alone into an unfamiliar world.

To be honest, every time he faced Hae-yeong, Gi Chairman’s atrocities followed like a nightmare.

So he avoided her more, pushed her away more coldly. But even so, he believed that keeping her by his side and continuing protection disguised as surveillance was the best option.

It would be a cruel confession to Hae-yeong, but that thought remained unchanged even now.

Perhaps because he was thinking too deeply, he recalled Gi Chairman’s past that he had once boasted about like war stories.

Gi Chairman, who caused frequent disturbances at the orphanage, got kicked out for causing trouble daily and wandered the streets as a vagrant, frequenting the Juvenile Detention Center like his own home. For him, theft and assault weren’t impulsive acts but his only means of survival.

A friend he met at the juvenile detention center suggested that Gi Chairman, who was parasitically clinging to the very bottom even among the underworld, work under An Dae-cheon, who was running a fairly large loan business in Seoul.

Tempted by his friend’s words about living properly with a sense of belonging and without worrying about meals, rather than being treated as back-alley trash that should be separated from society, he headed to Seoul.

It was then that Gi Chairman, who had lived by extorting money in back alleys, first set foot on Seoul soil.

When Gi Chairman faced the sign “Jiwon Capital” clearly embedded in a somewhat old-fashioned building standing tall in the heart of Yeouido Financial District, he thought, “Fuck, Capital my ass. Just thugs running loan businesses.”

But he was quite shocked by CEO An Dae-jin’s management style, which actually focused on solid foundation and growth.

That was natural, since the thugs Gi Chairman knew were originally groups swayed by strong forces.

That was the law of the bottom.

However, CEO An completely overturned his simple thinking.

A world where power comes before strength. Where money comes before power. A world where if you have enough money, you can grasp everything you lack.

In Gi Chairman’s life, strength had been the source of funds, but realizing that this was merely a survival method for someone who didn’t dream of tomorrow and lived only for today, it was perhaps natural that he changed his mind.

It was from that day that Gi Chairman, who had been rolling at the bottom, began to show loyalty to money and CEO An.

Taejun once thought that Gi Chairman, who so easily bowed his head to the An brothers, was a person who bullied the weak and sucked up to the strong, being extremely devoted to his superiors.

However, his true intentions were completely different from Taejun’s expectations.

What Gi Chairman believed in was only money.

And what he wanted to grasp was not high positions or people, but wealth and power.

Behind the dramatic growth of the stably and safely operated “Jiwon Capital” was, unbelievably, Gi Chairman’s devotion.

More precisely, there were invisible wars and sordid back-room deals behind the legitimate facade.

Gi Chairman devoted himself to Jiwon Capital in his own way, and for money, and if it could expand the company’s size, he would do anything without discrimination. Even if it meant harming people, he didn’t hesitate.

And finally, when Jiwon Capital shed the stigma of being a thug company that just played with money and took on the respectable name “Jiwon Group,” Gi Chairman finally realized. That if not for An Dae-jin and An Dae-cheon, all power and wealth would be his alone.

He had bowed his head not to the An brothers, but toward the money they possessed.

After learning about a new world from An Dae-jin, money became Gi Chairman’s religion.

If he could grasp the wealth and power that An Dae-jin and An Dae-cheon possessed, it would be no different from receiving an answer to his faith.

And Gi Jae-jun, who most resembled this Gi Chairman.

He had begun to move.

“Gi Jae-jun left the country.”

Breaking the deep silence, Taejun’s voice flowed.

Though he hadn’t expected that Gi Jae-jun, who inherited Gi Chairman’s blood, would jump into this fight, the eccentric behavior he showed afterward was predictable enough.

Demanding marriage with Hae-yeong meant he was targeting the fortune left behind her, and for this, he would have attempted ugly negotiations with Gi Chairman.

Seeing that Gi Chairman had thrown away even his hypocritical mask in front of Hae-yeong and revealed his ugly true face, Gi Jae-jun had definitely properly touched his reverse scale based on the inferiority complex pressed down at his very bottom.

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Team. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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