AGR 06

Outside the car window, a woman was walking along while talking to someone on the phone.

“What the hell is that?”

Her slow, leisurely pace grated on his nerves.

He had heard that the temperature tonight was minus eleven degrees Celsius.

She was walking around in this freezing weather with nothing but a coat on? After losing her scarf, too?

Wasn’t this the kind of weather when you would hail a taxi even if you were only going a short distance?

How was he supposed to interpret this?

Had Yoon-gi been right after all? Was this some new kind of trick? Had she been walking around hoping he would come out after her?

All sorts of thoughts flashed through his mind.

Should he pull over and give her a ride?

Should he use the scarf as an excuse to keep her around and have sex with her?

Even after the traffic light changed, she stood there blankly instead of crossing the street. It almost looked as though she wanted him to come and get her.

At that thought, his interest quickly faded.

He wasn’t interested.

If she was going to play the same obvious, predictable games as every other woman, he wanted no part of it.

“Please honk the horn.”

“Pardon?”

The parking attendant behind the wheel looked at him through the rearview mirror.

“Give that woman a wake-up call. Honk the horn once.”

Suddenly, he wanted nothing more than to get the woman out of his sight.

“Oh, yes, sir!”

HOOOONK!

Startled by the loud noise, the woman finally crossed the street.

Jae-eon tossed the scarf in his hand down as though throwing away his interest in the whole affair, then lowered his eyelids.

Feeling suffocated, he tried to tug down his tie, but his fingers found nothing.

He wasn’t even wearing a tie, yet it felt as though something were tightening around his neck.

For Yoon I-seo, seeing Kwon Jae-eon in person, a man she had previously encountered only through documents, had been a distinctly surreal experience—and a rather shocking one at that.

After arriving home, I-seo took a hot shower to wash away the chill of the winter night.

Even so, her thoughts remained occupied with Kwon Jae-eon.

The image of the man who had barged unceremoniously into her space and taken a seat without permission refused to fade.

His richly colored eyes meeting hers and the arrogant tilt of his lips replayed over and over in her mind like a broken video.

“Leaving already?”

“What’s your name?”

“There’s an open spot. Want me to make room for you?”

His gaze had seemed bored, yet there was something strangely sharp and lively lurking beneath it. His low voice had wrapped around her like smooth cream, yet its pointed edges had pierced her ears. The combination was unfamiliar and far too alluring.

“…Have I lost my mind?”

Alluring? What on earth are you thinking?

She roughly wiped her wet face with both hands and squeezed her eyes shut.

But even behind her eyelids, the man’s image remained stubbornly fixed, and that appalling moment came rushing back as vividly as ever.

He had offered her a spot in a threesome?

He had suggested the three of them have sex?

And he had said that so casually to a woman he had never met before?

Was he that confident in himself?

No. He was just that much of a piece of trash. He had proven it himself.

In fact, even calling him trash seemed too generous.

“Slut.”

Yes. That was the word that suited him best.

After turning off the shower, I-seo took a large towel from the shelf and dried herself off.

She wrapped herself in a thick, plush bathrobe and left the bathroom.

Even then, the man named Kwon Jae-eon refused to leave her mind.

After roughly drying her hair and changing into her pajamas, I-seo sat down at her desk and opened her laptop.

She stared at the blinking cursor in the search bar of a web portal before typing three Korean characters: Kwon Jae-eon.

As soon as she pressed Enter, information about the man appeared at the top of the results.

[Current CEO of TS Motors]

[Member of the Korea Shooting Federation]

[Registered Amateur Athlete of the International Equestrian Federation]

[Member of the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA)]

[Former Formula One (F1) Driver]

Opening each result and reading through it carefully, I-seo soon found herself poring over everything from his various hobbies and scandals to his career as an F1 driver.

It was ridiculous.

Since when had Yoon I-seo ever taken a voluntary interest in anything?

It would hardly be an exaggeration to say this was the first time in eleven years.

Beginning in the spring when she turned eighteen, I-seo had changed so completely that it was almost as if she had replaced her entire personality. Overnight, she had lost all interest in the world around her.

The eighteen-year-old I-seo, who had laughed easily and been full of curiosity, had been unable to remain the same after losing her only brother.

Her brother’s death had come quite literally like a bolt from the blue.

The eighteen-year-old girl who had lost her only family member hadn’t even been given the chance to properly grieve. Instead, she had been dragged from one place to another, forced to deal with one major ordeal after another.

She had followed her brother to the hospital aboard a helicopter, then waited seven hours for his surgery to finish.

After that came the recovery of his body, the return to Korea, the funeral, and the settlement of his estate.

Looking back now, she realized that she had been forced to face a succession of events that would have been difficult for anyone so young to handle, let alone all at once.

And by the time she finally came to her senses, her brother had already vanished from her world.

“Study. All you have to do is… study.”

“So that no one can look down on you. So that the fact that you have a brother like me won’t eat away at you.”

“I’d like you to become a doctor, a prosecutor, or a judge. A lawyer would be fine, too. Nothing else.”

The words her brother had left her with as he departed Korea before the Grand Prix had ultimately become his last will and testament.

Following his wishes, I-seo had done nothing but study herself to the bone from that day onward.

She had seen her brother off, buried him, and tried to forget him.

As she endured a period of pain so intense it felt as though it were gnawing at her bones, I-seo had suppressed every desire to do anything for herself, severed her own curiosity, and shut herself off from pleasure.

Perhaps it had simply become a habit.

Before she knew it, the Yoon I-seo who had existed before the age of eighteen had disappeared without a trace.

All that remained was Yoon I-seo: rigid, dull, indifferent, and seemingly incapable of smiling.

And now, here she was, becoming so absorbed in something for the first time in years.

If Won-i found out, she might sing a whole song about how hurt she was.

And so I-seo continued digging into Kwon Jae-eon until the early hours of the morning.

That was when she discovered something.

The competition in which he had won a trophy during his F1 career was the Monaco Grand Prix.

“That’s the year the accident happened.”

He had competed in the same Grand Prix as her brother, in the same year?

Then… could Kwon Jae-eon have known her brother?

Formula racing, overseen by the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile, included F3, F2, and F1.

Unlike her brother, who had steadily worked his way up from F3, Kwon Jae-eon had jumped straight into the highest class, F1, and won the Monaco Grand Prix in just two years.

Meanwhile, I-seo’s brother, who had been a championship contender that year, had lost his life in the brutal world of racing.

Pressing her lips tightly together, I-seo struggled to suppress the questions surging through her like a spreading wildfire before closing her laptop.

“This time, it’s a man.”

“A man?”

The primary responsibility of Legal Team 3 at Taesung Group, where I-seo worked, was image management for the conglomerate—in other words, cleaning up after the owner’s family.

Fortunately, the Taesung Group family led relatively respectable lives. As a result, Team 3’s workload was concentrated on Kwon Su-hyeong, the second grandson of Chairman Kwon Seok-ho and CEO of Taesung Construction, and Kwon Jae-eon, the third grandson and CEO of TS Motors.

In other words, the two men were regular clients of Legal Team 3.

Of course, there was a slight difference in the kinds of trouble the two habitual offenders caused.

Kwon Su-hyeong, Jae-eon’s cousin, who was three years older than him, tended to get involved in violent incidents, while Jae-eon’s problems usually stemmed from his promiscuous private life.

The two seemed to take turns getting into trouble, as though they had an agreement. This time, however, Jae-eon had managed to cause another scandal right on the heels of his last one.

And now, of all things, it involved another man.

“It seems he attended some party on Friday night. Someone apparently filmed him kissing a man there and uploaded it to social media. The problem is that getting the video taken down, even if we request it, will take a considerable amount of time. The chairman wants it removed immediately.”

As she listened to the team leader’s explanation, I-seo felt somewhat dazed.

If it had been a party on Friday night, then it must have been Won-i’s party at Club Ryun.

As far as I-seo knew, Kwon Jae-eon had arrived late that night, stayed only briefly, and then left.

When had he found the time to get into trouble?

And on top of that, a scandal involving a man?

Hadn’t he… followed a woman out of the club?

As the youngest member of Legal Team 3, I-seo sat at the very end of the conference table, absentmindedly scribbling in her notebook with a pencil as she turned the possibilities over in her mind.

Had he gone somewhere else afterward, perhaps to another party?

“…This is the video in question.”

The team leader had just brought up the footage on the screen, and I-seo raised her head to look.

Huh?

Her brows drew together slightly.

It wasn’t another party after all. It was Won-i’s party.

The setting and music in the video were unmistakably familiar.

It was the very room where I-seo had been sitting that night, and Kwon Jae-eon was still seated in the same spot.

The cocktail and finger foods she had left behind were still sitting untouched on the table.

The only difference was that Kwon Jae-eon now had another man with him.

The slender, handsome man closed the folding doors while holding a glass of champagne. Kwon Jae-eon, his expression cool, looked at him and flashed a grin.

As the doors gradually closed, they seemed to block the view completely. But the camera lens had found its way with remarkable precision into the narrow gaps between the slats of the folding doors.