Chapter Text
“Is it too cold?” he says, sneaking a glance at her in the passenger seat. In the dark cabin of the car, he can just make out how her arms are crossed. He reaches for the dashboard, preparing to adjust the temperature if she speaks.
The feeling of her eyes on his face is brief but searing. “No, it’s okay.”
“... Oh, okay. Good, that’s good.” Hyunwoo nods, cringing at his voice as he sits upright and drums his fingers on the steering wheel.
This is different from his usual car. The seat is so much bigger, the height so much higher off the ground than he’s used to; he has to push down on the acceleration almost all the way to get just a fraction of the speed of the sports car. And the space between his seat and the one next to him feels like he could reach an arm out and still not touch it.
It’s not like he could reach out to her right now even if he wanted, anyway.
The cool press of his fingers on the steering wheel serves as a hallow reminder of that. He can feel the skin of his finger on his left hand where it had been the clink of metal before.
“I’m cold,” a voice calls from behind, and Hyun-woo almost jumps. Hong Beomja is giving him a look in the mirror.
“Ah, of course, I’m sorry,” he tells her quickly. His hand swats behind him at the middle console of the bus. They’d had to find whatever was available for all of them to fit, but he doesn’t know much on how to use this one. “I think you can adjust the temperature to your liking here.”
She mutters a thanks and gives a quick nod when Hyunwoo finds her eye in the mirror again. He catches another face, all the way in the back, and the whole situation comes back to him.
It’s not the first time he’s been in the car with this family.
His mother-in-law, though, hasn’t been in the same car as him for years ― they were both going to an event or another for a family member, and her driver had been running late and he offered they take his car instead. Soocheol is also a rarer riding buddy, but they’ve driven in the same car to work every now and then, especially if Hyunwoo was helping with something legal. With his father-in-law, it’d been only a few weeks, when he’d accompanied him to see his estranged brother. Beomja is the frequent car companion he’d never considered but had gladly appreciated in recent days. And then― Haein. She’d been by his side more often than not, hadn’t she?
At one point, he’d shared a car with all of them before. Even a home, too.
Ah, right. Hyunwoo shakes his head a little, squeezing his eyes before refocusing on the dark stretch of road before them. They’re not his family anymore.
“Beomja.” The deep voice of Hong Beomjun is almost lost in the background, his words so quiet, betraying his distress. “How did you know?”
No one questions what he could be asking about.
“You know I’ve never trusted that rat of a woman at Father’s side,” she says, an eye roll on anyone else. “I had a detective agency look into her background.”
“Did you?” Beomjun asks at the same time as Kim Seonhwa says something about how they should’ve done that a long time ago. “And?”
Beomja details the findings from Conan. Hearing all of this before, Hyunwoo tunes the story out. He plays the facts again in his mind, hoping there’s something he missed the first time he’d scoured the information, something that would answer the blaring question that’s been weighing on his heart: why?
Yoon Eunsung made a little more sense. A supposed orphan with ambition, seemingly obsessed with the Hong’s and their Queen dynasty ― particularly obsessed with Haein, Hyunwoo wants to add, though that may be just projecting (they’d had a good relationship in the past, whatever that had meant; if it was inappropriate to ask before, he can’t fathom bringing it up now, regardless of if it would help him understand). Yoon Eunsung makes sense, in a way; Hyun-woo can see how and why he had played the family, if only in theory.
But his mother. Moh Seulhee. No, Oh Sunyeong? Why fake her death? Why choose to work her way into this family? Why wait for thirty years to seize power? It feels too personal to be just about greed.
“... and now, with the Power of Attorney, I fear the worst for Father,” Beomja is saying when Hyunwoo shakes himself from his thoughts. “Who in the world told him to do such a thing?”
Beomjun sighs, a deep and miserable sound. “I don’t know. I don’t understand any of this. Not only Moh Seulhee, but Yoon Eunsung ― how could we not have seen this?”
“Hyunwoo saw it.”
His eyes snap to Haein’s face, her voice a loud and firm point compared to the hesitant question marks in everyone else’s words. She is not looking at him, her arms still crossed, face void of emotion.
“You did?” Beomjun asks, surprised.
The hair on the back of his neck stands, suddenly in the spotlight. “I―”
“He warned me to stay away from Yoon,” Haein confirms.
“But how did you know, Hyunwoo?”
“Well, I―”
“The consulting firm Yoon hired predicted less than 20% of the profit margin for the resort.”
Even Hyunwoo has to turn his head back for a moment, unsure he had heard correctly. Soocheol, who’d been found with blood on his hands and a busted bike in tow, had not spoken two words together since they’d left the family home (no one dared to mention DaHye). Hyunwoo doesn’t know what is more impressive ― that Soocheol could be silent for that long or that he’d remembered almost word for word what he’d told him, as if he’d actually listened.
“What does that mean?” Beomja asks, twisting in her seat to glance at Soo-cheol.
“He recommended running the validity tests before we signed with Yoon Eunsung,” Beomjun adds instead, like something has just registered in his mind. “He urged Father not to sign away the convertible rights.”
“He told Father Director Jo has been ignoring Queen audits for 5 years, too.”
Haein sits up and glances in the back now, surprised. Seonhwa shifts her shoulders back when she feels all eyes on her, visibly uncomfortable from either the attention or what she’d just admitted. “What? I was standing outside Father’s office when he was talking to Baek-ssi.”
“Hyunwoo was right all along,” Beomja says after a beat. She sits back in her seat and slumps down, crossing her arms and sighing as the car is filled with mutters of agreement from the others.
“Of course,” Haein says, facing forward again. “If he can find 8 billion won for Queen’s mart without trying, imagine what he can do when he does try.”
Another hum in the backseats, until a beep interrupts.
“Battery is almost dead,” Beomja explains, and Hyunwoo sees her holding up her phone in the rearview mirror. “Does anyone have a charger?”
“I might have one in my purse.”
“I need it, too.”
The conversation dissolves into something less serious, but Hyunwoo doesn’t dare to move. He’s used to feeling like he’s invisible to this family ― until they need him ― but this is entirely new. Were they… praising him? In their own Hong way? It’s not a thank you ― has never been, with this family ― but it’s an acknowledgement, in its own way. All of them. All of them had something to say. Even ―
He’d expected her to be as blank as her tone, so he startles a little when he finds her eyes once he dares to peek.
“What is it?” he says quietly, just loud enough to be heard between them.
“Thank you.”
He glances back at the road, making sure he hasn’t collided with anything and this is all a fever dream. “For?” he says, glancing back at her.
“For trying to warn us.”
Haein holds his gaze for a moment, her face unreadable. But she is sincere, even he can see that. She means it.
Hyunwoo shifts in his seat and grips the wheel again ― an excuse to look away from her before he says something foolish and breaks this small, fragile truce between them. And Yangi will hate him for what he says next ― “think of the coupons, Hyunwoo!” ― but he can’t help it. It’s how he feels; he’ll always help her, no questions asked.
“I was only doing my job,” he says. He’s still talking lowly, hoping only she can hear him.
“You did your job well,” she corrects, almost like a scolding if the words weren’t so kind. “You work hard.” When he looks back at her again, she flips her hair over her shoulder and holds her chin high. “Why do you think I didn’t fire you after the divorce? I can’t lose such a valuable asset.”
It still stings when she says the word, even though her finger is as bare as his own from where it sits on her thigh.
But she didn’t fire him, he agrees. She could’ve done much worse to him ― given him much more hell that he deserved to some extent, but she didn’t. And he’ll take that.
“You won’t,” he promises.
It could be the trick of the light from the country roads, but he wants to swear he sees the corner of her mouth twitch upwards.
“Where are we going, anyway?” Beomja calls from the backseat.
“I thought it would be safer if you all were out of the city,” Hyunwoo explains.
“So you’re taking us―”
“To Yongdu-ri,” he finishes, glancing behind him briefly.
“Oh,” Beomjun says, and then after another moment ― “where?”
Hyunwoo fights between cringing and laughing, trying to picture his two worlds colliding. It says something that he can’t.
And maybe it’s a whisper or he really has crashed earlier and this whole car ride is just some unresolved dream his soul wanted him to see before he was done, but he hears Haein say, “home.”
“Do we go out with him?”
“He didn’t say.”
“But I need to use the bathroom.”
“What is he saying to them, I can’t hear anything.”
“The one with the pink hair, what was she saying ―”
“Haein-ah! Where are you going!”
“... I still have to use the bathroom.”
“We should go. Open the door.”
“Are you sure?”
“If someone doesn’t open the door in the next three seconds―”
“Okay! Everyone is uncomfortable, you need to be more understanding―”
“Why are we even here? Are we sure it’s a good idea?”
“You can just stay in the car if you want, but I’m leaving.”
“Me, too.”
“... damn it.”