Chapter 9
When Hangyeom opened his eyes, he found himself staring at a ceiling. Ordinary as it should have been, nothing about it felt familiar. This was not the ceiling he had expected to see when the tranquilizer dragged him under.
Where… am I? He’d figured he might open his eyes to something blindingly white, like that room with the stark white walls back then. He’d pictured the hard concrete of a musty prison cell, too, or an interrogation room with a bare bulb swinging overhead. Instead, as if to mock every grim scenario he’d conjured, a ceiling he never could have imagined greeted him.
The plasterwork was intricate, elegant—the kind of detail you could lose an hour just staring at. He traced the obviously expensive wallpaper with his eyes until they landed on a door set a surprising distance away. Only then did it hit him how enormous the room actually was.
Where the hell is this? A lab. A detention center. An interrogation room. Every place he’d imagined was wrong. None of them would ever hold a bed this soft, this indulgent.
When he braced a hand against the mattress to lever his stiff, aching body upright, the plush give of it startled him. It bore no resemblance whatsoever to the rock-hard slab back at his place—the one barely a step up from sleeping on bare floor.
However he looked at it, this was a home. A comfortable one. A very rich one, at that. Which only made it more bewildering. If he’d woken somewhere he’d anticipated, he might’ve had some read on what his captor wanted. Here, he had absolutely nothing to go on.
But one thing was certain: someone had grabbed him, no warning, no consent, and hauled him here. The thought left a foul taste in his mouth.
Whoever you are, I’d love to knock your teeth in.
Sure, he was an unregistered guide living off the grid as an illegal guiding peddler—but being shoved around by force? Hard no. Unlike his days in that place, he knew how to demand at least the bare minimum of human decency now.
Sliding off the ridiculously luxurious bed, Hangyeom took stock of his body first. Still sluggish, all of it, and his shoulder throbbed where the needle had gone in. But the drug would burn off on its own with time, so slipping out of a room like this shouldn’t prove too hard.
I need to get out fast and find Jaewoo.
His face tightened with worry at the thought of Jaewoo—Jaewoo, who hadn’t answered a single call.
He’ll be fine. Nobody’s better at vanishing and staying gone than him. He needed to link up with him as soon as possible; knowing Jaewoo, he’d be using his barrier ability to duck and weave his way clear. They’d already picked a rendezvous point in case a sudden raid from the Association’s search team or a crackdown squad ever split them up, so getting there was priority one.
Hangyeom crossed to the window and looked out. Escaping this way was a nonstarter—security bars saw to that—but he could at least get a feel for what lay beyond the glass.
The sun had already gone down. He couldn’t say how long he’d been out, but with the moon riding high, it had to be deep into the night. Even so, the view beyond the window blazed with light.
It looked exactly like the front grounds of some chaebol’s—old-money conglomerate family’s—estate straight out of a drama.
The garden and its lush lawn, flooded by outdoor floodlights that missed nothing, were tended so immaculately they pulled a low breath of admiration out of him. An artificial pond sat to one side, and a row of neatly pruned ornamental trees completed the picture like brushstrokes on canvas. Given that a single window couldn’t hope to capture the whole of it, he figured the grounds had to sprawl across an absurd stretch of land.
But now wasn’t the time to admire landscaping. Several men patrolled the grounds like clockwork. Guards held the garden’s entrance in a solid line. And out near the distant stone wall, more figures were posted at measured intervals. Every last one of them read as trained security.
Factor in the ones he couldn’t see from this room, and the place was locked down tighter than most detention facilities.
Whose house even is this…? He found himself burning to know who owned this place.
Curiosity, though, was just curiosity. It changed nothing about what he had to do next.
Peeling away from the window, Hangyeom made straight for the door. He closed the distance as silently as he could and pressed his ear flat to the wood.
He caught what might’ve been voices, but the door was thick—too well-insulated to make out a single word. Still, if they were carrying on a conversation, there had to be at least two people standing watch out there.
A shadow of frustration was just settling over his face when—the noise beyond the door swelled, restless.
A moment passed.
Then a knock.
Knock, knock.
Ear still pressed to the door, Hangyeom flinched hard and jerked back. On instinct, his hand flew to the small of his back—but the knife was gone, sheath and all, lifted off him sometime during the abduction.
As he retreated, jaw tight, the heavy door swung open with a soft, smooth hush.
Hangyeom jolted.
The instant it opened, he went still.
A high-end dark gray suit that cost more than he wanted to think about. A white dress shirt in a fabric so fine it made his own look like a rag. A deep red tie with a subtle, elegant weave, pinned with silver. Luxe cufflinks at the collar and cuffs. A wristwatch he couldn’t have priced if he tried.
The tall man in the doorway wore an outfit that all but shouted filthy rich. And yet his face outshone the clothes.
Soft, light brown hair that looked like it had never seen a bottle of dye. Sapphire-blue eyes. A high nose bridge, a clean-cut jaw, features cut sharp and distinct. Even at a glance, a striking man with unmistakably European coloring.
This guy is…
—The Urban Crystal Battery, developed on this foundation, is finally on the verge of full-scale commercialization. Prism Biobattery’s CEO, Seo Won, has fulfilled the company’s long-cherished dream just five years into his tenure, and the achievement is drawing considerable attention overseas.
The news clip he’d caught on a street corner a few days back surfaced, unbidden. Between the media circus around him and a face that was impossible to miss, there was no mistaking this man for anyone but the one in that broadcast.
Sure enough, flawless Korean rolled off Seo Won’s tongue.
“I was told you weren’t hurt. Anything feel off?”
And in that instant, Hangyeom placed the voice—someone he’d heard very recently.
“Heard you run a guiding business for unregistered espers.”
“Guiding’s done just by holding hands?”
“Sounds like you’re saying I could go further than that, if I asked nicely.”
The esper Kim Hyeseong had sent in her stead, wearing her trace like a passcode—the man who’d received guiding through that meticulously crafted clone.
“This woman’s your last appointment for today, isn’t she?”
“If you’ve got more booked, tell me now. I’ll clear the whole schedule.”
The same one who’d called from Hyeseong’s phone when she never showed for her slot, feeding him those loaded, cryptic words.
Hangyeom’s gaze slid to the two figures standing at parade rest behind Seo Won—bodyguards, clearly. The second he recognized one of them as the young woman who’d tried to drop him with a strike to the solar plexus, the whole picture snapped into focus.
“My regular clients… Hyeseong noona… what did you do to them?”
Seo Won didn’t flinch, didn’t bother denying it. He answered without hesitation.
“Just ran them off.”
“Ran them off?”
“By now they’ve scattered somewhere far from Seoul, all on their own.”
Hangyeom had braced for something colder—that the man might’ve simply had them killed—so the answer let him breathe again. Kim Hyeseong was the only one he’d ever felt anything for, but they’d all taken his hand at one point or another, and he hoped, as much as he could, that they were safe.
Then Song Jaewoo’s face rose in his mind, and the question left him in a rush.
“What about Jaewoo? What did you do to Song Jaewoo?”
Even as he asked, he prayed Jaewoo had gotten away clean. If this man’s target had been him all along, there was no reason to bother with Jaewoo—just a broker, nothing more.
Where Seo Won had brushed off the others with ran them off, this time his response shifted.
“He’s fine.”
The corner of his mouth curled, strange and knowing.
“Somewhere only I know.”
“You little—!”
Heat flared up Hangyeom’s throat, sudden and hot—but it fizzled just as fast, and he settled with surprising speed. Furious as he was, he pulled in a slow breath and let reason take the wheel.
Hangyeom was abnormally attuned to the architecture of guiding, to a degree no ordinary guide could touch. It was the singular quirk that let him wring the highest quality out of the smallest fraction of energy—but flipped around, it was also a weapon, one that could bring any esper dependent on guiding to heel with frightening ease.
If his opponent were a run-of-the-mill esper, he could shred their internal ESP pathways and drop them to their knees, no question. He could snarl their energy flow until they thrashed on the floor begging to die, or cinch each channel down so tight they’d be left completely powerless, unable to summon a scrap of their ability.
And since their powers couldn’t lay a finger on him, he was, for all intents and purposes, the natural predator of espers.
Right—if his opponent were a run-of-the-mill esper.
