The command center, which moments before had been a hub of tense, focused energy, was now a vacuum of stunned silence. The mission was over. The hunt was a failure. Yoo-jin stared at the blank monitors, the reflection of his own horrified face staring back at him. He had been so focused on the enemy in front of him that he hadn't seen the knife sliding into his back.
"Call them off," he said, his voice a dead, hollow thing. "Abort. All teams."
Min-ji, her face pale, typed the command, her usual swift confidence gone. On the screens, the surveillance feeds vanished one by one. The decoy operative on the subway, who had been their entire world for the last hour, simply got off at the next station and melted into the city, his purpose served. It had all been for nothing. A ghost hunt designed to keep them busy while the real crime was being committed elsewhere.
The mood in the room was funereal. Min-ji stared at her keyboard, replaying her own failure to see the bigger picture. Da-eun, still on the sofa, looked at Yoo-jin, her righteous anger from the night before now replaced by a kind of weary, pitying dread. She had watched him marshal his forces, build his intricate plan, and walk right into a trap that had been laid not for his body, but for his mind.
Nam Gyu-ri's voice, cynical and sharp, crackled over the secure comms link, cutting through the silence. He wasn't gloating. He was a scientist dissecting a failed experiment.
"Don't you see the beauty of it, Yoo-jin?" he said, a note of cold, intellectual admiration in his voice. "It's a perfect inversion. He knew you'd come at him with overwhelming force, so he created a target for your force to hit. And while you were enjoying your little spy game, he was working on the real objective."
He paused, letting the weight of the failure sink in. "He hasn't just turned your pawn. He's poisoned him. Whatever story Ryu fed Ji-hyuk in that cell, it will be a masterpiece of manipulation, designed to destroy you utterly. He'll have Ji-hyuk 'confess' to a new truth. He'll say you were the one who hired the girl, that it was all a risky publicity stunt to generate buzz for the drama, and it went horribly wrong. He won't just make Ji-hyuk a witness against you; he will make your own artist your public executioner."
Gyu-ri's analysis laid the new stakes bare with brutal clarity. If Kwon Ji-hyuk, in his terrified and broken state, told the prosecutor the story Ryu had fed him, Aura Management would be finished. They would be implicated in the death of Park Eun-sol. The company would be destroyed, and Yoo-jin himself would likely face criminal charges. The clock was ticking.
"I need to get to him," Yoo-jin said, his voice tight. "Before the prosecutor's official questioning tomorrow."
"How?" Min-ji asked, looking up from her screen. "The detention center is on lockdown because of the 'gas leak.' And after the concert last night, Chairman Choi has blocked every official channel we have. Your lawyers can't get in. No one can."
Yoo-jin's mind raced through his limited options. He had no legal moves left. His digital surveillance had failed. His back-alley thugs were useless against the walls of a federal prison. He had only one card left to play, a dirty, compromised card he had promised himself he would never touch again. Power. Not his own, but the old, corrupt power of the establishment he claimed to fight.
He turned and looked at Ahn Da-eun.
Her eyes met his, and she immediately knew what he was going to ask. A look of profound distaste crossed her face.
"I need your help," he said, the words feeling like acid in his mouth. "The Ahn family."
He was referring to her father, the powerful, old-money chairman of a massive construction conglomerate. He was a man Da-eun had spent her entire adult life trying to escape, a controlling patriarch whose world of arranged marriages and corporate dynasties she despised. But he was also a man who owed Han Yoo-jin a massive debt, after Yoo-jin had discreetly saved his company from a catastrophic hostile takeover years ago—a favor Da-eun had never known the full extent of.
"Your father has connections deep inside the Justice Ministry," Yoo-jin pressed, his voice low and urgent. "He sits on boards with retired judges and prosecutors. I need him to make a call. To pull a string, to call in a favor, to do whatever it takes to get me five minutes alone with Ji-hyuk before his official questioning begins."
Da-eun stared at him, her expression hardening into one of cold fury and bitter disappointment. "Let me get this straight," she said, her voice dangerously quiet. "After everything that has happened, after last night, your brilliant new plan is to go crawling to my father? The man you supposedly helped me escape? You want to use his corrupt money and his backroom influence, the very system you've built your entire reputation on fighting against?"
She stood up and took a step towards him, her eyes blazing. "You really have become just like them, haven't you? When your own clever tricks don't work, you just resort to the same dirty power plays as everyone else."
"I have no other choice, Da-eun!" Yoo-jin shot back, his own desperation making his voice raw. "It's this, or we lose him! We lose everything! Ryu has us in checkmate. This is the only move left on the board!"
They stood in a tense standoff, the chasm between his desperate pragmatism and her fierce idealism wider than ever. She looked at him, at the exhausted, cornered man who had once been her infallible hero, and saw the full extent of his compromise. He was willing to become his enemy to survive.
With a look of profound disgust—at him, at the situation, at herself—she finally gave a single, sharp nod. "Fine," she said, her voice brittle. "I'll make the call."
She turned her back on him, walked to the far side of the room, and pulled out her phone. She scrolled through her contacts, her thumb hesitating over the name she hadn't willingly dialed in years: 'Father.'
Yoo-jin watched her, a hollow feeling in his chest. He had won the argument, but he had lost something far more valuable. He listened as her voice, strained and formal, came from across the room.
"Father? It's Da-eun… Yes, I'm fine… No, nothing is wrong… I'm calling because I need a favor. It's for Han Yoo-jin…"
She was being forced to use the levers of the world she hated to save the new world she loved, and it was all because of him. The moral cost of this war was rising with every passing second.