CELESTE
The burner phone buzzed at three in the morning.
I'd been awake anyway, staring at the ceiling of the penthouse bedroom, Luna's soft breathing the only sound in the oppressive silence. Sleep had become impossible-my mind cycling through decryption sequences, medical protocols, and the way Jae-won had looked at Luna sleeping on his sofa.
She looks like you when you sleep.
The words haunted me. What had he seen? What had he remembered?
The phone buzzed again, insistent.
I slipped out of bed carefully, not wanting to wake Luna, and padded barefoot into the bathroom. The burner phone was taped behind the toilet tank-paranoid, maybe, but I'd learned the hard way that Jae-won's surveillance was everywhere.
I peeled it free and saw Nina's encrypted message waiting.
My heart started hammering before I even opened it.
Nina never contacted me on the burner unless it was urgent. Never risked the connection unless she'd found something that couldn't wait.
I sat on the cold tile floor, my back against the bathtub, and opened the message.
Cee. Digging. Choi's 'acquisitions' from 5-7 years ago are a graveyard. Small firms, lone researchers. Their work went silent, then appeared as Choi patents. Your father's name is a ghost in the machine-but he wasn't the first ghost. This is a pattern. Be careful.
Attached were files. Screenshots. Patent applications with names I didn't recognize, dated years before my father's death.
Dr. Sarah Chen. Neuropharmacology research. Lab fire, 2018. Six months later, Choi Pharmaceuticals filed patents for revolutionary pain management compounds using her exact methodology.
Dr. Marcus Webb. Gene therapy innovations. Killed in a car accident, 2019. His research appeared under Choi's name eight months later.
Dr. Keiko Tanaka. Regenerative medicine breakthroughs. Disappeared while traveling in Southeast Asia, 2020. Her work became the foundation of Choi's current cellular therapy division.
And then, at the bottom of the list: Dr. Antoine Moreau. Genetic engineering. Lab fire, 2021. His research became the VX-series gene therapy trials.
My father wasn't the first.
He was just the latest victim in a pattern that stretched back years.
My breath caught in my throat, the bathroom walls pressing in from all sides.
I'd thought this was personal. Thought Chairman Choi had targeted my father specifically for his groundbreaking work. Thought I was fighting a singular injustice.
But this... this was systematic. Calculated. A business model built on theft and death.
Small researchers. Brilliant minds working alone or in small firms without the resources to fight back. Easy targets. People who could disappear without major investigations. People whose work could be quietly absorbed into Choi Pharmaceuticals' vast empire.
My father had been one name in a long, cold line of ghosts.
And I was inside the belly of the beast that had consumed them all.
My hands shook as I scrolled through Nina's attachments. She'd compiled everything-news articles about the deaths and disappearances, patent filing dates, financial records showing massive profits from the "acquired" research.
The pattern was undeniable once you knew to look for it.
But who else knew? Did Jae-won?
I thought about the man who'd stood in the lab tonight, staring at Luna with something raw and broken in his eyes. The man who'd said his father built the company from nothing. The man who'd hunted me for three years because he believed I'd stolen from him.
Did he know his empire was built on graves?
Or was he as much a victim of his father's lies as the rest of us?
A soft knock on the bathroom door made me jump, nearly dropping the phone.
"Maman?" Luna's sleepy voice filtered through the wood. "Are you sick?"
I shoved the phone behind the toilet tank and flushed quickly, buying myself a few seconds to compose my face.
"I'm fine, mon cœur," I called out, my voice steadier than I felt. "Just couldn't sleep."
I opened the door and found her standing there in her pajamas, Monsieur Hopps dragging on the floor beside her, her dark eyes heavy with sleep but worried.
So worried. Too worried for a child so young.
"Bad dreams?" she asked.
"Something like that." I scooped her up, and she wrapped her arms around my neck, her small body warm and solid against mine. "Let's go back to bed."
I carried her back to the bedroom and tucked her in, lying down beside her. She curled into me immediately, seeking comfort, seeking safety in a place that offered neither.
"Maman?"
"Yes, baby?"
"Is the scary man going to help me get better?"
The scary man. She meant Jae-won. The father she didn't know, who looked at her like a puzzle he couldn't solve.
"Yes," I whispered into her hair. "He's going to help you. I promise."
She sighed, satisfied, and her breathing began to slow and deepen as sleep reclaimed her.
But I lay awake, staring at the ceiling, Nina's words echoing in my head.
This is a pattern.
Chairman Choi hadn't just stolen my father's research. He'd perfected a system. Find brilliant, vulnerable researchers. Acquire their work through whatever means necessary. Eliminate the competition. Reap the profits.
How many others were there? How many names I didn't know? How many families destroyed so Choi Pharmaceuticals could dominate the market?
And Luna's treatment-the VX-7 gene therapy that was our only hope-was built on my father's stolen work. Built on his death.
The irony was devastating. I'd brought my daughter to the place that had killed her grandfather, begging for mercy from the family that had destroyed ours.
But what choice did I have?
Luna stirred beside me, her hand finding mine even in sleep, holding on tight.
I had no choice. I'd never had a choice.
I would stay. I would work. I would decrypt my father's research and hand it over to the people who'd stolen it in the first place.
Because Luna's life was worth more than revenge.
Worth more than justice.
Worth more than the truth.
But as I lay there in the darkness, holding my daughter close, a different kind of determination began to crystallize in my chest.
Chairman Choi had built his empire on ghosts.
Maybe it was time those ghosts started haunting back.
– – –
AUTHOR
In his own apartment across the city, Jae-won sat at his desk, Luna's medical file open on his computer screen.
His finger hovered over the blood type information. Over the birth date. Over all the answers he'd been avoiding for days.
One click. That's all it would take.
One click to confirm what his gut had been screaming since the moment he'd seen the child sleeping on his sofa.
One click to know if Celeste had stolen his daughter along with his research.
His hand trembled.
Behind him, his phone buzzed with a message from his father: Board meeting, 9 AM. The Moreau situation needs resolution. We need that research completed.
The Moreau situation.
As if Celeste was a problem to be solved. A transaction to be completed.
As if she hadn't once been the woman he'd loved more than his own ambition.
As if the child sleeping in his building wasn't-
He closed the medical file without looking.
Some truths, once known, couldn't be unknown.
And Jae-won wasn't sure he was ready for this one.
But outside his window, Seoul glittered in the darkness, and somewhere in that vast city, patterns were emerging.
Patterns that would destroy everything he thought he knew.
The ghosts were waking up.
And they were hungry.