Chapter 49

It took longer than I expected for Taejun to show up at the station. Every moment waiting for him was agony knowing that I was absolutely and truly fucked no matter how things went today. I doubted that the stash Sungmin and I had left behind in our flight hadn’t been discovered. It was irrefutable that Sungmin and I had been trying to move it somewhere. And we’d literally been caught in the act of trying to break into a car. Even an idiot fresh out of the police academy could put two and two together.

Whatever possible chance of innocence I might have been able to plead if we had been caught in Sungmin’s car was completely and utterly destroyed.

I didn’t know if they could trace the stash back to the Seven Directions gang. For all the police knew, the only two perpetrators at the scene were me and Sungmin. I didn’t know if they’d caught Sungmin. Pretty much the moment I’d been escorted here they’d cuffed me to a table in this ‘interview room’.

They’d tried to question me somewhat. Even if my throat wasn’t still burning with agony, I already knew that I shouldn’t say anything before Taejun showed up. So I held my tongue, even when the cop interrogating me lost his patience with me and cuffed me to try to get me to talk. It was nothing. It was nothing compared to everything I’d gone through. He simply wasn’t allowed to hit me hard enough for it to matter to me.

I just asked for Taejun.

Even knowing that my brother would absolutely murder me if the state didn’t, he was the one best equipped to handle this shitstorm I’d gotten myself into. I didn’t know if he’d be able to get me out of it, but at least he’d be able to tell me what to do so I didn’t fuck up the situation even more.

Finally at long last, a cop came in to let me know that my family was here to see me. She exited quickly to let him in. Except…

It wasn’t Taejun who walked into my holding room first. It was my parents.

“Jae–” my mother started.

My father shoved her aside heavily so that she stumbled, almost crashing into the wall. I jumped to my feet but I was cuffed to the table, and my short leash jerked me off balance, almost back into the chair.

“Dad,” I hissed angrily. He was angry too, I could see that easily. Maybe he was drunk. Either way, despite his wheelchair (doubtless Taejun had funded that), apparently he was feeling recovered enough to be able to throw my poor mother around again. Seeing him do so immediately sparked an anger inside me.

The stormy rage that twisted his face made him look almost comical as he rolled up to me awkwardly like a stunted low flying thundercloud. But it was far from a comical situation.

“Saemin, get over here!” he demanded. My mother scurried over when she was summoned, and my father used her as a crutch to struggle to his feet. He glowered at me, and despite him being several inches shorter than me, I felt like a child again.

“Don’t treat her like that,” I bleated miserably in protest. “She doesn’t deserve that.”

“No,” my father agreed in a low growl. “But you do.”

He cuffed me across the face with far more force than I expected he could have mustered with his unsteady legs. I stumbled back and the cuffs dug painfully into my wrists as I again reached the end of my short chain. I hung my head in shame. I did deserve that.

“Playing around with drugs!” my father yelled at me. “Running around with gangs! Trying to steal a damn car!”

Each word he threw at me hit me like a bullet, burying themselves into my flesh painfully. I sunk down and my father grew bolder now that he stood taller than me again. He continued venting his anger on me, yelling and punctuating his sentences with wild blows as I retreated further into my arms like a turtle.

“You bastard gaesaekki!” he roared at me, ignoring the irony of calling his own son a bastard. “An idiot little yangachi! You think you’re so tough?! You think yourself a gangster?!”

I’d caught a glance of my mother’s face, pale and withdrawn. I knew she would have retreated into that ghost version of herself that she did when my father was angered. She never tried to outright escape, but she’d long accepted that she couldn’t stop my father’s rages. She simply just tried to make herself scarce, even if her husband’s rage was directed at her sons as it was now.

Better us than her.

“And not just any gang!” My father panted furiously as he struggled to continue his enraged rambling. “Han Jungho’s gang! Playing at being thugs with Han Jungho’s son!”

My father knew I was with Han Sungmin? Did that mean he had been caught too? But before I could ponder that too deeply, another smack of my father’s hand quickly returned me to the present.

His hand fisted in my hair as he yanked on it, trying to pull me up. A tactic that might have worked on my mother. But not so much on me.

“You good for nothing, piece of trash!” my father yelled. “The gang that oppressed us, your own family! Your flesh and blood family! For years!”

Oppressed my family? It wasn’t like they’d just randomly picked us to trouble us. It was my parents, who had gone running to them for money and therefore reaped the consequences, I thought angrily. I was the idiot who stayed behind to take the crossfire. Taejun got out while he could, good for him.

“Ran to them like a dog! For what? For what, Jaehyun? A quick buck? Tried to get rich quick instead of honest work?!” His howling was starting to irritate me.

How dare he? How could my father lecture me about honest work when for years he squandered his life trying to gamble his way out of debt? The only time I’d known him to hold a job was when Han Jungho had come and beat the fear of death into us all. And that hadn’t even lasted.

I worked for years for Do Hoon, never missing a day. I’d dropped out of school as a teen just to support the family. He had no right. No damn right.

I tried to fight the anger that was mounting inside of me. It swelled in my lungs like seawater, burning and forcing my breath into quick, unfulfilling pants. I never had a choice, I wanted to yell.

“You’re not my son!” my father screamed at me. He gave up on trying to tug me up, but he hadn’t needed to. I looked up now. The sight of my defiant face seemed to fuel his rage once more. “You dare?!” he seethed. “You dare to look at me like that, Jaehyun?! After what you’ve done tonight?! You worthless piece of shit!”

“Shut up!” I shouted at him, standing up now. My pulse pounded hard in my ears and in my veins, and I could feel my hands curling up into pugilistic fists.

He recoiled like I had slapped him. I’d never yelled back at him in all the years of abuse that he’d inflicted upon me. I’d lain over like a toothless dog any time he’d misdirected his anger at me, beating me down with words and fists and kicks. I’d never once retaliated. Even Taejun had yelled back in his later teenage years.

I should have learned. When Taejun learned to fight back, my father no longer tried to oppress him. Instead he went directly to either me or my mother, the meek ones in the family. All those years I’d looked up to Taejun, and I’d never once learned from him.

Well, it was never too late to start.

“You raise your voice?!” he sputtered angrily, so forcefully that he barely made sense. “I’m your father!”

“You just said I wasn’t your son,” I hissed back. The flames of anger burned me more ferociously than the various hurts I’d suffered tonight, and for now all I could think about was how much I wanted to hit him back. If we weren’t in a police station, I would have. I would have. “So what does it fucking matter?!”

My father’s eyes bulged with indignation and hurt pride to see his younger, docile son retaliating at last. For a moment, he just sputtered incoherently. Then he lifted his finger and pointed it at me. It trembled along with the rest of him. Though it was probably a tremble of suppressed rage, with his eyes wide and his mouth hanging open, he almost looked afraid.

He stabbed at the air between us with that finger. “You,” he stuttered furiously. “I don’t know you. You’re not my son. You’re not Jaehyun. I don’t know who you are anymore. You’ve changed. You choose those gangsters over your family? Your family! You’re dead to me!”

His voice rose back into an almost hysterical scream. “YOU’RE DEAD TO ME, YOU HEAR ME?!”

My vision went blurry and dark at the edges as pure, unadulterated rage exploded out of me like volcanic lava. The only reason I was even with Sungmin was because the Seven Directions gang had threatened my family. I’d only gone with him to keep my family safe. And this, this was how they repaid me?

My father’s rage. My mother’s silence.

“After all I’ve done for you?!” I yelled. I jerked forward and the chains at my wrists rattled in protest as I struggled forward. I’d paid off my family’s debt. I’d paid for them for years. I’d kept us all safe when no one else could. When no one else even wanted to. I could have disappeared along with Taejun, and left these two to their fate. To die in the grave they’d dug for themselves. But I hadn’t. I’d always been there. I’d been the one thing in their lives they could depend on, when they couldn’t even depend on themselves. “The only reason I was with Han Sungmin was to keep you safe!”

I don’t know how my father had yelled for so long. I’d shouted only two sentences and already my breath was gone, and I was struggling to breathe. My heart was racing, my lungs struggling. My father sank back into his wheelchair with shock.

“My whole life! Everything I ever did! It was all for you! I never once asked for thanks, for appreciation, for anything. It was all for you,” I panted pathetically. I was an idiot, pure and simple. I’d been so blinded by familial bonds of blood that I’d never once considered my own independence like Taejun had. Like an idiot dog I’d licked at my father’s boots, hoping that he, of all people, could see that his younger son had worth.

“I was a good son,” I sobbed between useless breaths. “I was there.. I helped…”

For what? Because I wanted to be as good as my brother? To do the things he’d never done? Had I really been so dead set determined to fill the hole my brother had left behind that I’d turned into a mindless automaton, working endlessly to fix the problems my family kept making for themselves?!

And now when it was I who needed help–

“Now you’re just going to throw me away,” I choked out. “Without once asking me what happened!”

“Jaehyun–”

“I never deserved any of this!” I shouted. My vision was blurring, but I didn’t think it was with tears. There was a pounding in my head. I continued to gasp for air like a fish out of water, but I just couldn’t seem to get any air.

"You damn, disrespectful--!"

“Get them out of here,” a voice demanded.

Was that Taejun? I couldn’t tell. I couldn’t see. I could barely hear.

Someone appeared next to me, and it was Taejun. I felt the strength leaving my body and I collapsed into him. He caught me. My pulse was pounding and my chest hurt. I clutched at his shirt to try to keep upright, still heaving for breath. With him so close, I could see him and his alarmed expression now.

“Jae–,” he started.

“I can’t… I can’t breathe,” I gasped. The dark edges of my vision closed in fast and I sank into a deep, dark sea once more.