Chapter 19

Somi turned the business card over with a skeptical expression. On the back, the broadcasting station’s logo and main phone number were stamped exactly as they were.

After flicking the corner of the card a few times with her long nails, she gestured with her chin toward the opposite side.

“Then what about that side?”

“Ah, he’s a professor in the Department of Criminal Psychology at Hankuk University.”

“A criminal psychology professor?”

Somi scanned Iheon’s features with narrowed eyes. Then, as if something had belatedly come back to her, she raised her eyebrows.

“Wait……. I thought I’d seen him somewhere. Is he really that profiler?”

Iheon neither denied nor confirmed it. The reaction of a woman who recognized him was so familiar that he felt no need to answer.

“Huh. And you’re married?”

“It’s also true that we’re married.”

“Really? Wow, unnie, your taste is certainly unique.”

Not knowing what to say, Jei simply smiled. The one pointed out as having unique taste looked indifferent, as if listening to someone else’s story.

“I can’t tell you the details of our situation. But it’s true we came to see you because we wanted to hear about Shin Gyeongho.”

“What kind of story do you want to hear?”

Somi looked the two over in turn.

“How much of a piece of trash Shin Gyeongho was? Or why everyone who knew that bastard wanted to kill him?”

“Your story, Somi.”

Jei answered without hesitation.

“How you came to meet Shin Gyeongho, why you came to hate him so much. What on earth happened to you.”

“Why are you curious about that?”

“I don’t know how this will sound, but honestly, right now I feel like I’m grasping at straws.”

“…….”

“Please. I’m asking.”

Somi stared silently at Jei for a long while. Her eyes seemed to be gauging how far she could be trusted.

“Where should I start……”

After pondering, she propped her elbow on the table and rested her chin on her hand.

“I first met Shin Gyeongho five years ago. He held out a business card on the street. Asked if I’d ever thought about modeling.”

With one hand supporting her chin and the other holding her glass, Somi slowly swirled the liquor inside. The amber liquid, with no ice, spun round and round along the glass wall.

“He was neatly dressed, had an office right in the middle of Gangnam, and even offered a signing bonus. It sounded pretty plausible.”

Her pale face, recalling her first meeting with Shin Gyeongho, sank noticeably.

“It’d be a lie to say I wasn’t tempted by the offer. I was barely scraping together tuition, so I needed money too. Did you know? Even if I look like this now, I was a student at a fairly prestigious women’s university.”

“…….”

“Thirty million won as a signing bonus. To a college student hopping from one part-time job to another, it was an enormous sum.”

The woman, having stopped speaking, swallowed a sip of liquor. Even with the heat of the strong drink, she did not once grimace.

“A few days after I received the signing bonus like that, Shin Gyeongho called me to a bar. He said it was a meeting with people from an advertising agency. But after the first drink, my memory cut in and out.”

As if searching for a memory that would not take shape no matter how hard she looked, her unfocused eyes wandered for a long time over the amber liquor.

“When I came to, my clothes weren’t even properly on, and I was left alone in an empty hotel room. I demanded to know what had happened from Shin Gyeongho, but he flatly denied knowing anything.”

Perhaps it still astounded her to think of it, because Somi let out a cold scoff.

“I only found out later. Signing bonus, my ass.”

Tilting her head to one side, she pulled her red-lipsticked lips into a smile.

“Would you believe it—I’d been ‘mikinged.’”

The hand gripping the glass trembled violently. The more she tried to force it still, the more clearly the trembling spread across the back of her hand.

“I thought I’d signed with an agency, but I’d been sold off as a girl who owed a bar thirty million won.”

There was not a drop of moisture at the corners of her eyes, heavily lined with dark eyeliner. Instead, in her laughter-less pupils, a bitter disillusionment pooled.

“The sin of not being suspicious, the sin of needing money, the sin of briefly dreaming of a better life—and in one moment, the foolish twenty-three-year-old girl who fell into the gutter. That’s me.”

Hearing Somi’s story, Iheon uncrossed his arms and picked up the bottle. Then he tilted it toward the woman mocking herself as a foolish girl.

“Rather than foolish, you were naive.”

“Oh my, oppa. Are you comforting me right now?”

Somi brought her glass toward the bottle he held out, teasing him. Iheon did not bother correcting her and filled the glass.

What the twenty-three-year-old college student had believed in was not just some smooth-talking stranger.

It was the neat clothes, the office in the middle of Gangnam, the seal stamped on the contract, and the plausible title of “advertising agency contact.”

The method was simple.

What they targeted was not ignorance. It was the desperation to escape a straitened reality.

So that even if suspicion arose, one could not let go of the opportunity before one’s eyes.

That was why it was all the more vicious.

Iheon loathed that kind of people.

Bastards whose only talent was an eye for recognizing another person’s desperate hope, who used their dreams as bait, mocked their trust, and justified the crimes they committed.

Their harm did not end with selling a woman to a bar. They made the victim endlessly blame herself.

Why hadn’t she been suspicious? Why had she taken the money? Why had she gone along to that place?

The wrongdoing had been committed by bastards like Shin Gyeongho, yet the guilt became entirely the victim’s share.

Meanwhile, the bastards just snickered, saying the girl who got fooled was the idiot, and went on living as if nothing had happened.

“Did you ever try asking the police for help?”

Jei asked carefully. Shin Gyeongho had deliberately deceived Somi. It was fraud.

Of course, proving that would not be easy, but……

At Jei’s question, Somi burst into a ringing laugh.

“Haha. Of course I did. There was a senior police officer who’d come in as a customer a few times. We’d gotten somewhat friendly because I saw him often.”

“What did he say?”

Somi tipped the remaining liquor in her glass into her mouth.

“He said I was the one who received the money and spent it, and that I signed the contract with my own hand. He wasn’t wrong. No one held a knife to my throat and forced me to sign.”

The empty glass came down on the table.

“Besides, who’d believe a girl selling her body in a room salon? He probably thought I borrowed money without knowing how scary it is, then got stingy when it came time to pay it back and made up a story.”

“…….”

“He even advised me not to report it and get countersued, but to work hard and pay it back. I was so grateful I could cry.”

Iheon surmised there had likely been some kind of arrangement between that police officer and Shin Gyeongho. It was common enough for a police official to take backhanders in exchange for looking after certain entertainment establishments.

“What happened after that?”

At Jei’s question, Somi shrugged and answered as if it were no big deal.

“As you can see. I’m still selling smiles in a bar like this.”

“You couldn’t quit because of the money?”

“…….”

“Or did Shin Gyeongho have some other hold over you?”

The fingers tracing the rim of the glass stopped. For an instant, hostility passed through the woman’s eyes. But Jei did not back down and continued.

“Something like photos or videos.”

“…….”

“Actually, I saw them. Photos of unconscious women.”

“It was probably GHB. It’s a colorless, odorless drug, so you wouldn’t have noticed even if it was mixed into water rather than alcohol.”

Iheon added the explanation, picking up Jei’s words. At that, Somi let out a short laugh.

“I know. It’s a water bomb, isn’t it? It leaves no trace on the body, and only the person who was drugged ends up miserable, they say.”

“Were you also a victim of that kind of footage, Somi?”

“Not long after I found out I’d been sold to a bar, I took drugs and tried to kill myself.”

It was the day she swallowed a dozen or so sleeping pills at once, thinking living was unbearable.

It was also the day she turned away from her fading hope in a dizzy, spinning field of vision and let go.

“Two days later I opened my eyes in the hospital, and Shin Gyeongho showed me something.”

As if she were someone who had never forgotten a single word, Somi recited Shin Gyeongho’s words clearly.

“If you want me to make your parents, relatives, and friends all see this video, go ahead and try to die again.”

Somi’s jaw hardened. Perhaps she was pressing the inside of her cheek against her molars, because one cheek briefly hollowed.

“If you don’t want that, remember clearly. Whose body it is now.”