AFTER THE DIVORCE, I BECAME A BILLIONAIRE

CHAPTER 24: PROJECT ANCHOR

POV: Seo-yeon

Guilt is a silent, creeping poison. It doesn't roar; it settles in the bone marrow, heavy and relentless.

For weeks, I had carried the suffocating weight of everything I had failed to stop. The staged photographs in the hotel suite, the calculated public humiliation, the cold, bloodless divorce—I had told myself I had no choice, that I was merely surviving the grand design of my family.

 

But the fragments I had overheard outside my mother's study—the cold mention of keeping Tae-jun distracted, the quiet, terrifying familiarity with the name Yoo Chang-min—had finally curdled into something I could no longer ignore.

On a rainy Thursday afternoon, with my father trapped in emergency board meetings and my mother out attending a charity luncheon in Seongbuk-dong, the vast Han estate fell into a rare, hollow silence.

I walked into my mother's home office.

The room smelled of old paper, expensive leather, and dried lilies. It was a fortress of private power, a sanctuary where my mother had spent twenty years quietly directing the lives of everyone around her. I wasn't entirely sure what I was looking for. I only knew that if the answers to my family’s monstrous architecture existed anywhere, they were hidden inside this room.

I went straight to the heavy mahogany desk. Behind the primary drawer sat a small, brass-rimmed lock—a compartment I had watched my mother access a hundred times throughout my youth, always stepping between me and the wood whenever the key turned.

It took me four frantic minutes to find the small silver key hidden inside a carved porcelain jar on the bookshelf.

The lock gave way with a soft, decisive click.

My heart hammered against my ribs, echoing in the quiet room like a frantic drum. I pulled open the heavy drawer. Inside lay a single, thick manila folder. Across the front, written in my mother’s immaculate, razor-thin calligraphy, was a title: Project Anchor.

I pulled the file out, setting it on the blotter, my fingers trembling so violently I could barely turn the cover.

Inside, organized with terrifying, clinical precision, were records dating back more than a decade—further back than my relationship with Tae-jun had even begun. The earliest documents dated to a time when Tae-jun was still an unmapped student living in a cramped studio apartment in Mapo, completely unaware of his father’s hidden empire.

I began to read, and with every line of clinical corporate prose, the floor beneath my feet seemed to dissolve into cold air.

The documents outlined a deliberate, long-term strategic initiative. It detailed the identification of Kang Tae-jun as an asset of critical interest to the Han family's broader alliance with the Cheonghwa Council. It mapped his daily routes, his psychological profile, his financial vulnerabilities—and then laid out a meticulous roadmap for engineering circumstances that would place him directly within my social orbit.

My vision blurred. A cold wave of nausea surged up my throat.

Every memory I cherished—the "chance" encounter at an art gallery opening in Insadong, the surprisingly fluid overlap in our social circles, the sudden, uncharacteristic enthusiasm my mother had shown for a match everyone assumed she would violently resist given Tae-jun’s complete lack of family pedigree—rearranged itself into something grotesquely engineered.

It had never been fate. It had never been organic.

I hadn't fallen in love with a man I accidentally met; I had been maneuvered into his path by a mother who viewed my heart as nothing more than a strategic tether. Tae-jun hadn't chosen me out of freedom; he had been drawn into a trap designed to keep him anchored to the Han family long before he ever discovered his true name. We were two pawns moved across a board, convinced we were choosing each other while old hands directed every step.

The horror of the realization wasn't just retroactive—it was forward-facing, jagged and terrifying.

If my family had orchestrated the marriage from the very beginning to bind Kangseong’s hidden heir, then the end of our marriage was equally constructed. The sudden rift, the staged photographer in the hotel room, the public execution of his reputation—none of it was really about my fragile, foolish attempts to seek solace with Ahn Tae-hyun. It was never about my feelings, my rebellions, or my sins.

I had never been an author of my own life. I was merely a mechanism inside a machine, a weapon my mother had wielded to bind Tae-jun, and then broken to ruin him when he became too dangerous to control.

A hot, bitter tear spilled over my lashes, splashing onto the clinical typescript of Project Anchor.

"I'm sorry, Tae-jun," I whispered into the empty room, my voice breaking into a ragged, suffocating sob. "I'm so sorry..."

I was so deeply absorbed in the suffocating horror of the file, so consumed by the sudden collapse of my entire reality, that I didn't hear the quiet click of the heavy oak door swinging open behind me.

I didn't hear the soft, deliberate footsteps crossing the Oriental rug.

"Seo-yeon?"

The voice cut through the quiet room like a strike of steel.

I froze, my body turning instantly to ice. I turned around slowly, my chest heaving, the folder still clutched tightly in my trembling hands.

Ahn Tae-hyun stood in the doorway.

He wore a tailored charcoal coat, a leather portfolio tucked beneath his arm, having bypassed the household staff with the effortless familiarity of a man who owned half the city.

For a fraction of a second, his handsome, aristocratic face registered genuine confusion at finding me standing behind my mother's locked desk in an empty house. But as his dark, sharp eyes dropped from my tear-streaked face to the heavy manila folder in my hands, his expression shifted with terrifying speed.

Confusion vanished, replaced instantly by a cold, calculating intensity.

His eyes locked onto the black ink script across the cover—Project Anchor. His jaw tightened, a subtle, razor-thin smile creeping onto the corner of his lips as he took a single, slow step toward the desk.

And in that horrifying, endless second of silence, my blood ran completely cold.

I stared at Tae-hyun's assessing eyes, a fresh wave of terror striking me dead in the chest—realizing, with sickening clarity, that I had no idea whether he already knew about the monstrous deceit written in this folder, or whether I had just handed him the most lethal weapon in the city.