AFTER THE DIVORCE, I BECAME A BILLIONAIRE

CHAPTER 26: THE PROSECUTOR’S ARCHIVE

POV: Seo-rin

The morning headline in the Financial Daily was a masterpiece of institutional aggression disguised as routine civil oversight.

Prosecutor Kang Soo-ah had formally opened an official regulatory investigation into Kangseong Holdings’ recent acquisition of Daehan Development equity. To the public, it was framed as standard diligence—a young, ambitious prosecutor protecting minority shareholders. But to anyone who understood the grinding machinery of the Seoul Central District Prosecutors' Office, her speed was terrifying. She moved with a razor-sharp, surgical precision that suggested months of covert preparation long before Tae-jun ever signed the share transfer agreements.

Maintaining my public cover as an independent compliance consultant, I arranged an emergency meeting with Prosecutor Kang at her office in Seocho-dong.

My official justification was offering cooperative transparency on behalf of Kangseong’s audit committee. My real objective was far simpler, and far more dangerous: I needed to look into Kang Soo-ah’s eyes. I needed to gauge how much she actually knew, how deep her warrants reached, and whether she was operating as Ahn Seong-ho’s attack dog or an unmapped variable in an already lethal game.

I was unsettled almost immediately upon stepping into her office.

The space was austere, stripped of all personal vanity. There were no family photographs, no awards on the walls, no silver frames. Only stacks of pristine, color-coded case files neatly aligned across a dark steel desk.

Soo-ah sat behind the desk in her sharp, tailored dark suit. She didn't offer tea. She didn't waste time on the customary, evasive politeness of government officials.

"Director Yoon," she said, her voice cool, melodic, and entirely devoid of decorative warmth. "I appreciate your promptness. Let's skip the introductory protocol. I’m currently looking at the secondary wire routings between Daehan’s offshore subsidiaries and Kangseong’s Busan maritime logistics accounts."

As the meeting progressed, a quiet, cold dread began to coil tightly in my stomach.

Soo-ah conducted the interview with a terrifying, disarming ease that completely shattered her official biography. A state prosecutor barely into her thirties—regardless of how brilliant or top-of-her-class at Seoul National University—should not possess this level of intuitive fluency regarding the Cheonghwa Council's shadow shell structures. Before I could even finish offering standard corporate explanations for complex clearinghouse delays, she anticipated my obfuscation techniques, reciting the underlying secondary ledger numbers from memory.

It wasn't textbook knowledge. It wasn't information culled from a three-month paper trail. It was the deep, instinctual comprehension that came exclusively from lived, intimate proximity to the machine itself.

My mind worked feverishly beneath my polite, professional smile, cataloging every micro-expression, every pause, every unnervingly familiar phrasing she used to describe Kangseong’s internal clearinghouse operations. Where did she learn this? Who taught a twenty-year-old girl to read shadow balance sheets like bedtime stories?

Near the end of the hour, Soo-ah stood up to retrieve a sealed blue document folder from her safe.

As she unlocked the heavy steel door, she glanced back at me over her shoulder—a moment that felt almost accidental, the kind of unguarded, conversational aside a person makes when dropping their professional guard slightly around someone they’ve decided, rightly or wrongly, to view as an equal.

"Kangseong's internal security protocols haven't changed much in twenty years," Soo-ah remarked, her tone carefully neutral, almost nostalgic as she pulled the folder out. "I spent parts of my childhood in and out of Kangseong facilities. You get used to the smell of their floor polish and the sound of those heavy key-card gates after a while."

She closed the safe door with a soft, metallic thud, framing the statement as an innocent, unbothered reflection before sliding the folder across the desk to me.

I held my breath, keeping my face locked in a mask of polite, polite interest. "I wasn't aware your family had ties to the conglomerate, Prosecutor Kang."

"Old history," she replied smoothly, her sharp eyes meeting mine for a brief, intense second before she sat back down. "Irrelevant to the current regulatory review, of course."

The moment I stepped out of the Seocho-dong courthouse into the biting afternoon wind, my composure fractured.

My hands shook as I unlocked my sedan. I sat in the driver's seat, my heart hammering a chaotic, desperate rhythm against my ribs.

Nothing in any public database—her official government biography, her judicial appointment press releases, her academic background checks—contained a single whisper of any connection to Kangseong Holdings. A lead state prosecutor with an undisclosed, intimate childhood connection to the very conglomerate she was now aggressively investigating represented, at minimum, a catastrophic, career-ending conflict of interest.

At worst, it meant her entire investigation was an elaborate, terrifying lie—a crusade designed for reasons that had nothing to do with standard corporate regulation.

The unresolved tension with Tae-jun, the poisoned text message, and the terrifying discovery of a second leak inside Kangseong were instantly eclipsed by this new, urgent puzzle.

That evening, locked inside my private apartment with the blinds drawn, I bypassed the public registries and broke into Kangseong’s encrypted, historical facility management archives—driving my search parameters back thirty years into the firm's unindexed asset records.

I cross-referenced old property deeds, municipal construction permits, and private medical expenditures against Soo-ah's approximate age, searching for any Kangseong facility that operated a specialized residential wing during her childhood years.

At nine o'clock, the database returned a single, restricted match.

My breath caught in my throat. The screen cast a pale, cold blue light across my trembling face.

It was a private, off-the-books Kangseong-affiliated children's residential and medical facility located in the mountains of Gangwon Province. According to the internal archives, the facility had been quietly, surgically decommissioned twenty-six years ago.

I scrolled down to the precise date the facility’s gates were locked and its records sealed.

It was the exact same month and year that Kang Min-jae's documented, desperate search for his lost, hidden son—Tae-jun—was officially recorded to have begun.