AFTER THE DIVORCE, I BECAME A BILLIONAIRE

CHAPTER 5: THE FIRST MOVE

"Don't go back to Daehan Development yet."

Choi Dong-wook said it for the fourth time, his raspy voice laced with a grating concern that made my jaw clench. He stood near the windows of my study, his aged silhouette cutting through the pale morning light.

I ignored him, keeping my eyes fixed on the financial ledgers across the mahogany desk. "I'm not going back to work for them," I said, tracing the numbers with a black pen until the paper almost tore. "I'm going to buy them."

Dong-wook stopped pacing. A subtle twitch caught the corner of his eye—a rare crack in his impenetrable composure. "Buy what?"

"Control," I replied, sliding a leather folder across the desk. "Forty-three percent of Daehan's voting shares already belongs to Kangseong Holdings through my father's private trust. Director Park Jin-woo holds four percent. The remaining minority shareholders are bleeding money and looking for an exit from Silas Han's erratic leadership."

Dong-wook didn't pick up the folder. His heavy gaze lingered on my face, searching for signs of the broken man who had walked out of a failed marriage eight weeks ago. "You need fifty percent plus one voting share to seize absolute command, Young Master."

"I am well aware."

"It will cost billions of won," he warned. "You will burn through your father's liquid reserves before you've even secured your footing."

"I am willing to spend whatever it takes," I said, meeting his stare without blinking.

Inside, my chest burned with an icy fury. The eight weeks I spent isolated in this house taught me a brutal lesson: vulnerability was a choice. Every corporate acquisition left a digital paper trail, every transfer invited regulatory scrutiny, and every sudden shift created enemies. If I was going to strip Silas Han of everything he owned, I needed operational control of Daehan before he realized I had entered the arena.

Director Park Jin-woo was our first strike. We approached his firm through an offshore entity in Singapore, dangling a buyout offer twelve percent above market value for his four percent stake. Panic is a powerful motivator. He accepted within twenty-six minutes.

The second acquisition was far more painful. An institutional investment fund held a critical six percent block. I spent nine agonizing days locked in encrypted calls with their legal team, my throat dry, my pulse hammering against my ribs as I negotiated sweetening terms with guaranteed dividends from Kangseong’s primary logistics network.

When their portfolio manager finally gave his verbal consent, a wave of relief washed over me. For a single second, I thought I had secured the floor beneath my feet.

I was a fool.

The following morning, my encrypted line rang. "We are rescinding the draft purchase agreement, Mr. Kang."

A cold knot twisted in my stomach. "We had a verbal agreement."

"A verbal agreement is not an executed contract," he replied flatly. "We received a superior counter-offer forty minutes ago. Cash upfront, zero performance clauses."

My hand tightened around the receiver until my knuckles turned white. "Who made the offer?"

A long silence stretched over the line. I could hear the faint rustle of paper—and the nervous sound of his breathing.

"Ahn Tae-hyun," he whispered, before the connection went dead.

I slowly lowered the phone, my heart hammering. Ahn Tae-hyun wasn't merely waiting inside his fortress—he was hunting. He knew someone was sweeping up equity. He didn't have all the pieces, but he had enough to strike back.

That afternoon, Dong-wook entered the study carrying a fresh dossier. He set it down with a heavy thud and uttered a name that changed the air in the room:

"Yoon Seo-rin."

I looked up, rubbing the dull ache building behind my temples. "Who?"

"Senior Internal Auditor for the Cheonghwa Council."

My chest tightened. "How do you know about her?"

"Your father knew her mother, Yoon Hye-jin," Dong-wook said. "She has been operating inside the Council's inner structure for three long years, quietly constructing a secondary ledger."

I pulled the dossier toward me, my fingers trembling slightly as I flipped it open. There were almost no personal details—no social media footprints, zero traces of an ordinary life beyond an academic transcript from Seoul National University. Looking at her grainy ID photo, I noted the sharp stillness in her eyes. It was the face of someone who had long since buried her feelings underground.

"Why does an auditor for the Council want to meet me?" I asked.

"She claims she possesses something your father left behind," Dong-wook said. "Though you must exercise extreme caution. She could easily be operating as a double agent for Ahn Seong-ho."

I stared at her photograph, feeling a cold paranoia settle into my bones. "Then I will proceed under the assumption that she is."

We met two nights later in a crowded, dimly lit izakaya in Gangnam—dense with clinking glasses and loud chatter, perfect for drowning out microphones.

Seo-rin sat at the farthest table, her back pressed against the dark wood wall, her dark eyes tracking every movement in the room. Two emergency exits were within her direct line of sight; there were no blind spots behind her.

As I approached, her gaze snapped to mine. A sharp flare of curiosity flickered in her dark eyes before her expression locked down into an unreadable mask.

"You took longer than I expected," she said as I reached the table. Her tone was smooth, devoid of warmth.

I pulled out the wooden chair opposite her. "I was deciding whether walking into this room was a trap."

A faint smile curved the corner of her lips—a razor-thin expression that didn't reach her eyes. "Good. Absolute trust gets people killed in our line of work."

Without another word, she pulled out a thick black folder, laying it flat between us. "I work for the Cheonghwa Council."

"I know."

"You know what Ahn Seong-ho permits to leak," she corrected softly. "You don't know how the machine actually digests capital."

She opened the ledger. Rows of meticulous handwriting, bank routing codes, offshore dummy accounts, and disguised wire transfers filled the pages. As my eyes skimmed the figures, a cold shiver ran down my spine. The terrifying scale of the corruption was laid out before me in clean blue ink.

"Where did you pull this from?" I asked, keeping my voice low.

"From inside their primary server," she said smoothly. She tilted her head, her dark eyes locking onto mine. "Do not mistake this for kindness, Kang Tae-jun. I am not helping you. I am helping myself."

In quiet, deliberate sentences, she spoke of her mother's sudden "stroke," the cold lies told by the coroners, and the agonizing three years she had spent smiling at the men who had murdered her family. The faint tremor in her right hand was the only crack in her composure—a subtle leak of the volcanic grief she carried beneath her icy exterior.

"Two hundred million dollars," she added.

"For what?"

"The upcoming Hanseong Maritime Infrastructure Contract. Ahn Seong-ho plans to siphon it out using a ghost subcontractor called Apex Global. Six weeks from today."

"How do I know you aren't feeding me manufactured bait?" I demanded.

"You don't," she replied without hesitation. She slid a folded scrap of paper across the table. "Verify this preliminary wire transfer code. It settles tomorrow morning at nine."

I took the paper, feeling the crisp texture between my fingers, and slipped it into my coat. "Why come to me?"

"Because your father was the only man brave enough to attempt tearing their structure down," she said, her voice dropping to a quiet whisper. For a second, her mask slipped, revealing a raw hunger for vengeance that mirrored my own. "I cannot break the door open from the inside alone. You hold the external capital; I hold the internal blueprints."

One insider to turn the key, one outsider to bring the battering ram.

I leaned back against the wooden chair, studying the tight tension in her shoulders. "Then we have a fundamental problem, Auditor Yoon."

"And what is that?"

"I don't trust you," I said flatly.

Seo-rin’s sharp, dangerous smile returned, genuine and terrifyingly calm. "I don't trust you either, Mr. Kang."

I looked at her across the table, feeling the weight of our shared hatred. For the first time in eight long weeks, that felt like the absolute truth.