AFTER THE DIVORCE, I BECAME A BILLIONAIRE

CHAPTER 6: TWO PEOPLE RUNNING OPERATIONS

Seo-rin didn't become my ally that night in Gangnam.

That would have been far too easy, far too neat for a city built on buried bodies and corporate fraud. Instead, she became something vastly more dangerous and infinitely more useful: an unpredictable variable.

We met twice over the course of the following week. Never in the same district, never under the same pretense, and never using an unencrypted method of communication. One night it was a quiet bench near the Han River, the air thick with mist and the low hum of distant traffic; three days later, it was a dim, deserted corner of a twenty-four-hour laundromat in Mapo.

She gave me pieces. I gave her pieces. Neither of us surrendered the full puzzle.

She knew I had gained access to my father's private, encrypted archives, though she couldn't gauge the depth of what Min-jae had left behind. I knew she had spent three agonizing years burrowing into the Cheonghwa Council’s financial machinery, yet I couldn't discern who among those corrupt executives still shielded her.

That distinction mattered. In our line of work, assuming an informant's protection was real was the fastest way to wind up at the bottom of a river.

Our first true strike hit a rogue construction subsidiary—a ghost firm concealed beneath four layers of overseas shell entities, quietly preparing to acquire a massive strip of land near the eastern development district. Seo-rin passed me the exact transaction number on a slip of thermal paper. Acting within hours, I leveraged one of Kangseong’s logistics arms to corner the primary creditor and block the purchase outright.

The Council lost nearly seventy million dollars in non-refundable liquidity overnight.

Ahn Seong-ho’s retaliation was swift, surgical, and terrifyingly close. Within hours of the deal's collapse, three of my senior regional directors received identical black envelopes at their private residences. Inside were photos of their children leaving school. By noon the next day, one executive had tendered his immediate resignation. Another was caught attempting to leak our server access logs to an anonymous broker.

It was a cold bucket of water over my head. For weeks, I had viewed this war through spreadsheets, share percentages, and legal maneuvers. But looking at the pale, trembling face of the executive who tried to sell us out, a sickening truth sank into my gut: every move I made carried devastating consequences for ordinary people who hadn't asked to join my crusade.

I wasn't playing a bloodless game of chess. There were real human lives on the board, and Seong-ho was more than willing to sweep them off.

I shifted my operational tactics immediately, adding layers of security and slowing our acquisition speed.

Seo-rin noticed the hesitation at our very next meeting.

"You've become slower," she remarked, her dark eyes scanning my face with cold precision.

"More careful," I corrected.

"It is the same thing."

"No," I said, leaning closer across the small wooden table. "Careful means I know what I am doing without getting innocent people killed."

"Then why did you let the eastern land acquisition proceed anyway?"

I frowned, a knot tightening in my stomach. "I didn't."

"You did," she replied flatly, sliding a fresh land registry document toward me.

I stared at the black ink on the page. The subsidiary had bypassed the block and finalized the purchase at midnight. My mind raced, searching for the crack in the wall. The hold on the funds could only have been lifted with my highest-level authorization key—a key only two people possessed.

That night, I confronted Choi Dong-wook in my study, the registry paper slammed down on his desk. "Who has executive authority above mine?"

"No one," Dong-wook said smoothly, not even flinching.

"Then someone forged my digital authorization."

His calm facial expression faltered slightly, his dark eyes hardening into stone. "Send me the transfer document."

I transmitted the file. He pulled it up on his tablet, his eyes scanning the cryptographic signature at the bottom of the page. He studied it in agonizing silence for nearly a minute before raising his gaze to mine.

"This signature is yours, Young Master."

"It isn't," I snapped, my throat tight.

"The cryptographic key matches yours down to the final digit," he said softly. "It is identical."

A cold, heavy dread settled into my chest, making it hard to breathe. Someone had bypassed my private security. Someone inside my inner circle was operating with my voice, my authority, and my name.

I said nothing to Seo-rin about the breach. She asked no further questions about the land.

That was the silent treaty between us: two isolated individuals running separate, deadly operations toward the exact same war, waiting to see who would stumble first.

Then Ahn Tae-hyun made his move.

He didn't launch a direct financial attack on Kangseong. He went after something far more visible. He targeted my ex-wife, Seo-yeon.

During a prime-time national broadcast, Tae-hyun publicly announced their engagement, framing it as a grand corporate union. He used the press conference to declare that Daehan Development had been "rescued from near-fatal financial instability" through a strategic partnership with his family's enterprise.

The narrative was clear, cruel, and precise. He wanted the market—and the public—to believe that Daehan and everything attached to it belonged to the Ahn family.

Not to me.

I watched the broadcast from my darkened office, the blue light of the screen reflecting off the glass desk. Seo-yeon stood at his side, wearing a brilliant ivory dress, her hand resting comfortably on his arm. She looked radiant, completely at peace—or she had become frighteningly adept at performing for the cameras.

I turned off the monitor, plunging the room into shadow.

My phone vibrated against the desk. Seo-rin.

"He's smarter than you thought," she said without greeting me.

"I know," I answered, my voice steady despite the adrenaline surging through my veins.

"Then stop underestimating him."

"I wasn't underestimating him."

"You were," she countered sharply. She paused, the faint sound of rain rustling through her end of the line. "That kind of pride is going to get someone killed, Tae-jun."

I remained silent, staring out at the city skyline, watching the neon lights flicker through the smog.

"I need you to understand something," she added, her voice dropping into a quiet, unyielding tone.

"What?"

"If you burn Daehan Development to the ground to spite Tae-hyun, you destroy the physical evidence I need to prosecute the Council."

"And if I step back and let him take it?" I asked coldly.

"Then Seong-ho survives," she said. "And my mother's death stays a quiet secret."

It was our first true, unbridgeable rift. I needed control of the company to gut my enemies from the top down; she needed the company intact to expose the paper trail inside. Neither of us had any intention of backing down.

And in that quiet, heavy darkness, I realized our greatest threat wasn't whether we could trust each other's motives.

It was whether our goals could survive each other's collateral damage.