AFTER THE DIVORCE, I BECAME A BILLIONAIRE

CHAPTER 7: THE MAN WHO OWED MY FATHER

Cord Peel was precisely the kind of man I expected to hold four percent of Daehan Development.

He was loud, deeply impatient, endlessly bad with money, and even worse with people. But beneath the garish suits and the incessant odor of cheap cigars, he wasn't stupid. He understood better than anyone that Silas Han had spent the last decade treating minority shareholders like useless furniture—ignored until needed, then tossed aside.

When my intermediaries quietly approached him to buy out his stake, Peel didn't flinch. He demanded twelve percent above the current market value. We paid it without a single counter-offer. He was selfish, but he was undeniably useful.

The next man, however, proved far harder to break.

Seo Jae-moon.

Seventy-two years old. A retired Daehan board member who had spent twenty-seven quiet years inside the conglomerate’s upper machinery before abruptly vanishing from public life a decade ago.

We met at his secluded estate tucked deep into the hills outside the city, far beyond the reach of corporate spies and streetlights. The air was crisp, smelling faintly of damp pine and cold earth. When I knocked, he opened the heavy oak door himself, wearing a simple wool cardigan, his weathered face lined with deep, permanent grooves.

When his pale eyes settled on me, he didn't ask for my name. He didn't ask why I had crossed the province to find him. He simply stood on the threshold, staring at me until the wind hummed through the trees.

"You look so much like him," the old man murmured, his voice raspy and frail.

"Who?" I asked, though my chest tightened instantly.

"Your father," he whispered.

I said nothing, the cold night air sinking into my coat.

He stepped aside, gesturing into the warm darkness of his hallway. "Come inside, Kang Tae-jun."

His home was shockingly modest for a man who had once overseen billions in industrial development. There were no polished trophies, no wall-sized photographs with politicians, no expensive modern art. Only wall-to-wall mahogany shelves lined with thousands of worn, leather-bound books.

He moved slowly to the kitchen, preparing bitter green tea himself with practiced, silent grace. He set the steaming ceramic cup down in front of me, sat back in his armchair, and looked into the dark liquid.

"I knew Kang Min-jae," he said softly.

"How well?"

"Well enough to know that I was a coward."

I leaned forward, studying the deep shadows beneath his eyes. "Why do you say that?"

"Thirty years ago, long before the Cheonghwa Council became the shadow monster it is today, your father walked into my office," Jae-moon said, his shoulders slumping as if carrying a physical weight. "He came to me with a thick leather binder full of forged municipal contracts and illegal land seizures. He asked me to stand beside him. He asked me to help him tear them down."

"Did you?"

"No." The old man looked down at his trembling hands, his reflection wavering in his tea. "I looked at his evidence, and I felt absolute terror. I told myself I had a family to protect. Children in university. A comfortable company position. Things I couldn't afford to lose."

"You still have those things," I noted quietly.

"Yes," Jae-moon replied, offering a hollow, heartbreaking smile. "I kept my life, my pension, and my quiet house. But I gained something else that has rotted me from the inside out for thirty years."

"What?"

"Regret."

He reached into the side pocket of his cardigan, pulled out a fountain pen and a sealed envelope, and placed them flat on the small coffee table between us. Inside were the legal share assignment documents for his three-point-eight percent stake in Daehan Development.

He offered no premium. He demanded no negotiation. He agreed to transfer every single share at fair market value.

When I looked up from the papers, stunned by the sheer ease of it, I asked the obvious question: "Why give them to me now?"

Jae-moon met my gaze directly, his pale eyes shining with a sudden, fierce clarity that cut through his frail demeanor. "Because your father asked me for help when I was too afraid to act. He died fighting them, while I hid in these woods."

He slid the pen toward me, his hand steady for the first time all evening. "I am an old man, Tae-jun. I don't want to die afraid again."

My hand gripped the metal pen, the cool ink flowing smoothly across the signature lines. I was taking a coward's redemption and turning it into a weapon.

On the dark drive back toward the city skyline, the rain began to slick the highway. My phone buzzed against the dashboard console, Dong-wook’s caller ID flashing on the dark screen.

I hit the speaker button. "Talk to me."

"The transfer went through," Dong-wook said, his raspy voice carrying a rare, subtle note of triumph. "You are over the threshold, Young Master."

"How much?"

"Fifty-one point eight percent," he answered. "You officially hold the controlling stake."

I exhaled a long, shaky breath against the steering wheel, my heart pounding a steady, heavy rhythm against my ribs. We had done it. Control was ours.

Yet the moment I stepped into my dark office forty minutes later, the sweet taste of victory vanished entirely.

Lying directly in the center of my desk, illuminated only by the moonlight filtering through the blinds, was a glossy photograph.

It was an exact, high-resolution copy of the photograph from my divorce proceedings—me sitting at my desk weeks ago, cold and detached, with Seo-yeon standing across from me holding the papers. But this shot had been taken from an impossible angle: from inside the private room, the camera pointed directly at my face.

Someone had written across the bottom in dark, thick red ink:

You looked happier before you knew who you were.

My throat went bone-dry. My pulse hammered violently as I flipped the photograph over. On the stark white back, a second line was scrawled:

Don't go back to Daehan.

I stared at the jagged handwriting, the chill of absolute paranoia settling deep into my chest. Before I could process the breach, my personal phone vibrated furiously in my palm.

I snapped it open. "Seo-rin."

"I received one too," she said instantly. Her voice wasn't its usual icy, unbothered cadence—there was a sharp, brittle edge to her tone, a dangerous leak of emotion.

My eyes narrowed into dark slits as I stared at the red ink on my desk. "What did yours say?"

A long, suffocating silence stretched over the encrypted line. I could hear the harsh, shallow sound of her breathing on the other end.

"That they know what happened to my mother," she whispered.

The line went dead with a sharp, hollow click.