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"I'm sorry you want me to what?" Mari asked her, shooting the girl what was supposed to be a hard and blazing glare. Though there was no doubt that she was trembling, her entire body shaking in pure terror and distraught as she backed away from Hongjoong.

"Kill him," Jaerin responded nonchalantly. She placed the snake ring on her finger, admiring the way it looked against her rather dainty hands. "Why should that be hard? You make into this room with every intent to murder any living soul who wasn't on your side of the fight and Hongjoong so happens to be one of them. And don't tell me you've already forgotten about your poor mother? The woman slaughtered mercilessly by him and his people?"

"Jaerin—" Hongjoong tried to defend himself to make him seem any worse than he already was.

She felt like her legs were going to give out on her, that her whole body was going to shut down at any second. "That was you?" Mari questioned him. "It was you who killed my mother and nearly ended my friend's life? You did that to them?"

"Not me... specifically?" He tried to convince her, trying to find the right words to say so that it didn't make the situation escalate even further. Jaerin stood and smiled, adoring the new piece of jewelry she had taken from the hands of someone else. "I wasn't even there, I was dealing with my own problems. You know that! I promise, princess, had I known I wouldn't have let it happen."

"Would you now?" Jaerin spoke, backing away towards the mahogany doors. "You may be the son of the Godfather but you've practically got no power there. You've alienated yourself from him so much that no one is willing to listen to you anymore unless you step up to the plate that's been displayed out for you. You couldn't change a thing, even if you wanted to. The only way your father could get you to assimilate with the faction was forcing you into that assassination group. And my, my, what a good killer you are."

Mari couldn't think straight, her head twisting and turning constantly at all the information that was being unwillingly thrown at her. She wanted to make it stop, she needed to make it stop. Every bit of knowledge she gathered from Jaerin's mouth was like daggers being thrown straight at her heart, making her bleed without even realizing it. That pristine image of a Hongjoong she had built was slowly being torn and battered into a pulp with every epiphany she had.

"Mari," Jaerin addressed her, holding her ring finger out to Mari to flaunt the pretty hand-me-down. "It would do you so much good to do as I say. You can hurt the Kim Faction by killing their last heir, you'll get your mother's ring back, and you'll even get the vengeance you've searched for as payback for all the atrocities that have donned your life. Doesn't that sound like a pretty good deal?"

The girl snatched the pistol out of Hongjoong's weakened hands, catching him off guard as she pointed the muzzle of the gun towards Jaerin. The Lee Faction heir yelped at the weapon pulled on her, her back pressing up against the mahogany door as she tried to back away from her. Mari's blood was boiling, practically radiating a blistering hot heat that matched the hostility of her glare. "How about I kill you first instead? I like that idea a lot more."

Jaerin was practically sweating bullets, not expecting the tables to turn on her so quickly. She tried her best to reach for the door handle as her hands trembled, preventing her from escaping as fast as she would have liked. Though Mari was already taking aim at the Lee Faction girl with her hand just hovering over the trigger. Oh, how she wished she was trigger happy at this moment so she could end the girl's life quickly.

"Mari," Hongjoong hissed, grabbing her wrist and forcing the girl to lower the pistol in her hands. "You can't kill her, as much as you want to right now you can't. You'll start a three-way war between the three factions if she turns up dead, throwing the Lee Faction straight into battle and turning on you in less than a second."

"Why should I listen to you?" Mari snapped, scowling towards the boy. "I listened to you ever since we met and look at how I ended up blindly believing the words that came out of your mouth?  My father is being targeted, my mother is dead, my home is under attack, my friends nearly died by your faction's actions and I almost died by your hands! There's no reason for me to listen to you anymore."

She snatched her wrist away, making him stumble from with excessive force she had used. Though Jaerin had already made her grand escape, pushing the mahogany doors open and running as fast as she possibly could. It was either going to be the Kim Faction or Mari who got to the girl first and she wanted it to be the latter. "Mari please," Hongjoong begged, "I need you to trust me, this isn't a good idea."

"I did trust you, I basically trusted you with my life even," Mari responded, burning her eyes into the boy's head. "Only to find that you were going to be the one to take it away from me. You've lost it, Hongjoong. I don't know if I'll ever be able to trust you again. I don't even know if I want to trust you again."

The sound of a door being pushed open caught the two off guard, turning their heads to watch as Jaerin sprinted away in her high heels with her mother's ring in hand. Mari pulled the trigger on the gun and aimlessly shot at the Lee Faction heir, wildly missing her in the fit of rage. "I'm gonna kill her," She mumbled, starting to follow after her without missing a beat. "I'm going to kill Lee Jaerin, I'm going to kill her if it's the last thing I do."

Hongjoong grabbed her wrist, trying to stop her from doing anything irrational and attempting to reason with her one more time. Though Mari snatched her hand away with a quickness, skidding to a stop and pointing the muzzle of the weapon straight at him. "Touch me one more goddamn time and Jaerin won't be the only one I shoot."

The boy froze upon hearing her words, instinctively raising his hands in the air to show that he posed no threat to her. "Mari, please. Just listen to me just this once."

"I trusted you!" She wailed, her hands visibly trembling as she tightened her grip around the pistol. "Fuck, I was falling in love with you even. You had me stringing along thinking that when I was with you everything would be fine. Only for me to find out that at any given point I was with you, you could have gotten me killed? That you could have killed me? There's no coming back from that, absolutely no way."

"We searched," Yeosang spoke, his eyes not even daring to make contact with Mari's. The two were standing inside of an office building, the doors to the room locked so that no one but the two of them was inside. The building was given to them by the Lee Faction, compensating for the damage Jaerin had caused them. The Seo Faction could no longer return to the Seo Manor as the manor was completely destroyed by their rival faction and their location had been completely compromised.

"We've searched the remnants of the manor as much as we possibly could, but there was barely anything left." Yeosang continued after that moment, taking note of Mari's silent demeanor. He simply sat down beside her in a chair, attempting to give her some sort of comfort by merely being by her side. "Everything's been destroyed, there is nothing to return to. That includes... that includes Wooyoung too. He's gone Mari, we can't find him."

"Are you sure?" She asked him, a sense of desperation in her voice that wasn't usually there. "You've checked everywhere? In the manor, outside the manor, around that whole territory and still nothing?"

"That area around the manor isn't ours anymore," Yeosang explained. "With the attack, the Kim Faction led on us and the information Jaerin released, they know all the ins and outs of that territory. It belongs to the Kim Faction, it is no longer Seo owned. Going there and staying there for long periods of time will get us killed on the spot and we've already suffered enough damage from one attack, we cannot handle another defeat."

Mari felt like her whole world was going to collapse on her. In fact, it already fell on her, now it was trying to suffocate her. First, Wooyoung had suddenly disappeared from her sight, resulting in him going missing after the fighting between the Seo and Kim Faction had ceased. Then Jaerin had taken her ring, an important object that was supposed to be given to her by her mother because all because she had refused to abide by her conditions. And then finally, Hongjoong.

How blinded by him was she? How long did she keep the rose tinted glasses the redheaded had bestowed upon her on for her to completely ignore every warning sign that came her way? There were so many red flags she ignored simply because she falling in love with him, only for him to turn out to be the enemy she loathed so much. He even tried to kill her, had Jaerin not entered her father's office when she did Hongjoong would have killed her in cold blood.

"This is all my fault," Mari choked, rubbing her eyes until she could feel the pain aching in her brain. "I did this, I was the catalyst of this."

Yeosang narrowed his eyes at her, visibly puzzled by her words. "Mari, this wasn't your fault. It was a combination of the Kim Faction and Jaerin's—"

"You don't understand, this is my fault! It's always been my fault," She argued, standing up out of her chair and facing him. "If I wasn't so blinded by anger, I would have never lost Wooyoung in the manor. If I just didn't fight with Jaerin so much, she wouldn't have run to the Kim Faction. If I just never met Hongjoong this whole situation wouldn't have even started! Can't you see that, Yeosang? You don't have to be nice to me, I already know I've created the problem and it's just fallen back onto the rest of the faction like goddamn dominos!"

Yeosang didn't respond, unable to find the right words to console her. A laugh escaped her mouth as she watched him struggle, though whether she was laughing at their situation or herself was unknown. "So you agree? You agree that this is my fault."

"I don't, I just need you to calm down first," The Consigliere's son demanded, forcing her back down into the chair she was in. "We need to focus on the problems at hand, not the problems of the past. We can't change those anyway no matter how much you curse and swear that this is your fault."

Mari folded her arms like a child, unwillingly listening to the words that were coming out of Yeosang's mouth. He quickly swerved the conversation back to the original topic, trying to avoid another emotion filled outburst from"Given the fact that Wooyoung isn't near the manor at all, I can guess where he is now. The same goes for Jaerin, as we haven't found any remnants of her body or any DNA that matched her's in the blood that's been spilled. Unfortunately, you're not going to like where they probably are."

"The goddam Kim's," She mumbled in response, kicking the ground with an annoyed huff. "What would they want with him?"

"Not exactly sure but... in my opinion?" He replied leaning back into the chair as his expression began to twist with worry. Yeosang collected his thoughts in his mind first before giving her his answer, trying to lay it down on her as softly as his honesty would let him. "Probably to draw you or the boss out of hiding. They have no eyes on us now with Jaerin away, so this was probably a way to aggravate us into attacking them again. But we can't,"

"We can't?" Mari repeated.

"We can't," Yeosang confirmed, "because we're so weak. Many of our soldiers are injured from the previous attack, jumping right back into a battle in this state is a suicide mission. We'll be slaughtered with our weakened forces."

"But the Japanese Yakuza—"

"Nakamoto Yuta has pulled themselves out of the fight," He answered, his dull expression donning his face as he spoke of what used to be their ally. "Their yakuza suffered many great losses from the Kim Faction and their assassination group. They were forced to retreat back to Osaka, Japan to regroup and handle their own business in their own country. They won't be gone for good but they are unable to help us at the moment, that's what Adachi told me before he departed."

Mari frowned, the thought of her long term ally pulling away from the Seo Faction's cause hitting a little closer to home than it needed to be. "Then the Lee Faction. Jaerin may have been a bad apple but they—"

"Are already providing us with enough," Yeosang finished for her. "They are providing us with a place to hide from the Kim Faction and rooming in their private hotels that they own until the Seo Faction can relocate. But they are facing their own problems, as Jaerin was their heir and she betrayed not just us, but them. The Lee Faction is usually sworn to neutrality and she broke it. Now they must decide on whether or not they go back to their neutral ways and part from the Seo's or join the fight against a much, much bigger faction than them even after seeing the damage they can cause."

Mari slumped in her chair, nearly wide-eyed at the information dump Yeosang had done. The longer they let the Kim Faction keep hold of Wooyoung, who knew what they'd do to him at that time. The Faction needed to heal from their scars, but with every moment they take resting, the Kim Faction grows more powerful than before. No matter what they did someone was going to get slaughtered in the process, and it most likely was either going to her or her father.

"You must heal too," Yeosang commented, placing his hand in her shoulder. "You didn't suffer any physical wounds, but I know what happened with Hongjoong is burdening you with this immense sense of guilt. You need time to recover, taking immediate action could mentally drain you."

"But if we don't—" She tried to argue, but the Consigliere's son was quick to act.

"Mari, I've done so much to willingly help you not just because you're the future boss of the Seo Faction but because I consider you to be someone close to me." He told her, raising from his chair. Mari watched as he got up, a pitiful and desperate expression on her face as Yeosang stared at her, nearly glaring at her with his stone cold eyes. "But I cannot help you any further, I will not help you any further on whatever you plan to do next. If you don't take a moment to rest for once in your life you're going to destroy yourself or get yourself hurt from the consequences of your actions. I refuse to feed into that, I'm sorry."

She clamored out of her chair as he began approaching the door, desperately trying to pull him back to her side. "Yeosang, I can't just sit around and do nothing while my friend is probably being tortured because of me! I have to do something, I'll do anything just to make sure that Wooyoung doesn't fall victim to the Kim Faction. I can't lose another person important to me, I can't!"

Yeosang's stopped in his tracks, his hands on the door handle as he hesitated to walk out of the room. "Yeosang," Mari begged, "I need you just one more time, please. I can't let Wooyoung end up like my mother, I can't."

The Consigliere's son didn't respond for a moment, as if his mind was running through a maze in order to reach the conclusion he was looking for. "Rest well, Mari," He responded as he unlocked the door and walked through it. She flinched when the door slammed close behind him, leaving her alone in the room to be her very changing and raging thoughts. The room was nearly completely silent after that, nothing but her heartbeat and mind making any sort of noise to fill up the room.

Wooyoung, Hongjoong, the Japanese Yakuza, the Lee Faction, Yeosang: all things she had lost in under forty eight hours.

"Fuck," She cursed, slumping back into her chair and letting her head fall into her hands. "What am I going to do now."

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A somewhat insignificant
chapter cuz I took a
couple days break
my apologies~~