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"Are you fucking stupid?!" Mari hissed, slapping Wooyoung's shoulder with as much strength as she could muster at the moment. The boy winced at her attack, even gaining a furiously bright red mark on his exposed arm. "I thought you had at least somewhat of a brain inside your head, it turns out you have none! What gave you the bright idea of bringing a gun out in public huh? You're a teenager Wooyoung, that's against the law when we're not with the faction!" The two were sitting in the comfort of the girl's room after returning back from the neighborhood she and Hongjoong had passed through.

It was her fault, to be honest. She had done a lot of back talking about Hongjoong before to Wooyoung, who soaked up everything she said like a sponge. It was as if he held grudges against a person he had never truly met and let it all explode the moment he had a chance. Plus the fact that she did run away from the manor for an entire night and left her childhood friend worrying about her wellbeing after her little fiasco the day before. The most likely reason he was carrying a pistol with him in the first place was in case the Kim Faction decided to attack again.

Her newly found friend had let her go with Wooyoung back to her house, though it didn't come without excessive persuasion. He didn't like the fact that Mari would be going home with a feral teenaged boy who strapped with a weapon his side and nearly tried to kill him. While she understood his reasoning, Hongjoong couldn't take her home even if Wooyoung wasn't there. Due to her affiliation with the mafia, anyone outside of it would be carefully watched and targeted by the Seo Faction. She may want to throw the biker boy off a cliff most of the time, but she wouldn't wish that upon anyone.

So when Wooyoung brought her back, she had returned to speak to anyone that knew of her existence. She listened when the Underboss tried to appeal to her, didn't go check San to see how he was doing in his current condition, and refused to even make her way towards her father's office. Mari had only one set goal in her mind, and that was to pass out in the comfortable warm sheets of her bed. In fact, the girl had only woken up a few minutes ago. She didn't get home till late in the morning and didn't wake up till the middle of the afternoon.

"I had to bring something or someone with me!" Wooyoung shot back, rubbing his arm carefully in a soothing manner. "It's my job to protect you, you know that. It's been like this since we were kids. Most of the faction was fixated on the injured, what Kim Faction's next step might be, and how to counter it. Yeosang and Consigliere had left with the Underboss to round up the stranglers and create some type of needed peace in the chaos. San was taken somewhere that wasn't the bloodied ground to get the correct treatment he needed and your father..."

Mari didn't even realize she had caught her breath, her body refusing to release the air that so desperately wanted to escape her lungs. Wooyoung noticed this change in her demeanor, trying to find another way to phrase his words. "And your father... is dealing with your family business. So I had to come with a weapon on me, there was no backup I could possibly get in time to go searching for you. What if something happened? My fists alone wouldn't have been able to save you from an ambush, Mari."

"I was going to come back eventually," She replied, her fuming anger from early dying down. "In fact, you caught me at the moment I was returning even! We just had to take the long way back because Hongjoong wouldn't be able to step one foot on the Seo Faction's turf. I just didn't want to be here with this... this disgusting scent of despair and blood and death in the air. Especially knowing the fact that it came from one of my closest friends and my mother." It was pathetic of Mari really. She had run away from something she had faced every day, something she usually didn't even bat an eye too. The girl made an absolute fool of herself in front of a crowd even. It was absolutely pathetic of her.

"It's really screwed up, isn't it?" He asked her with wide eyes as if a light switch flipped on in his head. She gave him a curious look, not entirely sure what he meant by his statement. Screwed up as in terms of what the Kim Faction did or in terms of what the consequences have been for the Seo Faction. Wooyoung sat up as straight as a log as he began to ramble. "It's like the universe is forcing you to pay it forward, forcing you to pay with the life of another person. The Kim Faction targeted and killed my mother years ago and now they're retaliating once again by targeting and killing yours. Isn't that just screwed up."

What's screwed up about that statement was that Wooyoung had brought up that entire situation in the first place. Wooyoung used to have both parents by his side like any normal child should have, in fact, he was never involved with any of the mafia madness, to begin with. He was just as normal as Mari's mother wished she was. Then the Kim Faction ruined Wooyoung's perfect life he was living and forced him and his now absentee father to look to the Seo Faction for protection against it. Ever since then, it's just been a spiral downhill for him until he came to a sudden stop at the foot of her father.

"Yeah, that's screwed up as hell," Mari mumbled, resting her head on the backboard. There was an uncomfortable silence between the two, a type of silence they've never truly experienced with each other before. Usually, they were so close that nothing could make them feel out of place with each other. Yet with the knowledge that both of their lives were getting equally screwed up ever so slowly together, the two of them didn't know how to react properly. "Is he at least holding a funeral or something?"

"No," Wooyoung replied, his voice as cold as the weather that was transitioning into winter. She snapped to attention, her jaw-dropping at the answer he had given her. No funeral? For his deceased wife? For her dead mother? "I was there when he made the decision. Both the Underboss and Consigliere were practically begging him to rethink his decisions, she should have a memorial at least to honor her work in the Seo Faction. He just wouldn't budge, kept making the argument that they had more important things to tend to than plan a funeral."

"More important things to tend to?" Mari growled, practically fuming with anger at her father's decision. "Is he out of his mind? He wasn't the one who was injured in a straight-up ambush!" Wooyoung opened his mouth to retaliate, to try and calm her down before she did something she would regret. Unfortunately, Mari wasn't a coward that wasn't afraid to get her hands dirty when she needed to. Plus, the girl was absolutely furious. She sprung up from her place on the bed a bit too fast for Wooyoung's liking, unable to stop her from storming out of the room with the force of a giant.

"Mari!" Wooyoung yelled at her as she slammed her doors closed behind her. Her face twisted with anger, her usual smile was now dropping to the floor in a deep frown of disappointment. She almost could have the same stone-cold eyes Yeosang had, that could turn even the strongest men into stone. No one would even dare jump in her way now, not when the very aura around her seemed to radiate aggression. Everyone except Wooyoung, of course. The boy came up behind with lightning speed, grabbing her wrist to stop her advance. "Mari, think about this for a second. Storming in that office with no plan won't do you any good."

The girl stopped in her tracks, snatching her arm away from Wooyoung as she gave him an annoyed glare. "Alright then. Since you're so smart what do you think I should do, hm? What does Wooyoung think is good for me this time? Do you have a better plan than telling the boss that his stupid decision of not even taking a minute to honor his wife who died without a chance to fight? Oh right, you don't." Mari let words just fly out of her mouth, her frustration as clear the nighttime sky in her tone. There wasn't anything Wooyoung could do, he had an opportunity and he didn't take it.

Now she's going to take advantage of her position to give her father a piece of her own mind. Wooyoung let out a deep sigh as if he was trying to keep himself calm in the situation and no lash out at her. "I know you're pissed off, Mari, but strutting in there with pure anger and nothing else can get you hurt a lot more than you think. You wanted to be treated like an adult, right? You want to be treated like every other person in this building right? Then he's going to treat you like one with no benefits attached. This isn't a situation where you can go in and come out completely untouched. Someone will get hurt and that someone is going to be you."

"He's right." The two turn their heads down the hallway they were standing in to find her father walking towards them. There was a sort of... hollowness in his eyes that wasn't there before, and when her father walked he brought along an icy and chilling cold wind with him, even if they were in the middle of the autumn season. He stood in front of them in strictly business attire, as if he had been out and about hopping from meeting to meeting. Mari only looked up at him with pure rage, no remorse even hidden in her eyes. This was the first time she had seen her father today after all.

"You wanted me to treat you like an adult, as a more simpler member of this faction, then so be it." He told her, leaning forward and getting all into her personal space. Mari took a few steps back to regain comfort, but her father didn't seem to care. The warmth she used to feel radiate off of him whenever she was around was completely replaced but a suppressed anger, one much greater than her. "My word is the law. There's no swaying my thinking or not my opinions, especially when it comes to these things. If you have a bone to pick with such laws, I have no problem with throwing you out to the dogs."

Mari would be lying if she said she didn't feel a shiver roll down her spine. She'd be lying if she said she wasn't slightly trembling at her own father's cold words, something she had never been faced with before. Every time he scolded her, it was all because he truly did care of her. Mari was his only daughter after all! But this one time he scolded her like she was just another soldier in the faction, there was no remorse behind his words. No warmth, no worry, no underlying hope that she'd genuinely listen this time. It was genuinely hollow.

Her father rose back up to his full height again, looking down at Wooyoung who practically grappled onto Mari the moment he pulled away. He held onto Mari's arm with a tight grip, as if once he let go she'd fly away with the wind. He gave her father a hard stare, trying to hide the glare that threatened to reveal itself just for Mari's sake. Her father smirked, almost scoffing at how easily Wooyoung was to trigger into a protective manner. "Of course, that's not why I'm here. I didn't come all the way here to give my daughter a scolding, right? I came to bring you some interesting news."

There was a confused expression that donned their faces before footsteps could be heard marching towards them in the hallway. In just a few seconds, a small group of men came down the hallway in what seemed like an attempt to a single file line, not even trying to be secretive about their arrival. One of the bigger, stronger men to be carrying a person on their shoulder, who showed no sign of struggle or fight in them. Her father cleared his throat a little louder than usual, causing the much bigger man to turn around in confusion. "This is the big news I wanted to show you. A little brat that a patrol unit had found sneaking around out turf."

The man turned to reveal the stranger to them, who seemed to be in worse shape than Mari had thought. His face was littered with purple bruises and bleeding cuts, one of his eyes left to suffer a hideous black eye that seemed to have been given to him. Thankfully the boy was still breathing, but his bruised face and ruffled up dark hair seemed to show he didn't go without a fight. "Wait a second," she mumbled, grabbing his face to inspect him a little closer. He seemed young, but not too far off from how old Mari was. In fact, he might have been just a few years younger than him, at least two years younger at best. "This is just some high school kid."

Her father shook his head, walking over the boy with a grim expression on his face. "Oh no, he isn't some harmless high school child, this isn't a school I'm running here after all." He told her, grabbing a handful of the unconscious boy's hair. He yanked his head up, examining his face closely with a deep frown on his face. "I had some of our men do a backup check on him before bringing him here. His name is Choi Jongho, and I have full reason to believe that he either participated in or watched my wife and your mother's death."

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sorry for such a messy
chapter 🤢 it's just been
way too long since this fic
updated AH