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"I wish I could say I didn't expect this, but I did." Wooyoung nodded, his shoulders beginning to tense in response to Mari's story. "It was only a matter of time before San started to understand what was going on around him. I won't lie, we have been off of our secretive game for a while."

The girl had spent thirty minutes sitting on her bed with Wooyoung, resisting the urge to let out a bloodcurdling scream every time she recalled a moment from the day before. In one singular afternoon, the day she had tried to avoid every living soul in her school, turned into what felt like a complete nightmare. Hongjoong collapsing without her knowing till the last second, his father coming and harassing the both of them, and worst of all, San exposing the fact that he knew his boss and her were related.

How long as she tried to keep up this lie to San, three or more years if she remembered correctly? There was no doubt that she had gotten comfortable, relaxing around him the closer they became. Yet that made Mari falter, blindsiding herself to all the possible hints that she had dropped to lead San to the conclusion he's come to. How many had went unseen by her and were picked by San piece by piece, helping him reveal the truth she tried so hard to lock him out of?

What's even worse was that while whatever small clues Mari and Wooyoung had left behind them could be second guessed and questioned, the scene she pulled in front of him during her catfight with Jaerin left no room for clues. The girl and the boss's actions that day could only leave one thought in the mind, that the relationship between the two was more tangled than anyone had originally thought. Had it been anyone else, they would have been punished or killed on spot for defying the boss's demands and harming a high ranking member of the faction.

But Mari? She had returned in one peace with furrowed brows and a ring on her index finger. Any other member of the faction would be dragged out of the boss's office, their blood leaving behind a trail of crimson red as they disposed of the body. If that wasn't the biggest dead giveaway to San, then she didn't know what else could be.

"What am I going to do?" She complained, running her hands through her hair aggressively, nearly pulling strands out in the process. "I'm not ready for this conversation... I was never going to be ready for this conversation! I mean... What do you think he'll say when we actually sit down and talk about this? 'Hey, I know you lied about your family for three plus years but that's okay because we're best friends'? I've already pissed off San once, I don't want to be in his line of fire again."

Wooyoung nodded, leaning his back against the girl's pillows in thought. "If he was really mad at you, you would have had a confrontation right then and there when he told you."

"But—"

"Yet he tried to keep it a secret," Her friend pointed out, not even giving her a chance to speak. "He blurted out what he knew in frustration, not because he was genuinely angry with you for keeping a secret from him for so long."

Well, he wasn't wrong. San didn't seem like he was mad at her for keeping a secret when the two had talked, more like he had been frustrated with her undermining his care for her. Mari groaned into the palm of her hands, letting herself fall back first onto the bed and resisted the screams that threatened to spill out her mouth. What was Mari so afraid of anyway? This shouldn't be that difficult for her to comprehend.

If what Wooyoung said was true, that meant that San wasn't mad at her for the secret she had tried to maintain for the entirety of their friendship. It sure felt like he should be though, she knew she'd go feral if someone else kept such an important detail like this to themselves. "San is really good at hiding his emotions," Mari countered, sitting up almost immediately at the fact. "What if he's truly pissed off at me and he's hiding it behind fake kindness?"

"Mari, you'd know if he was truly pissed off at you or not," Wooyoung reminded her, alluding back to the time Mari had really gotten on San's bad side.

Mari must be off her game today, every excuse she made was immediately counteracted by Wooyoung's logical thinking. Since when did he start using his brain? She always thought that if she rattled Wooyoung around hard enough his brain would sound like sleigh bells. "Whether you like it or not... one of you are going to confront the other about what happened yesterday."

"And I'm not ready to be confronted!" Mari complained, nearly pulling her hair out at the thought. "Usually I'm the one doing the confronting, not the confronted! What am I supposed to do? In a situation like this, no less?"

"Deal with it?" Wooyoung suggested, passing it off as a joke just before Mari could attack him. "No but seriously, you just need to figure out what you're going to say when he finally asks you about what happened. Just... tell the truth. He is your friend, right?"

The girl let her hair fall in her face as she sat up, keeping her hands in her lap to stop herself from grabbing at the strands and nearly yanking her scalp off. "We are."

"Alright then, don't be afraid to tell him the truth. I'll list a few questions he might ask and you answer them, okay?" Wooyoung offered, sitting up from where he was as Mari gave him a weak nod of approval. "Is your father really the boss of the Seo Faction."

Mari grumbled an answer, regretting agreeing to test questionnaire. "What was that? I can't hear you when you talk low, Mari."

"Yes," she grumbled a bit louder than before, annoyance bubbling up inside of her with Wooyoung's sudden attitude.

"Huh? I'm sorry you're going to have to speak up when you talk, I can barely hear a word coming out of your mouth," He complained, leaning dangerously close to her in an attempt to hear her better.

"I said yes, Jesus Christ Wooyoung!" She retaliated, shoved the boy back to where he came. "You're supposed to be helping me, not getting on my nerves!"

The boy threw his head back in laughter, nearly tumbling off the side of her bed in the process. His little mischievous giggles filled her room up like water to cup, a sound she had nearly forgotten about while spending time at Mingi's house. "I'm sorry, you're just so awkward with it all! How are you going to hold a conversation with him when you can't even answer a question coming from me? And I already know the answer!"

Mari wanted to slam her head into a wall but dropped her head into her hands instead. What was she going to do? Wooyoung was right, if she couldn't even answer a question from him how could she face San? "I'm so... so screwed."

"Do you wanna try again?" Wooyoung asked, earning an aggravated glare from the girl. Another fit of laughter escaped his mouth at her reaction, finding enjoyment in her stressed out situation. "You can either try again with me or go find San and stutter so hard that you'll just shut up and walk away."

"Wow, you're so encouraging." Mari hissed in response. He smiled at her, only finding humor in her reactions more than anything else. "At this point, I don't even want to confront him. You think I can trap myself in my room long enough for San to forget anything he's seen or heard?"

"You go to school with him Mari," Wooyoung reminded her, "You also work with him, here, in the Seo Faction. You can't run from San, he's everywhere you are. Unless you decide to run off unannounced to Hongjoong again," He told her, a bit of bitterness rolling off his tongue and a sour expression donning his face.

Mari couldn't lie, she thought about it for a moment before responding to him. "If I disappear from this house one more time without telling my father, he's really going to put me on lockdown for good. Plus I haven't spent much time with you these past few weeks and if I leave you alone again you're going to pull out your own hair from being ignored."

"You're right but you didn't need to say it." Wooyoung pouted, clenching his chest as if she had stabbed him right in the heart. "You've been leaving me alone so much more often recently, what happened to giving me all of the attention I required? I'm like a garden plant you know, I need special treatment in order to grow properly."

"You got special treatment in school yet still dropped out in our first year of high school so I don't think that statement really resonated with you," Mari nonchalantly jabbed back at him. "Plus if you were a plant, you'd be a garden weed."

Wooyoung opened his mouth to counteract her words, fight back her lighthearted insults with one of his own little concoctions of words. But then someone knocked on her door. Both of the teenagers turned their heads towards the doors, tilting their heads to the side like confused dogs. "Come in?"

The door swung open quickly, revealing a panicked and concerned Yeosang on the other side. He seemed to have just woken up, his hair tousled in all sorts of directions, and wearing mismatched clothes from head to toe. Yet at the same time, he seemed... exhausted. Exhausted as in he had been sprinting from point A to point B. The consigliere's son looked like he was on the verge of breaking a sweat, visibly breathing hard and trying to catch his breath.

"Yo," Wooyoung greeted first, looking Yeosang up and down cautiously. "Yeosang... are you...  are you okay?"

He hesitated to respond, staring at the two with the most emotion Mari had ever seen from her. Waves of disbelief and shock, mixed with a hint of anxiety hitting her like a typhoon. Yeosang's grip on the door handle tightened as he walked inside, glancing behind him to make sure no one had followed him in. "It seems we've got... a slight problem. No, slight isn't the right word. We've got a huge problem."

The two friends shared looks of confusion with each other as Yeosang ushered himself farther into her room, smoothing out the flyaways of his hair as he approached. "I was... I was in the Kang Manor earlier and my father and the Underboss were there together. They were discussing something serious and hoping that it was some sort of clue to Kim Faction's murder attempts or the target on Mari's back, I listened in."

"I swear to god if you tell me that the Underboss or the Consigliere are plotting against Mari I would literally scream," Wooyoung interrupted, rolling his eyes at the thought. The girl glared in his direction for talking out of turn, if he didn't have something useful to say he shouldn't have opened his mouth at all. Downplaying Yeosang's urgency was a horrible idea since he was truly their eyes on the close circle that followed her father.

Though the boy chuckled, trying to High his nervousness with the light hearted giggle of his laugh. "I would much rather have that be the case in all honesty. I would willingly allow you both to fight my father if given the chance."

"Good to know," Mari noted, grinning at the thought of potentially beating the Consigliere up herself. He wasn't the worst person in the universe, but the girl just didn't like adults in general. She'd jump at any chance she got to teach the adults around her a lesson.

Yeosang fidgeted around with his hands, uncharacteristically anxious compared to all the other times he shared information with them. Wooyoung seemed to pick up on the Consigliere's son's unusual nervous habit as well, going completely slight instead of making another joke of the situation. "Instead of that... there is a traitor within our ranks again, but not like the last traitor we had. They've been sharing very confidential information with the Kim Faction from what I heard the Underboss say."

"Like..." Mari trailed, rummaging around her head for a good example. "Who are our associates? Where are we getting our weaponry from?"

"Like how many soldiers we have on hand," Yeosang corrected, counting on his fingers of all he had heard. "How much our allies and associates are supplying us and what they are supplying us with, who our high ranking members are, weak points of our territory, our weakest links in the faction."

Wooyoung shuttered at the information dropped on them. "It sounds like we're preparing for war."

"It might as well be. They've got information on the Consigliere, Underboss, and of course, Mari's father," Yeosang listed, biting his lip as questions began to fester up in his head. "It's only a short amount of time before they figure out all of the Yakuza and Lee Faction's profiles and use it against us. They're planning something and they're trying to figure out who and where to attack first."

Mari nodded her head in understanding, trying to rack her brain around everything she's been told. Private information was leaking out of the Seo Faction like blood to a wound, slowly spewing out more and more as they searched for bandages to close the wound. "If someone is taking information from the Seo Faction and bringing it to the Kim Faction, that's probably how word of my mother's trip to China got out and lead to the ambush. And it's probably why they're targeting me now too, because of some bug that's been two timing us!"

"That's a very likely answer, but I don't know about the second part of your statement," Yeosang told her, crossing his arms as he thought for a moment. "When you began to do work for the Seo Faction, you were listened to as a soldier. Your specific connection to the Boss isn't even mentioned in any sort of legal documents for the Seo Faction. So as far as the Kim Faction knows, you and the boss's daughter are two entirely different people."

"So why the hell am I being targeted? And by some new unknown unit no less," She grumbled, falling back into the bed. Just when she thought he had some sort of lead on her situation she was right back to square one.

The boy snorted at her frustration, side eyeing her as he spoke, "I don't blame them for trying to kill you, you're so annoying and stubborn that I'd want you eradicated from existence too,"

Mari immediately shoved as hard as possible, nearly throwing him off of the bed and onto the ground. He landed with a heavy thud, yelping at the sudden shock of pain that shot up from his shoulder. "Now is not the time to be making jokes like that! What if someone heard you and took you seriously? There are people out there that are malicious enough to twist your words into something sinister you know."

"Your doors are closed," He grumbled, laying out on the ground for a few more seconds before forcing himself up. "No one can take my words wrong if they can't hear me."

"Unfortunately there's more to this growing problem then than just having our information leaked out," Yeosang noted, making both Mari and Wooyoung whip their heads around to him. There was more than Yeosang was letting on? There was already a traitor in their ranks willingly giving out crucial information to the Kim Faction that could start out an all-out war. This would be the peak of both faction's rivalry and a very bloody one at that. What could add on more problems than being on the verge of all out underground warfare?

"We've picked you little bits of information about the unknown unit that's targeting Mari," He explained. "We don't know enough about the men who are in said unit, the Kim Faction has been extremely careful with who they're handing their knowledge to. But upon further investigation of the place your mother was ambushed and your incident at the now burned down Utopia, I think it's safe to say that these two situations are connected. Meaning the same people who are targeting Mari now in an attempt to kidnap or murder her were also the same people who had nearly killed San and brought your mother to her demise."

"That means this group targeting Mari isn't a new unit after all," Wooyoung realized, his eyes widening at the thought. "It's an assassination division, they've been planning our downfall before we even knew of their existence. And they probably want to use Mari as a way to break into the Seo Faction's defenses and kill off the boss themselves."

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sorry for such a short
and kinda confusing
chapter ;; the writer's
block as been hitting
me so hard recently ^^ ;;
anyways make sure u
change ur passwords on
your devices since wattpad
decided fo screw us over
and get hacked. Take
care everyone !! — zero