Share Targets

Share Targets

I looked up at him.

"Your grandmother wants to meet this girl," he said. "I cannot stop her from wanting things. But I will tell you this plainly, Nathan, so there is no confusion between us." His eyes were steady and cold and not without love, which somehow made it worse. "There is nothing she will see in this woman that will convince me. Nothing. She has no name, no family, no standing. She cannot be your wife. Not in this family. Not in either version of this family."

The last part landed the way he intended it to.

Either version. The one that was legal and the other one that's not.

"You will marry someone appropriate," he said. "An aristocrat. Someone whose bloodline I can verify and whose loyalty I can trust. You will give this family an heir. And you will do it before this situation becomes something the press decides to narrate for us." He straightened. "Or."

He let the word sit.

"You will be removed from the family name. The underground name. Everything that was built before you — before your father — before me. You will be cut from it completely."

The office was very quiet.

I looked at him for a long moment. Then I leaned back in my chair and felt something at the corner of my mouth that wasn't quite a smile as I looked at my grandfather with hooded eyes.

"That threat," I said, "doesn't work on me, Grandfather."

His eyes narrowed.

"Everything established in the last four years is under my name and Grandmother's." I kept my voice even, almost bored. "The new holdings. The clean acquisitions. The legal infrastructure that keeps the other half from collapsing." I tilted my head slightly. "Without the Kang family name, I am still Nathan. I built what I built. I do what I want." I held his gaze. "Whether you accept her or not– I really don't care. You should know by now that we are not like other chaebol families."

The silence that followed was a different kind.

My grandfather looked at me for a long moment. The way he used to look at me when I was seventeen and he first understood that the boy he'd handed to his brother to shape had come back as something neither of them had fully planned for.

Then he straightened his jacket, picked up his newspaper from my desk, and moved toward the door.

He paused with his hand on the handle.

"Then prepare," he said quietly, without turning around, "for me to make her life very difficult."

The door closed behind him.

I stayed where I was. Coffee going cold on the desk. The skyline indifferent outside the glass.

‘Make her life difficult.’

As if he could. I scoffed. Grandfather always thought he had every power over his grandsons. He may be able to control theirs, but I have always been a challenged. There was something about Lily that I could not just let go. And that memory…

I picked up my phone and opened Jessica's contact.

Typed: Accelerate the Quinn background report. Use the dark web connections if need me. And flag anything that connects to my grandfather's network, eradicate it.

I set the phone down, took a deep breath as I looked at the ceiling. The steady aching beat behind my left eye continued even with the tense conversation that had just happened.

She hadn't asked me for protection. She hadn't asked me for anything beyond a transaction — money for a role, clean and simple, no complications.

But my grandfather had just made her a target.

And I didn't share my targets.