"Auntie?"
You gazed up at the woman sitting behind the desk. Even though you hadn't seen your aunt in over a decade, you knew it was her. She looked the same, but her age was starting to show. She still looked as beautiful as you remembered. She gave you a warm smile, her eyes crinkling at the corners.
"It's been a long time, (Y/N)," she said, beckoning you forward. "Come closer so I can get a good look at you."
You stepped forward into the room, your feet heavier than lead bricks. You wiped the tears away from your eyes, not wanting to embarrass yourself in front of your aunt.
It's been ten years. I can't believe it's been ten years.
"Jimin tells me that your Korean has gotten much better since you got here," she said. "It seems like you're getting closer and closer to being fluent."
"I'm not that good," you said, immediately shaking your head. "It's just been a very stressful week."
"Nonsense," Jimin said, rolling his eyes at you. "Your speaking skill has improved a lot since you first got here."
"That outfit looks very nice on you too," she nodded approvingly. "You made a good selection, Mark."
"It was nothing," Mark said, instantly dismissing the compliment.
"You've grown up so beautifully," your aunt said, scanning your figure once you were close enough to her. "If you wanted to, you could become a makeup model for the company."
"You might even be able to put me out of a job," Chaerin agreed, earning a smile from you.
"You shouldn't say things like that," your aunt chided, waving her arm at Chaerin. "She can take Minzy's spot. She quit just a few months ago."
"I don't know that I'd like that," you chuckled, dismissing their compliments with a wave of your hand. "I'm fine as I am."
"You must have so many questions for us," your aunt sighed, sadly shaking her head. "I can't believe that it had to happen this way. Please, take a seat."
She motioned to a chair that was sitting just in front of the desk. You nodded your head and stepped forward. You sat down and looked up at her, waiting for the final explanation.
I'm ready for the truth.
"Ah, where should we start?" Jimin asked, running his hand through his hair. "There's so much we have to talk about."
"How about at the beginning--no--before I even got here," you suggested. "I want to know why I'm here."
"That's a good place to start," your aunt said, nodding her head in agreement.
"Before you were born, your father and I were very close," your aunt said, her voice turning solemn. "But, there was always a difference between us. He was more family-oriented than I was, but I always had better luck with money than he did."
What does this have to do with anything?
"I made some smart investments once I got out of college, and I earned a large sum of money because of them," she continued. "I helped your father to pay off some of his debts. Hell, I even helped him pay for his wedding. That's how much money I had laying around."
"He promised me that one day, he'd pay me back somehow, but I knew he would never be able to get enough money to do so," she chuckled, shaking her head at herself. "So, I told him that one day I would let him know what I wanted from him. It would have nothing to do with money, but that I would want something of significance."
"That's when he started becoming more of a family man," she said, her eyes turning stony and cold all of a sudden. "He was spending more time with his wife, your mother, than me. That was the first real time that I had felt alone in this world. I was his only sister, his twin sister."
"Then, you were born," she said. "You were the most beautiful baby I had ever seen. You still are. I could see the love in your father's eyes as he held you. I knew that money couldn't buy anything this precious. It made me rethink my life and wonder about the truth behind my riches."
"Over time, I grew to accept the idea of love. I even wanted a family of my own," she said, her voice becoming wistful despite the coldness in her eyes. "But, things weren't necessarily meant to happen that way. At least, not for me."
"What happened?" You asked, taken aback by how sad she sounded.
"When I was in my late twenties, I learned that I was infertile," she said. "I lost the love of my life because of it, even though I suggested adoption. I lost the guiding force in my life. The only thing that I had left was my money and your family. But ironically, your father wanted nothing to do with my money anymore. He didn't want to worsen his debt to me."
"Eventually, I grew very depressed. There was a three-year period where I rarely left my house and spent my time hiding among my riches," she said. "I was forced to go through therapy, which ended up helping me figure out what I wanted to do with my life."
"When you were still just a little girl, I moved to South Korea, taking everything important I had with me," she said. "Your father took you to come see me off at the airport. Do you remember?"
You thought back to the last day you saw your aunt all those years ago. You remembered waving goodbye, not realizing that she would never set foot in the United States again. Now you were older, and not as naive.
"I remember," you said, nodding your head in response.
"You were only seven years old," she quietly murmured, shaking her head. "I can't believe that so much time has passed. But, back to the story."
"After a couple of months of living here, I didn't feel much different," she continued. "It didn't seem like the change of scenery was doing me any good. But of course, my new life was just beginning."
"One day, I was riding the trains through Gwangju when I met a woman who was looking for people to model her new line of makeup for her company, 2NE1," she chuckled, a faint smile creeping onto her lips. "I felt that I had nothing to lose, so I volunteered to help her. I was one of about a hundred people in the country."
"When I came to Seoul to work for her, I was surprised with the amount of competition I received from all the other girls," your aunt said, her eyes widening as if she were actually reliving the memory. "They all kept going on and on about something special that would happen if you were one of the best models in the company. So, I slowly worked my way up to the top of the food chain. It wasn't as hard as I thought it would be because I was the "pretty foreign girl."
"It took me about two months to reach the top," your aunt said, leaning back in her chair. "I was there with four other girls, Chaerin being one of them."
"We quickly realized the awful secrets about being the top models in the corporation," Chaerin said, a shiver running down her spine. "We all wanted to quit, but by then we had already learned too much."
"2NE1 wasn't just about makeup," your aunt said, her eyes going dark. "That's something that the five of us realized very quickly."
"What do you mean?" You asked.
"We were gaining wealth, and very quickly," your aunt continued. "It was almost unbelievable how fast the company was growing. But we weren't making all the money from selling makeup like the company lead us to believe."
"The CEO of the company was the head of an underground drug ring that had been escaping the police for months," Chaerin said, shaking her head as she ran her hand through her hair. "Most of the money that the company had ever earned came from those drugs. The makeup was just the exterior."
"They forced the five of us to make deliveries, or they would have us killed," your aunt said, her eyes glassy. "We would have photoshoots, and then we'd have to go make the deliveries. We would go out to have lunch together, and we'd come back only to be told to make more deliveries. It's a wonder we never got caught."
"That's when we decided that we'd had enough," she said, lowering her voice. "We were going to fix the company. We were going to make it clean again."
"We made some impulsive decisions, and we went to see some people that we should never have gone to," Chaerin said, leaning against the desk. "We couldn't go to the police without losing our jobs, maybe even our lives, so we went to the only people that we felt could protect us."
Both your aunt and Chaerin looked over at Jaebum. He nodded and stepped forward, realizing that it was now his turn to talk.
"Long ago, Junior, Jackson, Mark, Yugyeom, and I all worked for BTS," he slowly explained. "This was back when Jackson was still Namjoon's second in command, and before the scandals with the money and everything."
"You went to BTS?" You asked, looking at your aunt in shock.
"We were a very young gang at the time, but we were one of the biggest ones in Seoul," Jaebum said, drawing your attention back to him. "Since then, they've been driven out of Seoul, and half of us seceded to form GOT7."
"The five of you are GOT7?" You asked, looking at the five men in the room, aside from Jiyong, who was standing quite far away from the rest of the group.
"There are seven of us, but we're not all here," Jackson explained. "The only people you haven't met are Youngjae and Bambam. They had to go take care of something."
"Bambam?" You snorted at the name. "What kind of name is Bambam?"
"It's more of a nickname," Junior explained. "Besides, you probably wouldn't be able to pronounce his real name."
Jaebum stepped forward and cleared his throat before you had a chance to ask any more questions. He quickly made sure that everyone was focusing on the story again.
"Yes, they came to us, but things didn't start out very well," Jaebum said, scratching the back of his head. "Half of us wanted to help, but the other half of us didn't. They thought it wasn't worth our time to cause trouble when we were so young."
"So what happened?" You asked. "Who wanted to help?"
"There was a group of eight people that wanted to help," Junior said, taking over for Jaebum. "All of us were there."
"Jimin too?" You asked, motioning to him with your head.
"Of course, me too," he chuckled, shaking his head at you. "Who else do you think it would have been?"
I don't know. I just wanted to be sure.
"While I was his second in command, there were nights when Namjoon and I would split duties between the two of us, and we would take half of the men with each of us," Jackson said, picking up where Junior left off. "There was one night when we didn't have very much to do, so the eight of us decided to go and see what we could do to help 2NE1."
"We were so grateful when they came into the office," Chaerin said, "We had already tried going to them a few times before, so we instantly recognized them."
"The five of us went out for a walk with all of them, and we figured out what we wanted to happen and how we wanted it to happen," your aunt said, nodding her head in agreement. "It didn't take very long; we weren't very picky about what we wanted."
"The deal was that we would make the CEO and everyone involved in the drug ring disappear," Jackson said, checking his fingernails with a smile on his face. "Everything was on our terms; they didn't care how we dealt with their little problem. They each gave us one million and told us that they didn't want to hear from us until they knew that they were safe."
"We were much more polite than that," your aunt said, rolling her eyes at Jackson's exaggerated statements. "We knew that we were going to be forever in their debt if they could pull it off for us."
"We had it all taken care of by the end of the week," Jimin said. "The company was free, and we had our money, and best of all, it looked like an accident. Namjoon never learned about what we did."
"The five of us pooled together all of our money and bought out the company before another bigger company could," your aunt said, holding her head in her hands. "We lost so much money. We fired a lot of the models that had come to work for the company over the years. Others ended up quitting once they realized that they weren't getting paid near as much."
"By the end of the year, we only had four models," she continued. "I was placed in charge of the company because I was the only one who had any education that went past high school."
"Sandara, Minzy, Park, and I spent most of our time modeling," Chaerin said. "We tried our hardest to make it look like the company wasn't suffering. But, that's hard to do when you have only four models. We couldn't be everywhere, but we damn well tried to be."
"After a couple of months, we started gaining more popularity and security with the smart business choices that I made," your aunt said. "Soon enough, the company was making money again. We started hiring models again, and we paid them more than we ever got."
"We kept tabs on them for a little while, just to make sure that there wasn't any more trouble with any drug rings," Mark said, clearing his throat and finally speaking up.
"You weren't very sly about it," Chaerin snorted, shaking her head at him. "Every few weeks, one of you would be loitering in the lobby, talking to the younger girls until one of us came to greet you."
"They helped us to make sure that the company was back on its feet, too," your aunt said. "They proposed several ideas to us, like the possibility of naming an....heir...." her voice trailed off at the last second.
"But there was one day when we all came in to see them," Mark continued. "There was something that we all wanted, and we hoped that they would be able to help us."
"Like what?"
"Somewhere along that way, we grew tired of how Namjoon was choosing to run BTS," Jackson said. "We wanted to break away and form our own group, but we didn't have much money to support ourselves."
"So, we came to an agreement," your aunt said, her eyes flickering from Jackson to you. "They wanted a place to work, and we had the money that they wanted."
"Our conditions were that we listened to their orders, when they gave them, and we protected them," Jackson said. "In return, they gave us all a place to stay and a stable source of income."
"We didn't immediately leave, because that would have caused suspicion a lot of suspicion and hate towards us," Jaebum said. "But, over the past few months, we were forced to secede because of our own decisions."
"That's because you started smuggling money, right?" You asked, looking over at Jackson.
"Smuggling is a very negative word," Jackson said, holding his hand on his chest as if he was offended. "But yes, that's when I started taking the money. I can assure you that there was a good enough reason."
"Can you explain why you took it, then?" You asked.
"Well, you see--"
"I'll explain this," your aunt said, holding her hand out to stop him from talking. "It needs to come from me."
Jackson nodded his head and stepped away from the desk, letting your aunt take over. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, then looked up at you.
"There were two reasons that I had him take the money," she said, keeping eye contact with you. "The first reason being I wanted to give them a chance to secede from BTS without any suspicion of myself or this company being involved."
Her breath caught in her throat. You watched as her eyes became glassy and fragile as if her next words would break her. She looked up at you and you watched as a single tear fell down her cheek.
"What was the other reason?" You asked, your voice gently and soft.
"I wanted your father to forgive me."
You were silent as you slowly realized what she meant. Everything began to make sense.
Why your aunt asked for you, and only you.
Why Jackson left the money in an American bank.
Why your parents were crying so hard the day that you left.
Why Namjoon truly believed that you were so valuable.
Why so many people were focused on protecting you.
"You named me the heir of the company."
At that moment, the phone sitting on her desk rang, piercing through the silence in the room. You looked down at the phone and waited for someone to finally make a move. Jaebum carefully pressed one of the buttons on the receiver, putting the phone on speaker.
"Well, I'm glad that you've finally figured out what's going on, Princess."
You felt your heart stop in your chest. You looked up at your aunt, and she had the same look of fear in her eyes that you did. Without waiting for her to say anything, all of the boys instantly left the tableside.
"How the fuck is he still alive?" Jimin screamed, hitting the tabletop and voicing your own thoughts.
"You would not believe what kinds of torture I've had to go through in the past couple hours," Namjoon breathed into the receiver. "But, thanks to the bug Yoongi planted on you earlier today, I know enough."
Jaebum stopped in his tracks and looked over at you. He reached around to the back of your neck and pulled off a small metallic button. You widened your eyes, realizing that he had heard everything.
"Son of a bitch," Jaebum spat, throwing the bug onto the floor and crushing it with the heel of his boot.
"I found out that he'll do anything to get me back on his side," Namjoon said. "Even if that includes making a girl think that he's in love with her. Within reason, of course. I wouldn't want my prize girl falling in love with him, now would I?"
Jimin angrily shook his head and left the room. You watched as the boys all started to pull large, dangerous-looking guns out of nowhere. You could feel the panic start to rise in your chest.
"So, I'm going to make this very simple, Princess," he chuckled, clearly angered to the point of insanity. "You have a choice with two options."
"You either walk out of this building with me, or I kill everyone inside. You have three minutes before we storm the building."