Book 1
Previously named as mafias chubby bride
[𝐂𝐎𝐌𝐏𝐋𝐄𝐓𝐄𝐃 ✔️] (rewriting)
Exuvia;
❝Shedding the past, being reborn into something new, even if painful.❞
He's a dangerous mafia boss.
She's a sweet, calm artist with a tender heart.
In a worl...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
★・・・・・・★
A S H L E Y
I pad into the room on tiptoe, heart a drum in my throat. The bed is empty — his scent still clinging to the pillow — and from the bathroom comes the steady patter of the shower. He’s in there, steam swallowing his silhouette; perfect. I swallow and let my feet move.
This is everything. Jimin’s words loop in my head: Open the last door in Jungkook’s closet.
The closet yawns at me like a mouth. Clothes — suits, shirts, jackets — hang like soldiers. I nudge hangers aside and press my palm along the back panel. For a second nothing, then a faint give. A seam hides a panel. My fingers tremble as I find the latch and pull.
A narrow crawlspace yawns open. Dim light from the hall slants inside. My breath fogs for a beat and then I slide through, knees bumping into cheap carpet. The air smells faintly of paper and oil and something metallic — the exact stink of secrets.
Files. Boxes. A hard drive taped with masking tape. Manilla folders stamped with dates and coded project names. I pull one free and my pulse trips — shipping manifests, invoices, ledger pages listing payments with names I don’t know and bank accounts traced to shell companies. Each line is a lie disguised as art: “installation fee,” “donation,” “exhibition costs.” Beside them, documents marked CONFIDENTIAL with the Lord’s seal — contracts transferring artwork titles the day before illicit shipments left the warehouses beneath the galleries.
My hands go colder as I flip more pages. Photographs fall from a folder: crates labeled with my gallery’s logo, men unloading boxes into trucks at two in the morning, CCTV stills of people entering hidden basement doors. There are receipts for crates shipped to ports I recognize from news segments; “medical supplies” that, when matched with other files, become weapons manifests. There’s a ledger with my name — my exhibitions listed as front operations for money laundering, human cargo movement coded under floral variety names.
I find a binder with participant lists — charities, donors, trustees — the same people who smiled at me from the crowd. There are email chains: polite requests from the Lord’s office to “ensure the exhibit provides ample cover” and a forwarded shipment approval signed on company letterhead. My stomach drops. My paint-stained fingers shake.
I unzip a little pouch and find a portable drive. Jimin was right: it’s all here. Videos, transfers, photographic proof. My art — my hands, my blood on canvas — used as a mask for someone else’s filth.
For a long, trembling second I just sit in the crawlspace, clutching a stack of papers to my chest like a confession. Heat rises behind my eyes. Rage. Shame. A fierce, fierce love for the man whose name is on the foot of every file: Jungkook.
