DESTINED

ONE

Taehyung stood with his hands pocketed, bored while several of his father's guards kept fussing around in their firm's boardroom, preparing for a meeting that's, no doubt, going to turn into a disaster.

If he wasn't standing under his father's enterprise, he would have, probably, been out partying to take his mind off things. Things like how fitting it would have been if he weren't born into this corporate world.

His father, Kim Taewoo, the founder of the Kim Co Ltd, is a gentleman in the business sector, yet his father is well known for his skill in achieving his ends by deceit. Kim Taewoo had learned to play his cards well from a young age, since he was only seventeen when Taehyung's grandfather, the elder Kim, entrusted the Kim family's future into his hands.

Ruthless was Mr. Kim to the establishments that fell prey to his father's deceptive tactics. Kim Taewoo stood his ground when everything around him fell apart, when everyone around him disapproved, expressed their disdain, saying something critical shouldn't be trampled at the hands of the youth. Taewoo proved them wrong, though. It's evident from where he is standing, at the pinnacle of accomplishments he has his foot on.

Taehyung spent a better part of his teenage years looking up to the man who was his father. He was Taehyung's role model, the man who led a life that everyone around him was quite envious of. He boasted, with excessive admiration for his father to his friends, believing the path that his father treaded wasn't full of roses. His father fought for his place in this world and if Taewoo was a self-entitled prick, it was because his father was privileged to prevail.

It took twelve long years for the reality to come crashing down for him. For more than half of his life, Taehyung went with the notion that what his father did, be it the illegal trading or the violent crimes that got buried to secure his place in this world, was right.

Taehyung thought he could justify his father ordering to kill an employee who had infiltrated their firm under the guise of their old connections because that person could have murdered his father and got away with it. But will that defend his father who have ordered to get that poor man's whole family killed and to be staged it as an accidental fire?

Taehyung had learned the truth of it from secretly listening to Taewoo's personal Hitman, a sturdy man in his thirties with a weird beard that had haunted Taehyung's dreams for years. That was the day Taehyung had cried with a heavy heart for the family that got ruined with his father's hand, wept for the dreams that were crushed so he and his family could live safely.

At nights, when guilt threatens to consume him entirely, he will admit, miserable and depressed that he would have been an orphan if his father didn't intervene to dispose his foes.

Taehyung was only thirteen the first time he felt resentment for being called as Kim Taewoo's son. His father stood on a domain he made by silencing every hand that rose to defy him, and Taehyung pitied Kim Taewoo for it. Taehyung knew his father wasn't a compassionate man, so it wasn't groundbreaking to realize his father's hostility sometimes extended to him as well. What was he thinking that he could get into the almighty Kim Taewoo's good book without a fight, just because he was his only son? Taewoo doesn't have a single good bone in his body, and Taehyung will only be damned if his father acknowledges his presence.

However, his father has always been a doting husband to his wife, Lee Dami. This makes Taehyung think he was the only thorn in Taewoo's eyes, the one that his father watered only to strike him in the back. The prince who strayed from his father's kingdom searching for peace.

Kim Taewoo wasn't the reason Taehyung decided to stick around. It was his mother, the kind, beautiful Dami. She is the only thread that still tries to hold the burning ends of Taehyung's already fragile bond with his father. If not for her insistence and teary eyes, Taehyung would have seriously considered deserting the hellhole he grew up in. Maybe if she had given the green light decades ago, he would have whisked her away too. Dami would be one hard person to convince running away, given she is still in love with his tyrant father, but there's a chance she might choose her son over her husband. Or perhaps Taehyung is being unrealistic.