The days had begun to blur together.
Time had stopped meaning anything—days blurred into nights, nights into dawns—until even Taeyong no longer couldn't remembered when he had last slept more than an hour at a time.
The villa no longer felt like home.
The living room had been turned into a war room.
Maps of the city were covered every table in the house, or were pinned to boards marked with red circles, pinned together with handwritten notes and photographs. CCTV stills, blurry street cameras, traffic intersections, subway exits, parking garages. Names and faces were scribbled in the margins—people who might have seen something. People who probably hadn’t.
Red strings crossed each other chaotically, connecting places they had searched, leads that had died, tips that had gone nowhere. Phones were constantly charging, constantly ringing, constantly disappointing.
Still, Taeyong chased every possibility.
Hyunseong was five.
Five years old.
Every time Taeyong let that number sink in, something inside his chest cracked a little more.
He had failed.
Because he had promised his sister to protect him.
That thought followed him everywhere.
Panic had wrapped its fingers around his throat and refused to let go.
And finally—terror.
The kind that hollowed him out from the inside.
Three weeks.
That was how long Hyunseong had been gone.
Three weeks of sleepless nights, cold coffee, unfinished meals, bloodshot eyes and tension so thick it clung to the walls of the villa like smoke after a fire.
The first week after Hyunseong vanished felt unreal.
At first, Taeyong had refused to believe that his nephew was truly gone. Missing, yes. Taken, no. Children wandered off, misunderstandings happened, doors were left open by accident—there had to be a logical explanation. Something small. Something fixable.
He clung to that belief for exactly three days.
By the fourth night, reality had dug its claws into him.
He knew his nephew better than that.
Hyunseong was five years old and too young to understand danger, but his sister taught him —and Taeyong himself as well— that he should never trust people other than his uncles and parents.
The first days after Hyunseong disappeared had been frantic but focused.
Taeyong coped the only way he knew how at first: by doing.
He barely sat down. Barely ate. Barely spoke unless necessary. He had gone into autopilot, the same cold, sharp, commanding leader the underworld knew him to be.
Orders had been barked,teams reorganized to check the same locations over and over again as if repetition might force reality to bend. Contacts had been activated, money moved. Johnny and Jaehyun had coordinated searches while Doyoung and Jungwoo worked their networks. YangYang and Chenle monitored underground chatter, Sungchan barely leaving his phone for even a second.
They had searched abandoned warehouses, docks, empty apartments. They had questioned people who owed them favors—and people who didn’t. They had paid informants, leaned on old enemies, crossed lines they had sworn to never cross again.
Nothing.
No ransom demand.
No threats.
