House of Cards ||Vminkook

Chapter 15: Does It Hurt, Baby?

Since the news had broken last night Namjoon had been following it religiously. If he wasn't following it all on a TV of some kind then it was on his laptop or his phone; constantly checking the headlines and relevant sections to try and find what he was looking for. In the past he had followed important news stories often but nowhere near as often as this. This was something else, something a lot more personal than the other world-changing events that had happened over the last few years because this would change his world. Possibly permanently. That was why he couldn't seem to stop checking even when it was driving him crazy. Yet Namjoon knew that he couldn't just focus on his work when something this massive had occurred.

There had been an attack on a casino in Singapore, one that was currently being labelled a terrorist attack by all major news outlets. According to the reports that had come out so far a gang of armed gunmen had opened fire on people inside, shooting the place up and causing mass chaos. The number of attackers was so far undetermined and there were at least thirty-five confirmed deaths and near a hundred injuries so far, some of which were potentially fatal. Yet there was no mention of who the dead were, just details about the location that the attack had occurred at. It hadn't been just any casino but The Gold Monkey casino of course. Haedogje Pa owned, the exact same one that he knew The Boy and Taehyung had boarded a plane to go to at some point in the late evening hours. If that wasn't the worst kind of knowledge to have then Namjoon didn't know what was. He did know that waiting to find out more was even more painful and a part of him wasn't entirely certain if he would have preferred to have not known that Taehyung was in Singapore or if knowing was better; could prepare him for a possible blow.

He was taking a slight break currently, hanging around the small break room on the ground-floor of the station. He wasn't interested in the fresh coffee on offer nor talking to the couple of other officers inside but rather the small TV stuck in one of the corners of the room ceiling. It was set high on a wall bracket and usually always turned to one of several news stations. Namjoon hadn't taken his eyes off the screen, eyeing the red rolling tape without blinking. So far over the past twenty minutes he had seen various stories hastily covered, the main focus shifting constantly back to the 'Singapore Shootout' as it was being labelled. The most popular clip so far seemed to be an interview with a witness to it all, a rather attractive female foreigner who had clearly been enjoying a holiday when all hell had broken loose.

" There were a lot of men, " the translator spoke over the woman. Her tone was rather flat and at odds with the frantic gestures of the witness on the screen. " They were wearing suits and had guns. They opened fire on one of the balconies and then things went crazy. I think men started firing back at them. I don't know if they were security personnel or rivals. I think it might have been gangsters or something like that. Or drug lords. " The reporter asked the woman how she was feeling and Namjoon could practically mine along with her reply in both Korean and English. " Terrified, I'm absolutely terrified ."

He closed his eyes and let his breath out in a weary sigh. It had been late in the night when he had received information from Sungah about how something had been going on with Taehyung and The Boy, something rather noteworthy. She had been rather dangerously watching their apartment building in Gangnam-gu on her own self-imposed night shift and she had decided to risk tailing the vehicle that they had left in. Unlike Hoseok she had been lucky and had managed to track them all the way to an airport without incident, and from that point she had snooped around and managed to snag a few blurry shots of Jungkook and Taehyung before they had boarded a private plane to Singapore. The second Taehyung had stepped foot through the security checkpoints had been the last time any of the team had seen him alive and right now they had no clue what that meant exactly.

Thirty-five deaths and one of those could be Taehyung. Another could be Jungkook too, and as much as Namjoon hated admitting it he also prayed that he wasn't one of them. That would fuck up the entire mission and this had been several hard months of training, preparation and actions that couldn't go to waste, and even more years waiting for the opportunity to arise for the department. He needed The Boy alive because that raised the chances of Taehyung being alive but there was still nothing on the circuit letting him know what had happened to them both. Watching the news over and over and seeing no updates wasn't exactly good, wasn't exactly healthy, but he couldn't help it. He needed to know the second that news broke if Taehyung was a casualty or not, and only then could he truly rest.