We didn't even make it through the bank's front doors.
A hand landed on my shoulder. Another on Junha's. Heavy, familiar, and the last thing I expected — because the last time I'd felt that exact weight I'd been a different age, in a different world, and the man it belonged to had been—
I turned around.
Dad.
Kim Suho, standing on the bank steps in his good coat, one eyebrow up, looking at his two sons like he'd caught us with our hands in his wallet.
That's the thing — I hadn't braced for him. I'd spent a thousand years bracing for the faces in that living room. But my father, somewhere across all those years, I'd folded away into a place I didn't let myself look anymore. I'm not ready to say why. Not even now. And here he was, solid and breathing and irritated, his hand on my shoulder like no time had passed at all, and it nearly took my legs out from under me.
I kept it off my face. Mostly.
"So this is where my boys wander off to," he said, dry as old paper. "And you'd be amazed what a man hears when his own children try to mortgage his house. I've got friends in every bank on this street." He clicked his tongue. "Care to explain yourselves?"
"D-dad—" And there it went, twenty-eight years old and instantly nine again. "It's — it's for supplies. Weapons. To get us ready for what's coming." I made myself straighten up and played the only card that might shut him up. "And anyway, you're hardly the one to lecture me about staying clean. Aren't you a gangster?"
Dad choked on air.
Beside me, Junha's head snapped around so fast I heard it. "He's a WHAT?"
"You little—" Suho recovered, dropping his voice, eyes flicking up and down the street out of pure habit. "Where in God's name did you hear that?"
"Your phone call," I said.
Which was a lie. I'd heard it the long way — a whole lifetime the long way. But I overheard you was a story he could live with, and I watched the world end and came back was not.
He held my eyes for a long second. Whatever he found in mine, I'll never know. But the lecture died in his throat, and something in him just decided.
"...Fine," he said. "Inside. Both of you. If we're doing something this stupid, we do it properly."
So the three of us walked into that bank together, and we mortgaged everything — the house, the land, every last brick the Kim name owned — and walked back out with more cash than any of us had a right to carry in daylight. The teller's hands shook. Mine didn't. I'd done harder things with steadier hands.
Out on the steps, I turned to him. "Dad. One more thing. The underground market — the real one. Take me there."
He went quiet. Studied me a beat too long, like he was trying to work out which of his sons this actually was.
"...You're not the boy who left the house this morning," he muttered. Then, louder: "Get in the car."
The place he took us to didn't have a sign. Didn't have windows. You went down a stairwell that smelled like damp concrete and gun oil, through a door that cost a password and a face the guard recognized — and my father's face, it turned out, opened every one of them.
A man was waiting at the bottom. Broad, a scar splitting one eyebrow, wearing the particular calm of someone used to being the most dangerous person in the room.
He clapped my father on the back. "Suho. Didn't think I'd see you down here twice in a week."
"Park." Dad nodded. "My sons. This is Henry — old partner of mine." A glance at us. "Don't insult him. Don't try to be clever."
Park Henry looked the two of us over, amused — and then watched me start pointing at the shelves.
I bought almost the whole room. Two-thirds of it by the time I was finished — rifles, sidearms, ammunition by the crate, anything that put metal between my family and what was coming. I knew exactly what we'd need, down to the box, because I'd run out of every bit of it before, in a war these men couldn't begin to picture.
By the time I stopped, the whole place had gone silent, watching me empty it.
Park Henry let out a low whistle. "...You boys headed to war or something, Suho?"
"Something like that," Dad said. He didn't smile. "Honestly, Park — you'd be smart to stock up yourself. Soon."
Henry looked at him. Then at the mountain of crates with my name on it. And maybe he caught something under my father's voice — the same way Suho had caught something under mine.
"...All right," he said, quiet. "All right."
We loaded it all into the car until the suspension sat low to the road, and we drove home — three Kim men and an arsenal, through a city that still believed it had years left.
Nobody said much. Dad kept catching my eye in the rearview, the question sitting right there behind his teeth, and not once making it out.
I let him look. I had everything I needed now. The people. The money. The guns. The family. The warning. Everything I'd have killed for, the first time around — and the first time around, I had none of it.
This time, I told myself, watching the ordinary streets slide past the window. This time it goes differently.
— To be continued.