The war had begun decades ago.

Yoo Myung Sung sets the water running and washes her hands as she thinks. In the mirror over the faucet she could see herself, if she stopped enough, she could see her battle worn face. There are bags under her eyes, the pallor of her face, her sunken eyes - she didn’t look like that before the war had begun.

She washes her hands again and again trying to think - regrouping - cutting the losses. It was what she was best at, she reminds herself. Rising from the ashes. And this is just another battle - the war is far from over.

At first it had been against her father. The man she hated to the tips of his silvery hair. The control, the demand, the need to make an example out of her - she had wanted to escape that. It was the simple case of a caged bird when she was young. He decided what she wore - whether it suited the family image, the style of her hair, the courses she took at school.

She flew away at the first chance and fell in love. It felt like the road to freedom - even for a little while. She thinks of it now and wonders if - but the thought leads no further. Myung Sung does not have an imagination, somewhere down this twisted path her soul had curled and blackened and lost its softness. She can no longer imagine riding into sunsets like she had - before the war.

It was her father who brought the first battle to her door, catching her unaware, shuttering her bubble. The man she had loved was no prince of fairy-tales. Ready to fight the dragons that kept her in. Instead he had shackles of his own, expectations, greed - he loved her - but not enough to choose her at the risk of forsaking his family.

She could have given him a new family - she remembers that hope - it is a faint memory, of all good and fragile things that she were. They crushed it rather brutally - her family was cruel like that.

“Your baby was stillborn.”

There had been no emotions on her father’s face as he announced, his cold eyes piercing her soul - catching her unguarded - unarmed and unaware - plunging the sharp edge of his words to the core of her heart. She believed him and lost that first battle.

There is something addictive about love. That makes you relapse, go back to trust the people who stabbed you in the back. There is something seductive about love, that lulls your logic into an oblivion. Otherwise she wouldn’t still love the same man who had forsaken her for his father’s wealth and married the woman his family had chosen.

He just wanted his father’s money. He was nothing without it - without the family name backing him up. It was not just for him - it was for her too. He could give her the life she was used to - the life she deserved - the life of a queen! He would divorce that woman as soon as he gets the money - it could be any day now - they just had to hold on for a little while.

And she fell into the same pothole of hopes and dreams and trust - foolish of her, she could see now.

“No one prays for the devil, darling daughter,” her father had sounded vindictive. There was no warmth behind his words of endearment. “Although he is the greatest sinner in the world. Because second chances are not given to repeat the same mistake more elaborately.”

“We don’t have time!” She tells him desperately. Her memory fails her when she tries to recall how she had escaped the clutches of her home, a few stolen moments where they were face to face. “You don’t have anything to worry about now - with your father gone. Divorce her - marry me! Save your child…” she adds the last as an afterthought, her last attempt at making her case.

His face is buried in his hands, the long sigh that escapes him breaks her heart even before he speaks a word aloud.

“Before he died - he changed the conditions - remade his will. It is as if he knew what I was planning to do. The business - the money - I’m merely made a trustee on behalf of a future daughter of mine. A daughter not a son!” He shakes with suppressed fury. “The legacy of my ancestors - he’ll just hand it over to some other family on a silver platter! That’s how much my father hated me!”

“But -” she probes, hanging by the last threads of hope. “Maybe we are already having a daughter!”

“You don’t understand,” he says slowly. “He meant a daughter from my current marriage. My wife and I -” His eyes burn in anger. “We are joint trustees, until such time that we -”

She doesn’t listen to his entire speech, there is something wrenching inside her that doesn’t allow patience enough to do so. Instead she staggers back to her feet, pushing back her chair, shaking in rage.

“After all this time - you will still not choose me?”

And when her father speaks of devils and second chances she cannot retort. She feels like a sinner for completely different reasons from his - she feels like a sinner for trusting, for hoping - for being so naive.

She loses the second battle willingly and marries the widower her father chooses. She loses the battle so that she doesn’t lose another child - just like the one before.

She learns to live the life of a conquered, to wear the mask of angel that everyone seems to tie over her scars. And two battles have taught her enough of the art of survival that she begins building her own fortress, collecting her own allies and raising her own army. The world sees what they want. She becomes a mother to many, a friend to a man who would never love her, who she could never love. And she waits, as she helps him on his way to her father’s thorn. It is not because she wishes to make him a king - she cares nothing for the ambition of the husband forced upon her, it is because she wishes to snatch the power from her father.

The senior Yoo dies a pitiful death, with no one but his dutiful daughter to care for him. She does it to the perfection and secretly takes pleasure in how powerless and utterly dependent on her mercy the once dictator of her fate had become. She gives him affection in charity - her own kind of punishment.

And she thinks she is winning the war when the man who had destroyed her life is at the end of his - but he grasps her hand and delivers the last blow.

“Your child lives.”

In his wheezing, raspy voice his words are hardly coherent. But her heart stops for a moment.

“Of cause -” she tries to smile. “Tae is growing into a wonderful young boy, he reminds me of the stories granny used to tell of your childhood Appa.”

His fingers dig into the soft flesh of her wrist as he wheezes, the machines around him working themselves into a frenzy.

“Not Tae…” he gasps. “Your firstborn - the child - I told you - was - stillborn.”

Her gasp is partly of pain and partly of fury. She lets her hands curl around his collar on their own will, her eyes burning with tears.

“Where is he?” She demands. “What did you do to him?”

He never tells her. Her father manages to break her again just as he goes to his grave.

“You can’t go! Tell me where is he? Tell me! Aboji! Aboji! You can’t leave me like this! You can’t go! NO! NO! No!”

And her husband thinks she is beside herself in grief, hugging her father’s still warm body. But in fact she is clawing at her enemy, the man who had defeated her even in death.

Myung Sung regroups. Picking up pieces of herself she plans meticulously. It’s no longer a battle with her father - or her father’s ghost. It’s a battle with her own cruel fate. Along the trail of breadcrumbs her father had left, she goes in search of her firstborn. She knows what she would do when she finds her, but for that she needs the man her father had tied her to.

Now - with her father gone, she has no intentions of letting him sit on her father’s throne with ease. Especially not when he is planing of disposing her at his pleasure, just because he had fallen in love with some starry eyed woman. No - she will teach him what a wretched thing love was, and how hard it was to get what you want. She had let him use her till now - it was finally time to reap the harvest.

She plays it smooth, plays on his trust, on his misunderstanding, on his underestimation. He believes her father’s loss had devastated her, and she preys on his compassion. She shows him what he wants to see - the devastated woman who had lost her last anchor in this world - lets him console her, feeds his guilt to her ambition. And he falls in to the well oiled jaws of her trap.

It is strange how even after so many decades she still remembers every little detail of the night she gave herself to him - her sacrifice to the god of war - the last remains of her soul. She didn’t make love to him, instead they made war. She feels no heartbreak when he takes another’s name at the zenith of pleasure, instead muses - darkly - how easy it had been to take her place.

For all the love - she thinks skeptically - that you so ardently profess, how easily you gave me the very weapon to break her heart - wrench you apart. Men - she thinks - in the end are slaves of their own sense of superiority. How easy it is for a seemingly defenseless woman to ruin them. Men are destroyed by their greed. You just need to find what their greed is - wealth - power - love?

“Oh dear husband of mine -” she brushes his hair off his sleeping face. “I will make a puppet of you - now that I’ve found your thread.”

She is not without faults. She had taken too much for granted. Oh Soo Yeon proves to be a sticky stain to remove. She lost too much in the process. Breaking them up was just the beginning. She had played the right cards, knowing both her husband and his lover enough to know which buttons to push. But her own greed had damaged her plans. She does not want to leave a bastard of her husband to stake a claim on a kingdom made on her blood and tears. It is her father’s legacy that he had taken up - the legacy and power that she wishes to pass on to her children one day - Tae and her firstborn, when she finds him and of cause the unborn child who had consolidated her position.

She doesn’t play it smooth enough. Her husband finds out what she had tried to do. And it enrages him - the child - he says - could be born defected. And if anything happens to them - she notices with a flinch how he seems to talk of them as a unit, that protective, threatening tone, her lover never used - if anything happens to them, she would live to regret it.

So she retreats and regroups.

In between she finds her son - her firstborn. And she curses her father to the deepest and darkest pit of hell for what he had put her boy through. But she has to wait - wait until the perfect moment, or she will lose again, and that she can’t afford.

Instead she befriends the mother who is a monster to her child- a doctor who’s thread she captures too easily. Money - something she had in abandon, and the woman is at her disposal - a weapon of value. So she waits and picks her battles wisely. Fights them with tears, words and emotions.

“I’m a sinner -” she sobs at her husband’s feet. “And for that I’ve been punished.”

She knows well enough that her pregnancy holds his hand on proceeding with a divorce, that after her miscalculated actions it is only a matter of time. So she plays a different hand. “My baby - one of my babies,” she says in between hiccups. “Is diagnosed with sirenomelia.”

She had thought it through and played every angle of the lie beforehand, with the help of her newly acquired gynaecologist’s input and collaboration. Her husband wouldn’t possibly plan to abandon her with a child like that and in the meantime she will deal with Soo Yeon more prudently.

She spins it well, her tale of twins, one healthy and one defected. She keeps the ending to herself, by the time her husband would learn the truth he would not have a lover to return to - a reason to abandon her. But she had underestimated many things. Her husband, her fate and her firstborn.

The doctor dies in a fire - taking with her Myung Sung’s well crafted plans for Soo Yeon and her child and leaving a trail of evidence that reveals everything to her husband - the investigating prosecutor.

The man’s ire runs in ice. It freezes her over but she stands unmoving. It is something so many loses had taught her - to take her defeat in stride. She watches him work it out, the trap she had laid around him, each lie, each deceit and she waits for the sword to drop.

There is something she had deduced by then, he loves his ambition too much to kill her with his bare hands. It was perhaps that struggle between his love for that woman and his love for power that kept her alive for so long.

“What will you do now - prosecutor Hwang?” The mockery in her tone is her way keeping dignity in defeat, she looks at him in the eye as she asks. “Will you kill me? What will you have me do?”

“I’m taking in our baby.” He informs her coldly. She snorts and he continues ignoring her. “Soo Yeon believes - as I had for a while - that one of your children -” Oh the distinction is not lost on her. Their baby and her children. “Will not survive, I had persuaded her to replace him with our son.”

“Well,” she growls out. “Your Soo Yeon will be disappointed then - for none of my babies will die.”

He barely clenches and unclenches his fist.

“But that’s the irony of it isn’t it - dear wife?” She can’t help but draw a parallel in her head, with the same vindictive tone of her father and the hallow endearment. “For one of your children will be lost to you - either way.”

He picks a file, flips through it and pushes it towards her.

“I’ll lose Soo Yeon, you will lose a son. Quid pro quo.” He smiles, a sneer that curls his lips like a silent growl of a predator. “If I lose both of them - you too will pay dearly.”

She doesn’t need to read through his investigation to know what he must have found. In her rush to mitigate her losses after the death of her ally she had forgotten how convenient it all was - she had ignored the prickling sense of wrongness at the back of her mind. The fire - it couldn’t be natural. And watching the steel fury in her husband’s eyes gleam with victory she knows her firstborn had done it. The woman was a monster to him - she thinks - he was provoked - he might have reached his limit - he just wanted to be free. Like I did - when I was young.

“How did you know - that he is -”

“Your son? Oh darling - you might take me as a fool - a dog on your lash. But I’ve been sniffing your tracks every since you showed me your true colors. You know the saying goes dead men tell no tales? Apparently, dead women talk a lot. Your faithful doctor kept all your secrets in her locker.”

She bites the inside of her cheek, until she tastes blood.

“The boy is damaged - he needs psychiatric help. Would you like me to arrange it?”

“It’ll ruin him!”

“Would you save him then?” He claps his hands and rests his chin on them, watching her as pleasantly as if she was a character of a daily soap. “My my - is it so hard? It’s not like you think much before killing infants?”

“You want me to kill one of my babies?”

“You tried to kill my son twice.” He reminds her coldly. “But no. I’m not asking you to kill anyone. I want you to stick to your story and let me replace one of your sons with mine.”

“They are your children too!” She shrieks, beside herself.

“No - they are yours. For all the calculations and heartless plotting you deserve the sole honor. You lied to me. Tried to kill the woman I love - my unborn child repeatedly. Consider this my revenge and hate me all you want.”

“You - you despicable man! Why don’t you just divorce me?”

“Oh you’d love that wouldn’t you? But why should everything go according to your plan?”

She takes a deep breath, balls her fists.

“What about the baby then?”

“I will arrange for a suitable family to take him in.” He sounds finite, words set in stone. Just like her father had announced her child’s death, he announces their separation. As if it is a fate she deserved, a judgment, a sentence, justice. And with it he masks his greed, his own ambition that he won’t sacrifice.

She thinks in disgust, how he is no different from her father, or her lover. Greed. Ambition. Same traits in three different men. She will not have him build a cage for her unborn. She will not have her son at the mercy of a man who hates him.

So she regroups again.

She reaches out to a man she never through to find again, with a bargain of her own. His son under her wing, for her son in his protection. It is when she finally persuades him to act on her plan that she realizes how much of her soul is truly blackened. For this time she is cruel - ruthless and unfeeling.

Her lover is childless so far in the marriage his father had trapped him in as he died. They had adopted a daughter, abiding by the conditions - taking the control of the vast estate his father had left. Now she speaks, well chosen words and offers him a better - tempting - alternative.

She will be adopting their firstborn, in her husband’s name. When the time comes marry the girl to her son - your son. That way, your son will get the wealth. Unlike some adopted stranger who shares none of your blood - who will marry away and take it all to some other stranger. Be wise - she tells him - use the chance. This is fate giving your back what should have been yours. Get them married and finish off the girl, with her the bane your father placed upon you.”

“What’s your price?” The man asks her slowly, gone are the days when there was feelings between them. All that is left now is a fragile bargain.

“I will protect your heir,” she tells him. “You will hide my son.”

It had been a long journey, too much she had lost to protect her children. Yoo Myung Sung shuts off the water and wipes a hand over her face. Still thinking. Still trying to regroup. Her mind buzzes with wired nerves, the basin is full of the palest red of dialuted blood and even though clean and wrinkled with cold, to her eyes her hands are still stained with blood.  

“Oh Wook - ah, what have you done?” She murmurs in the end.

Her son. She thinks. But a man. Another man with the same weaknesses, same greed that was about to ruin her once more.

“What have you done?”