LBOT-25

After the knock, he heard Li Bowen’s voice unexpectedly.

“Are you inside?”

Zhan’s face hardened coldly. Kim Yaan quickly climbed onto the toilet. The two held their breath and fixed their eyes on the door.

“I’m taking care of my business. I’ll be right out.”

“Is everything all right? I came here because I was worried.”

“Yeah, it’s nothing. I’ll go get the coffee.”

“Okay, I will go and wait.”

Zhan swore silently in the shape of a mouth. He heard footsteps outside then it was quiet.

Kim Yaan asked who it was, and Zhan shook his head and shut his mouth. He lowered his body and looked under the partition, but he couldn’t see Bowen’s feet.

He quietly opened the door and exited after signaling to Kim Yaan that he was leaving by hand.

As he walked into the cafe, the vibrating bell in his pocket rang. He went to the car with two cups of coffee.

Li Bowen was sitting in the driver’s seat, looking straight ahead.

Zhan took the cup of coffee from the bag and handed it to him.

“Please drink. It’s cool.”

“Yes.”

He sipped his coffee and drank half of it before starting the car.

Their gazes met several times in the mirror, but no words were exchanged.

===

[Did you take good care of the guest list?]

[Yes, I made a separate VIP guest list and sent it to my father now. Please confirm it. At the entrance, we will conduct a thorough inspection of invitations for general guests and a body search. You don’t have to worry.]

[I trust you. Xu is dead, so you have to work hard for him.]

[I know. Trust me, Dad. I won’t make a mistake.]

Zhan soaked himself in warm water in the bathtub. The rectangular bathtub is also quite large, so even after Zhan enters, there is still plenty of room.

He hung his arms out of the bathtub after smoking. The bathroom was filled with a mixture of cigarette smoke and water steam.

Wen Chao and his father were still on the phone. They were planning a charity event on the ship two days later.

They say it was a charity event, but it was like a drug party.

A large number of VIP guests gathered, including some who appeared to be celebrities.

The call was disconnected after a lengthy conversation.

Zhan rubbed the cigarette on the floor before flushing the cigarette butt. He looked in the mirror before entering the shower, and the red mark as big as a coin on the back of his neck was so clear.

He rubbed it with his hand after frowning. It could not be erased.

He clicked his tongue, put on his robe, and went outside after taking a shower.

He drank a beer and sat down with his feet on the table.

Kim Yaan handed out a forged USB. Zhan wondered what was in the original that was priced the same as life. He was curious but opening it was an absolute foul.

He drank the beer all at once. His thirst has subsided, but drunkenness has increased slightly.

He was about to drink another beer when he gave up and got up from his seat with the USB that was on the table.

He went through the house again, just in case, to see if there were any CCTV or wiretapping devices.

Li Bowen, who lives next door would have no idea what was going on inside.

Zhan put on gloves on both hands to avoid leaving fingerprints and strode towards the hidden study.

He could see the ordered USB inside. What was commissioned remained. He took out the real thing and replaced it with the fake he got from Kim Yaan.

He smiled naturally as he closed the safe door. In any case, it was resolved.

He should go to Chairman Wang’s house now that he has the items. Wang Yibo certainly did not forbid him to stay at his parents’ house. He should call Wang Haoxuan tomorrow and give him the rough idea.

If he stayed with Wang Yibo until the inauguration ceremony, Zhan thought he would die from anger before that.

Zhan rose from his seat and was about to return when he noticed an album on a bookshelf. That was the only album among all the books.

He took out the album and turned the first page out of curiosity.nThere were pictures of babies.

Was this Wang Yibo? A slightly taller girl hugged Wang Yibo next to him. The smile was stunning.

He flipped to the next page. The baby appears to be slightly bigger, but he was expressionless. Still, Wang Zoey smiled and Wang Yibo looked at the camera with an expressionless face.

Even though he was a child, he had a very unfriendly expression on his face. There were no smiling pictures on the next or subsequent pages.

Zhan remembered his childhood. Zhan never smiled and always wore the same expression. If there was a picture, it would have looked similar to Wang Yibo.

They didn’t seem to take pictures after they got a little bigger. There was nothing left.

The ID photo Yibo took while wearing a school uniform in high school seemed far from decent. His lips were stubbornly closed and his eyes full of rebellion.

Zhan smiled and moved on to the next page of the album.

All of them were empty. He was curious about Yibo’s mother’s face, but there was no picture left. The irony was that there were no photographs of the living father.

At the elementary school graduation ceremony, he only took photos with his sister Wang Zoey.

Zhan closed the album and put it back in its place.

After going out, he opened the refrigerator, took out a beer, and returned to the sofa.

When he turned on the music, the living room was filled with magnificent classical music.

He caught the night of Beijing in his eyes as he stood in front of the window with a beer in his hand.

The city’s night view embroidered the dark night streets. The headlights of a car flashed across them. The music that came out was Queen of the Night Aria.

Zhan sipped his beer and smiled bitterly.

Wasn’t that song suited him perfectly? Did Wang Yibo also look out the window while listening to this music like him?

Like the Queen of the Night, he must have hated and cursed someone.

====

Next Day.

“I can’t help it. Because my father only likes Director Wang.”

Wang Haoxuan leaned out of the pool and drank the watermelon juice the staff had just brought him with a straw.

As he sat on the sunbed, Zhan sighed.

There was still time until the day he decided to kill Wang Yibo, and in the meantime, he mentioned wanting to stay at Haoxuan’s house, but Chairman Wang refused.

The reason was that Wang Yibo was against it.

Wang Haoxuan said that Chairman Wang favored only Wang Yibo, but after learning the circumstances, that was not necessarily the case.

“Don’t do that, come in and swim. The water is cool and nice.”

Zhan shook his head and lay down with his arms crossed and looked up at the sky.

The color of the blue sky and the red parasol matched wonderfully. Seeing that, he stopped thinking about Wang Yibo for a moment and thought of Wen Chao.

Wen Chao said he was going to rent a cruise and throw a party at sea tonight.

This party was done to reassure customers who were concerned about the JK-road bombing. All kinds of drugs and entertainment will be available, as well as large and small trades.

Wang Haoxuan appeared to be unaware of this fact.

Zhan was sweating despite the fact that he was under an umbrella. Like Haoxuan, he wanted to strip naked and dive into the water.

Wang Haoxuan, who was doing the backstroke while fanning himself with his hands, turned to face Zhan.

“What is that on your neck?”

“What?”

“A band-aid around your neck. Did you get hurt?”

Zhan pretended it was nothing. It’s not fade easily, so he ended up covering them with a band-aid.

It was difficult because everyone he saw since the morning had asked whether he was hurt. If it had been winter, he would have worn a shirt that reached his neck.

“Are you…?”

Wang Haoxuan asked with a sly smile “Who it was.”

Wang Haoxuan asked if the girl was the model from before and if the two had previously been together.

When Zhan said no, Wang Haoxuan listed by linking the people who had contact with Zhan one by one. He couldn’t have imagined it being Wen Chao.

“It’s just a little scratch and put it on…”

“Pretending to be innocent.”

He laughed and then continued swimming. He really likes water.

Their mother might be different, but Haoxuan is very similar to Wang Yibo in that matter. Zhan wasn’t sure if Wang Yibo liked the pool or missed his mother.

Come to think of it, he will return to China tomorrow. He has to go home from work until he comes home.

A message arrives on his phone while he was cooling off with watermelon juice.

It was a message from Kim Yaan reconfirming when and where they would meet.

As he was replying, Wang Haoxuan reached out of the pool and turned on the music.

Thump thump thump thump, a beat faster than the heart rate, Haoxuan shook his head excitedly.

Zhan also clapped his hands in time with the music. A plan for what to do at night was forming in his mind.

===

The sound of a vehicle engine coming from a distance disrupted the face of the guard at the gate.

A small truck passed in front of the gate not long ago, and it stopped to see what was wrong before restarting the engine.

The guard moved towards it because it was unbearable.

He knocked on the window, and a man with short hair stick his face out.

“What are you doing?”

“Ah, the engine suddenly stopped.”

“Where are you going?”

The guard’s eyes were cautious. The driver motioned ahead with his finger.

There were houses as well as scarce farms. The man’s truck, unsurprisingly, smelled of manure. The guard frowned.

“This is private land, so you are not allowed to pass freely.”

“Really? I didn’t know because it was my first time. But what can I do? The car isn’t moving. Let’s get down and take a look.”

The man stepped out of the driver’s seat and opened the car’s cap. The guard remained close behind the man.

If there was any suspicious behavior, it would be dealt with right away. For a while, the man who was sticking his face into the car grumbled.

“Ah, this came off. After all, both cars and people experience breakdowns as they age.”

THUD!  the man who slammed the cap shut and climbed into the driver’s seat. He backed up, turned the car around, and drove back the way he had come.

The guard, who had been left alone, clicked his tongue in displeasure. Immediately, a radio could be heard from inside the house.

It was Li Bowen.

[What’s going on?]

“Nothing. He must have taken the wrong path.”

The guard returned and stood in front of the gate. The place was quieter today, like a dead mouse.

The light from a distant car approached Zhan’s eyes as he lowered himself into the grass.

When a truck approached, Zhan hurriedly opened the door and climbed into the passenger seat.

Kim Yaan sat in the driver’s seat. He bought Zhan some time to safely cross the fence in front of Wang Yibo’s house a while ago.

“You’re just in time.”

Kim Yaan exhaled a long sigh. Despite the fact that the children had been entrusted to him, Zhan took the risk of an unexpected event and was unsure whether or not to do it.

Furthermore, he had to bear all of these concerns on his own because Zhan had requested that Kim Joon not be informed.

“If Joon finds out, he will try to kill me.”

“I’ll give you 10%.”

Suddenly 5% share double. Kim Yaan laughed so hard with a tear in his eye that his worries from a while ago were overshadowed.

“Okay. I will keep my mouth shut until I die.”

He met Kim Yaan’s subordinate in the middle of the main highway and switched cars.

Not only that, but the two wore stylish suits and had their hair trimmed. He began driving toward XN Port after changing from a truck to an expensive imported car.

On the way, Zhan looked at the invitation. The names of the two men were written on the invitations.

They were regular customers who were briefly kidnapped and detained in order to obtain this invitation.

The car that was on the highway changed to a national road and proceeded to the port.

“The gun.”

“I kept it in the food storage. Do you know how hard it must have been for me to bring it in?”

Zhan quickly spread out five fingers, fearful that Kim Yaan would dismiss it. He had decided to give him an additional 5%, so he wanted him to stop talking about it.

Unlike Kim Joon, Kim Yaan was willing to take financial risks. He resembled Zhan in that, and Kim Joon always scolded the two when they were young.

Zhan put on black sunglasses as the cruise approached.

Cars were already lined up when they arrived.

Wen Chao’s staff were dressed in neat suits and inspecting invitations and conducting a body search at the dock where the cruise would leave.

Unlike regular guests, VIPs entered directly by invitation without a body search.

He parked in an appropriate location and walked towards it.

Wen Chao was spotted among the crowds dressed in suits and dresses. Fortunately, he was busy greeting the VIPs next to him.

Wen Chao’s subordinates confirmed the invitation while he was waiting for his turn with his back to him.

They demanded his cell phone after checking in, and it would be returned when he got off the boat.

Zhan had prepared the duplicate phone ahead of time, so he gave it to him, put it in a sanitary bag, marked it, and placed it in one location.

They also searched Zhan and Kim Yaan’s bodies. It went off without a hitch, and he was handed the bedroom key.

Gold badges indicating that they were passengers were hung on their clothes at the entrance.

The ship was a cruise ship, and it was larger and brighter than expected. Upon entering, there was a colorful chandelier hanging in the middle of the cabin.

Indoors, there was a swimming pool, spa, casino, massage shop, and performance hall, and on the deck, there was a swimming pool, putting practice area, and sun beds.

And, starting on the second floor, the majority of them were rooms.

He noticed people drinking and chatting in groups of two or three.

Kim Yaan grabs a glass of champagne while Zhan keeps an eye out for any familiar faces.

Zhan took it and put it back in its place.

“Don’t drink.”

“Only one drink.”

“It could be the last drink your drink in this life. Get a grip.”

“You’re too strict.”

Kim Yaan shook his head. Pretending to look around, he figured out the ship’s layout and the approximate number of guards. Then he went upstairs to the designated room. He came to a halt in the middle of the second floor to check the number written on the key.

The corridor overlooked the center of the ship. There were more people than on the first floor, and they were having a good time.

Zhan searched the crowd and found Wen Chao’s father, Wen Ruohan. He appeared to be more lively than he had been at the funeral a few days before, and he appeared to be much younger now that he had dyed his hair.

Wen Ruohan was busy greeting people with a young woman who appeared to be his partner next to him.

Kim Yaan glanced at him.

“Is it that person?”

“Yes.”

“I’m excited. He doesn’t even know that today is his memorial day.”

Zhan remained silent. He stood with his hand on the railing, then turned and placed the card on the room’s doorway.

There were two beds and a bathroom. When he opened the drawer next to the bed, marijuana and pills were prepared as a service.

Kim Yaan sat down on the bed and smiled.

“Zhan. Doesn’t it looks like we’re on our honeymoon?”

Zhan took off his sunglasses and walked up to the window. A quick glance through a small window revealed the sea facing the night sky.

The fishing boats’ lights were attracting fish from the sea here and there.

Kim Yaan approached him and lit a cigarette. He blew smoke out the window and stared out at the darkened sea.

Zhan’s eyes were also gradually becoming as black as the darkness.

===