CHAPTER 190: CHAPTER 189. A WHIP FOR A SNAKE

Sarah tilted her head with a dismissive attitude. "Huh?"

Joseph stood up and pointed at the screen. "Stop this!"

Sarah tilted her head to the other side. "Why would I?"

Joseph gritted his teeth, staring hard at the screen showing the car driving away. "I’ll do it! I’ll do it!" he shouted anxiously. "I’ll send you the shares and leave the country!"

"Hmm...why can’t I believe you?" Sarah pursed her lips, looking at the old man skeptically.

Gritting his teeth, Joseph threw the crumpled paper to the floor as he scrambled to his desk--or rather, the vault inside a secret compartment of his desk drawer. Sarah strolled to the desk with Hajin, arching her brow and half expected the old man to pull out a gun or something in anger.

But then again, it wasn’t a movie. Not even Hajin had a gun.

Instead, he took out a briefcase and slammed it on the desk. "It’s here!" he said agitatedly. "The bonds and certificates are all here!"

Sarah arched her brow higher. Honestly, up until a few moments ago, she still wasn’t sure whether using Joseph’s wife and daughter would be effective. That was why she also prepared all kinds of countermeasures, including placing explosives around the old man’s house. But, well...seemed like this snake was still a father and a husband, after all.

"My, my--hiding in plain sight. J," Sarah flicked her finger and Hajin moved to check the content of the brief.

Before Hajin even finished checking, however, Joseph was already pointing at the tablet screen frantically. "Get those things off their car!"

"What are you talking about? You’re still here," Sarah scoffed.

"What?!"

Sarah tilted her head, looking at Joseph as if he were a stupid old man. "You haven’t given me all that I wanted, have you?"

"You--"

"Oh, and if you tried to get rid of it yourself, we still have other surprises in your house," Sarah shrugged, making herself comfortable on the couch.

Joseph blinked, trembling lips parting slowly. "What?"

"Might blow up tomorrow if you’re not quick about it," Sarah continued in a flat, uninterested tone as if she didn’t just allude to an act of terrorism.

"I can’t just go and live in another country in a night?!" Joseph slammed the desk angrily.

Even then, he didn’t look scary at all. He was much scarier when he was still smiling kindly, hiding his venom from everyone. Many of his masks had shattered, and he looked much older, much weaker than he had at the beginning of this appointment.

"That’s not my problem, is it?" Sarah rolled her eyes. "Your choice."

"You..." Joseph hissed through his gritted teeth, staring viciously at the bodyguard who grabbed the briefcase filled with his decades of work, to be handed to a girl a third of his age. "You demon!"

Sarah raised her brow, before chuckling openly.

"Isn’t it weird?" she shook her head in amusement, as if Joseph were an exotic specimen. "You think your family is precious, but you don’t think others’ family members are?"

Slowly, almost lazily, Sarah walked to the desk and put her gloved hands over the edge as she leaned forward slightly.

"I didn’t mean it to happen, Director Seo," she whispered softly, in the same sympathetic tone and blank eyes that Joseph used earlier. "But you were upsetting me too much."

"I..." Joseph opened his mouth, just to let out a choked sound as his mind failed to compute a reaction.

Decades of planning no longer had meaning when all of his exits got blocked. He didn’t even have any recordings because this was supposed to be him questioning Sarah about Jacob Oh’s whereabouts. He didn’t want to admit it, but he had lost.

Ironically, he had lost because of the last shred of humanity he still held: his love for his family.

"I’m going to confess!" when Sarah stepped away from the desk, Joseph pleaded desperately. "Can you just let them go if I go confess and--"

"Ah, it’s too late now. I told you already, didn’t I? I don’t trust the authorities," Sarah swatted the air coldly, replying in an annoyed tone. "I could just wait for you to die, but I’m running out of patience now."

Patting the bodyguard’s back, Sarah spared the old man one last glance before turning away. She didn’t know whether those tears welling in the old man’s eyes were real or a last attempt to fish for sympathy, but either way, Sarah was running out of pity.

Would he come to this point of begging her if he still had his people and money? If Daesung was available to heed his request? Probably not.

Most likely not.

"The only way you can survive is by leaving this place with your wife and daughter tonight," she said in a sharp warning. "You still have half a day to get ready, so why don’t you get up already?"

"Why..." Joseph stared at the retreating figure through a blurry, shaky gaze. The world suddenly felt constricting and darkening, just like when he found out his son was inside a jail in a foreign land. Those retreating back of Sarah looked just like her grandfather as he left Joseph in despair. "How...how did you end up like this?"

Sarah paused, halting her steps as she looked back. "How?"

She turned on her heels and stomped her way back to the desk, so quickly that Joseph didn’t have any chance to react when she grabbed the top of his head and hissed viciously.

"How?!"

The grip on his head forced Joseph to stare into the fierce glare filled with poison and anguish. A glare so familiar to Joseph because he looked at it so often when he stood in front of the mirror after his son’s death.

"You’re the one who turned me like this."

Sarah spat coldly before letting the shaken old man go. There was not a shred of pity or sympathy in her deep, numb black eyes. Only hatred.

Only disgust.

"It’s all your fault, Seo Joseph."

* * *

Sarah took another deep breath, leaning back and closing her eyes while Hajin held her hand and wiped it with an antibacterial cleaning wipe inside their car. He cleaned it further with a clean handkerchief, and even applied a moisturizing hand cream.

"You shouldn’t have touched him, Princess."

"I know," Sarah sighed.

Hajin, still grumbling, brought her hand to his lips, kissing every part of her fingers. The intention behind it--and the ticklish feeling it created--brought a smile to Sarah.

"Pfft--are you purifying it?"

"Yes."

Sarah chuckled and stroked her cute puppy’s chin lightly before shifting her gaze to the steering wheel in front of her. "Let’s go, then."

Unlike usual, Sarah was the one behind the wheel this time because Hajin needed to concentrate immediately on the laptop in his lap. Besides, Sarah wanted to destress and driving was one of them. She would have preferred the bike, but early winter was still winter, and it was too cold for it to be fun.

"Will he really do it?" Hajin asked as the car entered the highway.

"It doesn’t matter since the shares are already in our hands, but..." Sarah tapped the steering wheel in contemplation. "I remember what Sol told me."

"What is it?"

"Bad people know best the extent of what other humans can do."

Normal people would probably think around will this person really do that? Can a human being really do that?

But someone who already did that before knew that someone else could do the same to them.

If he still needed convincing?

Well...their threat was all real anyway. All they had to do was convince him with something; blowing up one of his vases, or making the car swerve a little bit. If he called someone to identify the explosives and contraption, Sarah would release the proof of his embezzlement.

He would be forced to leave the country to avoid jail time in the end.

Sarah scoffed and glanced at Hajin. "Have you done erasing it?"

The urgent work he needed to do was, of course, erasing their traces from that office. That was why Hajin didn’t bother ransacking the pantry to make a drink for Sarah, and why they kept their gloves on even though the building wasn’t that cold.

"Yes, Princess. No one will know we were in his office," Hajin replied. "No one will even know we were in the company, unless they check the street’s CCTV of this car entering the gate."

They had used the unmanned gate that is only accessible with the executive card. Of course, Hajin had already erased Sarah’s ID from the log. Should Joseph go to the security to collect evidence of Sarah’s visit, there would be none.

"He even cleared up the environment for us, how benevolent," Sarah snickered. "Sloppily leaving his phone on the desk for us to tamper with."

His lack of suspicion against Sarah was honestly quite endearing. He didn’t think of recording their conversation or watching his phone while talking to Sarah. Very easy for Hajin to put Little Bird’s advanced program on his phone.

"Anyway, since we already have access, it’s easy to react to what he’ll try to do," Sarah shrugged.

Hajin hummed and nodded, opening the interface connecting to Joseph’s phone on his laptop. "Where do you think he will go?"

"Well, it should be somewhere he doesn’t need a visa for; somewhere cheap enough for him to live while trying to get a visa to a better place," Sarah narrowed her eyes. "He probably won’t tell the truth to his wife and daughter yet, and would cover it up as a surprise vacation."

"So, somewhere known for its tourism."

"Southeast Asia, probably."

Hajin smirked. "I have several connections over there."

Wherever Joseph ended up, Hajin had enough connections from his previous work. All he had to do was make a phone call and the old man’s fate would remain a mystery for a long time. Probably forever.

"I’d like to do it myself, but I don’t want to leave you," Hajin said.

"Don’t you dare."

"Hmm?"

Sarah cleared her throat. "Anyway, only target him."

Hajin arched his brow. "What about the other two?"

"They are not really criminals," Sarah shrugged. "If they could survive in another country without Joseph’s support, then it’s their right to live it."

"Understood," Hajin knew his princess was softhearted anyway. "But...where are we going, Princess?"

He tilted his head as he looked outside, realizing that Sarah had taken an outbound highway--definitely nowhere near their home or Helios.

Sarah only smiled in response. "Somewhere nostalgic."