by Asia Olanna
Now, you’re probably wondering how I survived, if my parents died…
♦♦♦
Shadows splayed across the dresser next to my table. I was downstairs in the lower levels of the mansion, looking out my window. A rain storm blew across the hillside. Thunder cracked in the sky, tearing apart the clouds. Light fluttered into my eyes, making me shut them. All I wanted to do was sleep.
Footsteps. I heard footsteps thundering across the ground floor. I got out of bed, wandering to the light. My parents were on the other side of the house, and it was unusual to hear someone screaming.
I raced across my bedroom, getting out into the hallway. With a SIG Pro in hand, I crept around the corner of their bedroom. I was fully loaded and ready to punch bullets into skin.
Of course, I suspected there were people who wanted my parents dead. Their cronies could not stand making less money than them. They wanted prestige that they had. They didn’t want to risk their lives anymore running around the streets of Tokyo and Manila, Jakarta and Singapore. The real Double Dragons sprawled across underground Asia, and everyone wanted a piece of our name. Our wealth.
One of the guys standing outside my parent’s door looked at me. They were all armed to the teeth—Smith & Wesson, Radom, some more brand-name pistols—and aiming at me. I did not flinch at all. I wasn’t scared of them.
There were only five of them anyway.
“If you die quietly,” one of them said, “then you will go to heaven faster. I promise it. God will still love you in the end.”
I laughed. “Please,” I said, “I have no god besides money!”
I fired the first round, knocking over some dude wearing black sweatpants. Then I ducked back into the darkness, rolling for shadow. They fired back at me, slinging metal all around my head. A hail of bullets struck the walls behind me. I crept back into my room, though they were unaware on account of how the blackness draped every corner, every inch of the house.
Suddenly, coming from downstairs—Hae-il. He grabbed my shoulder, his own SIG Pro in his other hand. “Stay with me,” he said.
The other goons came away from my parents’ room, some of them going inside. Adrenaline pumped through my body; I couldn’t have my parents die like this.
So Hae-il and I crawled upstairs, our heads low against the ground. With our hands raised, we propped ourselves against a nearby wall and took shots.
It was difficult to tell who was striking what. But I heard the sounds of men—grown-ass men—falling to the ground. Collapsing in a heap of hurt. I did not close my eyes.
I wanted to see those who would threaten us. Who would dare do this?
“Let’s go in,” Hae-il said, once we felled two men.
Too late. My parents…
Their bodies sprawled across the floor. And the moment I saw them, there came a light from the left side of the room, a spray of gunfire. Hae-il and I ducked, scurried out of the bedroom.
Our guns at hand, we made to kill.
I saw a man over my mother’s dead body, so I fired at him first. My strike was true, quick. He flopped over, as if an angel had struck him dead. Hae-il waited for his opportunity— he got it whenever the goons tried playing cocky, firing back at us in retaliation for their own deeds.
There would have been no deaths if they had not come.
They brought it upon themselves.
We wasted the goons who killed my parents. I didn’t feel anything at the time. There wasn’t anything to feel—how could you? Blood smeared their faces, holes riddled their arms. I looked away immediately, thinking nothing about the bodies beneath my feet. The goons who hurt them, the low-level thugs who didn’t know the end of a pistol barrel from the grip.
“Did you know anything about this?” I asked Hae-il later. He said he didn’t, but that didn’t explain what he was doing in my house in the middle of the night.
“I have a sixth sense,” he said. Though it was a very suspicious sense, and I had my own.
He wanted power. Maybe he changed his mind midway through the operation. I didn’t know at the time.
All I knew was that he couldn’t be trusted. Even if he had saved my life.
♦♦♦
My life? Very precarious. A thin tightrope to walk.
But I had a plan for myself. I had no intention of staying in the Double Dragons forever, even though I was branded for life, the tattoos sprawling across my arms, down my spine, several down my legs.
Branded.
For.
Life.
And my fans wondered why I always wore jeans and long-sleeved T-shirts? Yeah.
Hae-il walked the length of the windows, casually turning his eyes across the shoreline the mansion overlooked. The mansion stood in Gyeryong, a fairly remote and mountainous area of South Korea. No one could bother us. We discreetly bribed and paid off many officials, so many looked and turned the other cheek, though we were always ready to slap them back if they gave us any push. Many officials stayed in contact with the Chinese Mafia, the Triads, for us. Other officials dealt with the government itself. My parents had really set up an entire network to tap dry.
And it would all come crumbling down.
Eventually.
I hoped at the time that my head would not come off with it all as well.
Because truthfully, I never enjoyed the lifestyle. So many on the outside would judge me as a horrible person without knowing me. But imagine having grown up with criminal parents— a criminal family you can trust, individuals you simply called brother or sister, they just had tattoos and could shoot.
It was all I knew. Everyone backstabbing each other and playing politics. It wasn’t an easy lifestyle. Not at all.
“The shipment did come through,” Hae-il said. He paced the length of the windows again, pointing out the rising sun. Light poured through, making me hot and heavy, baking me alive slowly. I wiped my brow, watching him go around, his footsteps echoing around the room. “The shipment came through,” he said, “but there has been a problem. One of the local guys from North Korea has gone rogue.”
I clicked my tongue in disapproval. Shook my head. Made a fist. Smashed the bench rest and shook with rage.
Though it was all acting.
I didn’t want Hae-il to think that I was happy about our shipment going awry. Because in fact, I was.
North Koreans were unreliable on account of their lives being horrible. Chained to the demands of their oppressive government, an average person had no choice but to deal with the underground world. A shipment going badly didn’t matter much to me. I kind of hoped the guy made out like a bandit and won his freedom in the end.
“Just ask someone else to smuggle some goods out,” I said, casually. Hae-il pressed his face against the glass. His muscles bulged out of his shirt, although I never really felt threatened by him.
I was bigger than him.
I had more aestheticism than he, and if it came down to it, I could easily take him out and save myself. Fly off to a different country, create a new name.
I just needed more time.
I guess more than anything, I was conflicted. Growing up in such a rough environment changes you, changes your mentality about what’s right and what’s wrong. It’s sort of like Stockholm syndrome: you want to leave, but you can’t.
I had so many feelings tied up to LBC Records. Being that it was the brainchild of my parents, the culmination of all of their hard work, I couldn’t just throw it all away in an instant.
Tied to the Double Dragons, LBC Records had entrenched itself in me. Even if I didn’t enjoy a life of crime, I didn’t mind being a pop superstar.
Singing meant something to me—I was the one who gave my parents the most inspiration for all of our hit singles.
LBC Records was more than an extension for money laundering: it was my heart and soul, the last bit that mom and dad had left for me.
“I always wanted to sing in front of people,” mom had told me, when we were leaving for Beijin
g one night. I remember the operation being a delicate one: we were off to see a couple of Triad members about extortion plot—millions of dollars being raked in. She had her best dress on, an A-line skirt and a halter top. Her tattoos sprawled over her arms, and she nonchalantly smoked a joint while our drivers took us there. My dad laughed.
“She has a beautiful voice,” he said. “Have you ever heard her sing?”
The first song I ever wrote went something like this:
Shadows over an empty valley
The wind in my face, the sun in your eyes
Being with you is a challenge
Because of all of your lies
And she sang that back to me, my mother did. I rested my head on her shoulder, as she walked me back and forth. I didn’t understand everything of what we were doing back then.
Crime was still a foreign concept to me. Seeing muscular men in tank tops walking around and talking about who they just “popped,” like it was nothing, like life did not matter.
I could not express my feelings to anybody though. I was already considered a “flower boy.”
They didn’t respect me, these other guys.
I suspected Hae-il did not either.
“We shouldn’t have to ask people time and time again to be on their best behavior and give us what we need,” Hae-il said. He took out a cigarette lighter, and then pulled out a blunt. With a couple of deft movements, he lit up, not even offering me one. “Sorry. These are hand-rolled. Take a lot of time. Anyway, they should be able to get the shipments over to our side without any of this fuss. I take it that you’re just hiding your anger all on the inside, maybe for your next heartfelt song?”
I grimaced, annoyed. “I’m angry like you, but I have other things on my mind. Besides, losing one or two shipments doesn’t really matter in the long run. We can get others. Have you checked in with Eun-jung and Kyung-joon?”
Eun-jung and Kyung-joon were our best undercover agents.
And they were some of the most intelligent, kind people that you could ever meet.
Eun-jung: a chiseled face, tall, and lanky, with long black hair, silky sharp like a knife edge. And Kyung-joon: beefy, with round arms, sort of like a bouncer’s, but with the force of a battering ram—he might’ve come off as a pudgy person who never did much in the way of exercise, but boy, could he destroy.
We sent these two on special missions to infiltrate the Chinese border, to wine and dine the officials whenever we needed them to grease the palms of their lowly staff and look the other way when we were conducting shady activities.
They were usually incognito in hospitals, since both of them worked as doctors in previous lives, although Eun-jung tended to take over administrative duties like the front desk of certain places around Busan or Gimhae.
But Eun-jung and Kyung-joon frequently encountered difficulties. Being undercover all the time was hard.
“I heard back from them,” Hae-il said, “but I think they’re still trying to work on getting the Beijing diplomats to agree with our imports. Sometimes those diplomats complain way too much. You know how it is.”
Pure methamphetamine. That’s what they wanted over in Beijing. And the purity was oftentimes under scrutiny. Pickiness was the name of their game. They wanted only the best. But it wasn’t always possible on account of North Korea’s inconsistency. North Korea was where most of the drugs were produced: heroin, methamphetamine, amphetamine, black tar…
“If you just keep worrying about everything,” I said, closing my eyes, “then you’re going to jinx everything. Relax. It’s only been about two days since we gave the last order. If things go bad, then we make a pit-stop over there. So what? Punch a few heads, get what we want, done deal. It’s simple.”
Although I knew it was never like that. Things always got sticky when you were in the world of crime.
I heard footsteps beat across the wood flooring. Hae-il tapped me on the face. I crossed my arms. We stared at one another.
“You better be getting ready for your show,” he said. “Or am I going to have to carry you out of ‘bed’?”
“You won’t have to carry me anywhere.” I stuck my foot off the side of the bench press, slowly edging away from the steel of a barbell overhead. “I’m getting ready. I’m getting ready. But I still think you’re worrying too much.”
As I walked away for the stairs leading to my real bedroom, Hae-il said, “You think I shouldn’t worry. When I have the world to worry about…”
The game of politics would be kept up for some time. A game of cat and mouse. Queen, king. Chess! Between the gang and my life as a popstar—it culminated in a lot of stress on all sides. But I wanted to make sure that I had the upper hand in terms of anxiety.
Because I knew that Hae-il was the type of person to get stressed out over small, minor details.
I knew he was the type of person to get flustered…
Ever since we were in kindergarten, really.
We had just known each other for a long time.
Too long and never close. We weren’t friends, just partners in business. His parents left him when he was a teenager, so he got attached to my family pretty quick, my parents taking an interest in him—or maybe pouring their pity on him.
“If things go wrong,” I said, “then I can go check them out myself. I haven’t been to Beijing in a long time. I haven’t managed to get over there in a very long time, actually. I’m looking for a vacation though. What do you think?”
Hae-il was standing behind me, his brows furrowing. He had a round jaw and a tiny nose. Eyes that were so dark, they looked black. Unlike my chiseled chin, aquiline nose, and hazel eyes—well, no wonder I was on the cover and not him. Whenever he did this—furrowed his brows—he could’ve been cast in a movie as a mad scientist. His unstyled hair didn’t give him any points either.
And I’m not the vain type of guy either. It’s just if he was going to take potshots about my being a popstar, then his attractiveness was fair game.
I could tell he was calculating something in the depths of his mind, maybe a plot to overtake me.
It would only be a matter of time.
The Double Dragons and others had become decentralized. Aside from the mansion house in Gyeryong, we really didn’t have a headquarters anywhere. Few people in the Double Dragons knew about where I lived.
Even the ones who helped staged the coup.
In total, I think there were maybe about three or so members working for us.
High-class, top-quality agents.
But it would only take time to reveal whose side people were on.
“I’ve got nothing,” Hae-il said, patting me on the shoulder. I flinched for a moment, and then I reached out for him as well. I stared into his tar-pit eyes, watching his round features. Fraternal twins: same mindset, different objectives.
“All I know is,” I said, “is that you worry way too much. You just need to relax, and let the chips fall where they might. And then, we can figure out what to do. Until then, I’m going to go and prepare for the show.”
I started walking away, listening to Hae-il pick up one of the barbells in the room. As I turned down the staircase, I saw him in the corner of my eye, getting ready for a work out.
Close but never tight.
That’s what our relationship was.
HENRIETTA
“I knew you would go far, what did I tell you?”
My dad was on the phone, screaming at me. Excited, he wanted me to fly away to Korea pronto. I was kind of surprised, considering he didn’t expect people play nice with black people over there. He sounded apprehensive, but at the same time happy, tense all the same.
“Are you sure though you want to go there alone? How long is the entire ordeal going to be? Are you really going to live in Korea for the entire length of the stay? You can always come back to my place if you want to come home early.”
I answered all of his questions for him, although I tried not to sound annoyed. He could b
e so overprotective. I had to spread my wings already. I needed to go on this trip not only for myself, but to prove to everyone what I could do alone. “Yes, I’m going to go there by myself. It’s only going to be for a year or so. It’s not like I’ll be away forever. I don’t know if I’ll come back to your house anytime soon, but I don’t really have a reason for coming home.”
I felt a strain in my vocal chords, as if I was having difficulty fishing out all of the words to tell him. My father and I didn’t have the best relationship. Even though he helped pay for college—my room and board mainly, by living at home—his blessings came with all sorts of strings attached.
