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CHAPTER1
Hana
So, it’s not every day that you overhear your parents talking about sending you halfway across the world to look after your grandmother, and probably die a spinster. At the tender age of nineteen, I wasn’t ready to go down like that.
It’s also not every day that you decide to do something about your impending fate, and actually do it.
My name is Hana, and in my excessively overprotected life as the youngest daughter to a real-life kingpin, I’d wanted two things. To finish my degree, and to be with a man of my choosing, at least once, to see what all the hype was about. As a mob princess, or in my case, jopok princess, the Korean American arm of organized crime with a stranglehold on New York’s ports, both of those humble dreams were precarious.
Daughters were dispatched for the good of the family, and that was the rule. Daughters didn’t need to have advanced degrees in Mathematics or like their fiancés either, that was the sad truth. The worst truth of all that I was slowly coming to terms with, was that I was the backup daughter for my mother. The one whose kind and sweet nature would do well in a caretaking role and could be expected to look after a procession of family members, starting with my grandmother, and later, my parents, without any hope of a family of my own.
Tonight, for the first time in my life, I rebelled against my parents' best-laid plans.
The field trip is what made it all possible. My parents didn’t allow me to go away overnight, as a rule. I had few friends, and visited none of their houses, or knew their families. Sometimes the isolation threatened to drive me completely crazy. However, my father was still Korean enough to be pretty rule-abiding when it came to higher education. Now that I knew he didn’t care to fight my mother on finishing my advanced degree, my heart hurt a little when I thought about it. I’d always thought Song Min-Ho, my father, secretly shared my love of academia and supported me when he was alone with my mother. It seemed that respect for education didn’t extend to opposing Dami Song for me. My mother always got her way, and it killed me.
However, with a well-placed call from a professor to my parents, they had been convinced to let me stay one night in a hotel, with their security in place, of course, to meet and look after a key speaker who’d arrived from Seoul.
Tonight, I was getting out of this hotel, and achieving one of my lifelong goals.
I was meeting a man, and no one was stopping me.
* * *
At midnight,my plan spun into action. I was dressed in a short, sparkly minidress I’d bought one day on campus, stuffed into my backpack and hidden in a stack at the library. The tenth floor where the advanced Mathematics books were, was almost always empty and no one had found it. It felt strange on my skin, too tight, and dangerously sharp at the edges, but I liked it. I felt aware of my body in a way I was never allowed to. I shoved my sweatpants and a loose shirt on top to hide the outfit. My stomach roiled with nerves. I’d been so anxious earlier, I’d thrown up most meals for two days straight. But nerves or not, I was doing this.
Next, I took the cigarettes out of the pocket in my bag where I’d hidden them. I’d been stealing them from security guards for a while, and no one had noticed.
Lighting the cigarette, I climbed up onto the desk beneath the smoke alarm and wafted the smoke in that direction. It took a while to work. I had to use three whole cigarettes until the smoke concentration in the air was thick enough to set off the alarm.
As soon as the loud sound began to blare through the hotel, I jumped down and shoved my sneakers on. There wasn’t much I could do about my footwear sadly.
A knock sounded at the door.
“Hana, we need to evacuate,” Ho Jin called through the door. He was the closest thing to a friend that I had in the made men of the Song family. He was only a little older than me, and his father was good friends with mine. He was given tasks that were way above his pay grade because I felt safe with him, and most importantly, I didn’t fight him on things.
Until tonight.
I grabbed my bag with several heavy textbooks in it and made for the door. In the hallway, people were walking toward the emergency stairs at a quick clip, grumbling and confused. I spied the guest lecturer head before us in the crowd.
“Professor!” I called and hurried after her, leaving Ho Jin to keep up. I knew he was alone because I’d pried the schedule out of him earlier. He was alone in the walkway outside my room from midnight for ten minutes. The perfect window.
I caught up with the professor, who was blinking around, looking confused.
“Here, let me help you,” I urged.
When we got to the ground floor, Professor Lim veered toward the bathroom, like I’d known she would, as the woman drank tea compulsively and had a nervous bladder.
“She needs to go to the bathroom,” I told Ho Jin, biting my lip and looking worried. “Oh, wait, there was one in the bar next to here.”
Ho Jin nodded, looking relieved, before frowning at me. “How’d you know that?”
“All bars have toilets. Come on, let’s go.”
I hurried her down the street and pushed into the hot, dark interior of the nearby Irish pub. Holding the professor’s arm a little firmly, I propelled her through the room, headed for the bathrooms at the back. I’d scooped it out with the professor earlier when we’d been talking outside the hotel and she’d wanted a drink. Ho Jin didn’t know, he hadn’t been on duty.
The narrow hall outside the bathroom wasn’t big enough for anyone to stand and wait, and servers constantly passed, pushing any waiting customers back to the main bar, where they couldn’t see the door. I went inside the bathroom with Professor Lim, who was speaking away to me about the fire alarm situation. I nodded, distracted, and desperate to achieve my goals, now I was so close.
As soon as we were in the bathroom, I moved to the window. One thing I noticed yesterday was how dangerous the ground-floor bathroom window was. It opened easily right onto the alley beside the pub. Anyone could jump in or out, and probably a whole lot of patrons had skipped out on their tabs that way.
