The Fall of Gods (A Welcome to the Underworld Novel, Book 2) (54 page)

“But what fun is that, Boss Kwon?” Jae Won greeted with a quick bow. He wore a maroon dress shirt and black slacks too. He and Chae Young looked like the perfect preppy couple. “Happy girlfriends, happy lives, right?” he said as Chae Young stood to the side and started gaping at the feast before her.

Tae Hyun nodded before they
moved to the dining table. “True saying.”

“Oh man, you got the
barbeque beef I requested too!” Jae Won shouted like he just won the lottery.

“You’re not eating that,” Tae Hyun stated inflexibly, snapping Jae Won out of his euphoria.
 

“Wait, what?” Jae Won asked with confusion. His face was covered with disappointment.

“Yoori’s been eyeing that,” Tae Hyun explained, already pushing Jae Won away from the food he was saving for her. “You can eat something else.” 

“But – ”

“Happy girlfriends, happy lives, right?”

That statement was the last thing Yoori heard Tae Hyun say before she got distracted.

“Yoori, are you done staring at your lover or can we meet again?” Kang Min joked, appearing beside Hae Jin, who was smiling nonstop at the fact that Yoori was gaping at her older brother instead of paying attention to the people around her. 

“For your information, I was staring at the food,” Yoori tried to contend. She swiftly pulled her eyes away from Tae Hyun. She hoped her acting worked. Judging by the expressions on her audience members’ faces, she doubted it.

Kang Min pursed his lips in confusion. “I didn’t realize that the food on the table was that tall. Did you know that, Hae Jin?”

Hae Jin pursed her lips in bafflement too. She shook her head, her curly black hair swishing about. “I don’t know…the table looks pretty short to me. Unless ‘food’ equals my brother.”

Yoori crinkled her nose. “You two haven’t seen me for awhile and instead of being super nice to me for neglecting me because of your ‘Underworld stuff,’ you decide to gang up on me?” 

“We’re just kidding, Yoori,”
said Hae Jin, grabbing Yoori’s hand and swaying it about to show her playfulness. 

Yoori gave them both a big smile. “So is everything good between you guys?” She made sure her voice was barely above a whisper so that only they could hear her. She hadn’t forgotten that Tae Hyun wasn’t privy to their relationship.

Hae Jin and Kang Min gazed at one another and nodded. Big, bright smiles lit up their faces. The sight of such happiness caused Yoori’s heart to warm.

“Yoooooooooooriiiiiiiiiii!”

“Bossssssss Choiiiiiiiii!”

Chae Young and Jae Won shouted in unison. They came running toward her. Yoori had
an inkling that Jae Won was just passively mimicking his girlfriend, which was why she couldn’t stop laughing when they reached her.

“Boss, you look like a Christmas ornament!”

The laughing ended after she hugged them. Yoori scowled at the comment. 

Your ass is fat! Your ass is fat! Your ass is
fat!
Yoori felt like screaming out. She refrained from doing so just because she looked so cute in the dress. She didn’t want to ruin her demure image.

“Christmas ornament?” Kang Min scoffed from the corner when Yoori pulled out of the embrace. Jae Won was standing to one side with Chae Young beside him, Hae Jin beside her, and Kang Min beside Hae Jin. “
Why would you say that to a girl?”

“It was a compliment,” Jae Won defended, his eyes distraught that anyone could consider his compliment to be an insult.
 

“What girl in her right mind would be flattered if she was compared to a short, fat and bald
 ball?”

“You fuc—!” Jae Won curbed the inclination to curse when he noted there were a good amount of females around him. Merely biting his tongue, he said, “I wouldn’t mind jabbing you with a broken ornament right now.”

“Just compliment me,” Kang Min huffed back. “I’m sure it’ll hurt more.”

“Why you little—!”

“Are we at a family reunion or something?” Tae Hyun’s voice thundered over the brothers, causing them to shut up immediately.

He was standing beside the dinner table, his face shrouded with impatience. It appeared that he had been ready to eat for quite some time now and was only waiting for everyone to finish their greetings.
 

“You two.” He pointed at the brothers. “You were the ones who requested the most food. Now it’s all here for you. Get your
asses over here and start eating before I toss both of you out the window.”

That was how dinner got started, with Tae Hyun berating Kang Min and Jae Won like they were his younger brothers and everyone happily taking a seat at the dinner table. The girls sat on one side and
the boys sat on the other. They were all excited for the great company and the amazing feast before them.

As dinner progressed, there were a couple of interesting things that Yoori learned. In the amount of time that she had spent separately from Tae Hyun and the brothers, she never once thought they would be as close as they were. When Tae Hyun told her they were “close enough,” she couldn’t have imagined the scene before her. They didn’t look like close friends – they looked like brothers.
 

With Tae Hyun sitting in the middle, he looked just like an older brother as he laughed, joked, and picked on Kang Min and Jae Won. It was actually entertaining for her. She was silently praising the Lord for a break from all of Tae Hyun’s teasing.
 

Yay for Kang Min and Jae Won getting the sharp end of Tae Hyun’s mean wit instead of her!
 

The relationship was the same way with Hae Jin, Chae Young and herself. Like long lost sisters, Yoori and the girls would whisper things amongst themselves. Such an act would have the boys leaning in to eavesdrop. Yoori was elated with how good dinner was. In her 3 years worth of memories, she had never experienced a dinner like this. With all the bickering and laughter included, Yoori only realized now how blissful she felt. She actually had friends now. Good friends.

“We were sitting on it, amongst all the rose petals that Kang Min and Jae Won happily spread around, and then the bridge started falling apart!” Tae Hyun shared in disbelief, reliving the events of the night at the park. Of course Tae Hyun, being the gentleman that he was, edited out all the flirting, making out, and questionable use of handcuffs – basically anything incriminating from that very eventful night. 

The brothers laughed boisterously.

“I prayed for that to happen!” Jae Won shouted proudly.

“Me too!” Kang Min shouted, high-fiving Jae Won.
 

“We didn’t fall in the water though,” Tae Hyun said mockingly. “Unlike these two idiots I know.”

Jae Won and Kang Min reddened and shut up immediately.

“So did anything productive happen after we dropped you
guys off?” Kang Min asked subtly, drinking from his champagne glass.

Everyone grew quiet to listen to the answer.

Damn him! Yoori knew someone was going to be nosy and start snooping around for more naughty answers. Who knew the first nosy kid was going to be Kang Min?

“We slept,” Yoori assured them as Tae Hyun bit into his sushi, his bored face somehow not corroborating her lie. He seemed bitter at the reminder that
 nothing happened for him that night.

Jae Won furrowed his brows
while he bit into his lasagna. “A whole gang of Serpents were climbing on trees and drowning in water and you guys just slept?” 

“I…I…” Yoori assumed that Tae Hyun would jump in to save her. To her indignation, he
merely took another careless bite out of his sushi. His eyes were glued on her. He, too, was awaiting her answer.

“I—I—
Don’t talk with your mouth full, you rude person!” Yoori spluttered out at Jae Won.

Jae Won sulked at her command. He looked away, stuffed another sushi into his mouth and went silent.
 

“Oppa, you should host more dinners like this. It’s so fun!” Hae Jin exclaimed from the side, smiling at her brother from across the table.
 

“Yeah, you throw one hell of a feast, Tae Hyun,” Chae Young agreed, stuffing herself with lasagna.
 

Tae Hyun smiled at the girls. “Yes, I do enjoy throwing dinner parties the two of you invite yourselves to before I even knew I was throwing it.”

“You don’t share Yoori enough,” Chae Young explained. There was no guilt in her smile as she patted Yoori’s shoulder with adoration.

“Which reminds me…excuse us,” Hae Jin announced suddenly, standing up and grabbing Yoori’s hand.

A look of knowledge spread across her face and Chae Young stood up too.

“Wait, where are you three going?” asked Kang Min. His mouth was still stuffed with chow mein.

“The bathroom,” Chae Young stated simply. 

“There’s only one toilet in the bathroom,” Jae Won ingeniously proclaimed.

“So?” Hae Jin replied blankly. Her hand was still on a confused Yoori, who didn’t know why the hell she was being led to the bathroom. “We’re going to have girl talk.”

“Since when is it appropriate to discriminate against genders?” Kang Min stated. His face was
cloaked with worry as to why the girls were sequestering themselves.

“What are you, a baby?” Chae Young asked jokingly, clearly unhappy that he was bringing gender discrimination into their “girl talk.” “Are you going to cry now?”

Kang Min grimaced. “No, that was just a question. Damn, Chae 
No-Fun
, that was mean.”

Chae Young smiled apologetically. “You know I was just kidding.”

“Uh huh,” Jae Won voiced with approval, smiling uncontrollably at the sight of his girlfriend picking on his younger brother. 

“Just let them go,” Tae Hyun said in a brisk tone. “They’ll be much nicer to us if they can complain about us in the bathroom.”

“But that’s why we shouldn’t let them go in there!” Jae Won protested.

Kang Min was about to agree with Jae Won when their Blackberries sounded off, interrupting any intentions of keeping the girls from the bathroom.
 

It happened instantly – just as it did when Tae Hyun’s phone rang in their bedroom the other day. A cold chill ran over Yoori’s skin as she watched their faces read the text on the screen. They looked troubled.

“We’ll be out on the balcony,” Tae Hyun announced, already rising to his feet and approaching the balcony. He slid the door open and the brothers followed. They instantly dialed a number and got onto the phone.

“What’s going on?” Yoori asked, watching worriedly as the boys stood outside.

“It’s nothing,” Hae Jin said with a reassuring smile, though even her smile wasn’t too certain. “Tonight is the five-minute initiation for the new recruits that are joining the Serpents. The only ones not there right now are my brother, Kang Min, and Jae Won. It’s a big event. There are about 130 being initiated tonight alone. Everyone is at the Serpents estate right now, setting up. We’re all just here for dinner before we go back and get things rolling.”

“Serpents estate?” Yoori asked, never hearing Tae Hyun speak of any Serpents estate before. She was never even introduced to it…

“It’s where we have our meetings. It’s one of the biggest estates in the country, very secluded. It’s a secretive place. You’ll only know where it is and be able to go inside if you were an actual Serpent,” Hae Jin explained, noting the curiosity in Yoori’s eyes. “Oppa has never introduced that place to you because he didn’t want to directly initiate you into the gang. He wanted to keep you away from all of that.”

Yoori nodded absentmindedly before asking, “So what do you guys do for the five-minute initiation?”
 

130 people in one night?
Yoori was certain something more drastic took place for anyone who wanted to join Tae Hyun’s gang. As Yoori recalled, the Advisors said that her chances of survival were higher if
they
 initiated her. She couldn’t imagine how much more violent things could get if any other gang initiated her. 

Hae Jin bit her lips. “Sorry Yoori, I would tell you, but we’re all put under oath.”

Yoori nodded, realizing that although she had known Tae Hyun for quite some time, she really only knew him as Tae Hyun – not the Underworld King, who was so connected that he was deemed as one of the most powerful men in the country. This realization hit her like a splash of artic water. She had always known this but to realize it to this degree was staggering. Tae Hyun, with all intents and purposes, was going to become a God in this world. If forced to make a decision, why in the world would he choose her over being a revered Lord in the Underworld? This knowledge stung her. It stung her badly. 

“Yoori, did you hear what I just said?” Hae Jin’s voice came rippling into her ears seconds later.

Yoori snapped out of her stupor and gazed at Hae Jin questionably. “Wh – What did you say?”

“It’s something Tae Hyun doesn’t want you to know,” Chae Young said with a smile. The content of the statement should’ve sounded cryptic, but there was eagerness in Chae Young’s voice. It made Yoori curious.