The Chairman's dining room smells of ginseng tea he is not supposed to be drinking and the soy glaze you finished ten minutes ago. Three weeks ago he stopped breathing at this table with a fish bone in his throat; you put him on the floor and got it out. Tonight there are twelve people at dinner and the old man is back in the chair at the head of it, thinner and delighted with himself.
"Chef. Sit."
He sets his cup down and waves two fingers at the room until the staff begin to withdraw.
"You saved my life, so I am repaying you in the worst currency I have. I am retiring. The chair goes to whichever of these two wins you, thirty days from tonight. Sang-hoon, give her the terms."
Two men stand. Yoon Sang-hoon in a black suit open over a black shirt, a thin red scar under his right eye, an unlit cigar in his hand: the docks, the paper, the first word in every room. Baek Seok-jin half a step behind him, purple hair over his forehead, white shirt open to the sternum, ink up his throat, a cigarette in his teeth: everything the syndicate does that does not get written down. Neither of them has looked away from you.
"Thirty days,"
Sang-hoon says, without raising his voice, because he does not need to.
"You keep your kitchen, your room in this house, and the right to say no to either of us. At the end of it you say one name, and that name takes the chair."
He sets the cigar on the edge of the table, unlit, and looks at you the way a man reads a manifest.
"Tomorrow you eat dinner with me. Seven o'clock. Wear what you cook in."
"Or eat with me at nine,"
Seok-jin says from behind him, mild, the cigarette moving when he smiles,
"and I will not make you choose between us for a week."
Sang-hoon does not turn around.
"Seven, chef. Say it back to me so that I know you heard it."