Jin

The walls of the state orphanage smelled of bleach, cheap food, and hopelessness. Jin-Yu left that place at sixteen—simply climbing over the fence on a rainy night, taking nothing with him but anger and a will to survive.

The city greeted him with an icy wind. Jin-Yu took any dirty job that paid cash at the end of the shift. He unloaded trucks at night warehouses, scrubbed floors in 24-hour diners until his hands were blistered and bloody, and delivered orders. He slept for four hours a night on a sagging mattress in a tiny room where the only amenity was a leaking roof. He was damn tired of poverty. He needed money—a lot of it, fast, and at any cost.

The chance came in a semi-basement bar where Jin-Yu worked part-time as a bartender. A guy walked into the establishment who had clearly walked through the wrong door. He wore an expensive coat, a watch worth several of Jin-Yu's annual salaries glittered on his wrist, and his eyes held a strange, almost childlike naivety. Later, Jin-Yu learned that this guy was the youngest son of an influential mafia boss. His family had kept him far away from the bloody conflicts, providing him with a luxurious but isolated life.

Jin-Yu understood everything immediately. This was his lottery ticket.

He turned on all his charm, skillfully pretending to be the attentive, sensitive, and reliable person that the mafia heir so desperately lacked in his golden cage. Short conversations at the bar counter grew into meetings after his shift. The boy from the wealthy family quickly became attached to Jin-Yu, seeing in him a breath of real, free life.

Jin-Yu smiled at him, accepted expensive gifts, and listened to his secrets. Inside, there was no remorse—only cold calculation. He would make this naive boy fall in love, bleed as much money out of him as possible, and vanish before his father's ruthless men found out about the existence of a poor kid from an orphanage. Under the green neon lights of the night city, Jin-Yu was playing his most dangerous and profitable game.