Chaebol Princess
Copyright© 2026 by Komiko Yakamura
Chapter 2
She took his hand and used it the way she would have used a courtier’s offered arm — as a fixed point, not a lifeline. Her free hand gathered the waterlogged silk of her outer robe and she climbed the pool steps with the measured pace of a woman ascending a dais, which was more or less what she decided it was. A very wet, very blue, very confusing dais in a building that smelled of nothing she could name.
She released his hand the moment she was on solid ground and shook the water from her sleeve with a single precise motion.
The assembled guests stared.
There were perhaps sixty of them arranged around the pool area in the particular frozen configuration of people who have collectively witnessed something they cannot explain and are waiting for someone else to explain it first. The women wore dresses in colors she associated with late autumn chrysanthemums. The men wore the dark fitted garments the tall man wore. Everyone held a small glowing rectangle and the rectangles were all pointed at her.
She understood being looked at. She had been looked at her entire life. She straightened her spine and returned their collective gaze with the serene and absolute composure of a woman who had fallen from the sky into a pool and found it entirely unremarkable.
“Juwon.” A woman’s voice from the left, moving closer with purpose. “Juwon what is happening.”
“Working on it,” he said quietly.
The woman arrived. Late fifties. A cream dress structured like armor. Hair arranged with the precision of someone who understood that appearance was a form of argument. She looked at Eun Bae with eyes that took in the soaked hanbok, the ruined hair, the complete absence of distress on her face, and narrowed incrementally.
“Chaerin,” she said. “What on earth—”
“She’s not Chaerin,” the tall man said.
The woman’s eyes moved to him. Back to Eun Bae. “I beg your pardon.”
“She fell into the pool from above. I watched it happen.” He said it quietly, not for the guests, a fact delivered for the record. “Chaerin is afraid of water.”
His mother — because this was clearly his mother, the resemblance was in the eyes and the stillness — absorbed this information without allowing it to touch her face. Eun Bae found herself revising her assessment of the woman upward immediately. That was court-level composure. That was a woman who had spent years in rooms where showing the wrong expression had consequences.
“Get her out of the public area,” his mother said. “Now. Smile at the Lim family when you pass them, they’re already asking questions.”
Juwon shrugged off his jacket and held it out. Not placed over her shoulders, she noted. Held out. As though he’d correctly read that she would want to put it on herself. She looked at it for one second then put it on. It fell to her thighs and smelled of something clean and unfamiliar.
“This way,” he said.
He moved through the guests and she followed and she smiled at a cluster of people near the door with the expression she had spent years perfecting — warm, present, revealing nothing — and heard one of them say to another, after she had passed, that she seemed very calm for someone who had just fallen into a swimming pool.
Yes, she thought. She did.
The corridor was cool and quiet and she catalogued everything as she walked. The floors — a single unbroken material, pale and smooth. The lights — sourceless, emanating from the ceiling without flame. The doors, the handles, the small panels beside each door with glowing numbers. A moving room at the end of the corridor — she watched its doors open and close and understood from the cable mechanisms visible in the gap at the top that it descended and ascended through the building’s floors, and told herself firmly that it was engineering and not sorcery and that she would ride it when required without incident.
He stopped at a door and pressed something and it opened.
The room beyond was large enough to be a minor pavilion. Pale furniture. One wall entirely glass, and beyond the glass—
Seoul.
She looked at it for three seconds. Then she turned away and did not look again.
Later. That was for later.
“Sit,” his mother said, already seated herself, already composed, already the patient and dangerous center of the room.
“I will stand,” Eun Bae said. “I have been sitting since dawn.”
A small silence.
“Since dawn,” his mother repeated.
“I require dry clothing and food. I have not eaten since this morning.”
“I’ll arrange it,” Juwon said. He picked up one of the small glowing rectangles from the table — a device of some kind, she filed it — and spoke into it briefly. Instructions. Someone would come.
His mother looked at her son. Then at Eun Bae. The look of a woman triangulating.
“Perhaps,” she said, with the precision of someone selecting a scalpel, “you would like to tell us what is going on.”
“I would,” Eun Bae said, “like to tell you what I can.”
“That is not the same thing.”
“No. It is not.”
Another silence. This one had texture. His mother was deciding something — Eun Bae could see the calculation moving behind the composed face, running its sums. The woman was not fooled. The woman was almost certainly never fooled. But she was also, Eun Bae sensed, practical above all things. And the practical question right now was not who is this woman but what do we do about her.
“You look,” his mother said finally, “remarkably like my son’s fiancée.”
“So I have gathered.”
“Where is she.”
Eun Bae met her gaze. “I don’t know.”
Which was true. She had never met Han Chaerin. She had no idea where Han Chaerin was. She was in another country with a K-pop star but Eun Bae did not know this yet and so the truth remained intact.
“I am Park Eun Bae,” she said. “I come from a very traditional family. Very old fashioned. There are things about my situation that I am not yet able to explain fully even to myself. I am asking for patience while I find my footing.”
It was not a lie. It was simply a truth that had been very carefully folded.
His mother looked at her for a long time. Eun Bae looked back. Outside the glass wall Seoul rose into the grey sky in its impossible towers and neither of them acknowledged it.
“You speak like a textbook,” his mother said.
“As I said. Very traditional.”
“Mmm.” She stood and smoothed her dress with two flat palms, a decisive gesture. “I have a wedding to dismantle and guests to manage and a situation that will be in the press by morning regardless of what we do. I will deal with those things. We will speak again later.” She looked at Juwon. “Don’t let her leave.”
She walked out and the door closed behind her with a soft click.
Eun Bae looked at the door. Then at Juwon.
He looked tired. He had looked tired from the beginning but now the tiredness was closer to the surface. He sat on the arm of one of the pale chairs and studied his hands for a moment.
“My fiancée left,” he said. Not complaining. Just accounting for it, putting the fact in its place.
“I see.”
“She left before the ceremony. Someone saw a car to the airport.” He looked up. “Then you appeared.”
“In the well.”
“In the pool.” Something in his face shifted almost imperceptibly. “A pool is — it’s a body of water for swimming. Recreation. It’s not—” He stopped. Looked at her more carefully. “How traditional is your family exactly.”
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