Chaebol Princess
Copyright© 2026 by Komiko Yakamura
Chapter 5
The drama was called Flowers of the Inner Court and it was, Eun Bae had determined by the end of her second day, approximately sixty percent historically accurate.
This was better than she had expected and worse than she could tolerate.
She said nothing during the first read-through with the full cast. She sat at the long table in the production company’s meeting room with her script and listened and made small precise marks in the margins with a pencil she had requested specifically because the pen Sora initially offered her felt wrong in her hand. Around the table the other actors spoke and laughed and held their scripts loosely with the confidence of people in familiar territory. She held hers the way she held every new document — as intelligence requiring analysis before response.
The Crown Princess was the female lead. The drama’s engine was court politics, poisoned alliances, a king who was not what he appeared and a princess who was more than anyone suspected. This was, she reflected, not entirely unlike her actual life, which perhaps explained why the character felt less like a role than like a room she had simply walked back into.
“The concubine scene in episode four,” she said, during a pause in the director’s notes.
Oh Sung Pil looked at her over his glasses. “What about it.”
“She would not confront the concubine directly. Not in the inner court corridor. Too many witnesses, all of them the concubine’s people. She would send a gift the following morning. Something beautiful and slightly wrong — the wrong flower, the wrong color, arranged in a configuration that means something specific. Everyone would understand. No one could prove anything.”
Silence around the table.
The actor playing the concubine — a woman in her thirties with sharp eyes and the alert expression of someone who recognized useful information when it arrived — leaned forward. “What configuration.”
“Chrysanthemums,” Eun Bae said. “White. Arranged for mourning.”
The sharp-eyed woman sat back with a slow smile.
Oh Sung Pil made a note. “I’ll talk to the writers.”
Eun Bae returned to her script.
Sora, seated behind her against the wall in her capacity as self-appointed personal assistant — a role she had assumed without discussion and which Eun Bae had accepted without discussion because it was simply what was happening — leaned forward and whispered: “You’re rewriting the drama.”
“I am offering observations,” Eun Bae said, without looking up.
“They’re going to give you a writing credit.”
“They are going to give me an accurate drama.”
Sora sat back and wrote something in her own notebook that Eun Bae didn’t ask about.
He arrived on set at half past ten.
She was in the middle of a scene — the Crown Princess in her receiving room, a formal visit from the queen dowager, the particular chess game of two powerful women speaking exclusively in pleasantries while conducting actual warfare underneath. The actress playing the queen dowager was sixty-two and had been doing historical drama for thirty years and had arrived that morning with the attitude of someone prepared to be unimpressed by the internet’s new favorite.
They ran the scene once.
Afterward the older woman looked at her for a long moment.
“Where did you train,” she said.
“Privately,” Eun Bae said.
“With whom.”
“People you wouldn’t know.”
The older woman made a sound that was not quite a laugh. “Run it again,” she said. “And this time don’t be polite about the teacup moment.”
They ran it again and Eun Bae was not polite about the teacup moment.
Oh Sung Pil said cut and immediately called for a ten minute break in the particular tone that meant he needed to go look at the footage privately and have feelings about it.
It was in this break, while the crew moved lighting and Sora appeared with tea and Tangerine’s morning report via text — Tangerine had knocked Sora’s second-favorite moisturizer off the shelf, unclear if deliberate — that Eun Bae became aware of Kang Juwon standing at the edge of the set.
She did not look at him.
She accepted the tea from Sora with both hands. She read Tangerine’s morning report. She listened to the focus puller explain something technical to his assistant. She was aware of Juwon at the edge of her vision with the precise low-level awareness she had developed over years of court life — the skill of knowing exactly where every person in a room was without appearing to track any of them.
He was speaking to Oh Sung Pil. They knew each other — of course they did, Hanwol Group owned half the buildings on this street, probably had a stake in the production company, a man like Juwon had his family’s fingerprints on everything in a three block radius without needing to be present for any of it.
He was wearing a dark coat. His hands were in his pockets. He was ostensibly looking at Oh Sung Pil while they spoke.
He was not looking at Oh Sung Pil.
“He’s here,” Sora said, in the voice of someone attempting a whisper and achieving only a quieter version of her normal volume.
“I’m aware.”
“He’s been standing there for ten minutes.”
“I’m aware.”
“He keeps—” Sora stopped.
“He keeps what.”
“Nothing.”
Eun Bae looked at her.
Sora’s face was doing eleven things. “He keeps looking at you and then looking away really fast when you move.”
Eun Bae returned to her tea.
She allowed herself to feel, privately and briefly, the particular satisfaction of a woman who has spent her life being trained to read rooms and finds that skill transferring perfectly across three centuries.
Then she set the feeling aside. There was a scene to finish.
He had told himself, in the car, that he would stay twenty minutes.
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