My Boyfriend Is an Executioner
Copyright© 2026 by HyunnaPark
Chapter 2: The Long Night
Jinny squats beside Hae-joo. “Tell me what you saw.”
Hae-joo’s voice is small but steady. “Mia had a patron, Minister Nam. Tonight his son came instead. I heard them in the courtyard ... then nothing. I could tell she was hurt, so I ran to Soo-yeon’s for help. A few minutes later the investigator arrived.”
Jinny and I lock eyes. Cleanup. The investigator wasn’t investigating, he was erasing the minister’s son’s mess. Hae-joo is a witness.
Jinny is already moving, whispering orders to a young girl who darts across the gravel silent as smoke.
I help Hae-joo to her feet. Her heavy body creaks, but she’s tougher than she looks. Her eyes are misty, but she’s fully present.
“Stay here,” Jinny tells her. “Blend in with the dressmakers when they search.”
Hae-joo wipes her eyes and chubby cheeks. I can’t imagine the night she’s having. Losing a junior kisaeng after spending years teaching her to play the zither, memorize poetry, and read the Confucian classics in the original Chinese.
If it had been Beom ... I can’t breathe for a second.
I keep seeing Mia’s neck twisted at that impossible angle, her leg bent wrong. That poor girl. I wonder how many Chinese characters she knew, what her best instrument was, what type of sijo she wrote. We never met while she was alive, but I know the life she led. Soon the hairpin in my bag will be the only proof she existed. My eyes mist, too.
Jinny puts her hand on my shoulder, startling me. “I’ve been watching Minister Nam. He only has one son, Nam Tae-hee. Maybe if —”
Then the back gate clatters. One of Jinny’s men skids to a stop next to her and whispers fast into her ear. Her posture stiffens though her face stays blank.
“The roads to Banchon are blocked. They were trying to come back but got separated,” Jinny says, shaking her head and looking down at her mismatched shoes.
My stomach drops.
Jinny’s youngest girl bursts in from the front, panting. “They’re here. The Iron Cord is going up.”
We run to the front gate and look through the slats to see for ourselves. Indigo and crimson uniforms stream past, unrolling thick hemp rope, pinning it to every gatepost. Total neighborhood lockdown.
“Fuck,” Jinny breathes.
Five men, including the noodle-shop elder, are already on their knees in the mud. Shirts torn open, backs bare to the night air. A commander in a tall horsehair hat paces behind them, scabbard tip scraping stone.
Each scrape slices straight through me. That man wants to kill Beom. My eyes narrow. A cup of flavored soju with a spoonful of Bu-ja, the “Fire Starter,” dissolved in it would have him rolling around on the ground puking his guts out until he died within the hour.
“They’re rounding up every kibu,” Jinny says. “If he comes back now...”
Panic grips my body. I need to pee. Keep it together, Na-young.
Wump. Wump. Wump. Poleaxe butts against our gate. “Open in the name of the Royal Bureau! Registries and men! Now! Barred gates will burn!”
Jinny nods. One of her kibu slides the gate open.
An armored officer fills the entrance, two spearmen with axe-headed blades behind him. “Registry!”
Jinny bows. Deep and graceful. “Of course, sir. This way.”
Her eyes flick to the spearmen, then to me. “Soo-yeon, see if our guests want tea.”
Tea? Is that a code I forgot? Am I supposed to poison them?
I stay low until the armored boots clank away down the path.
The two spearmen remain. I recognize one, his wife nearly died in childbirth. The midwife called me.
“You’re from the neighborhood,” I say, stepping closer.
One spear lifts. Beom would not let him do that. The familiar guard scowls. “Put that down. She’s the doctor lady.”
The spear point wavers, then drops to the dirt.
“If you or the girls know anything about the dead investigator, tell them quick,” the familiar one mutters. “They’re cutting hands off the kibu until someone confesses.”
My face stays blank, just like Jinny’s. My heart tries to punch through my ribs.
“I will urge them to show filial piety to His Majesty,” I say, bowing again. When I was a kisaeng, I had to learn many ways to say nothing to a man with words he finds reassuring. That doesn’t work on Beom.
The curious spearman eyes me as he rests the butt of his spear in the dirt.
Please go. Please go now.
Armor clanks behind me. Jinny returns with every kibu in the house. The officer herds the men out, shoving. The two spearmen stay at attention a moment longer, then follow.
Jinny shuts the gate. “You know what they’ll do to them.”
I nod.
“Then take Hae-joo and get ready, use my apartment. I’ll have the girls bring the wounded there.”
My nerves are already on fire, skin crawling, muscles wooden. This feels like the famine riots all over again, three days of setting broken bones and cleaning amputations in the back of the Pine Pavilion tavern while Beom fought off guards who got too close to our makeshift hospital.
Hae-joo is with the older women who make and repair the girls’ valuable dresses. The women stop talking when I walk in, so the story of what Beom did in the courtyard has already spread. She’s quiet on the short walk to Jinny’s private apartment at the back of the compound. Her eyes flick to me but then away when I meet her gaze, like there’s something she wants to ask.
“This place seems different from other kisaeng houses. We always wondered about it, why none of the girls at the place behind the red lantern were from the neighborhood. Why they ... don’t stay long.”
“It’s not a kisaeng house, not really,” I say as we stop on the wooden porch to Jinny’s apartment. “Jinny helps kisaeng buy their freedom, and some of them stay here for a little while until she finds them new homes far from the city.”
“Doesn’t she have to bribe a lot of people for that? Where does she find the money for that?” Hae-joo asks me.
I shake my head. “No one knows. That’s Jinny’s secret. She freed me eight years ago, right after I turned eighteen, and I still don’t know. All I know is that I’d be down at the docks serving five drunk men a night in a tavern if it weren’t for Jinny and her secrets.”
But now I fall asleep every night in the arms of my love, unless the orange cat gets jealous and squeezes between us.
The first hour she watches me burn mugwort, mix ash into compresses, and check pulses. Her hands are healers’ hands, steady under stress. “I spent years taking care of the other kisaeng,” she says, by way of explanation. She isn’t learning from scratch.
The main thing I show her is how to hold a thrashing man down.
“They’ll try to hit you,” I tell her. “Some men turn wild from the pain.”
“They don’t try to hit you when Beom’s around, do they?”
“No,” I admit. “Something about him calms them.”
“Terrifies,” Hae-joo says.
The word hits me. She’s right. Beom’s quiet remoteness can be scary. People stay away when they know what he used to do. They’re afraid he still carries the spirits of the dead with him. If he does, I’ve never seen them.
“Yeah,” I say. I can’t care about the reason when I’m trying to stitch up a cut.
The first wounded man arrives on a stretcher, left hand gone, bloody rag wrapped tight. Four girls bring him in, their slender shoulders struggling with the weight. Jinny follows them in. It takes me a moment to realize that this is actually happening. But since it is, moments matter and the patient needs them.
Dong-san is the man’s name. Teeth white against tanned skin, head snapping side to side like he wants to break his own neck and end it.
I imagine Beom trying to cook with one hand, trying to tie his own clothes, trying to cut little strips of meat for the cats, and my throat closes. Please don’t get caught, Beom. Please come back to me.
“Hold his head,” I tell Hae-joo. “Arms on either side, pull him tight against you. Don’t let him thrash and snap his neck.”
Jinny and the girls stare in horrified fascination while I root for the leather strip riddled with old bite marks.
“Bite this, Dong-san. This is going to burn worse than anything you’ve felt. Try not to hurt the girls. They have a long night ahead.”
He bites. Vinegar pours over the stump. He screams once, long and raw. Muscles lock, body twists, but the girls and Hae-joo hold. I slice my own pant leg into bandages and wrap the clean wound tight.
He goes still, eyes glazed. That’s probably for the best. There’s nothing he can do, and the girls need a few moments of quiet.
More men come every hour. Clean wrist stumps, no extra bruises. At least they’re not beating them.
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