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Her name was Suyeon, and she sold for 1,000,000,000 won.
Changmin was unable to sleep one night, held in the clutches of wakefulness when he heard it: the sound of glass shattering. Lying in his bed, breath caught in his throat, he listened in the stillness of the night for any other sounds. All was silent, not even the fluttering of his pet parakeet Momo’s wings whispered, and yet, there was a distinct disturbance in the air.
Changmin was a man of intuition, and following the uncomfortable clenching in his gut, he crept out of bed and tip-toed down the long hall until he heard the muffled screams and shouts of people he knew to be his parents. He paused near the top of the foyer stairs, just listening to the harshness of their rage. The conversation was not clear from a distance, but he was able to pick up a few key words that left a sour taste in his mouth.
Liar.
Cheater.
Scumbag.
Disgusting.
Filth.
Her.
Abomination.
Though the words were few and helpless on their own, together they were telling of a story he was not sure he wanted any part in hearing. But it was a vague story, one with too many holes and too many questions that might never be answered. Changmin must have sat in front of the door to the grand hall for nearly an hour, listening to his parents argue before he’d learned enough to fill in the biggest holes in the story.
At the age of 14, Changmin learned the truth of how corrupt politicians were. He learned that his father was no different, but instead among the worst, and regularly solicited young women for services his mother was too uptight to provide him any longer. Changmin learned his father was among the lowest of the low, and that he was not the precious baby of the family. Not anymore.
But what Changmin had already known was that he’d been meticulously bred to follow in his father’s footsteps, and this was the beginning.
* * *
In the following weeks to come, Changmin had all but forgotten of violating the sanctity of night and listening in on things he was not yet meant to hear. His father began to spend more time with him, leaving tidbits of information comparable to table scraps regarding his duty as a politician. The man tested the waters, swimming like the filthy leech he was in the shallow stillness before latching onto his son and burrowing deep within him.
Changmin’s fifteenth birthday came and went in a flurry of materialistic gifts he would never again deign himself to see. The re-election campaign followed and went in a matter of months, leaving his father still in the position of power that Changmin knew one day, he would have to take over. Shim Changsuk was a brilliantly shameless man, doing all he could to keep his position as a respected politician until Changmin was ready to take the throne as his own.
Schooling became more rigorous, and even still his father made time to burrow a centimeter deeper into Changmin each and every day. Before he knew it, at the age of 16, Changmin was looking in the mirror every morning and seeing just how much he truly resembled his father. He was damn near a carbon copy of the man, not a trace of the beautifully enigmatic woman that was his mother to be found in him. Except, perhaps, the heart of ice she had passed onto him. Where she was cold and frozen over like a shallow river in the midst of a bad winter, Changsuk was the exact opposite. He was wild and hot like fire, contained for only moments before he spread and wildly consumed everything in his path. Everything Changsuk touched, he burned and scarred and corrupted with his sin. Others were mere moths, fluttering around him as if entranced by his light and unable to run away. Closer and closer they came, bountiful in their numbers until they came close enough to be burned to ash, reborn as grotesque and unrecognizable specters.
The hardest part of waking up every morning was looking into that damned mirror and realizing he was conceived in those ashes – that he would never be able to escape the form his father had meticulously carved for him.
It was on the evening of Changmin’s seventeenth birthday when he met her, timid and shy with eyes he couldn’t see because she kept her gaze averted, head lowered. Changsuk came up behind her with a large hand covering her shoulder and a brilliant smile.
“This is Suyeon,” he introduced. Suyeon couldn’t have been a day over 14 years old, and she was a pale little thing with long, dark brown hair. She wore a plain silk blouse with acid-washed jeans tucked into knee-high stiletto boots – which struck Changmin as rather odd, but he knew better than to question anything his father did.
“Please eat as usual.”
She’s meant to be seen, not heard went unspoken.
Suyeon sat at the table, and only then did she raise her head. Changmin’s breath caught in her throat when he saw the same mirrored width and thickness of her mouth, the same arch of cheekbones, and damn it even her eyes. But where Changmin’s jaw was harsh and square-shaped, hers was a delicate V that emphasized the softened curves of her nose and cheeks, giving way to a long, pale neck that disappeared under the collar of her blouse.
Dinner that night was palpably awkward and no one said a word. The malicious curl of his mother’s lips was telling enough of the tale from that one night nearly three years ago.
Suyeon’s presence became a bit of a constant, if somewhat irregular. She was not always present at dinner, but on the rare occasion that she was, she was always quiet, prim, and demonstrated perfect table manners with her slim fingers and delicate movements. She never said a word, not even if Changsuk had spoken to her. Changmin’s mother, Yee Jin, took to pretending Suyeon didn’t exist, but there were those rare moments the woman regarded the illicit girl as a fecal stain on her impeccable furniture.
It had almost been a year of being seen and not heard before Suyeon completely disappeared. Months had gone by before Changmin realized he had not seen the young girl at dinner in quite some time.
“Where did she go?” he asked, absent of himself.
Arching an eyebrow, Changsuk had replied, “She’s moved onto her next lesson.”
“What?”
Instead of answering his question, Changsuk clapped a large hand on his son’s shoulder and smiled. “You’re showing interest, good. I’ll explain it all to you one day.”
* * *
One day was almost two years later, when Changmin had to accept the bittersweet revelation that he and his father were so alike. He’d learned the tricks of the trade, how to think on his feet and slash at his enemies with his sharp tongue and wit. When he looked in the mirror, he didn’t see a young man of 20 years with smooth skin and a youthful exuberance – he saw an old man, twisted and decrepit as he played games of sin and sanity. Games that had borne him, games for which he’d been meant to continue.
“Are you ready?” Changsuk asked from beside him, watching his son from the corner of his eyes. The young man had taken a moment to freshen himself up in the luxurious bathroom, meticulously fixing a stoic facade upon his face. His father would accept no less.
As a child, Changmin had always dreamed of the day he’d be an adult and he could march beside his father, strong and proud, but today was the day he realized how wrong those infantile ideas were. Today Changmin would be walking behind his father, bathed in his shadow, and reacting to a script he’d been unknowingly taught since the moment of his conception.
Her name was Suyeon, and she sold for 1,000,000,000 won.
Humanity was cruel. It as the rich versus the poor, madmen versus the sane. The rich and the mad always won, because of the few that could stop them, none would.
Her name was Suyeon, and she, too, was born from the ashes of his father’s corruption.
They were collectively addressed as slaves, but some slaves specialized in some areas that others did not. There were concubines, who lived like pampered pets, and then there were maids, servants, workers.... Their sole raison d’etre was to work, to serve the rich and the mad – to indulge the gluttonous, to pleasure the lustful, and to suffer the prideful.
Yee Jin was too proud to lower herself to any man. She did once, and only once, to beget a son, but never again would she suffer herself to anyone. They considered her to be of the mad because she smiled only when stars died, when children lied, and grown men cried. And, perhaps she was for hating the life she’d been gifted on a diamond platter others would – and had – killed for.
Everyone who knew her knew what was hers, was hers, and what was not was still hers. She did not take kindly to sharing, and those that took without asking would forever beg mercy from her wrath.
Her name was Suyeon, and she knew naught of the fairytale Mercy of which old maidens told.
“Throw her in the slave house.”
His name was Jung Yunho, and he was just like Changmin. Both of them were conceived in the image of their fathers; the molds were already made for them and all they had to do was grow to fit.
Suyeon would have been just like them if her only crime hadn’t been existing.
* * *
“She seems a bit lacking in some areas, does she not?” Changsuk directed the question to his son, gaze over the back of his shoulder. Before him stood Suyeon, naked as the day she was born on a raised, oval-shaped pedestal. Her chin was in the firm grasp of the man that sired her, face jerked to and fro as he speculated her from a merchant’s standpoint. “Are you certain your friend will be content with his purchase?”
Snorting, Changmin replied, “She was bred for it, am I wrong?”
“Rightly so.” Changsuk chuckled. He took a step back, looking the pale girl and her supple body up and down. He took in the swell of her breasts, the curve of her waist, and the width of her hips. She was petite – stomach flat and a bit on the short side. Suyeon was the picture perfect concubine, reading for her deflowering.
“I suppose her jaw could be shaved a bit, nose straightened, eyes double-lid...and her mouth –”
“What of it?” Changmin interrupted, drawing to his feet. He closed the gossip magazine he’d been half-heartedly reading, tossing it aside as he strode to his father’s side. “Her mouth is perfect. She’ll look so pretty on her knees and her mouth stuffed.”
Humming, the senator prodded the young girl’s mouth before he finally nodded. “Excellent observation. I don’t suppose that was the selling point for her investor, was it?”
“Perhaps,” Changmin ambiguously replied.
* * *
“Changminnie, I don’t suppose you’ll come here and spare a minute for Hyung?”
A minute. Right. Changmin suppressed a scoff, pushing his books and pencils to the side. He would always spare a minute for Hyung – he’d spare as many minutes as the man was willing to ask for, and then some. Reading about government fixtures and the slave trade industry was just so damn boring when he’d already done it hundreds of times before.
“What do you need?” Changmin asked, sidling to the other side of the mattress, until he was so close he could feel Hyung’s body heat.
“Ah,” Yunho hummed, pretending to think it over. They both knew he was a terrible actor. “Today’s lesson is a bit difficult for me to grasp. I don’t think I’m understanding it.”
“Do you need help?” Changmin purred, tilting his head to the side. A glance downward revealed the source of Yunho’s real problem: the bulge of his jeans pressing upward, insistent. “Or are you distracted?”
“Yes,” Yunho replied. “Could you help me focus a bit, Changminnie?”
“I can try,” the other hummed, hand on Yunho’s hip to coax him to relax against the mountain of pillows behind them. He shifted, legs spread to coax Changmin between. The musk of Yunho’s need was thick in the air, permeating Changmin’s skull as he inched down the zipper and the coarse material of his pants. Yunho’s dick was thick and long and leaking a thick dollop of precome at the tip, and Changmin’s mouth watered.
He needed a taste.
Leaning forward, his tongue swiped at the tip, hand pulling down the foreskin before he wrapped his lips around the head. Yunho’s reaction was instant: the bass timbre of his voice, growling low in his chest. Changmin was teasing him – the bastard knew Yunho knew and thought it was funny.
“Oh, Changminnie,” Yunho breathed, “don’t be so mean.” Curling fingers in Changmin’s thick hair, he attempted to encourage the other to take his cock deeper into that sinful mouth, but was met instead by resistance.
“Hyung, where have your manners gone?” Changmin tsked, pulling away to send Yunho what should have been a spiteful look, but was instead ruined by the evident lust in his eyes, the way his loose fist still pulled at Yunho’s dick.
“Please, Changminnie?” Yunho pouted, hips jerking. “You’ve been so mean to me all night, teasing me with your mouth...”
“So?” Changmin laughed, tongue curving along his upper lip, then the bottom.
Yunho made a sound that sounded a bit like he was choking, and perhaps he really was. Changmin was all too familiar with his best friend’s oral fixation, the almost absurd way he stared and stared and stared until he was hard as a rock.
“Please,” Yunho reiterated, this time softly, as he curled his fingers just below Changmin’s on his cock and directed himself back up to Changmin’s parted mouth. The tip bumped against his lips, a thin line of precum keeping them connected as Changmin pulled back with a licentious smile he’d mastered years before he knew what lust actually was.
Something inside Yunho snapped, pulled taut by the tension of his lust and broken by the one weakness he truly had. “Oh, Changminnie,” Yunho moaned, a hand curling around the back of his neck. He jerked the other forward, dick sliding easily between his parted lips fast and hard, and he relished in the way Changmin gagged and his eyes watered.
“You dirty little bitch,” Yunho swore as he continued to gyrate his hips, his hard length pushing and pulling at the pillowing fabric of Changmin’s thick mouth. “How dare you tease me like that? How dare you? You’ve been doing it all night, with your tongue sticking out of your mouth as you concentrate-” a lilt heavy with sarcasm, “on your schoolwork.
“But you weren’t concentrating on your schoolwork, were you? No, you were baiting me.” At the end of his tirade, Yunho threw his head back and let out a low, guttural moan that vibrated in his chest. Fuck if Changmin didn’t know how to use his beautiful mouth to the best of his abilities. Maybe it was the dirty talk, the way such disgustingly deprave words spilled forth from Yunho, the same Yunho who was always so polite and courteous to the praise of many. Everyone always said Yunho was the perfect son, the perfect, modest man that knew how to flatter the women and beckon forth potential comrades. But none knew of this side of him, the smutty deviant lurking just beneath the surface that painted corruption with the tip of his tongue as he sipped from the wines of Eros.
Nobody but Changmin.
And only Changmin could keep him in check.
Yunho was not a cruel lover, but he was wild and without abandon. There was a strength within him that he held back always except for moments like this when he knew he could let go, and sometimes he was too much, too rough, but Changmin loved to feel the way his throat and face would be sore. It was Changmin's own way of letting go, of letting the stress and tension fade from his body. He could forget about the corruption in which he had been bred, could forget about all the hundreds of other things he was supposed to remember to keep himself in the shadow of his father's legacy.
In moments like this, nothing else mattered but the way Yunho's thick cock felt as it filled his mouth and pressed at his throat. Every twitch, every pulse, and eventually the way Yunho would groan through his release as he painted Changmin's face. These moments were the moments both Changmin and Yunho lived for, moments they could let go of all pretenses and fall away from the masks they were forced to wear – to fit into their own skin once more.
Yunho's release was heavy and thick on Changmin's face and in his mouth, no doubt in mind that Yunho had been without release for some time. Changmin liked it best like this with a full load, cheeks sticky with phantom reminders of their freedom.
"Do you think you'll be able to focus now?" Changmin asked, pulling his textbook back to his side.
Yunho's lips purse into a pout. "Maybe for a few minutes," he said. "But you might have to help me again."
The curve of Changmin's mouth was there before he even realized it. "I think we can manage that."
* * *
It had long gotten to the point that the shimmer of diamonds glistening around the throats of others no longer appealed to Changmin, nor did the the glittering gold sprinkled as a fine garnish around the first of his eight course meal. Instead, he would entertain the comely woman to his left with half-lid eyes and well rehearsed lines. She flushed when appropriate, delicate fingers adorned with pricey jewels and precious stones fingering the line of her platinum gold necklace encrusted with layer upon layer of Swarovski crystals. Her name was a vague whisper in the back of his mind, reminding him that she was the daughter of a very prominent business man that was the main sponsor for Changmin's father's re-election.
She was pretty but her naivety was practically a visible aura, a shimmering golden halo propped on meticulously styled curls. Changmin was willing to wager that such a silly little thing like her probably believed in things such as true love and, well, Changmin knew a golden opportunity when he saw it.
His father would be proud of him.
“May I have this dance, Choi Sooyoung?” Changmin was making wedding plans already as her hand clasped his.
“I'd be honored, Shim Changmin.” When she smiled, the diamonds reflected in her eyes. Changmin's only regret was that she obviously was not aware of what she was about to involve herself in, but soon enough she would.
It was just a typical gala, and Changmin did his best to impress upon the young princess of the Choi corporation. A marriage to her would be a valuable asset in their world, conceived by Choi Taeshik himself and Shim Changsuk but fostered by none other than Changmin himself. Senator Shim would be unstoppable with the full support of Choi Taeshik behind him, and it would be up to Changmin to maintain that legacy via their marriage.
As Changmin swept Sooyoung into his arms, he caught the gaze of his best friend from the corner of his eyes and returned the champagne salute with a haughty twist of his mouth. And then, just before he would give Sooyoung his best smoldering stare, he caught sight of the slight woman not far off to Yunho's left; she was practically a replica of him if not for the feminine V of her chin.
It was such a shame Yunho had already made it clear that his younger sister was off limits. Jihye would no doubt be just as entertaining as her brother – in and out of bed – but Yunho turned green at the thought of their illicit affair breaking her little heart.
Sooyoung was, logically, the better choice anyway.
Nevertheless, the Shim-Jung family alliance could be cemented in another way – and that was what lingered beneath the cover of the gala, hidden in the shadows only seen by those who knew to look.
Her name was Suyeon, and she sold for 1,000,000,000 won.
In a rare show of emotion, Changmin would find Yunho alone in the bathroom and he would grasp him by the lapels of his suit – gently, so as not to wrinkle the expensive fabric – and he would slam their mouths together in a desperate kiss. “Take care of her,” he would say, “or I'll never suck your dick again.”
Yunho would roll his eyes, but he would murmur back, “You know I will.”
The transaction was called the deal of the year, meant to be a show of wealth and alliance between two prominent political families with heavy input in the operations of the Blue House. But weeks, months, years later, when Changmin would be in bed with another man – with Jung Yunho, even well after the Shim-Choi wedding and a perfectly healthy troupe of children – they would always know the truth in their hearts beneath all pretenses.
The world had no place for them, but at least they could be content in their stolen moments like this.