Chapter 2 - THE CRACK IN THE WALNUT TABLEThe conversation in the dining room died the second the heavy oak doors struck the mahogany wainscoting.
Fourteen people—uncles, aunts, cousins, and legal fixers—were halfway through a course of poached lobster. Sun-hee Han sat at the head of the table, her posture rigid as an iron rod, a glass of 2012 Bordeaux suspended two inches from her lips.
Daniel did not walk to his seat. He stopped halfway down the length of the polished walnut table, his boots leaving wet, dark prints on the imported Persian rug.
"Continue," Daniel said. His voice was a low, velvet hum that cut through the silence like a scalpel. "Please. Don't let me interrupt your celebration."
Victor Han cleared his throat, setting his silver fork down with a microscopic clink. His face was flushed with wine and the distinct, jittery adrenaline of men who thought they had finally won a war without firing a shot.
"Daniel. We thought you were stranded on the Eastside bypass. There was an accident reported near the arboretum—"
"An accident," Daniel interrupted. He pulled a heavy, metallic object from his coat pocket and dropped it onto the center of the table, right beside a silver gravy boat.
It was a dashboard camera unit, its casing melted and warped on one side, the lens cracked like a spiderweb. A thin trickle of dark fluid leaked from its housing onto the white linen tablecloth, staining the imported fabric a slow, ugly brown.
Sun-hee’s eyes flickered to the device. For the first time since Evelyn had met her, the older woman’s breathing hitched.
"What is this nonsense?" Sun-hee demanded, her voice like dry leaves scraping across concrete. "Your uncle is speaking to you. Show some respect to the head of this household."
"The head of this household," Daniel said, taking two slow steps toward his mother's end of the table, "is the person who holds the voting shares of Han Maritime and Logistics. Which, as of four o'clock this afternoon, was transferred entirely to my wife."
The room erupted.
Marcus leaped to his feet, knocking his mahogany chair backward onto the floor with a loud crash. "You did what? That's family capital! You gave our assets to an outsider—to a southern nobody whose grandfather built porches in Georgia?"
Daniel didn't look at Marcus. His eyes never left his mother.
"My wife spent all afternoon making red rice for this table," Daniel said, his tone dropping an octave. "You put her in the kitchen like a hired scullery maid. You stole her architectural blueprints, you tapped her phone, and you paid three professionals from the Tacoma docks two hundred thousand dollars to put a truck through my driver-side door on the rain-slicked highway."
He leaned forward, planting both palms on the polished walnut surface, bringing his face inches from his mother’s.
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"The only problem with your plan, Mother, is that the men you hired didn't know who I was before I ran the docks. They took my counter-offer. And they gave me the recording of the wire transfer originating from Uncle Victor's offshore account in the Caymans."
Sun-hee’s fingers tightened around the stem of her wineglass so hard the crystal stem snapped, spilling deep red liquid across her immaculate white lace cuffs like a spreading wound.
