DISAPPEARANCE

[ **CLASSIFICATION ]
INVOLUNTARY :// KIDNAPPING
DURATION :// ~ 1 YEAR

When Yveza was nineteen, he was taken. Not by police; the Hans were careful people, and police would have been preferable, but police meant paperwork, and paperwork meant traceability, and that meant someone could find you. He was taken by someone else, a collector.

A man named 'Seo Daejung', wealthy, private, and cultivating the specific grudge of someone who has been made to feel foolish. The Han family had 'acquired' something from him. Twice. Daejung had been planning. He left it unreported to the authorities; he solved it himself. The way people with private resources solve things. He had found which member of the Hans had conducted the second acquisition. He waited, and he was patient in the way only people with money could afford to be.

Yveza was held for nine months in conditions that weren't violent, exactly; Daejung was not crude, but which were designed to strip away the things that make a person feel like a person. No contact. No information. A room with a window but nothing outside was worth seeing. He was held as leverage, or as a trophy, or as proof of something; never entirely sure which.

And yet, his family knew. The Patriarch knew within the first week, and the Patriarch did not act.

The reasons for this have never been stated directly. The Patriarch may have weighted the risk of escalation. He may have used the period to negotiate something else entirely. He may have considered it a consequence; The Han family did not get caught, so how could Yveza make such a blunder? There was a logic to the Patriarchs decision that would never be voiced aloud, but something Yveza understood.

Tsumiki was told that Yveza had gone. Not taken, but gone, the word chosen was deliberate. When she asked why, she was told he hadn't explained himself. Which was true, because he had not been given the chance to.