Park Avenue

FIREBREATHER

'Are you sure it's a Birkin 30 in Barenia Faubourg? You know I'm not interested in another-' Before she could finish her sentence, Jia Song's wet snow boots slid across the slick granite floor of the skyscraper housing Whitman Volker, one of Manhattan's most prestigious law firms. The metal art installation flashed into view above her, a thousand scalelike discs soughing on silk strings like whispered threats. Hic sunt dracones.

Here be dragons.

'Fuck.' Jia braced herself for the humiliation of a fall. First thing at work. On a Friday.

Just in time, the tip of her umbrella struck the floor, catching her on a precipice. The second she managed to steady herself and regain her composure, her phone slipped from her grasp, clattering to the granite in staccato bursts of sound. Jia squeezed her eyes shut, her thoughts pounding in her skull. The champagne. Richard. Everything about last night.

Regret was a stale cracker on her tongue. Salty. Dry. Unsatisfying.

'Jia?' the muffled voice of her SA, Anka, cried out in the distance. 'Are you all right?'

Cold wind gusted at Jia's back, the revolving doors behind her hissing.

'Jia Song.' This time the voice was louder. Just over her shoulder.

She spun around, recognition flushing her skin. 'Mr Volker?'

Benjamin Volker. The biggest, baddest fire-breather of them all.

What was her firm's managing partner doing at work so early on a Friday?

Benjamin Volker's weathered features crinkled at the edges. Ten years ago, he would have been a silver fox. Now he'd aged into that perfect blend of powerful and wise. Gandalf in a three-piece suit. Zegna. Always Zegna. 'Here before seven,' he said. 'Good to see that making partner hasn't gotten to your head yet.'

'Junior partner.' It wouldn't hurt for Ben Volker to know Jia was hungry for more.

'With your work ethic, I have no doubt you'll make senior partner one day.' His polished brogues resumed their strides across the gleaming granite. Unlike Jia - who'd been a public-transit peasant since moving to Brooklyn seven years ago - he'd been dropped off outside the revolving doors by a chauffeured Maybach. Jia wondered if Ben had ever worn boots to trudge through the grimy snow while carrying his good shoes to work.

She doubted it.

'Hope you have a great day, Mr Volker,' she called after him, grimacing as the words escaped her mouth. Trite. Insipid. Worst of all, forgettable.

Ben paused, then turned back toward her. 'Pardon the' - he almost smirked - 'impolitic question, but your family is Korean, correct? Candace thought they might be Japanese, but I'm fairly certain you're Korean.'

'Yes.' Jia kept her quip in check. 'We're - I'm - Korean American.' She wouldn't waste another chance to impress him. Besides, she'd learned the hard way that lighthearted jokes about microaggressions didn't land well on the overlords.

'Do you speak Korean?'

'Er. yes. But I'm more comfortable in English. I can understand everything that's said to me in Korean and can converse well enough to get by, but from a business standpoint, I' - Jia wanted to fold in on herself, as if she were a note being tucked into an envelope - 'prefer English.' Such a shit time for honesty.

Ben Volker nodded once, his head canting to the left like it was hinging on a decision. A bubble of eagerness gathered in Jia's throat. She swallowed it, hating how much being a middle child had screwed her for life. A people pleaser, they called it. The human equivalent of a goddamned labradoodle.

'I believe I have a client for you.' Ben nodded again, his decision made. 'It would be a favor to me, as this is a referral from a personal friend.'

The bubble threatened to burst in Jia's throat. 'Of course.'

'Clear your desk and report directly to me. Pass your current caseload on to a few first years.' He paused a moment in thought. 'Tell Kim to help you dole out the work.'

She mirrored his crisp nod. Keep it simple. Like one of the guys.

'Good. Come to the conference room beside my office at nine. I'll be along soon after.'

'Yes, Mr Volker.'

'Ben,' he corrected. 'In the meantime, I want you to read everything you can on the family of Chilsoo "Seven" Park. They live in Lenox Hill on Park Avenue, and they own a cosmetics company called Mirae.'

'I will.' Jia refrained from offering him a firm handshake. 'Thank you, Ben.'

Without another word, Benjamin Volker continued toward the elevator bank, leaving Jia frozen in his wake.

A personal favor to the firm's managing partner. A chance to further distinguish herself from the pack of hungry wolves at her firm. To become the kind of awe-inspiring attorney Jia had always dreamed of being. A vested senior partner, sharing in the profits. Whitman Volker's next Emily Bhatia, the youngest senior partner in the firm's sixty-year history, with the highest billables for the last four years running. Emily Bhatia, who'd never given Jia more than a passing glance, despite Jia's countless attempts to garner her attention.

Never mind the celebratory champagne hangover and the visceral memory of Richard's pale backside as he snored in Jia's bed this morning. A lesson she still refused to learn.

Regret was the last thing on her mind now.

Her first official day as a junior partner at Whitman Volker, Jia Song was shedding the lizard skin of her former life - one of M&A drudgery and black holes of legal minutiae - to become something bigger and badder.

A fire-breather in her own right.

She glanced up at the ceiling's flashing scales once more, refraining from raising her right fist to the sky in triumph.

Hic sunt dracones.

'Jia Song!' a muffled voice shouted with exasperation from beside her foot.

'Jesus!' Jia stooped for her long-forgotten phone. 'Anka, I'm so sorry. Now, about that Birkin. Are you sure it's a Barenia Faubourg with gold hardware? And what size is it, again?' She resumed her walk toward the elevator bank. 'I can be there tomorrow.'

Mirae. The Korean word for future.

Jia liked it. It sounded hopeful. A tad optimistic, with just the right dash of ego.

As far as stories went, the tale of Mirae epitomized the sort of American Dream that resonated in the ears of immigrants around the world.

But Jia knew there was a sinister underbelly to many American Dreams. She'd been there in the nineties when the only lenders who would give her parents reasonable lines of credit for their bodega had been ones who looked like them. She'd stood firm when a roofing company had accosted her mother for payment, trying to blame Umma's 'bad English' for their poor bookkeeping. In 1998, her father's cousin in Queens had been beaten by her ex-husband. The police had done nothing, despite numerous recorded incidents of abuse. In one of the reports teenage Jia had read in secret at night, she'd seen an offhand comment about it being 'difficult to understand the victim.' As if it were a challenge to interpret the meaning behind a black eye, a fractured nose, and a broken jaw. Her father's cousin and kids had slept on the floor of the Songs' apartment for two months until the rest of the community found a place for them.

Jia had witnessed firsthand the struggles her family had experienced with their business. The constant worries about making payroll and the endless supply chain issues and broken refrigeration units with thousand-dollar parts and indecipherable inspection notices and harebrained schemes to sell Spam kimbap and Halmunni's kalbi sauce under the table in an attempt to become New York's Next Big Thing.

Three months ago, a white man had come into their bodega in the middle of the afternoon carrying nothing but a bat. Without warning, he'd started trashing the shelves and shouting racial epithets at Jia's father and their part-time employee, Yung Hee. Her father had defended them with a box cutter until the Syrian florist across the way could call for the police. The man was carted away in handcuffs and sentenced to a year in a mental rehabilitation facility. His attorney claimed he'd suffered a psychotic break after Yung Hee had ended their relationship.

He was released from the facility two months later.

The Syrian florist, Amna, had tsked when she heard. 'The more things change, the more they don't,' she'd said to Jia.

Jia wondered what the underbelly of Mirae's fairy tale looked like.

On the silvery surface, Mirae's story began in the early eighties as Mirae Dry Cleaning with just two employees, Chilsoo and Jeeyun Park,...