Chapter 13: The Agency's New Game
The walk from the dorm to the agency took twenty minutes, but Aidan felt like he’d crossed into another country. The cozy, cloistered world of Crimson Veil was replaced by the aggressive sheen of Gangnam. Towering video walls pulsed with the faces of idols he didn’t recognize. The air smelled of exhaust and expensive perfume.
He rode the elevator up to the agency’s headquarters in a sterile silence, his reflection ghosted in the polished steel doors. He could still smell jasmine on his collar.
The receptionist nodded him through without a word. Madam Choi’s office door was a slab of frosted glass. He paused outside, his hand hovering. For a second, he imagined turning around, walking away, leaving the note in his pocket as the only artifact of a strange, secreted life. Then he knocked.
“Enter.”
Her voice was the same. Cool, precise, leaving no room for hesitation.
He opened the door. The office was as he remembered: painfully clean, minimalist to the point of aggression. The jasmine incense was stronger here, a manufactured attempt at calm that didn’t mask the room’s essential coldness. Madam Choi sat behind her vast, empty desk. But she was not alone.
A man occupied the chair beside her. Late fifties, with a jawline like a cliff and hair silvered at the temples. His suit was a dark, expensive charcoal, and he wore it like armor. He didn’t smile. His eyes tracked Aidan from the door to the chair opposite the desk, missing nothing.
“Sit, Aidan,” Madam Choi said. She didn’t introduce the man.Not yet.
Aidan sat. The leather chair was low, putting him at a slight disadvantage. He kept his posture easy, the disarming smile tucked away for now. The note in his pocket felt like a live wire.
“You cleaned up,” Madam Choi observed, her gaze lingering on the faint bruise on his neck Eun-ji had left. “The girls saw you off?”
“They did.”
“Good.” She steepled her fingers. “Your work with Crimson Veil is on pause. They have promotional activities in Japan for the next month. A useful cooling-off period.”
A cooling-off period. The phrase was clinical, dismissive. It reduced the desperate kisses, the tangled limbs, the whispered confessions in the dark to something that needed to be managed, like a fever.
“I have a new assignment for you,” she continued. She gestured slightly with her chin. “This is Mr.Kang. He is Head of Creative at Starline Entertainment.”
The rival label. The big one. Aidan gave a short nod. Mr. Kang’s returning nod was so slight it was almost an insult.
“Starline has a problem,” Madam Choi said. Her eyes were fixed on Aidan, watching for the flinch, the doubt. “A sensitive one. They believe you are uniquely equipped to help solve it.”
Mr. Kang spoke for the first time. His voice was a low gravel, his English flawless but accented. “We have a girl group. Crystal Tears. Five members. They are two years into their contract. The public sees synergy, sisterhood.” He paused, letting the cynicism of the words hang. “The reality is a leaking pipe. One of them is attempting to blackmail the company CEO. Threatening to release private correspondences. Demanding an illegal contract termination and a significant financial settlement.”
Aidan felt his stomach tighten. He said nothing.
Madam Choi slid a tablet across the desk. The screen was already on. A promotional photo of five young women, perhaps a year or two older than the Crimson Veil members, smiled up at him. Their hair was in perfect waves, their outfits coordinated shades of ivory and silver. Their eyes, though. Their eyes were flat. Empty.
“The threats are anonymous, sent from encrypted accounts,” Mr. Kang said. “Our cybersecurity people are chasing ghosts. The source is within the unit. We have narrowed the probable suspects to three of the five. The group’s dynamics are… fractured. They do not trust each other. They will not talk to us.”
“So you want me to talk to them,” Aidan said, his voice quiet.
“We want you to do what you did here,” Madam Choi corrected, her tone leaving no room for misinterpretation. “But with a different objective. Be the safe outsider. The confessor. The object of fascination. You will be introduced as a vocal consultant from the UK, a specialist in breath control and emotional delivery. It is a credible cover. Your task is to get close to each of the three suspects. Gain their unique trust. Unlock them.”
The room was very still. The hum of the city was a distant rumor.
“And when I find out which one it is?” Aidan asked.
Mr. Kang’s expression didn’t change. “You report to me. Immediately. With evidence. The company will handle the rest.”
Handle the rest. Aidan knew what that meant. Disappearance. A sudden, unexplained hiatus for “health reasons.” A one-way ticket to obscurity, if she was lucky. A lawsuit and total ruin if she wasn’t.
“You are asking me to seduce information out of them,” Aidan said, not as a question, but as a flat statement. The word ‘seduce’ felt filthy in this context. What he did with Crimson Veil was transactional, but it had a strange, twisted honesty. This was purely predatory.
“We are asking you to perform your function,” Madam Choi said, her voice sharpening. “The function for which you were hired. To provide empathy, intimacy, and trust. To be a release valve for pressures they cannot express elsewhere. The goalpost has simply moved. Instead of preserving their mental well-being for the good of the brand, you are now identifying a cancer within it. The method is the same.”
The method is the same. He saw Mina’s soft kiss. Felt So-mi’s note crinkle in his pocket. Heard Eun-ji’s muffled ‘be safe’. He had used their loneliness, their trapped, glittering existence, for money. He’d just convinced himself he was also giving them something of value in return. A momentary escape. A pretend love.
This stripped that last illusion away. He was a tool. A sophisticated, sensitive tool, but a tool nonetheless. His job was to open people up. What others did with the contents was not his concern.
Mr. Kang leaned forward slightly. “These are not innocent children. They are ambitious, calculating young women who signed contracts with their eyes open. One of them is trying to burn the house down with everyone inside. Your task is to find the match. Before she strikes it.”
Aidan looked at the tablet again. The hollow eyes of Crystal Tears stared back. One of them was desperate enough, angry enough, to try and torpedo her own life. He understood that desperation. He felt it curling in his own gut right now.
“The compensation will be triple your usual fee,” Madam Choi said, a final, brutal piece of calculus.
The silence stretched. Aidan could feel the note, that single, stupid word, pressing against his thigh. 사랑. What a joke.
He thought of walking out. He thought of the debt back home, the dead-end his life had been before this. He thought of the girls in the photo, living a version of the same gilded nightmare as Ji-hyun, Mina, So-mi, and Eun-ji. One of them was drowning and lashing out.
He was being asked to be the friendly face that pushed her under for good.
“When do I start?” he asked, his voice devoid of any inflection.
Madam Choi didn’t smile in triumph. She merely gave another small, satisfied nod. Mr. Kang’s stern face remained impassive, but Aidan saw a flicker of contempt in his eyes—contempt for the man who had just agreed to become a beautifully tailored weapon.
“Tomorrow,” Mr. Kang said, placing a business card on the desk and pushing it towards Aidan. “Be at this address at nine AM. You will be given your backstory and materials. You will meet the group in a casual setting. A ‘get-to-know-you’ session.” He stood up, straightening his jacket. “Do not disappoint us.”
He left without another word. The door clicked shut behind him, sealing Aidan in with Madam Choi.
She watched him for a long moment. “This is the reality of the veil, Aidan,” she said, her voice surprisingly low. “It is not all soft lighting and grateful sighs. Sometimes it is about finding the rotten thread before the whole tapestry unravels. What you did for my girls… it was a kindness. This is also a kindness. Preventing greater ruin.”
“Is that how you sleep at night?” The question was out before he could stop it, blunt and ugly.
Her eyes hardened, but she didn’t rebuke him. “I sleep,” she said simply, “knowing that the ones who play by the rules have a chance. The one who doesn’t? She made her choice. You are just the mechanism of discovery. Do not confuse the tool with the hand that wields it.”
She stood, signaling the meeting was over. “Go home. Shower. Get the scent of my girls off you. You need to smell like a blank page for this.”
Aidan stood, his limbs feeling heavy. He picked up Mr. Kang’s card. The paper was thick, embossed. It felt like a verdict.
He walked back out into the gleaming hallway, then the elevator, then the roaring street. The neon lights of Gangnam bled into the evening sky, painting everything in garish, unreal colors. He took the crumpled note from his pocket, smoothed it carefully on his thigh, and read the word one more time.
Then he held it over a grumbling street-side sewer grate. He let it go. The small white square fluttered, twisted, and was swallowed by the dark.
The scent of jasmine was gone, blown away by the city’s petrol-tainted wind. He was just a man on a street corner, a tool preparing itself for its next use. The hollow feeling in his chest wasn’t guilt, he told himself. It was just the quiet, efficient vacuum of a job well understood.