Chapter 14: The First Meeting
The practice room held the cool, sterile silence of a hospital ward after hours. Aidan stood alone in the center, the five empty water bottles and slightly moved chairs the only evidence of the hour that had just passed. His bag was by the door. He walked over, the floorboards silent under the plush carpet, and unzipped the main compartment.
On top of his notepad, resting on the folder of fabricated vocal exercises, was a single slip of rice paper. It hadn’t been there when he’d arrived.
A question mark. Drawn in careful, almost architectural ink. Not hurried. A deliberate placement.
His blood didn’t run cold; it congealed, thick and sluggish. This wasn’t fear. It was recognition. The move was too elegant, too quiet. This was tradecraft. Someone in this girl group wasn’t just a disgruntled idol; she was operating with a spy’s precision. He’d seen similar messages passed in Berlin cafes, in Istanbul hotel bars. A signal. A provocation.
I know you. That’s what the mark said. Or perhaps, What are you?
He pocketed the paper, his movements slow and deliberate. He reviewed the session, each girl’s face playing on the mirrored walls of his memory.
Sora, the maknae. Nineteen, with eyes that darted like trapped birds. She’d barely looked at him, focusing on the floor during the breathing exercises with an intensity that suggested terror. When he’d gently corrected her posture, her shoulders had jumped under his touch as if scalded.
Nari, the leader. Sharp, beautiful, with a smile that never warmed her eyes. She’d been polite, attentive, answering his questions about their routine with corporate blandness. “Our schedule is demanding, but we are grateful for the opportunities.” She’d watched the others more than she watched him.
Then there was Yuna. The main vocal. She had a lazy, observant gaze and a sarcastic tilt to her mouth. When he’d demonstrated a diaphragmatic breathing technique, she’d followed along with exaggerated precision, then cracked, “So if we do this right, we can finally hit that high note in ‘Starlight’ without sounding like we’re being strangled?” The others had frozen, but Aidan had laughed, a real one. “That’s the general idea,” he’d said.
Ji-min, the main dancer, had been all coiled athletic energy, stretching while she listened, her body never still. Hana, the visual and sub-vocalist, had been preternaturally calm, her face a perfect placid mask, nodding at everything he said.
Any one of them. Three of them, according to Kang.
The door clicked open and a young male assistant bowed his head in. “Mr. Aidan? Mr. Kang asked if you would join him for a debrief before you leave.”
The debrief was in a windowless conference room that smelled of lemon cleaner and stale coffee. Kang sat at the head of the table, a tablet before him.
“Your impressions,” Kang said, without looking up.
Aidan slipped into the chair opposite, adopting the analytical tone he’d once used for mission reports. “Sora is frightened of something, possibly of everything. Nari is controlling, possibly hiding strain. Ji-min uses physicality to deflect. Hana is either deeply placid or heavily medicated. Yuna uses humor as a shield. She’s the most intellectually engaged. And skeptical.”
Kang finally looked at him. “And which one slipped you the note?”
Aidan didn’t let his surprise show. Of course the room was monitored. “I don’t know. The angles in the mirror are complex. It could have been any of them on the way to the water cooler or the restroom. It was a professional move.”
“Yuna,” Kang said, tapping his tablet. “She passed closest to your bag after the session ended. She dropped a hair tie and bent to retrieve it. A two-second window.”
Yuna. The skeptic. Aidan filed it away.
“You will focus on her first. Then Nari. Sora is a potential wild card—fear makes people unpredictable. You have a group dinner scheduled for tomorrow night. Casual. A team-building exercise. Use it.”
The dinner was at a discreet Korean BBQ place in a back alley of Apgujeong, private room in the back. The girls arrived in casual clothes—oversized hoodies, baseball caps, jeans—their public faces shed like glittering skins. They seemed younger, but also more tired.
The atmosphere was awkward at first, the sizzle of the grill the loudest sound. Aidan played his part, the slightly awkward foreign consultant, fumbling with the tongs, asking naive questions about banchan. He let them teach him.
“You don’t wrap the garlic in the lettuce with the meat,” Ji-min chuckled, showing him with swift, efficient hands. “Like this. It’s an art.”
“More of a survival skill, I’m finding,” Aidan said, and earned a few genuine smiles.
Soju was poured. His glass was constantly refilled. He sipped sparingly, watching their guards dissolve by millimeters. Sora drank her first glass in one nervous gulp. Nari nursed hers, a general surveying her troops. Hana smiled softly at nothing. Ji-min grew louder, more boisterous.
Yuna watched him over the rim of her glass. “So, vocal coach,” she said, her voice cutting through Ji-min’s laughter. “What’s your real story? You don’t seem the type to be obsessed with perfecting the vowel shape in a high C.”
The table went quiet. Nari shot Yuna a warning look.
Aidan held her gaze, his disarming smile in place. “What type seems that type?”
“I don’t know. Older. Stiffer. More… Korean.” She shrugged. “You’re just some fit British guy. Seems random.”
“Maybe I’m a spy,” he said, light, tossing it out like a piece of kimchi onto the grill.
Her eyes didn’t flicker. “Maybe you are. Would be more interesting than a vocal coach.”
Later, as the dinner broke up and the managers began to usher them toward separate vans—no two members lived together, he noted—Yuna lagged behind, pretending to search for a missing earphone by the coat rack. Aidan lingered, putting on his jacket.
She straightened up, the earphone in her hand. In the dim, cloakroom light, her sharp amusement was gone. She looked exhausted, and older than her twenty-two years.
“A question mark is a rude way to introduce yourself,” he said quietly, his voice barely a murmur over the distant clatter from the kitchen.
She didn’t deny it. She glanced toward the door, ensuring they were alone. “It’s the only safe question left. Everything else has consequences.”
“What do you want to know?”
“What side you’re on.” Her eyes bored into his. “Their side? Or the side of the people they own?”
“There’s a difference?”
“There’s always a difference.” She looked at him, a long, assessing look that stripped the vocal coach pretext away. “Sora cries herself to sleep every night. Nari pops benzos like vitamins. Hana hasn’t spoken a real sentence off-camera in six months. And someone in this beautifully broken dollhouse is trying to burn it down. I just want to know if you’re here to put out the fire… or to pour gasoline on it.”
Before he could answer, a manager called her name sharply from the doorway. She gave him one last, inscrutable look, then walked away, the vulnerable fatigue replaced in an instant by a lazy, confident saunter.
Aidan’s phone buzzed in his pocket. A message from an unknown number.
The Hannam-dong residence. 11 PM. Use the service entrance. Code 8890. Come alone.
It wasn’t from Kang. He knew Kang’s tone. This was different. He thought of the question mark, of Yuna’s weary eyes. A risk. A colossal, stupid risk.
At 10:58 PM, he stood in the narrow, fluorescent-lit corridor behind a luxury apartment complex in Hannam-dong. He entered the code. The door buzzed open.
He took the service elevator to the 12th floor. It opened directly into a sparse, modern kitchen. The apartment was dark, only the city lights painting shapes on the bare walls. It felt like a set, not a home.
Yuna stood by the floor-to-ceiling window, a silhouette against the galaxy of Seoul’s lights. She wore a simple t-shirt and sweatpants. She held two glasses of whiskey, neat. She handed one to him without turning.
“No cameras here,” she said. “I had it swept. It’s a company property. A ‘perk’. Usually used for… entertaining executives.”
“Why?” he asked.
“Because you looked at Sora today like you wanted to save her. Not like you wanted to fuck her. Or use her. It was confusing.” She finally turned to face him. “I need confusing right now.”
“The blackmail,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
She took a long drink. “What about it?”
“Are you the one sending the threats?”
She laughed, a short, bitter sound. “No. But I wish I was. I wish I had that kind of guts. Or that kind of death wish.” She looked out the window again. “I think it’s Sora.”
Aidan stayed silent, letting her talk.
“She’s the youngest. The most devout when we started. Believed the fairy tale. The fall was the hardest. The things they made her do… the people they made her…” She shook her head, chasing the memory. “She has a brother. Sick. Expensive. She asked the company for an advance. They refused. Said her family was a distraction. A liability. I think she’s trying to force their hand. She’s not a criminal mastermind. She’s a desperate kid who doesn’t understand the monsters she’s poking.”
“Why tell me?”
“Because Kang brought you in. You’re not a vocal coach. You’re a fixer. A charming, handsome fixer. I figured you either work for the monsters… or you might be the only person who can get Sora out before they dismantle her.” She finished her whiskey. “So. Which is it?”
The weight of the choice pressed down on him. He saw Madam Choi’s cold gaze. Kang’s contempt. The hollow eyes in the tablet photo. Sora’s terrified flinch. The crumpled note with ‘love’ on it, dissolving in a sewer.
He set his glass down on the cool concrete windowsill. “What if it’s both?”
She understood. Her defiant posture softened into something like resignation. She stepped closer, her scent cutting through the whiskey—jasmine soap and something like exhaustion. “Then be the fixer for tonight. Just tonight. Make the monsters go away.”
Her kiss wasn’t like the ones from Crimson Veil—grateful, hungry for escape. This was a pact. A bitter, collaborative immersion in the charade. It was all lips and fierce, quiet intensity. She led him to the bedroom, a sterile space with a mattress on the floor and a single duvet.
In the dark, the city glow outlined her as she peeled off her shirt. There was no coyness, no performance. This was transactional, but the currency was a momentary, shared forgetting. When he entered her, she let out a sharp, shuddering gasp, her nails digging into his back. It was tight, almost uncomfortably so, a raw physical resistance that felt utterly separate from the calculated world outside. She buried her face in his shoulder, her body a taut line of tension and reluctant surrender.
After, they lay in silence for a long time. Her breathing evened out.
“You know,” she said, her voice a rough whisper in the dark, “whoever is sending those threats… they’re not just asking for money. The last one demanded all the original footage from our first ‘recruiting trip’ to Jeju. The unedited footage.”
Aidan’s mind, hazy with the afterglow and the weight of his betrayal, sharpened instantly. That wasn’t blackmail for profit. That was blackmail for a reckoning. That was someone seeking a weapon, not a payout.
“Who has access to that footage?”
“Kang,” she said simply. Then she rolled over, turning her back to him. “The door will lock behind you in ten minutes.”
He dressed in the dark, the new information clicking into place like a bullet in a chamber. Sora was a decoy. A frightened, desperate decoy. The real blackmailer was after something far more dangerous than money.
As he let himself out into the sterile hallway, the service elevator doors closing with a soft sigh, he knew. Yuna hadn’t brought him here to confess. She’d brought him here to be used. To plant a story. To point him at Sora.
She was the skeptic. The intellectual. The one who’d asked if he was a spy.
He looked at his reflection in the elevator’s polished brass. He saw the tool, being wielded by a hand he hadn’t even seen coming.