Chapter 16: The Gala Aftermath
The three words glowed on his screen, a tiny beacon in the dark of his apartment. I need you. Aidan set the phone face down on the cluttered coffee table, next to the cold soju bottle. He could still smell the hotel ballroom on his jacket, a mix of perfume and dread.
Kang’s directive was clear. Use whatever leverage you have. Break whoever you need to break. Yuna was your in.
The tablet with the five-second clip sat beside his laptop, a dormant grenade. Sora’s sobs echoed in the silence of his own head. He thought of Nari in the service corridor, her face lit by phone-light, forging a weapon from a younger girl’s mistake. He thought of Yuna’s dead-eyed smile as she danced with the laughing executive.
He picked up his phone again. The text was sent an hour ago. No follow-up. Just that single, stark declaration. It wasn’t coy. It wasn’t an invitation. It was a statement of fact, and in its simplicity, it felt truer than anything he’d heard all night.
He stood, the decision pulling him upright before his mind had fully ratified it. He shrugged off the tuxedo jacket, left it in a heap on the floor. He pulled on a dark hoodie and jeans. He pocketed his phone, his keys, the tablet. He was a fixer going to a job. That’s what he told himself.
The cab ride was a blur of neon streaks and his own reflection in the window. His knuckles were white where he gripped the tablet case. Use her. The mantra felt foul in his mind.
Yuna’s apartment building loomed, a sleek obelisk of muted gold light. The lobby was deserted. The elevator ride to her floor was soundless.
He stood before her door, fist raised. He didn’t knock. He texted. I’m outside.
The door opened a few seconds later, so fast he knew she’d been waiting right there, watching her phone.
She was a mess. The silk robe was tied haphazardly, her short black hair stuck out in places, and her face was bare and blotchy from crying. No makeup to armor her. Her eyes were huge, red-rimmed, and utterly terrified. The sarcastic shield was gone, shattered.
“Get in,” she whispered, her voice raspy.
He stepped inside. The jasmine scent was there, but undercut with the sharp, metallic tang of panic. She closed the door, locked it, leaned her forehead against the cool wood for a second. She was trembling.
“She told me,” Yuna said to the door. “Nari. She came straight here from the gala. She was… calm. Scarily calm.”
Aidan didn’t move. “Told you what?”
“Everything.” Yuna turned, wrapping her arms around herself. “The real blackmail. Not for money. She hacked Kang’s personal cloud months ago. She’s had the Jeju files. All of them. Not just Sora’s. Mine. Hers. All of it.” A hysterical little laugh escaped her. “She’s been sitting on a nuclear bomb, waiting for the right wind.”
“To burn it all down,” Aidan finished, his voice flat.
Yuna nodded, a quick, jerky motion. “She showed me the files. On a drive. Not a sample. The whole thing. What they did to Sora… it wasn’t just that night. It was a pattern. A system.” She looked at him, her gaze pleading for him to understand. “She’s going to release it. Tomorrow. To every media outlet, every fan forum, every shareholder. At noon. She says it’s the only way to break the cycle.”
“And you believe her?”
“I saw it, Aidan!” The words burst out of her, loud in the quiet room. She flinched at her own volume. “I saw my own file. From two years ago. The ‘investor meeting’ in Busan. I was so drunk I barely remembered… but the footage remembered. Every fucking detail.” Her breath hitched. “Nari’s right. They’ll never stop. They’ll just find new Sora. New me’s. Unless someone burns the whole farm down.”
Aidan felt the crossroads solidifying under his feet. Kang on one side. This raw, grief-stricken vengeance on the other. “Kang knows. He saw the sample. He’s not going to wait for noon. He’s authorized ‘direct resolution.’ That means they find Nari and the drive, and they disappear her. And anyone who helped.”
Yuna went very still. “Is that why you’re here? To get me to help you find her?”
He was supposed to say yes. That was the job. Extract the location, the plan, then call it in. He opened his mouth to lie.
But he didn’t.
“You texted me,” he said instead, his own voice quiet. “Why?”
The tears welled up again, spilling over. “Because I’m fucking scared. And I don’t want to stop her. I want to help her. But I don’t know how. They’ll be watching her. They’ll be watching me.” She took a step toward him, the robe gaping slightly. “You’re the only person who isn’t one of them. You’re just… here. In the middle. And I need you to tell me what to do.”
The trust in her words was a physical weight. It was also a weapon. Kang’s voice hissed in his memory. Use her.
He could. He could hold her, calm her, get Nari’s location, her method. A few hours of careful, gentle manipulation. He’d done similar things before, in other lives, for lesser reasons.
He looked at Yuna—really looked. Not as an asset, not as a means to an end. He saw the tattoo peeking from her collar, the hidden indie rock fan, the dancer who used exhaustion as a punchline. He saw the girl in the Busan file, the one who couldn’t remember. He saw someone who had just been handed a lit match and told the only way to save herself was to become an arsonist.
His moral calculus, the one he’d clung to since taking this filthy job, finally short-circuited. There was no right side. There was only Kang’s violent, preserving evil, and Nari’s destructive, righteous chaos.
“Where is she now?” he asked, his tone changing, becoming operational.
Yuna heard the shift. A flicker of hope. “She has a place. Not hers. A love motel in Itaewon. She pays for it weekly in cash. She said it’s the one place they wouldn’t think to look. Room 407. The drive is there.”
“Is she there now?”
“She said she was going there to wait. To prepare the data dump for noon.”
Aidan ran the logistics. Itaewon. Crowded. Anonymous. Difficult to extract someone quietly. Kang’s people would go in hard. They wouldn’t care about collateral.
“What’s your plan?” Yuna asked, searching his face.
“You can’t help her by going there,” he said, thinking aloud. “They’ll have you followed if you move. You stay here. Act normal. Broken-hearted over the gala stress. Order food. Watch TV.”
“And you?”
“I’m going to talk to her.”
Yuna’s eyes widened. “They’ll kill you if they find you with her.”
“They won’t find me.” The old certainty from his past life slipped into his voice. It felt foreign. “But I need to know what you’re asking me to do, Yuna. If I walk out of here, I’m not going to stop her. I’m going to… assess. Maybe facilitate. That makes me a traitor to the people who pay me. And if it goes wrong, we all burn. You understand that? Not just Nari. You and me. We’ll be complicit.”
She didn’t hesitate. She crossed the space between them, her hands coming up to frame his face. Her palms were cold. “I am so tired of being clean,” she whispered, her lips close to his. “I want to be dirty for the right reasons for once.”
She kissed him. It wasn’t like before—not desperate passion, but a seal. A pact. He kissed her back, a grim acceptance.
When they parted, she rested her forehead against his. “Bring her back here. After. We can hide her. Figure out the rest.”
“No,” Aidan said, gently disentangling himself. The planner in him was taking over, walling off the emotion. “This apartment is compromised. Kang knows we’re close. If I succeed, I’ll contact you. A new phone. Burner. I’ll get one for Nari too.”
He was moving now, toward the door. The job was different, but the mechanics were the same. Tradecraft. Deception. Movement.
“Aidan.”
He turned, his hand on the door handle.
“Thank you,” she said. It sounded like a goodbye.
He didn’t answer. He slipped out into the hall, a shadow leaving one kind of darkness for another. The elevator descended. He pulled his hood up. Outside, he flagged a cab, but not toward Itaewon. First, he needed a different kind of room. One with no cameras. And he needed to buy two prepaid phones.
As the city scrolled past, he felt the last vestige of his official role fall away. He was no one’s fixer now. He was just a man in the middle, running toward an explosion, hoping to steer the shrapnel.
He was just a man in the middle, running toward an explosion, hoping to steer the shrapnel.
The cab dropped him in Hongdae, not Itaewon. He needed a layer Kang wouldn’t predict. A twenty-four-hour PC bang was his first stop, the air thick with the smell of cheap instant noodles and the frantic click-clack of mechanical keyboards. He bought two burner phones from a sleepy clerk at a convenience store, the plastic packaging cold and slick in his hands.
He loaded a minimal amount of data onto each, creating anonymous accounts. His fingers hesitated over the first contact. He typed a message to Yuna’s real number. New phone. This is Aidan. Memorize this number, then destroy the SIM. You never got it. Status: en route. Will contact from a different number next.
He sent it, powered the phone down, and pocketed it. The second phone was for Nari, if she was still alive to use it.
Another cab, this time cutting through the late-night pulse of Itaewon. The love motel was tucked behind a bustling street, a garish neon sign depicting a cartoon heart flickering on its last legs. Hotel Belleview. It was perfect. No questions, no names, just cash and transient privacy.
Room 407 was on the fourth floor, accessible by a concrete staircase that smelled of mildew and bleach. He took the stairs two at a time, his shoes scraping softly in the hollow well. The hallway was lined with identical doors, a threadbare red carpet absorbing all sound.
He stood before 407. No light leaked from underneath. He listened, hearing only the distant thump of bass from a club blocks away. He knocked, a pattern: two quick, one slow, a pause, then two more.
Silence.
Then a shuffle, close to the door. A peephole darkened briefly. “Who is it?” Nari’s voice was a taut wire, stripped of all its polished resonance.
“Aidan. Yuna sent me.”
A chain rattled. Two deadbolts thunked back. The door opened just a crack, held by a security latch. One dark, furious eye peered out. “Prove it.”
“She told me about Busan. She saw her own file.” He kept his voice low, even. “She doesn’t want to stop you. She’s terrified for you.”
The eye studied him. The latch slid free. The door opened wider, just enough for him to slip inside before it was swiftly shut and relocked behind him.
The room was a tomb of electric light. Every lamp was on, blindingly bright. The bed was immaculate, unslept in. Nari stood in the center of the room, dressed in black jeans and a simple grey sweatshirt, her hair pulled into a severe ponytail. She looked older, and utterly formidable. On the small desk, a laptop was open, cables snaking to two external hard drives that hummed softly. A cheap burner phone lay beside them.
“You shouldn’t be here,” she said, not moving. “If they tracked you—”
“They didn’t. I’m good at not being tracked.” He didn’t approach further, giving her space. “Yuna thinks you should come back with me. Hide.”
A dry, humorless laugh escaped her. “Hide? Where? In her apartment they have monthly sweeps for bugs? No. This ends at noon. One way or another.”
“Kang saw the sample. He knows it’s you now. He’s not waiting for noon. ‘Direct resolution’ was the term. They’re coming, Nari. Tonight.”
A flicker of fear finally crossed her stony face, quickly buried. “Let them. The files are already encrypted, set to upload to seven different servers if this drive is destroyed or if I don’t enter a stop code by 11:55 a.m. They can kill me. It won’t matter.”
“It’ll matter to Sora,” Aidan said softly. “And to Yuna. They’ll be branded as co-conspirators. They’ll be destroyed with you. Is that your solution? A grand gesture that gets all three of you crucified?”
“They’re already being destroyed!” she snapped, her composure cracking. She gestured violently at the drives. “You saw it! That’s not a career, it’s a… a farm. A slaughterhouse with good lighting and catchy choruses. Someone has to hold the door open so everyone can see the blood on the floor!”
“I agree.” He said it calmly, which seemed to disarm her more than shouting would have. “But you’re holding a grenade. You pull the pin, you might take out the target, but you’ll shred everyone standing near you, including the people you’re trying to avenge. There has to be a way to cut the head off the snake without burning the whole garden.”
“There isn’t.” She turned back to the laptop, her shoulders rigid. “I’ve looked for a year. The law protects them. The money protects them. The silence protects them. The only thing that doesn’t protect them is sunlight. Raw, ugly, undeniable sunlight.”
Aidan leaned against the wall, the floral wallpaper gritty against his hoodie. He watched the data transfer bars on her screen crawl toward completion. She was right, and so was Kang. This was a binary choice: preserve the system or detonate it. Both options left the girls as collateral, either continuing victims or sacrificial pawns.
He thought of Madam Choi, who had “lent” him to Kang with a smile. The rival with a soft spot for her artists. The one person with enough power and inside knowledge to possibly, maybe, orchestrate a different outcome.
HE COULDN'T SEE A RESOLUTION THAT PROTECTED EVERYONE. INSTEAD HE DECIDED TO TRUST SOMEONE ELSE, WHO COULD BURY THEM ALL IF HE WAS WRONG.
He pulled out his personal phone, the one Kang monitored. He’d have to be fast. He navigated to his messaging app, then to a blank new message. His thumbs moved quickly, punching in the sequence of numbers he’d been given months ago, a number not written anywhere that he’d memorised just in case the walls ever closed in this completely.
He typed the message, each word a gamble. "CHOI. I HOPE YOU DIDN'T KNOW THE SITUATION WHEN YOU LENT ME TO YOUR RIVAL. IT'S UGLY, SYSTEMATIC RAPE OF THE GIRLS BY THE EXECUTIVES. I'M NOT PROTECTING THEM, BUT I DON'T KNOW A WAY TO EXPOSE THEM AND SAVE THE GIRLS AT THE SAME TIME. I'M TRUSTING YOU TO FIND A SOLUTION, YOU LOVE THE GIRLS AND I BELIEVE YOU CAN'T ABIDE THIS ANYMORE THAN I COULD. TELL ME WHAT TO DO TO FIX THIS."
He hit send. The whoosh sound was deafening in the quiet room.
Nari whirled around. “What was that? Who are you messaging?”
“Insurance,” he said, powering the phone off completely. “Or a death sentence. We’ll know soon.”