Page 53 of K-Pop Double Life

But I couldn’t focus. The rest of the session was a blur of missed cues and frustrated corrections and the choreographer finally calling it early because I was making everyone else’s timing worse.

In the dressing room after, Tae sat beside me while I stared at nothing. “Haneul told me about you and Sang-hoon. I always thought you guys were close. And he just picked up and left?”

“You know about the fraternization rule. He thought he could save my career by leaving.” My throat was tight. “So he left. And now I’m supposed to just keep performing like my entire world didn’t just fall apart.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“No. I want to go back in time and make him stay. I want to scream at him for being a coward. I want—” My voice broke. “I want him back.”

Tae pulled me into a hug, and I let myself collapse against him for a moment before remembering where we were. Professional. Had to stay professional.

“Sorry,” I said, pulling away. “I’m okay. I’ll be okay.”

“You’re allowed to not be okay, you know. You just lost—” He paused. “A friend. A relationship.”

“Everything,” I said quietly. “I lost everything.”

20

NETWORK

AIDAN — LONDON

Liam and I were at the back of the rehearsal hall, watching the rehearsal and working on our laptops. Even without knowing the choreography, I saw Jin was off.

Half a beat slow on transitions. Stumbling over lyrics I was sure he knew by heart. Ending a dance number five feet from where he was supposed to be. His focus slipping every time he thought no one was looking.

Was it an accumulation of all the threats he had received? Or was it because Sang-hoon had decamped back to Seoul?

Sang-hoon’s departure made our jobs easier. We no longer had to worry about protecting two men, on the chance that someone would hurt Sang-hoon to get back at Jin. But Sang-hoon’s absence was taking a toll on Pryzm’s center. All the technical staff were upset, from the technical director to the music engineer to the choreographer. Everything revolved around Jin, and if he was off he knocked the whole performance out of whack.

I logged into the secure proxy server Richard had set up for us years before and stared at my laptop screen, at a series of emails that had started arriving at Eun-ji’s inbox shortly after the Amsterdam show, the time normalized to Central European Summer Time. Three messages, each one escalating in specificity:

Message 1, sent 11:47 PM: The center cannot hold.

Message 2, sent 12:33 AM: Red looks good on him. Like devotion. Like blood.

Message 3, sent 2:15 AM: London will be beautiful. So many ways to fall from great heights.

All three sent from an IP address that resolved to Starhouse Entertainment’s corporate network in Seoul.

Which meant either someone at headquarters was threatening their own talent, or someone had compromised the company’s security from the inside.

Richard’s response had come through twenty minutes ago, characteristically blunt: IP is legit Starhouse, but routing through VPN. Could be internal or spoofed. Need physical access to their servers to confirm. You’re on your own until someone can get that.

Across the room, Liam looked up from his tablet. “The photograph from Paris.”

“What about it?”

“Forensics came back. The frame was purchased at a duty-free shop in Nice airport. Cash transaction, no security footage. The cameras in that section have been broken for three weeks.” He pulled up an image on his screen. “But the photograph itself is interesting. Look at the metadata.”

I leaned over. The image file had been stripped of most identifying information, but traces remained—fragments that told a story if you knew how to read them.

“Canon EOS R5,” Liam said. “Professional camera. The kind of equipment a tour photographer would use.”

“Or any serious hobbyist.”

“True. But I went over the list of people with legitimate credentials who could have been backstage at 21:47 on the night of the Cannes show. Jason’s team documented seventy-three people in Cannes including Starhouse staff and local crew. Then he checked out eighty-three who had access in Paris to place the gift-wrapped box in Jin’s dressing room.”