Park Jinyoung has come out of retirement to face a crisis he never anticipated: the security division of JYP Entertainment has been infiltrated by the Yakuza, and the investigation into it has already been buried by bribery. When a mysterious masked figure called Kashimo appears, representing an ancient organization known as the Edict of Death, Jinyoung finds himself sitting across a dinner table with the heads of Korea's biggest entertainment companies, all of them facing the same threat.
The room is dark, shadows working like a tide to turn the room to void. There is a single source of light, a lamp on the center desk. It casts a stubborn gold halo to fight the tides back, a thin light which throws itself across a desk drowning in paperwork. A mug of coffee sits on the side, its heat long gone in the cold of the room. Night has settled deep and absolute, except for one Park Jinyoung. He lies behind the desk, still as a portrait, eyes ringed dark and hollow. He reads, and reads, and understands nothing. The words swim. The numbers lie. Something in these reports does not add up, and the silence offers him no answers.
“Sigh…oh my fucking god”, Park Jinyoung brings both his hands up to his face, palms pressed hard against his mouth, fingers splayed as though he could physically hold back whatever was threatening to escape him. His eyes were wide, tired, dark, and blown open with something that sat somewhere between disbelief and dread.
The thing was, Park Jinyoung was supposed to be living his free life. He had earned it, the quiet, the distance, the slow exhale of a life no longer measured in comeback schedules and quarterly reports. He had handed the reins to Jeong Wook with steady hands and a full heart, trusting the man the way you only trust someone you have watched grow. That chapter was supposed to be closed.
And yet here he sat. Alone in the dark, the lamp burning low, mountains of paper swallowing his desk whole.
This was not Jeong Wook's failure, not entirely. He would not allow himself to think that simply, but something had gone wrong on a level that neither of them had seen coming. Something had gotten in. Unexplained hires. Names that appeared in the organizational structure of JYP Entertainment with no clear origin, no clean paper trail. This was not nepotism, he had seen enough of that in this industry to know the shape of it. This was also not a friend of a friend slipping through the cracks of a lenient hiring process. This was something graver. Something deliberate. The security division was compromised, the security of his idols was compromised.
He set the report down. Picked up another. The words did not change.
Convicted criminals. Men with ties to criminal organizations. And deeper, buried beneath layers of falsified agency listings and ghost contractors, Yakuza.
Jinyoung's jaw tightened. He had read this page three times already. The shock had long since curdled into something colder, something that sat low and still in his chest like standing water.
He did not know how they had gotten here. Neither did anyone else, and that was perhaps the most terrifying part. Every answer he unearthed peeled back to reveal another question underneath. One hire led to another, which traced back to a private agency, which dissolved into nothing, a fake name on paper, an address that did not exist, a thread that simply ended. The rabbit hole had no visible bottom, and every time he thought he had found solid ground, it gave way beneath him.
He told himself to be grateful. The senior members of his security had caught them. Nothing truly catastrophic had occurred. He told himself that.
But there had been incidents. He reached for a specific folder, one he had read its content so many times the words had fused with something that felt uncomfortably like guilt.
A TWICE fan meet. An ordinary evening, bright lights and the sound of girls laughing, fans reaching over barriers with trembling hands. He had not been there. He hadn't needed to be, he had trusted the process and the team. Then, somewhere in that venue, standing among his staff, had been men he had never seen before. Men who had no business being there, wearing credentials they had no right to carry.
They had been intercepted before they reached the girls. The man who intercepted them had not walked away clean. Knife wounds. Multiple lacerations across the torso, one dangerously close to something vital. The bodyguard, which was also someone he has shared meals with, had spent eleven days in a hospital bed and told no one outside the room the real reason why.
The assailants had been arrested quietly, efficiently, the entire incident sealed away from the press. The public saw nothing. The fans saw nothing. The girls saw nothing.
But Jinyoung had seen the photographs taken during processing.
The tattoos. Black ink climbing skin, intricate and unmistakable. The mark of a Dragon curling up from wrist to shoulder. Yakuza. The Fucking Yakuza.
He had pushed for a deeper investigation immediately. He made calls, pulled weight, demanded answers with every resource available to him. And then, quietly, the investigation had stopped. Bribery. An outside source, unidentified, with reach long enough and pockets deep enough to make the entire thing simply cease. No arrests beyond the initial. No further inquiry. The Dragon's mark led nowhere, officially. The file was closed before it was ever truly opened.
He had ordered a full sweep of the security division, every hire, every clearance, every face that had ever stepped a foot into a JYP building in the past three years. All groups were placed under lock down in the interim, schedules quietly restructured. The sweep had found more. It kept finding more.
Jinyoung lowered the folder. The lamp hummed faintly. Outside these walls, Seoul breathed on. The world was indifferent, enormous, unknowing.
He pressed his hands against his face, palms flat over his mouth, and sat very still in the dark.
He did not know who had done this. He did not know how deep it went, or how long it had been going, or what, who, the intended target was. He knew nothing.
What he knew was this: he could not trust the system that was supposed to protect his artists.
And he did not know yet what he was going to do about it.
The phone rang.
Jinyoung did not move immediately. His hands were still pressed against his face, the folder still open before him, the lamp still burning its pale, exhausted light across the desk. For a moment the sound simply existed alongside everything else.
Then he reached for it.
Unknown number. The screen glowed cold and blue in the dark, clinical, offering nothing. Jinyoung stared at it for exactly two rings before he answered. In his experience, unknown numbers at this hour were never wrong numbers.
He pressed it to his ear. Said nothing.
A beat of silence on the other end. Not the silence of a bad connection or a misdial, but something more deliberate than that. Measured. As though the person on the other end was simply taking a moment to confirm he had picked up before deciding to speak.
Then, a voice.
"Park Jinyoung-ssi."
It was calm. Unhurried. Gender-neutral in the way that certain voices simply were, smooth enough to belong to anyone, specific enough to belong to only one person. There was no greeting beyond the name, no apology for the hour, no performance of warmth. Just the name, landing in the quiet like a stone dropped into still water.
Jinyoung's eyes moved slowly to the window. Seoul glittered beyond the glass, distant and indifferent.
"Who is this." It was not quite a question. He had stopped phrasing things as questions when they were really demands a long time ago.
"Someone," the voice said, "who is aware of your current situation."
Jinyoung said nothing. He waited.
"The Dragon," the voice continued, unhurried, as though reading from something only they could see. "The sweep. The eleven days your friend spent in a hospital bed that no one was supposed to know about. The investigation that stopped before it started."
The silence that followed was Jinyoung's own. He did not fill it. His face had not changed, but beneath the desk, his hand had closed slowly into a fist against his thigh.
"I see I have your attention," the voice said. Something in the tone did not quite smile, but simply acknowledged.
"You have thirty seconds," Jinyoung said quietly, "to tell me who you are."
"My name is Kashimo."
“I represent an organization that deals in a very specific kind of solution. One that I believe you are in need of, Park-ssi, given the nature of what has been finding its way into your house."
"What organization."
"You wouldn’t recognize it. That is intentional."
Jinyoung leaned back slowly in his chair. His eyes had settled into something flat and careful, the look of a man who had navigated this industry long enough to know that the most dangerous conversations were the ones that began with someone already knowing more than they should.
"You're going to tell me," he said, "that you can fix this."
"No," Kashimo said. And the correction was so immediate, so precise, that Jinyoung's jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. "I am going to tell you that I can protect what you cannot afford to lose. Fixing this, that is a separate matter. A longer one. But your artists cannot wait for long."
"There will be a meeting. The details will arrive through a channel you will trust when you see it. You will not be alone in the room. There are others in your industry facing what you are facing, whether they have uncovered it yet or not. I need you to bring them there."
Jinyoung's gaze dropped to the folder on his desk. The photographs. The ink of a Dragon climbing pale skin.
"And if I don't come," he said.