Chapter 6b No Safe Ground
No Safe Ground
The first thing I notice isn’t the sunlight slicing across the floor or the evidence of a life that isn’t mine—his script pages stacked neatly, our clothes in a messy trail to the bed. It’s the angry notification badges on my phone. They seem to multiply as I watch.
A timeline of my own execution, delivered in a neat little list.
Cold, clipped messages from the CEO.
Shin’s final, stark: Call me.
And then one from an unknown number, sitting at the very top of the screen, looking less like a text and more like an unexploded bomb.
It’s the morbid curiosity of staring at your own car crash. It’s a rule of human nature: you have to look at the wreckage. My thumb swipes it open.
[Official summon for police questioning — Seoul Metropolitan Police Department, Narcotics Unit. Appearance required at 10:00 AM.]
I sit up so fast the sheets tangle around my legs, nearly sending me face-first into the nightstand.
A sharp, ugly sound escapes my throat—somewhere between a gasp and a choke—as the first curl of panic burns through my chest.
Beside me, Suho blinks awake, hair sticking up in a way that would still look editorial-ready in Vogue Korea.
“You’re loud for someone who’s not even dressed yet,” he mutters, voice rough with sleep. Then his gaze drops to my phone screen. “Oh.”
“‘Oh’?” I snap, my voice cracking. “That’s all you’ve got? ‘Oh’?” It’s a quiet, world-weary ‘oh’—the kind that comes when someone sees the tidal wave a second before you do and realizes you’re standing right in its path.
He sits up, rubbing his face. “Breathe.”
“Breathe? I’m about to breathe my way into prison!”
The infuriating ghost of a smirk touches his lips. “That’s not how prison works.”
“Really? You’d know? Is this in the How to Survive Prison as a Celebrity manual?”
He doesn’t rise to the bait. He just leans over and takes my phone. “I’ll call a car. The agency’s lawyers will meet you there.”
“And Shin,” I mutter. The mention of his name is a physical thing, a guilty weight settling low in my stomach. I can picture his unanswered messages: the barrage of ‘Are you okay?’ texts, and that final two-word message.
Suho catches the shift in my expression, his own hardening slightly. “He’s your manager. He’ll be there. That’s his job.”
“That’s not all he is,” I say quietly, more to myself than to him.
He exhales, a hint of impatience in the sound. “Min-hee, I can’t go with you. I have a full day of shooting, and you know we can’t be seen together right now. It would just add fuel to the—“
“The scandal?” I interrupt, my voice dripping with sarcasm. “The rumors? The fact that the entire internet already thinks I’m running an underground weed cartel out of my kitchen?”
The ghost of a smile on his lips vanishes. He scrubs a hand over his face, the exhaustion of the morning suddenly hitting him full-force. “Exactly.”
The sarcasm hangs in the air, a flimsy, useless shield against the cold, hard reality of the situation. He’s right, and we both know it. A long, tense silence stretches between us, filled with a shared, helpless frustration.
“I should go,” I say finally, my voice flat.
I move quickly, splashing cold water on my face in the bathroom, then grabbing my purse and the sunglasses—a pair of thin, fashionable frames that are more of a statement than a shield. I’m almost at the door when his voice stops me.
“Wait.”
I turn. He’s right behind me. Before I can react, he gently takes the flimsy sunglasses from my face. “These are useless,” he says, his voice a deep, grating rumble. “They’ll see right through them.”
He takes off the heavy, black designer sunglasses the console near the door and slides them onto my face. They’re oversized, heavy on my nose, and they smell faintly, unmistakably, of him.
“These are darker,” he says, his voice softer now, his thumbs gently adjusting the frames on my cheeks. “They won’t see your eyes.”
I just stand there, my breath caught in my throat. I look up at his tired, worried eyes. I can’t speak. I just give a single, small nod.
By the time I’m in the car he called, I’m wearing sunglasses that are too big for my face and a knot of pure, uncut dread in my stomach.
***
The sidewalk in front of the police station is a war zone. Camera flashes burst like mortar shells, and questions are shouted like accusations.
“Min-hee! Are you admitting to the charges?”
“Who supplied you with the marijuana?”
“Are you still seeing Kim Suho?”
That last one lands like a physical blow. My head whips in the direction of the voice, an instinct I regret instantly as the world whites out in a supernova of flashes.
Being interrogated in a police station is bad enough. Being interrogated while wearing your hookup’s boxers while the reporters yell his name, making sure the world won’t forget, is a new circle of hell.
And then, a voice cuts through the noise. “Ms. Yoon.”
Shin. His tone is cool, flat. Polite enough for the lawyers, cold enough to make my skin prickle. He’s standing a few feet away with two men in black suits who look like they could either draft a bulletproof contract or make a body disappear.
He doesn’t look at me. He just tips his head toward the station entrance.
“You’re late.”
I swallow, forcing a smile that feels like cracking glass. “Good morning to you too, manager-nim.” The formal title is a pathetic attempt to volley his cold “Ms. Yoon” back at him. He never calls me that. It’s the voice he uses when a brand deal falls through. Only now, I’m the failed brand deal.
“Morning,” he says, his gaze still fixed somewhere over my shoulder. His tone could refrigerate a small country.
Inside, the detective’s office is all gray walls and cold, humming fluorescent light. I feel less like a person and more like a specimen pinned under glass.
“They’ll need samples,” one of the detectives says. “Urine, hair… possibly fingernails.”
I blink. “Fingernails?”
He nods, his face impassive. “Standard procedure for all suspects in cases like this.”
The words settle in my stomach like a stone. I’m not even sure what was in that cigarette—but in their eyes, I’m already halfway to guilty. For a second, I picture myself under a microscope, my life dissected in a sterile lab while reporters outside fight for a glimpse.
Then the questions start: dates, places, people I’ve been with—so precise I wonder if they keep a running log of my life.
Shin sits beside me, a silent guardian, his expression carefully neutral. My legal team is a wall of expensive suits, their faces giving away nothing.
Halfway through, a detective leans in, his breath sharp with bitter coffee. “Where were you on the night of—”
My brain does something I’ve trained it to do over years of grueling, pointless interviews: it checks out. The words dissolve into static. The fluorescent lights hum. It’s a defense mechanism, a way to float above the moment until it’s over.
“Ms. Yoon?”
I blink, pulled back from the fog. “Sorry, could you repeat that? I… zoned out.”
Beside me, Shin lets out a quiet, barely perceptible sigh. He knows exactly what I was doing.
By the end, my head is pounding. I’ve signed papers I barely read and promised to remain available. Translation: my life, my career, everything I’ve built, is officially on hold.
After wading through another media feeding frenzy, we finally make it into the car. Shin and the legal team murmur in low, careful voices.
My phone vibrates in my hand like a revving engine.
Suho.
My heart leaps into my throat. Hearing his voice now, in this car with Shin and two stone-faced lawyers, feels like a reckless risk. It could trigger crying, or yelling, or both.
But I answer anyway.
“Hello,” I say, my voice sounding foreign even to me.
“You survived,” he says. There’s a strained attempt at lightness in his tone.
“Just barely,” I whisper, instinctively cupping my hand over the phone, trying to shield the conversation from the silent, disapproving presence of Shin just a few feet away. “It was a spectacle.”
A short, sharp laugh crackles through the line. “I can imagine.” There’s a pause, and his voice drops, becoming softer. “I wish I could’ve been there.”
I lean my head back against the leather seat, closing my eyes. My first instinct is to say something sharp, something bitter. Yeah, well, a phone call isn’t quite the same as having you here instead of two lawyers who were probably programmed to say ‘no comment’ in their sleep.
But the words die on my tongue. The last thing I need is to antagonize my own legal team. So I just swallow, the bitterness a familiar taste in the back of my throat.
“It’s fine,” I say into the phone, my voice colder than I intend. “I’m handling it.”
He catches the chill in my voice immediately.
That quiet, professional dismissal is a language we both speak fluently.
There’s a beat of silence on his end, and I brace myself for the familiar, bitter script to begin: the sarcastic comeback, the frustrated sigh, or the quiet, definitive sound of him setting the phone down—not hanging up, but simply ending the conversation on his terms.
Instead, his voice comes back, practical and laced with a new, specific concern.
“Where will you go after?” he asks.
The question catches me off guard. I hadn’t thought that far ahead. My own apartment, a space now contaminated by the memory of Shin’s quiet disappointment, feels impossible. He’s not asking to be romantic; he’s asking a logistical question, because he knows I have nowhere safe to land.
The cold, calculated celebrity math doesn’t do a damn thing to quiet the fact that I’m running out of safe places to stand, and he’s the only one who seems to have realized it.
“How’s the shoot?” I ask, because it’s easier than admitting that.
“Chaotic. Half the cast has food poisoning, so I’m running back-to-back scenes. Doctor costume, the whole deal. Already downed two energy drinks just to stay upright.”