45. Jae
Chapter forty-five
Jae
The conversation with Amiyah happened last night in the vet clinic parking lot, both of us leaning against my car while camera crews loitered at the entrance like they were hoping the building might spontaneously produce something worth filming.
She looked perfect—pink blouse, blonde hair pulled back, the kind of composure that makes other people look like they’re forgetting how to stand—and she took the whole Kai Ryu thing with the specific, devastating grace of someone who’d already decided not to be surprised.
“So you’re a K-pop star,” she’d said, not a question.
“Was,” I said. “Very was. Past tense. And I sure as hell don't plan on going back to it.”
“You have fan accounts.”
“Fan accounts have me. There’s a difference.”
She laughed, the sound bright and quick in the thick air, and it should have closed the loop.
Should have been enough. The secret’s out, she’s fine with it, we move on.
Except something in her eyes didn’t quite land.
Something about the way she held her shoulders, the fractional distance she kept between us that hadn’t been there two days ago when I had her bent over my couch making noises she would deny under oath.
Not cold. Not cutting. Just slightly out of reach, like a call dropping mid-sentence, the connection thinning to static before the words finish.
The possibilities run on a loop, none of them useful.
The identity chaos spooked her—fair enough, finding out your whatever-he-is spent three years on international stages tends to recalibrate expectations.
She’s pulling back from whatever we’re building because the building got complicated overnight.
There’s someone else, though the thought lands like a rock in my stomach and I push it away before it settles.
Or—and this one feels most likely, which is its own special brand of humiliation—I’m just too far gone over her to read anything clearly anymore, projecting my own anxiety onto the blank spaces between her sentences like a man translating a language he doesn’t speak.
The radio hums. Some pop track I’ve heard six hundred times. I let it play.
My phone rings through the car speakers.
The name on the dash display stops the thought mid-cycle.
Kiho. Two in the morning in Seoul, which means he’s either still gaming or something is catastrophically wrong.
Given that he typically texts before he calls and his last text was fourteen hours ago asking if I’d seen a specific patch note for a game I don’t play, the math doesn’t favor gaming.
I hit accept.
“Hey,” I say, the greeting automatic.
“Hyunjae.”
My name. My full name. The one he uses maybe twice a year, when whatever he’s about to say requires the gravity of all three syllables. My jaw tightens before he says another word.
“Listen to me,” he says, and his voice is stripped. Flat. The easy energy he carries like a second skin has been surgically removed, leaving something careful and measured in its place. “I need you to listen, and I need you to not—” He stops. Starts again. “Just listen. Don’t interrupt.”
“Okay.” My hand finds the wheel, grips.
“Nari heard something.” His girlfriend. Rising act, Baek Sound Group, the kind of talent that gets featured on every end-of-year list before she’s even dropped a full album.
“She was at the company building late. Overheard Minjun and Director Baek in one of the private rooms. The walls are—you know how they are. Not as soundproof as they think.”
The name lands in the car like lead. Baek.
Seo-jin Baek. Chairman of the board at Baek Sound Group, the man who has spent the last decade watching Crown & Throne outpace his label at every award show, every chart, every distribution deal that mattered.
The man whose smile in industry photos never reaches his eyes.
“Baek took out a hit on you,” Kiho says. Each word placed with deliberate weight, like he’s reading coordinates. “A contract. On you specifically. Possibly on the family too, but you’re the priority. The heir. The one who walked away.”
My first response is a flat, almost bored “A hit.”
The word sits there in the cabin of my car, absurd and tiny against the vast, indifferent hum of the freeway.
A hit. Like something from a movie I watched too young, the kind of phrase that belongs in subtitles beneath a man in a black suit walking away from an explosion.
Not here. Not in my car, on the 10, with the radio murmuring about summer love and the city lights pressing through the glass.
I almost laugh. The sound forms in my chest and dies there because Kiho isn’t laughing. Kiho has called me Hyunjae, and the silence that follows my flat repetition is long enough to confirm that whatever this is, it is not a joke, it is not an exaggeration, and it is very, very real.
“Jesus Christ,” I whisper.
“I know.”
“How sure is Nari?”
“Sure enough that she called me crying from the bathroom. She recorded part of it. I’ve heard it. It’s—” He stops. “It’s him, Jae. It’s Baek. Talking about timelines and clean execution and making sure the body reads natural. I can send it to you, but I don’t think you want to hear it.”
“Send it,” I tell him.
“I’m sending it now. Look at your phone in a second. It’s him, Jae. Talking about the contract, the clean execution, making sure the body reads natural.”
“Got it.” I pull off at the next exit. Don’t signal.
Don’t care. The ramp curves down toward a strip mall parking lot flooded with the bright glare of afternoon sunlight, and I park in the farthest corner from the building, engine off, sitting with my hands on the wheel and my breath coming in pulls that feel too shallow for the size of my lungs.
Kiho is quiet on the line. Giving me the space. He’s good at that—knowing when words help and when they just take up oxygen.
“There’s something else,” he says, finally. Carefully. Without the full apology the admission probably deserves. “The leak. The Kai Ryu thing. That was me.”
I close my eyes against the glare bouncing off the hood.
“I did it,” he continues. “Posted the side-by-side. Started the threads. Got the accounts talking. I—” A breath.
“I reasoned that if someone was already hunting you, visibility was safer than anonymity. Harder to disappear someone everyone is watching. Harder to make it look accidental when half the campus has you on video crossing the quad. I know I should have talked to you first. I would make the same call again.”
Fuck. The anger flares up, a hot, clean line running from my sternum to my throat, ready to be weaponized into something sharp enough to cut with.
But the bandwidth isn’t there. The hit takes up too much space, leaves no room for the secondary betrayal, and somewhere in the back of my skull a cold, clinical part of me is already nodding.
He’s not wrong. Visibility is armor. Not perfect armor, but better than nothing.
“Okay,” I say. The word comes out steadier than it has any right to. “Okay. I need to call my father.”
“I know.”
“I’ll call you back.”
“Jae—”
“I know.” I hang up.
The parking lot is half-full. A shopping cart sits abandoned near the dumpster, one wheel bent at an angle. I sit for one beat. Two. Then I pull my father’s contact up and press call.
He answers on the second ring. Always does. The man treats his phone like an extension of his arm.
“Hyunjae.” He answers.
“Dad. I know this is going to sound crazy but—” I pause.
How do you tell a man his family is in danger and his son is being actively hunted?
“Baek is trying to have me killed. Possibly the whole family. You need to double security.”
“Hy—”
“Dad, I’m fucking serious. Kiho sent proof.”
Silence then…
“Send it to my secure line,” he says, his voice dropping into a register so cold it makes the back of my neck prickle. “Now.”
“Sent.”
“You need to come home,” he says. “Now. Today. I’ve already booked you a seat on the evening flight out of LAX. A car will meet you at Incheon. No argument, Jae. This is not a discussion.”
I listen to all of it. Head bowed slightly toward the wheel, the phone warm against my ear, the midday sun turning the dashboard an unnatural glare. A beat of silence before each reply, the way he taught me—think, then speak. Measure your words.
“I can’t,” I say. “Not yet.”
“Jae—”
“Dad.” I keep my voice level. The particular register I use when I need him to hear me not as his son but as an adult making an adult decision.
“I’m weeks from graduation. Three weeks.
Less. My clinical hours are done. My thesis is submitted.
All that’s left is the ceremony and the paperwork, and then I’m done.
I’ve spent three years here. I’m not walking away three weeks short because Seo-jin Baek decided to have a tantrum. ”
The silence on the line has texture. I can feel him weighing it—the paternal instinct to drag me home by the collar versus the respect for the autonomy he’s spent my entire life cultivating.
It’s a conversation we’ve had before, in different shapes, about different things.
The tension between protection and trust. The line between his empire and my life.
“Three weeks,” he says finally. “Not a day more.”
“Three weeks. Then I’m on the first flight home, I promise.”
“Your mother—”
“Don’t tell her yet.” The request comes out sharper than I intend.
I soften it. “Please. You know how she gets. She’ll worry in the way that doesn’t stop, and I can’t—” I stop.
Swallow. “I can’t carry that from this distance.
Not right now. Let me finish this. Then I’ll tell her myself, in person, where she can see I’m fine. ”
Another pause. Longer.