Page 84 of K-Pop Double Life

Wednesday June 3, 2026

The flight from New York to São Paulo gave me close to ten hours to work, and I intended to use every minute.

Aidan was asleep in the seat beside me. The kind of deep, trusting sleep that only came from sixteen years of partnership. He could sleep anywhere when I was awake, knowing I’d handle whatever needed handling. I’d do the same when he was on watch.

My laptop glowed in the dim cabin, three encrypted windows open simultaneously. Financial records in one, travel logs in another, communications metadata in the third. Richard had dumped the raw data into my secure folder six hours ago with a single line: Follow the money. It always tells the truth.

He wasn’t wrong.

While Aidan and I were dealing with crazed fans, Richard had been tracing payment patterns for three days, cross-referencing every transaction that touched Pryzm’s tour budget. Not just the obvious stuff, venue costs, travel, accommodations, but the peripheral expenses. Contractors hired through third-party agencies. Consulting fees paid to shell companies. The small, regular payments that looked legitimate until you aggregated them.

That was when the pattern emerged.

A series of ₩5,000,000 payments to Sophie Tran tied around the concerts in Cannes and Paris. ₩3,500,000 to the makeup assistant who’d leaked backstage footage. €2,500 to a pyrotechnics consultant in Cannes who’d disappeared the night of the fireworks incident.

All routed through the same Singapore shell company, all authorized by the same Starhouse account.

My pulse kicked up as I pulled the account details, cross-referenced them against the personnel database Eun-ji had sent us.

Account holder: Sara Yoon, Manager – Artist Development (Vanta).

Age thirty-four. MBA from Yonsei. Hired by Starhouse eighteen months ago after four years at a smaller entertainment company that had gone under. Currently managing Vanta, a five-member girl group with decent sales, strong streaming numbers, and nowhere near Pryzm’s level of international attention.

I was no accountant, but years in close protection had shown me how to dig into financials. I looked for bank transfers, reimbursement authorizations, anything that connected Sara Yoon to money that didn’t belong where it was.

She held accounts in Seoul, Singapore, and the Caymans. Too many for an entertainment manager only five and a half years into her career. Deposits that didn’t match her salary. Withdrawals that lined up too neatly with payments to people who had created problems for us.

She’d made too many transfers through the same pipeline. Too many people on the payroll. Enough noise to form a pattern.

One mistake can be luck. This many becomes a signature.

Across the aisle, Tae was asleep with his mouth open, injured knee propped on a pillow. Woo had curled against Min-kyu with a blanket pulled to his chin. Haneul stared out the window into cloud cover, earbuds in. Jin and Sang-hoon had staked out a pair of seats at the back of the plane.

Up front, Jason and Eun-ji were probably talking security protocols for São Paulo.

I opened Starhouse internal communications and searched for anything that might explain motive. Budget reviews. Audit notices. Department restructuring.

A finance committee memo from six weeks earlier flagged Vanta’s overseas expansion budget for review. Weak return projections. Recommendations to redirect marketing spend toward higher-performing acts, specifically Pryzm.

I sat back as Aidan woke. “Well?” His voice was rough with sleep. I glanced over. He hadn’t moved, one eye half-open in my direction.

“I think we found our sponsor.” That got him upright.

I turned the laptop so he could see. He scanned the payment trail, jaw tightening as he followed the connections. “Jesus.”

“Yeah.”

“So Vanta’s manager bankrolls attacks against the company’s biggest act to weaken them, shift resources, maybe create a scandal big enough to force a cancellation.”

“That’s where my money is.”

Aidan rubbed a hand over his face, then looked at the screen again. “That bank account in the Cayman Islands. Can you open those records?”

I did. Lots of money in, almost nothing coming out. “Her savings account,” I said. “But how did someone at her level put away two point one million US dollars?”

I pulled up the other records in a split screen. “Look at this transaction. Starhouse paid a company called Keundon LLC about a billion won for tour advice. Richard traced ownership of that company to a company registered in the Caymans.”

I did a quick translation search. In English, Keundon meant “big money.”