Page 85 of K-Pop Double Life

I told Aidan, and pointed at the next line. “Ownership there is a company called Nae Don LLC in Luxembourg. Nae Don means ‘my money.’”

“And who owns Nae Don?” Aidan asked.

“One shareholder. Sara Yoon.”

We tracked additional similar transactions. Overall, Sara Yoon had managed to fill her Cayman account with Starhouse money.

“That’s not opportunistic embezzlement,” Aidan said. “That’s systematic theft.”

“And it explains why she’s so desperate. She’s not just facing termination—she’s facing years in prison. Korean white-collar crime sentences are harsh, especially for amounts this large.”

“So she’s got nothing to lose.”

Aidan took control of the laptop and hit a few keys. “Worse. Starhouse has an internal audit scheduled for next month. She’s got millions to protect and a finite window to secure them before Starhouse catches up with her.”

“Which means she needs time. Time the audit isn’t giving her.”

“Exactly. Kill Jin, tank the tour, create enough chaos that Starhouse abandons the audit to deal with the crisis. By the time things settle, she’s gone and the money’s untraceable.”

Aidan handed the laptop back to me and I pulled up the tour schedule. “She’s still got time to hire professionals to create trouble. From São Paulo, we head to Seoul for the finale. Two more chances for her to make something happen.”

Aidan crossed his arms over his chest. “Unless we stop her first.”

“We can’t arrest her. We’re not law enforcement. Best we can do is flag her to Starhouse and Interpol and hope they can get an arrest warrant and pick her up before she moves.”

Aidan took the laptop back and I watched as he composed a careful email to our contact at Interpol—a woman named Ritu Chopra who owed us a favor from a job in Singapore two years ago. Laid out what we had: financial evidence of embezzlement, communications logs showing coordination with known threats, travel patterns that matched every attack on Pryzm.

Enough for a warrant. Maybe enough for an arrest. He hit send and sat back.

“This is very coordinated. Fireworks in Cannes. Controlled access breaches in Paris and New York. Threats sent to Eun-ji and to Jin in London and Amsterdam. Paid intermediaries. Shell companies.” I shook my head. “This isn’t improvisation.”

“Consider her job,” Aidan said. “She manages a group, like Eun-ji. It’s her responsibility to coordinate every detail. She’s just transferred those skills to something more dangerous.”

Finding the person behind the action should have felt like progress. Instead, my stomach tightened. If Sara Yoon had financed trouble in Cannes, London and New York, then São Paulo wasn’t a future threat. It was an active operation.

A secure alert flashed in the corner of my screen. Not a conversation. Just a flagged scrape from one of Richard’s automated monitors. Fan chatter spiking around the São Paulo show. Most of it was the usual noise.

One post from an anonymous account had been flagged for keyword overlap. This will be a performance they’ll never forget.

35

CHOKE POINTS

AIDAN — AIR

Liam closed his laptop. “We need to tell Eun-ji and Jason,” he said. “This can’t wait until landing.”

“Agreed. But not Jin. Not yet.” I looked at my husband. “He’s got three days of press in São Paulo. If we tell him we suspect one of Starhouse’s own managers is behind this, but we can’t prove it and the person’s still out there, he’ll spend every interview wondering who’s watching him. That kind of tension shows on camera.”

“So we lie to him?”

“We tell him we’re following leads. Which is true.” I sat back in my chair. “What about Sang-hoon? He notices everything. He’ll know we’re not telling him something.”

“Then we tell him enough to keep him sharp but not enough to make him panic,” Liam said. “He’s good in a crisis; we saw that in Cannes. If something goes wrong, I want him alert and ready to move, not paralyzed by fear.”

Fortunately the private jet had a small conference room at the front of the plane. Liam unbuckled himself and stood, banging his head on the bulkhead. A minor problem of being six-four. The only one on the team with that kind of issue. He strode up the aisle to the conference room.

I followed him as far as where Jason and Eun-ji sat, across from each other, both with headphones on, intent on their laptops. When we stopped in front of them, they both looked up and unhooked. “New information,” I said. “We need to review it.”