Chapter Text
He looked at himself in the mirror. His hair was tousled, and his lips were red. He felt good. There wasn't anyone to tell him he needed to be something else. For a moment, he really felt like the person he was. Whoever it was supposed to be, all the pieces fell into place like a butterfly finally fleeing its cage.
“Jimin…”
“Yes?” That man, the one who tore him apart from the inside out, stood in the doorway, in awe of what he laid his eyes on. So beautiful that his heart stopped the moment he saw the blush color crushed and lying on his beloved’s lips.
“I’m- I’m leaving.”
“And what about me? What about our story? We were supposed to finish it together.” He could not bear to see the tears pooling in Jimin’s eyes, so he looked at the ground instead.
“I…I promised to do this, I’m sorry.”
“I’ll follow you.” Jimin, now sturdy in his disposition.
“You’ll die. You know that.”
Jimin turned around, putting his hands on the older's chest. “In your arms, I hope.”
“This is serious. You’re not coming. We discussed this together.”
“I got all dressed up.” A cruel laugh fell from his lips. “I finally.. Feel like myself. Pretty and still the man you can hold.” He put his head in the crook of Namjoon's neck.
“I’ll hold you if you’re in a three-piece suit or a dress.” The Taller kisses the man deeply. In a moment of panic, to keep him close to his chest. It was terrifying. The way Jimin felt so soft, the way he looked, how hard he gripped his shoulders.
“I might die waiting for you.”
Namjoon didn’t answer because the two of them knew the likelihood of the one dying wasn’t Jimin.
The meeting was held in the evening. It was inconvenient for the businessman, but when your investors are sending Hail Mary emails, you make time for emergency meetings. He was waiting at a table in a restaurant where the menu was a car payment, his assistant told him once, and the food was less than a third of the plate.
Namjoon, CEO of SEVEN, looked at his watch, a brand-new Audemars Piguet. The man who was supposed to be on the other side was fifteen minutes late.
“You’re positive he sent confirmation that he was coming?”
“Yes. Multiple times, actually.”
Pushing his glasses up, he glanced at his phone. No new calls or messages. Something felt wrong to him. Then he walked in, all black, mask on, but the eyes all too familiar. Jung Hoseok with his bodyguard and assistant.
“Fucking late.”
“Yeah, there’s traffic, dumbass,” Hoseok spoke low and got to business the moment he sat down. “I called them. They don’t want to meet.”
Namjoon wiped his mouth with the black cloth on the table and stared at the man across from him. His eyes were dark and angry. “Say that again?”
Hoseok gestured to a waitress. “White wine, please. Thank you.” He pulled out his phone. “I said I called them, you’re lucky if you get half of them to even engage in a conversation. After the shit that happened.”
“It’s been four years. Are you telling me they don’t give a fuck about the company investigation? The stocks are falling fast because of this shit.”
Hoseok shrugged as the waitress poured his cup. “And they don’t need you anymore. See how that works?”
“They’re going to. They’re moving to backdoor methods. I’ve already heard from Intel.” This is what made Hoseok stop drinking and pay attention. “What the fuck did you just say?”
“Set up the meetings. I don’t care about what everybody has going on. Tell them it's a bullet.”
“Shit… It’s that bad?” Hoseok's face crumbled at the thought.
“Yes. Which means as your leader, I cut off anything that’s feeding you when I feel like it's necessary. None of you will be eating from it anymore because we have to funnel things differently now.” His phone buzzed on the table.
“What about Jimin?” The words came out of Hoseok slowly because if anybody knew anything about their boss, it was that that name could send you down a river on the wrong day.
“What about him?”
“Nobody knows where he is. Not even Taehyung or Jungkook. I tried. He’s off-grid.”
“Then nobody gets anything until he’s back home facing it like the rest of us.”
Hoseok objected. “Namjoon? Don’t you think that’s a bit extreme? Some of their income is-”
“I don’t pocket check anybody for that exact reason. I’m nobody’s father. We made a promise, right? All seven. Rise and Fall.” Namjoon rose from his seat, fixing his suit jacket on the way up.
“Send it out. No Jimin. No BB in operation.”
Jimin. Namjoon hadn’t heard that name in so long. It still sent a shiver down his spine when he heard it. Now at his desk, mahogany wood imported from an artist that nobody else could afford, he made plans to clear his schedule, but his desktop screen was plastered with news articles. “SEVEN underwater claims of fraud?”
“Will the BTS members reunite after a spontaneous hiatus?
“What really happened between the BTS?”
The only thing he was used to doing was counting on one man, but he had to learn to let go of that. The years of pain slowly faded in the background to an aching dullness. But that name ignited it once again.
Jimin.
The morning was beautiful. Bigger than the one before, but something in his stomach was stirring. The bell above the door chimed, a soft, brassy note that Jimin had come to love. It meant a customer, yes, but it also meant a brief interruption to the quiet, a small human connection that asked nothing of him beyond the location of the poetry section or a recommendation for a rainy-day read. He looked up from the box of yellowed paperbacks, a customer-service smile already blooming on his lips.
And then the smile died.
The man in the doorway was dressed too well for a town like this, all clean lines and quiet luxury, but it was the eyes that pinned Jimin to the spot. Jung Hoseok. Those eyes, always so warm, so full of sunshine in another life, now held a storm of disbelief and something that looked terrifyingly like relief.
Jimin’s heart slammed against his ribs. His hands, dusted with book mold and age, began to tremble. He was suddenly acutely aware of the worn cardigan he wore, the reading glasses perched on his nose, the complete absence of the armor he’d left behind. He was just Jimin. The bookstore seller. Not Park Jimin of BTS. Not the man who ran.
“Jimin-ah…” Hoseok breathed, the word barely a whisper, yet it echoed through the small shop like a gunshot.
The terror was instantaneous and total. It locked Jimin’s limbs, dried his mouth, and narrowed his vision until all he could see was the man who had finally found him. Four years of carefully constructed silence, of a life so small it was invisible, shattered in the space of a single name. He wanted to run, but there was nowhere to go. The back room was a dead end. The front door was blocked by his past.
“Hobi,” Jimin’s voice cracked, a fragile thing he barely recognized. He instinctively backed up against the counter, his hip knocking against a stack of newly arrived hardcovers. They swayed dangerously, a physical echo of his unsteady world. “How… how did you find me?”
Hoseok took a step forward, and Jimin flinched. It was a small, involuntary movement, but it made Hoseok freeze, his expression fracturing with pain. “Nobody knows where I am,” Jimin continued, the words spilling out in a panicked rush. “Tae. Jungkook. I made sure. I was so careful. You can’t… you can’t tell anyone, Hobi. Please. You can’t.”
“Jimin, breathe,” Hoseok said, his voice softening into the tone one might use to soothe a wild, trapped animal. He held his hands up, palms out. “I’m not here to drag you back. I just… we were so worried. You just vanished. We thought…”
That you were dead. The unspoken words hung in the dusty air. Jimin had known they would think that. It was, in a cruel way, the point. A clean break. A death of a different kind. He shook his head, the terror receding just enough to let a cold, hard resolve take its place. He’d run for a reason. From the fame. From the pressure. From the devastating, consuming love that had promised to hold him but only ever made him feel like a bird in a gilded cage, waiting for a man who would never truly come home.
From Namjoon.
“I couldn’t be that person anymore,” Jimin whispered, his eyes glued to the worn floorboards. He finally met Hoseok’s gaze, his own eyes filled with a desperate plea. “I’m not Jimin here. I’m just Min. I sell books. I drink tea. I’m nobody. And I’m safe.”
Hoseok’s face crumpled, the always-bright Hope of their group looking utterly devastated. “Safe from what, Jimin? From us? From the people who love you?”
A tear slipped down Jimin’s cheek, tracking a hot path through the dust on his face. “From the ones I couldn’t survive being loved by.” The image of Namjoon in the doorway all those years ago, his face awestruck and terrified, flashed in his mind. I might die waiting for you. Namjoon’s words, once a lifeline, now felt like a prophecy Jimin had chosen to break.
Hoseok watched him for a long moment, the silence broken only by the ticking of an old clock and the frantic beating of Jimin’s heart. Then, he took a deep breath and let it out slowly, the tension in his shoulders melting just a fraction.
“He’s shutting it all down, you know,” Hoseok said, his voice carefully neutral now. “The entire operation. All of it. He cut off everyone’s income flow. Jungkook can’t even access his. His condition was that we all face the current storm together. Rise and fall, all seven. No Jimin, no operation.” He paused, letting the weight of the statement settle. “He’s tearing the empire apart, brick by brick, looking for you. Because he can’t find you anywhere else.”
The terror that had briefly subsided roared back, but this time it was mixed with something far more dangerous: a sliver of the aching, long-buried love that had sent him running in the first place.
“Don’t tell him,” Jimin begged, his voice breaking. He grabbed Hoseok’s arm, his grip desperate. “Hobi, please. You saw what it did to me. You were there. I’m begging you.”
Hoseok looked down at the hand clutching his sleeve, so different from the strong, graceful one that used to hold a mic. It was the hand of a man who spent his days shelving books, not a superstar. He covered Jimin’s hand with his own, his touch gentle.
“I won’t tell him where you are,” Hoseok said softly, and for a single, blissful second, Jimin’s knees went weak with relief. But then Hoseok’s eyes turned sharp, the businessman in him surfacing. “But I’m not going to lie to him either. And he’s going to know something’s changed the minute he looks at me. He’s got a sense for these things, you know that. He’s been a ghost for four years, but the second I found you, I came alive. He’ll see it.”
Jimin pulled his hand back as if burned. A new, cold dread seeped into his bones. He wasn’t just a hidden bookshop owner anymore. He was a spark that could re-ignite a wildfire. And the man holding the match was now standing right in front of him.
“So what am I supposed to do?” Jimin asked, his voice hollow. The little bell above the door chimed again as a local woman walked in, oblivious to the world-ending conversation happening by the register.
Hoseok gave him a sad, knowing smile, the kind you give a friend who’s standing on the edge of a cliff, deciding whether to jump into the unknown or step back into the fire.
“You get ready,” he said quietly, not for the woman’s ears. “Because if he’s tearing the world down for you, Jimin-ah, he will not stop until he’s standing in this very bookstore.” He gestured around the small, dusty room, the smell of old paper suddenly feeling like the scent of an ending. “You thought you fled the cage. But for a man like Namjoon, the whole world is a cage. And he just found out you’re somewhere inside it.”
The woman who walked in was Mrs. Aldridge, a retired schoolteacher who came in every Tuesday for a new mystery novel and to gossip about the weather.
"Min-ssi," Mrs. Aldridge called out, her voice a familiar, reedy thing. "Do you have the new one by that gentleman? The one with the detective and the cat?"
Jimin forced his lungs to expand. He turned to her, the smile sliding back onto his face like a mask he'd kept in his pocket for just such emergencies. "I set a copy aside for you, Mrs. Aldridge. I know how you hate waiting lists."
While he retrieved the book from behind the counter, his hands moved on autopilot. His mind, however, was sprinting through escape routes. The back door led to a narrow alley. He could be gone in sixty seconds. But then what? Leave everything? The shop, the cat that slept on the poetry shelf, the first life he had built that was entirely his own? And where would he go that Hoseok's resources couldn't follow?
Mrs. Aldridge chattered about her roses while Jimin wrapped the book in brown paper. He felt Hoseok's gaze on his back, a warm, sad pressure. When the bell chimed again and the woman shuffled out with a wave, the silence that returned was heavier than before.
Jimin didn't turn around. He braced his hands on the counter, head bowed. "You should go, Hobi."
"I know." Hoseok's voice was closer now. A hand, light and hesitant, touched Jimin's shoulder. "But I'm not leaving you without a way to reach me. I won't be the reason you're completely alone if... when this all comes down."
Jimin flinched at the implication. When, not if. He turned, and Hoseok was pressing a small, cheap burner phone into his palm. The plastic was cold.
"There's one number in it. Mine," Hoseok said. "Not his. I won't give it to him, I swear on my life. But if you need anything, money, a way out of the country, someone to just... listen, you call me. Okay?"
"And what do I give you in return?" Jimin asked, a bitter edge creeping into his tone. "Your silence?"
Hoseok's jaw tightened. "You give me the peace of knowing you're alive. That's all I ever wanted, Jimin-ah. We thought you were dead. We mourned you." His voice cracked on the last word, and for the first time, Jimin saw the toll of those four years etched into his friend's face. "I'm not your enemy. I never was."
The words broke something open in Jimin's chest. He clutched the phone like a lifeline. "I know. I'm sorry. I just... I couldn't say goodbye. If I had heard any of your voices, I would have stayed. And staying was killing me."
Hoseok pulled him into a hug, fierce and brief. He smelled of memory, airport lounges, dance practice, late nights in the studio. "I can't lie to him, Jimin. When I go back, he'll look at me, and he'll know. He's been half a man since you left, and that half is still the smartest person I've ever met."
"Then don't go back," Jimin whispered into his shoulder, a foolish, last-ditch plea.
Hoseok pulled away, his smile sad. "I have to. We all have to face the music sometime. You taught me that, once." He walked to the door, pausing with his hand on the brass handle. "He's not the same, you know. The cage you were in... he's been living in it too. Alone."
The bell chimed. And then he was gone.
The shop closed at six. Jimin went through the motions, shutting the blinds, feeding the cat, tallying the meager register, but his mind was a storm. He climbed the narrow stairs to his apartment above the shop, a small space with slanted ceilings and a window that looked out over the town square. It was nothing like the life he'd left. It was small and quiet and his.
In the bathroom, he caught his reflection. The same kind that had once shown him a man on the precipice of becoming himself now reflected someone else entirely. Softer, yes. Still pretty, still a man you could hold. But there was a wariness in his eyes that hadn't been there before. A haunted look.
He leaned closer, gripping the porcelain sink. "You're not that person anymore," he told his reflection. "You're not afraid." But the words felt hollow. Because the truth was, he was terrified. Not of Namjoon, not exactly. He was terrified of the part of himself that still, after four years, ached at the sound of that name. The part that wondered what Namjoon's hands would feel like now, if his voice had changed, if he still looked at the world like a puzzle he was determined to solve.
He'd run because the love was too big, too consuming, and in its shadow, he had forgotten how to exist as himself.
Now that love was coming for him, one way or another.
In Seoul, the rain was relentless. It beat against the floor-to-ceiling windows of Namjoon's office, blurring the city lights into smears of gold and neon. He hadn't slept in two days. The news about the investors was worsening, and his desk was a battlefield of legal documents and contingency plans. But none of it held his attention.
Hoseok had been acting strange since he returned from his trip.
He'd claimed it was a personal matter, a sudden need to clear his head. But Hoseok had never been a good liar. There was a new energy thrumming beneath his skin, a lightness that had been absent for four years. When he walked into Namjoon's office that night, soaked from the rain and claiming he'd just come to check on the latest crisis, Namjoon saw it immediately.
The hope in his eyes.
The meeting was brief, all business about the backdoor dealings and Intel's latest report. But as Hoseok turned to leave, Namjoon's voice cut through the sound of the rain.
"You found him."
It was the statement of a man who had spent years learning to read every micro-expression, every flicker of muscle in a face. Hoseok froze, his hand on the doorframe.
"Namjoon..."
"Don't." Namjoon's voice was dangerously quiet. He rose from his chair, the leather creaking in the sudden, thick silence. "I've known you for over a decade. You've been walking around this office like a man who just saw the sun for the first time. The only thing that ever made you look like that was him."
Hoseok turned, his face a mask of conflict. "I can't tell you where."
"I'm not asking." Namjoon moved closer, his presence filling the room. There was something terrifying in his calm, the stillness of a predator who had finally caught a scent. "But you're confirming it. He's alive."
A long, heavy pause. Then Hoseok nodded, a single, agonized dip of his chin. "He's alive."
The breath that left Namjoon's body was not one of relief. It was something rawer, a sound dragged up from the depths of a chest that had been hollow for four years. He leaned back against his desk, glasses askew, and for a moment, he was not the untouchable CEO of SEVEN. He was just a man whose heart had suddenly, violently started beating again.
"You have to give him time," Hoseok said urgently. "He's been hiding for a reason. If you go in there like a wrecking ball, you'll lose him forever."
Namjoon looked up, and the expression in his eyes was one Hoseok had never seen before. It was hope and fury and a love so profound it bordered on obsession. "I've had four years of time," he said, each word a shard of glass. "Four years of not knowing if he was dead in a ditch or just... gone. Four years of tearing myself apart trying to figure out what I did wrong." He straightened, and the mask of the CEO slid back into place, but it was cracked now, the raw edges showing. "I'm not going to lose him again. But I'm also not going to let him keep running when everything is falling apart."
Hoseok opened his mouth to argue, but Namjoon was already walking past him, grabbing his coat.
"Where are you going?"
Namjoon didn't turn around. "To clear my schedule. And then to bring him home."
The door clicked shut, leaving Hoseok alone with the rain and the sinking realization that he had, in trying to protect Jimin, lit a fuse that would burn all the way to a quiet little bookstore in a town nobody knew. And when it reached its end, none of them would ever be the same.
The transatlantic flight had done nothing to cool Taehyung's temper. If anything, the recycled air and bad coffee had distilled it into something purer, sharper, a blade he was all too ready to slide between Namjoon's ribs.
He landed at Incheon just past noon, a ghost returning to a city that had once worshipped him. Nobody recognized him at baggage claim. The mask helped. So did the plain black clothes, the artfully disheveled hair that obscured half his face. He'd traded the Parisian silks for something more anonymous, but the walk was unmistakable if you knew what to look for: lazy and lethal, the gait of a man who knew he was dangerous and had stopped caring.
Hoseok's intel had been sparse but incendiary. Jimin's alive. Namjoon found out. He's shutting down the operation piece by piece until Jimin comes home. The words had sat in Taehyung's gut like a bad meal for the entire fourteen-hour flight. Four years. Four years of silence, of mourning a man they all thought was his best friend was dead, and Namjoon had decided to use their survival as leverage. As if Taehyung's gallery in Paris, Yoongi's studio across East Asia, and Jungkook's entire future were just bargaining chips in a lover's quarrel.
The car waiting for him at the curb was a black Genesis, unmarked, one of the few fleet vehicles SEVEN kept for discretion. The driver was new, Taehyung didn't recognize him, but the man knew better than to ask questions. Taehyung slid into the back seat and said only two words: "The headquarters."
Seoul blurred past the tinted windows. It was gray and humid, the summer heat pressing down like a wet hand. The car turned onto the street that housed SEVEN's main building, and everything went wrong.
He'd forgotten. Or maybe he'd never known, because he'd been in Paris when the hiatus became a feeding frenzy. Either way, the cluster of news vans and photographers camped outside the building's entrance hit him like a slap. The investigation into SEVEN's finances had gone public four days ago, and the press had been circling ever since, desperate for any scrap of the BTS mystique. A disgraced company was a story. A disgraced company that used to house the world's biggest boy band was a spectacle.
And into that spectacle walked Kim Taehyung.
The car door opened. He stepped out, mask still in place, and for a beat, nobody noticed. Then a photographer with a zoom lens and an encyclopedic memory for eye shape did a double-take. The man's mouth fell open.
"Holy shit. That's V."
The name exploded through the crowd like a spark in gasoline. Cameras swung. Shouts erupted. Taehyung had a split second to register the chaos, security guards sprinting, reporters screaming his name, the electric whine of shutters firing at machine-gun speed—before he was surrounded.
"V! V, are you here about the investigation?"
"Taehyung-ssi! Is BTS reuniting?"
"Where have you been for four years?"
"Are the rumors true? Was there a financial dispute?"
The questions layered over each other, a wall of noise that pressed against his skull. He should have kept walking. Should have let security muscle him inside and slammed the doors. But Taehyung had never been good at doing what he should. He stopped. He turned. And he pulled down his mask.
The cameras went feral.
His face hadn't aged so much as sharpened. The softness of his twenties had been carved away, leaving behind cheekbones that could cut glass and eyes that held a storm. When he smiled, it wasn't warm. It was the smile of a man who'd learned how to weaponize charm years ago and had only gotten better at it.
"I'm here," he said, his voice carrying over the din with a theatrical clarity that silenced the mob, "because I heard my family needed me. You know how it is. You leave for a few years, and suddenly your brother thinks he can burn the house down." He tilted his head, the picture of casual poison. "I'm just here to remind him who else lives there."
The implication landed hard. Reporters began screaming over each other, the word "family" twisting into a dozen different headlines before Taehyung had even finished speaking. He didn't give them another second. He turned on his heel and walked through the glass doors, leaving a hurricane of speculation in his wake.
The lobby was a sleek expanse of marble and indirect lighting, all of it empty except for a terrified receptionist and a cluster of security guards who looked like they'd just watched their careers flash before their eyes. Taehyung strode past them without acknowledgment, his footsteps echoing off the polished floors. He knew this building like a second skeleton. The executive elevator required a keycard he no longer possessed, but the stairwell didn't. He took the stairs two at a time, his anger burning off the jet lag with every step.
Twenty-seven floors up, the executive suite was quieter. The door to Namjoon's office was closed, a slab of dark wood that Taehyung had once walked through like a brother. Now he shoved it open without knocking.
Namjoon was at his desk, mid-sentence with a lawyer who looked like he'd been about to cry. The conversation died the instant Taehyung filled the doorway, his chest heaving, his eyes blazing, his mask crumpled in one fist like a declaration of war.
"Get out," Taehyung said to the lawyer.
The man looked at Namjoon, who didn't take his eyes off Taehyung. A long moment passed. Then Namjoon gave a tiny nod, and the lawyer fled, papers scattering in his wake.
The door clicked shut. Silence.
Namjoon rose slowly, his hands flat on the desk. He looked like hell. Taehyung could see it now, up close, the shadows under his eyes, the hollowness in his cheeks, the way his suit hung slightly looser than it should. The great RM, reduced to a specter in a glass tower.
"You're back," Namjoon said. An observation, carefully emptied of emotion.
"I'm back," Taehyung confirmed. He stepped further into the room, letting his presence fill the space. "And below this building, right now, about forty reporters are live-tweeting the fact that Kim Taehyung just walked into SEVEN headquarters for the first time in four years. The rumors are already spinning. By tonight, the whole industry will think BTS is reforming. Your investors will think it. Your enemies will think it." He stopped a few feet from the desk, close enough to see the muscle twitch in Namjoon's jaw. "You wanted to force Jimin out of hiding? Congratulations. You just forced all of us out of hiding. I hope you're ready for what that means."
Namjoon's composure didn't crack, but something flickered in his eyes. Guilt, maybe. Or exhaustion. "I didn't plan for you to be seen."
"No, you just planned to freeze my accounts and Yoongi's and Jungkook's and Jin's, and you thought we'd all just... what? Wait patiently? Starve quietly while you played your little game of emotional chess with the man you drove away?"
"Careful." Namjoon's voice dropped, a dangerous quiet replacing the calm.
"Or what?" Taehyung laughed, a sharp, humorless sound. "You'll cut off more of my money? You already took all of it. You'll threaten me? I just flew fourteen hours on pure spite. There's nothing you can do to me that you haven't already done."
The words hung between them, barbed and bleeding. Namjoon looked away first. That was new. The Namjoon of four years ago would have met Taehyung's fire with his own, but this Namjoon just stared at the rain-streaked windows, his reflection ghostly against the gray sky.
"I'm not trying to destroy you," Namjoon said, and for a moment, the exhaustion won. His voice frayed at the edges. "I'm trying to hold us together the only way I know how. He vanished, Tae. He just... vanished. And nobody cared enough to find him."
"Because he didn't want to be found!" Taehyung slammed his hand on the desk, the crack of it echoing through the room. "He ran because we were all suffocating him. You most of all. And instead of respecting that, instead of letting him breathe, you turned our lives into collateral. You made his freedom a weapon against the rest of us. Do you even hear yourself?"
Namjoon's head snapped back, and for a heartbeat, the old fire was there. "Then what would you have me do? Let the company collapse? Let the investigation bury us all while he hides in some bookstore pretending he's not still one of us?"
Taehyung went very still. "Bookstore?"
The word slipped out before Namjoon could stop it. He closed his eyes, a flicker of regret crossing his features. "Hoseok found him. I figured it out three days ago. I haven't gone there yet."
"You figured it out," Taehyung repeated, and the fury in his voice was now edged with something colder. "You knew where he was, and instead of going to him yourself, you sat here in your tower and waited for the pressure to force him back. You used me showing up as a pawn." He shook his head slowly. "You haven't changed at all. You're still the same man who thought love was a cage you could lock him in."
Below them, the faint sound of the crowd still buzzed, a hive of speculation that would only grow louder. Taehyung could already see the headlines: BTS Member Returns Amid SEVEN Scandal. Kim Taehyung Hints at Reunion. What Really Happened Four Years Ago? The press wouldn't stop. They never did. And now the spotlight was back, burning as bright as it ever had, trained on a fractured family that hadn't healed a single wound.
Taehyung turned toward the door. "I'm going to find Jimin. Not because you forced my hand, but because Hoseok called me and told me the truth. He's the only one who's been trying to do this right." He paused, his hand on the doorframe, and looked back over his shoulder. "When the press asks me questions, and they will, I won't lie. I'll tell them the company is in trouble. I'll tell them we're trying to fix it. But I won't protect you from the story you've written, Namjoon. You wanted Jimin back. You're about to get all of us back. I hope you're ready for the mess that comes with it."
He left the door open, the silence of the office spilling into the hallway. Namjoon didn't call after him. He just stood there, a king in a crumbling castle, while the first drops of a much larger storm began to fall.