A Company That Sells Its Own Family
The rest of the group, sensing something was off, climbed over the wall one after another.
The fact that the moaning had ended after a single sound suggested the matter had been resolved somehow, but something had clearly happened — and not a small something, either.
I likewise hurried up the wall and slipped inside.
"...What the hell is this?"
Climbing through the window into the study, I was greeted by a very peculiar scene.
Lying sprawled next to Rando, who was scratching his head, were two naked people — a man and a woman.
The masks hid his expression, but Rando looked more than a little flustered himself.
"...When I infiltrated the interior, those two were... well, doing that."
"And?"
"They hadn't noticed us yet, but I judged it was only a matter of time."
"Fair enough."
"They would have made noise, so I knocked them out first."
"...Yeah, I can see that for myself. The question is, with what?"
"Anesthetics."
"...Isn't that illegal?"
"If you don't get caught, it's legal."
So the moan we'd heard had been the sound of the pair passing out.
It hadn't been loud, so no harm done — but the situation itself was so absurd I didn't know whether to laugh.
The man had knocked two people out through illegal means himself, hadn't he?
And this was the guy who'd lectured me about violence and property damage?
I understood it was a sudden situation, but his words and his actions were a little too far apart, weren't they?
Well, whatever. These were people who'd apparently lived lives every bit as rough as mine. I could let it slide.
Still, what exactly were these two doing in the study of all places?
"And besides — drunk or not, how do you fail to notice a man climbing in through the window?"
No matter how I turned it over, it made no sense.
"Then I'll start looking for the goods, Cutie Boy."
"Right, Sally. Over to you."
While Sally combed the study up and down hunting for hidden compartments, I turned my attention to the two unconscious bodies sprawled on the floor.
The villa was supposed to be empty, so the very fact that these two were here like this struck me as wrong.
"...Wait a second."
Something clicked. I snapped a photo of the unconscious woman's face and sent it to the guards who'd stayed behind in the Black Whale, asking Luna to confirm her identity.
The reply came back almost instantly.
"...A trainee? This girl? Which means..."
CEO Moon, you absolute piece of work. So you were up to no good again.
"Honey, found it."
"...Oh, already? Also, why am I 'honey' now?"
"Nitpicking the little things makes you unpopular with the ladies."
"...Ugh, fine, whatever. Hand it over."
While I was mulling over what to do with all this, Sally had located a small safe and cracked it open.
Inside, three USB drives sat forlorn and alone.
We had no way of knowing which one held the real thing, so we decided to take all three.
"Oh, wait. How many hours does that knockout stuff last?"
"An hour or two?"
"Plenty."
It felt a bit anticlimactic to just leave, so we searched the study a little longer.
Clothes lay scattered in every direction, and among them I spotted a smartphone.
Presumably belonging to one of the two.
"Let's see... fingerprint lock, huh."
I pressed the unconscious man's finger firmly against the sensor, and the phone unlocked.
Just as I'd guessed, it was his.
Pleased with how smoothly things were going, I used his phone to call the police.
"Ah, yes, so the address is Yangpyeong, XXXXX, and, uh, some people here are behaving really strangely. Yes, some kind of strange drug... No, I don't know what exactly, but they're seriously out of it. Yes, yes. Understood."
"...What did you just do?"
"Reported a drug incident."
"...A drug report? Were these people on drugs?"
"Couldn't tell you."
Drunk out of their minds or not, failing to notice a man climbing through the window was strange enough. But that wasn't proof of drugs, of course.
It was just that this particular drinking party clearly hadn't been a normal one, and if the police came out to investigate, things were bound to get very interesting.
The people in the living room might manage to slip away, but I doubted these two — holed up back here enjoying themselves — would have the presence of mind to escape as well.
From where I stood, it was a case of nothing ventured, nothing lost.
We'd already accomplished our objective, and we were about to bolt anyway.
Entertainment hosting at the very least, and drugs at the very worst — one look and you could tell.
If this villa belonged to CEO Moon, wouldn't that end make quite a bit of noise for him too?
"However it shakes out, he'll be losing sleep over it."
Every bit of this was self-inflicted. Your karma, your problem to carry.
The lounge at Flame Entertainment.
After racing back to the office in the Black Whale, Luna and I made our way to the lounge together.
Cheon Yua and Representative Ju had both stepped out briefly over Luna's situation, and Luna — apparently still reeling from some massive shock — collapsed bonelessly onto the lounge sofa.
"CEO Moon..."
"What's got you so shaken up?"
"I'm the one who told him. I said I earn plenty of money, so he'd better never stoop to selling out the kids."
"...Ah. The hosting."
"And he was using the trainees as escorts. He promised me to my face. He said we were family. Said he'd never sell a person."
"That..."
I started to say something, then shut my mouth.
Nothing good was going to come out of it anyway.
"...To think such things went on at Mun Entertainment..."
All I could think was birds of a feather, but to her, this was apparently still a real blow.
Wait, there was still further down for this woman to fall? Incredible. She's genuinely something else.
Then again, this seemed to have severed her last lingering attachment to the place, so maybe she'd come out ahead after all.
I was just congratulating myself on a job reasonably well handled when Cheon Yua returned.
She gave Luna and me a quick once-over, then asked how things had gone.
"You're back. Did you find what you were after?"
"We did. Got it right here. We owe it all to Sally's expertise."
"Any injuries?"
"Would such a thing even be possible?"
"Good. Return the drives to Moon Sooyeon. Tell her to handle it herself."
"Sounds like the right call."
When I held out the recovered USB drives, she snatched them away in an instant.
One moment she'd been sprawled across the sofa; the next, a fresh surge of energy had come over her.
"...You didn't look at the contents, did you?"
"Why on earth would I look? Ask someone else. There was hardly time to check, verify, and deliberate."
"You're telling me you weren't even curious? Siwoo, are you a eunuch?"
"...What is that supposed to mean?"
What did she want from me, this woman?
"All right, enough of that. Let me explain how things are going to unfold from here."
With the leverage now handed over to its owner, the situation had been settled. Sensing her explanation would run long, Cheon Yua cut herself off and began laying out the facts she'd uncovered — and the atmosphere that Luna's nonsense had briefly lightened sank back into something heavy.
"I met with the employees who worked under the late CEO Moon Youngwoo and received quite a few interesting documents. They'd been waiting for a chance like this, too."
"Is that so?"
"Yes. And cross-checking the information they provided, it turns out Moon Sooyeon received absolutely nothing from that company. This woman was flat-out destitute."
"...What about her settlements?"
"They were supposed to be paid out in company shares. She never even collected those."
"...I'm sorry, what?"
Korea's most successful female solo artist was flat broke? What kind of nonsense was this?
Settlement in shares instead of cash — and she couldn't even claim those?
I stared at her in disbelief, but she averted her eyes and launched into a string of excuses.
"Things were genuinely dire when CEO Moon first took over. He said the company had to come first. Since the profits were being reinvested into the business, I told him to go ahead, and when he promised to pay me in shares later, I said fine."
"And then the money started pouring in, didn't it? After the company got back on its feet?"
"He said the company still had to grow first. So I said fine again."
"So you haven't been paid anything this entire time?"
"...Correct."
What is this woman?
Look, I'd long known that celebrities are the easiest marks in the world to swindle, and stories of managers and CEOs fleecing their talent are so common in this industry that nothing surprises me anymore.
But with the poster child sitting right in front of me, it still didn't feel real.
So that's why a woman who must have raked in tens of billions of won kept saying she had no money. All this time, that's what it meant.
"Which actually made my end of things quite easy. Once this goes public, whatever spin CEO Moon tries will be utterly meaningless."
"True enough."
The backroom dealings between CEO Moon and Luna had been kept hidden from the staff, and even the old employees who'd produced albums alongside her had only learned the truth recently.
So dumbfounded were they that they resolved to get her out of the company no matter what — pooling their efforts to gather evidence, and when word spread that she'd be moving her nest to Flame, they handed over everything they'd collected.
The situation itself was infuriating, but it made going up against Mun Entertainment vastly easier.
At this point, no amount of spin the company threw out would carry any weight at all.
"So here's my question for you, Moon Sooyeon. How far do you want this to go?"
"What do you mean?"
"Judging by the intelligence that's come our way, the problems number far more than one or two. Mun Entertainment is drowning in debt. From the look of things, CEO Moon has even been making trips to overseas gambling dens. There's no end to the issues, but..."
Having said this much, Cheon Yua turned to face Luna squarely and asked, dead serious.
"If that's what Moon Sooyeon wants, I'll close out the deal cleanly on the sole condition that you go free. In that case, whatever happens down the line, Mun Entertainment won't shut its doors tomorrow."
"..."
"But if that's not what you want, then we dig up everything and bury them for good—"
"...Erase them."
"Pardon?"
"Mun Entertainment. A company that sells out even its own family doesn't deserve to exist. That's not... that's not Mun Entertainment. Not the one I knew."
So that was how she felt.
Even knowing she was being a fool, she'd given up her settlements at CEO Moon's word out of affection, presumably.however badly things had warped, she'd still thought of the company as family.
She'd decided she had to get out because she was worn down to nothing — but she'd never actually wanted Mun Entertainment itself to collapse.
One look at her and I could tell: even after switching agencies, she'd been planning to simply forget the settlement money she was never paid.
But the hosting incident today had evidently lit a fire of vengeance in her.
She'd brushed off something like a nude video as if it were nothing, yet flew into this kind of rage over trainees being pimped out.
Her points of fury did seem a little skewed, honestly. But everyone holds different things sacred, so I kept that observation to myself.
"You do understand you won't be getting your settlement money back, though. The situation on that front is a bit..."
"I don't need it. It was shares, to begin with. Even if I'd taken shares, the company collapsing would make them scrap paper. Consider my settlement paid in full the moment Mun Entertainment ceases to exist."
"Then this is simple. We'll proceed that way. And send over a separate list of the staff you need — we'll find a way to employ every one of them."
"...Then I'll leave it in your hands."
"It won't take long."
Luna had earned staggering sums all these years — and they'd pocketed every last won of it.
And despite all that, their finances were apparently so dire they were pimping out trainees.
On top of that, the CEO stood accused of overseas gambling, which meant embezzlement and breach of trust charges were all but guaranteed to stick.
With Luna as the company's only real asset, a cascade of disasters like this left Mun Entertainment with no way to survive at all.
The debt alone would be the first domino to fall.
It was obvious they'd been planning to clear that debt by grinding Luna for every penny — and that plan had just come apart at the seams.
And just as Cheon Yua had promised, the rest was settled with remarkable speed.