She stepped aside.
Minjae exhaled, shaky. Taemin touched his shoulder. Brief. Grounding.
Do-hyun walked slightly ahead, scanning. Calm and controlled. I followed.
We reached the dressing room. Warm light spilled out. It was a safe pocket.
I pulled out my phone and typed a message to Griffin.
Rune:I didn’t hide.
I hit send.
The text didn’t deliver. No check mark or confirmation. Nothing but the words sitting there, suspended.
That was fine.
The point wasn’t to reach him. Not right now.
The point was to say it. To myself, if I had to.
I locked my phone. Put it back in my pocket like a vow.
Chapter twenty-one
Griffin - Seattle - May 17
Icaught him on the service level between loading dock C and the auxiliary stairwell—two floors below the arena where seventeen thousand people were screaming through the opening number.
The bass line punched through concrete, a physical throb that made the walls hum. Crowd noise rode the ventilation like pressure, building and releasing with choreography I’d memorized from watching rehearsals.
Rune was onstage.
I was hunting the man who wanted to erase him.
Soo-jin didn’t run like someone afraid. He moved like someone late for a meeting, controlled and unhurried, posture straight, pace measured. His body suggested he’d already decided how this would look on camera.
That was what made the fear sharp in my chest, not panic. Recognition.
Fear made mistakes. Soo-jin engineered them.
My boots hit concrete in a steady rhythm. In the bowels of the arena, the air tasted like metal and dust. The service level had its own weather—stale, warm, dry, lit by fluorescent strips.
Above us, the music changed. I recognized the bridge. I knew precisely where Rune would be standing. Stage left. Jinwoo to his right. Taemin and Minjae completing the formation.
All of them visible. All of them protected by people who weren’t me.
“Stop,” I called.
My voice carried clean. No strain. Authority without volume.
Soo-jin turned his head just enough for the security camera mounted above the stairwell door to catch his profile. He wanted to be seen.
Then he took the stairs. I followed. Two steps at a time, hand on the rail. My boots were too heavy for speed.
The stairwell light was hard fluorescent white, flattening everything. No shadows or soft corners.
He reached the landing and pivoted, as calm as a man stepping out of a meeting. Up close, he appeared almost untouched by the last twenty minutes. Hair neat. Collar straight. That composed expression he wore when he told the band what to do and expected obedience.
