"You were the last number she texted, on Sunday, isn't that right?" Detective Park asked him. This had to have been the sixth time she asked the question, but it was the first time they were doing it behind two-way glass. Jiwook didn't like the feeling of being flanked by both the officer and the company's lawyer, not to mention the cameras, but he simply kept his eyes averted.
"Yes," Jiwook said softly.
Detective Park sighed, exasperated. The insistence that Jiwook knew something was remarkably frustrating, especially from an officer who was barely older than he was.. "Can you tell me what she said?"
Jiwook ran a hand through his dyed blonde hair as he put together the words in his mind. "She said...that she was going home. Her boyfriend was going to give her a ride home."
"We did look at her texts and saw it was written in English. Is there a reason why?"
"If you look at texts between the two of us, you may notice we switch languages a lot," Jiwook said. "I'm from New York originally, as I am sure you are aware."
"My little sister is a fan of 1SH0T, yes."
Great, Jiwook thought. Not a fan, but close enough. "Well," he said gently. "She wanted to learn English back in our trainee days, so we always switch languages. Honestly, she probably speaks better than I do."
"Have you heard from the boyfriend?" Detective Park asked him. This was the eighth time this question had been asked, Jiwook counted.
"No. We have no connection. I only know his name, and that's from the text."
"Do you have any way of reaching him?"
"No."
"Was he aware of the health issues she was having?"
"I would assume so."
"Were you?"
"Only as much as anyone at the label would," Jiwook said.
The detective looked up at Jiwook. The repeated interrogations, in and out of the home, were starting to get on his nerves. "Sir. Ha Seojin has been missing for three days. If you know anything it could help."
"If I knew anything, Detective, I would have told you." Jiwook's irritation dripped from his tongue. The lawyer next to him put a hand out, telling him to cool his temper slightly. "...she's my best friend. We've been friends since we were teens. I want her found too, more than anything."
"I just want to find Miss Ha, that is all." Detective Park pressed her fingers against the bridge of her nose. "Was she-"
"I do too." Jiwook looked at her apologetically. "But I can't give you anything that could help you."
"Well...I want you to tell me one thing, at the very least." Detective Park pulled out a manila folder. She opened it up to reveal detailed phone records with highlighted portions. "She did say the following: 'Thanks for listening, Ji.' What was the conversation about?"
Jiwook stared at the text in front of him.
Ahn Seojin 7:48 PM: I'm going home with Yun Seo. Thanks for Listening, Ji.
"Listening" was with a capital L.
Jiwook ran his fingers over the spelling. He hadn't noticed the error before, but now he was hyper aware of it. Seojin's spelling was always impeccable, as was her grammar. She never messed that up.
She didn't...
Did she?
Jiwook blinked at the text for a moment, then looked up. "She was saying how much she loved him," he said, grateful that this wasn't a lie. "And how happy she was. I guess...she hadn't said it out loud yet."
There was silence between all parties at the table - the idol, the officer, and the lawyer.
Finally, the company's lawyer spoke up.
"Are we done here?"
The officer's eyes pierced Jiwook's defenses, but did not break them. "...yes. Yes we are. Thank you, Mr. Ahn."
"Thank you, Officer Park."
Jiwook couldn't leave the precinct fast enough.
The black car behind him had followed him the last several turns. Jiwook was driving his own car - one look in the rearview mirror and there it was, presumably a cop car. Of course it was - he was likely a suspect in the disappearance, whether or not he knew anything.
He hadn't lied, nothing that he knew would be able to help him. He really didn't have anything that would be useful to them. He didn't even know what Seojin's boyfriend looked like, beyond the descriptors she'd given him.
"He has long hair," Seojin had told him, grinning ear to ear as the clear soju turned her cheeks pink. "It's like, past his shoulder long. But it's not my favorite thing about him."
"Are you going to say something cheesy, like 'what's inside'?" Jiwook had asked, stealing the bottle from her.
"But what if it's true?!" Seojin had pouted. "Besides, it's not like you're one to talk, Mr. Pining-After-Coworker-For-A-Decade."
Jiwook smiled a little bit at the memory. Seojin had been pushing him to ask this coworker out. There were obviously complicating factors in the fact that he hadn't asked said coworker out - namely, that his proclivities weren't exactly well known, no matter what the fanfic writers believed.
"I'm getting distracted," he said aloud to his empty car. "Seojin wanted me to know something, but what?"
Jiwook found himself pulling into the parking lot of his record label, Cosmic Records. He saw the obvious cop car drive away when they saw he was going to work. He supposed that they weren't too interested in an idol recording a demo track at night, that wasn't going to help them solve a missing person's case. Especially when she'd disappeared from her home.
He walked into the entertainment company, greeting the security guard Beomseok as he always did before running up to his office. In the elevator, he texted his bandmates via group chat:
Jiwook: Interview went okay. Going to stay at the recording studio for a bit, was thinking of recording some demos.
Juntae: Ugh, you're not gonna cook dinner for us?
Jiwook: You're 25, dumbass. You can figure out how to heat up some ramyeon.
Juntae: But you can make the ramyeon GOOD!
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Minwoo: We'll be fine, hyung. Don't worry.
Namil: Can you pick up some sodas on the way back?
Jiwook: Yes, I can. What would you like?
The younger boys all prattled on about what sodas they wanted - mostly the good Japanese ones with the glass ball on top. As the door opened to the fourth floor of the company, Jiwook felt his phone buzz, a few seconds after the other texts came through. He looked and saw it was a direct message.
From Cheolsu.
Cheolsu: Don't worry about them. I'll buy them the Ramune. You focus on being creative :)
Jiwook stared at the message for so long he almost let the doors close on him.
"SHIT!" Jiwook screamed, shoving his hand through the elevator doors to keep them open. The doors closed on his arm way too hard, but did graciously release him after maybe half a second. He groaned and flexed his hand as he made his way out of the elevator.
It didn't take Jiwook a long time to find a recording studio - they were usually empty on this floor. There were trainees elsewhere in the building, but the older idols had the luxury of some free time. He shoved his phone away before rubbing the still-sore part that the doors had crushed, then let himself inside.
He made sure to lock the door once he knew he was alone.
Jiwook booted up the computer and immediately logged in on the guest account. Then, to be absolutely sure no one would know what he was looking up, he opened up an incognito tab. He did a cursory search for Ha Seojin's name. All of the results were as he expected: month old articles about the success of her last album, two week old articles covering the reveal that she was going to be on a variety show as a coach, and fan accounts that posted regular thirst traps.
"They haven't made her disappearance public yet," Jiwook mused. He then typed SOUTH KOREA SEOUL DISAPPEARANCES into the search bar and hit enter. Most of the articles were within the last few weeks, or even days. Clicking one of the more reputable ones gave him a series of highlights, which he wasted no time in combing through.
- Twelve disappearances as of today.
- Victims range from 21 to 64 years old.
- Victims disappeared on weekends.
- Families self-reported to the press that the victims were on the verge of being hospitalized for severe flu-like symptoms.
- No known suspects.
Everything lined up with Seojin's disappearance, which explained why they were taking it so seriously - beyond Seojin being a high-profile victim herself, of course. She was 27, only 2 years Jiwook's junior.
However, Jiwook made note of the "severe flu-like symptoms." That felt odd to mention, but it wasn't...inaccurate, Jiwook supposed. The whole reason Seojin had texted him she was going home was that she had suddenly gone to the bathroom and started throwing up in the middle of the work day. She wasn't pregnant - Jiwook had asked, and he'd gotten slapped in the arm for that. But even then, Seojin said she'd just had her period a few days ago when she was complaining about cramping, so unless he was wrong about science, he figured morning sickness wasn't usually within a few days.
Jiwook pressed his fingers to the side of his head. "Okay...so she was actually sick. That would fit. But that doesn't explain where she went. And it doesn't explain her text..."
The L in that text was still burned into his mind. He was absolutely certain that Seojin would backtrack and fix her spelling, even when she got sick. When she was bedridden from COVID, all of her texts were more like dissertations. Jiwook had teased her about it. Seojin had teased him about his incomplete sentences in return.
Jiwook briefly considered the possibility that it could have auto corrected, or that Seojin could have hit backspace too many times and accidentally capitalized it. But neither of those things made sense to him. If Seojin was backtracking to fix a spelling error, she would have just fixed the capitalization too. And if it autocorrected, why would it autocorrect "listening" to a proper noun?
None of that explained the other major point of confusion for Jiwook.
Why would Seojin send that text in the evening, if she'd left around noon?
This was a sticking point that somehow, despite the multiple interviews he'd been forced into, Detective Park had never thought to ask Jiwook about. You'd think an officer of her caliber would have noticed the discrepancy. But, if Jiwook was right about his hunch, and he suspected he was, then it was probably better not to involve the police any further.
Jiwook took out a blank sheet of paper and pencil, and wrote down everything he knew so far.
- Seojin got sick the day she disappeared. Could not easily be attributed to anything.
- Seojin disappeared sometime between Friday night and Saturday morning, so the weekend.
- Seojin fits in the age range of 21-64 easily.
- Seojin went home around noon that Friday.
- Seojin was cagey about her boyfriend, but he picked her up.
- Seojin didn't tell me his name in person, but mentioned it in the text the night she went missing.
- Seojin's misspelling.
- Seojin's text was sent at 7:45ish, when she should have already been home for several hours, but says she is currently going home.
The pencil fell from Jiwook's hand. The answer was staring at him, clear as polished glass.
"Seojin got taken by the Listeners," Jiwook said softly. "And she knows what they are already."
The entire building went dark inexplicably. Jiwook stood up instinctively, realizing with a start that the entire building had gone dead silent - the distant hum of fluorescents and errant cleaning people had vanished. Jiwook couldn't even hear the cars of Seoul.
He was completely alone.
"Hello?" Jiwook asked the void he was now a part of.
There was nothing. No sound whatsoever, except for Jiwook's own breathing.
Jiwook cautiously took out his cell phone and pointed it around the room. It was still empty, save for him, and the door was still locked. He did try flicking the light switch a few times to see if it would turn on, but the attempt was futile. Evidently, he surmised, he used all his brain cells trying to figure out what was going on with Seojin.
His hand was moving to the lock to unlock it, when he heard a low voice whisper directly into his ear.
"I wouldn't do that if I were you."
Jiwook's heart stopped. No one was in the room with him. No one had been in the room with him. He'd checked more than once at this point.
This was probably the most comforted he'd felt all day. Sure, he was cornered by a supernatural being and was probably about to die, but it wasn't like he didn't know the proper etiquette in this context.
Jiwook didn't look towards the source of the voice - in fact, he elected to close his eyes and drop his phone, putting his hands in the air. "You're Yun Seo, aren't you? Seojin's boyfriend," he asked.
The voice let out a chuckle and whispered again, his voice so smooth it was not comforting, it was uncanny. "Seems you already know how to behave."
"You're not the first Listener I've met." Jiwook spoke with a confidence he most assuredly did not feel. "I'm surprised that you didn't know, considering how Seojin seemed to be warning me about you."
The owner of the voice - Yun Seo, it would seem - clicked his tongue. "Now why would she do that?"
"Because you're the one who is kidnapping all those people."
"Ahn Jiwook, you have it all wrong. I am just as perturbed by the situation as you are."
"You know, sneaking up on me in the dark doesn't actually help your case."
"I am well aware. But desperate times call for desperate measures."
Jiwook felt a hand under his chin, tilting his head up. The voice was no longer in his ear, but in front of him.
"You may open your eyes, if you wish."
"Since you're asking nicely," Jiwook said, obliging.
The dim light created from Jiwook's discarded phone meant that he could see Seojin's mystery boyfriend, and...
...damn.
Long hair framed Yun Seo's chiseled face. A face. Listeners never showed their faces if they could help it. This face had a dark expression, but the smile was almost playful, even in spite of the circumstances. But one look at the perfectly combed hair, long eyelashes, stormy gray eyes, and physique, and Jiwook was both completely understanding of and deeply offended by the fact that Seojin kept Yun Seo's existence to herself.
The Listener smiled at Jiwook, his fangs glinting in the phone's flashlight. Jiwook dimly wondered how many people would be screaming in his position, and contemplated his need for therapy considering how unfazed he was.
"I suggest we work together, Ahn Jiwook-ssi." Yun Seo's voice sounded like a cat. "If you are interested, we will become collaborators in this endeavor. You know what that means."
Jiwook did. "And if I say no?"
"I will coil you into forgetting this interaction ever occurred, send you home, and there will be no strings attached."
"That's too easy."
Yun Seo cocked his head, mildly amused. "Is it?"
Jiwook pondered that for a second. If Yun Seo wanted to kidnap or kill him, he probably would have done that by now. But they were just...having a conversation.
"I don't like being coiled," Jiwook stated.
"Then you will not need to be." Yun Seo flexed his hand and examined his own nails - or claws, as they were pointed on the ends. "But I would appreciate an answer, irrespective of that."
Jiwook bit the inside of his lip as he thought it over. Though he bit the inside of his lip, he felt the pain between his ribs on his left side, where a thin, puckered scar lay beneath his clothes. A thought crossed his mind - a memory from long ago, of a rainy night and blood on the pavement.
Jiwook's thoughts ran wild. You would want me to do this, wouldn't you?
He grabbed the collar of his own t-shirt and pulled it down. "Let's get started, then."
Yun Seo blinked, his lashes making the movement look slower. "Just like that?"
"You want to find your girlfriend. I want to find my friend. Now Listen before I change my mind."
Jiwook hoped that he made "Listen" sound like the proper noun he intended it to be.
Yun Seo smiled, and Jiwook felt a primal fear flicker past his heart as he watched the fangs in his mouth elongate. "With pleasure," the man purred.
If fear was primal, so was resolve. Jiwook nodded in assent.
And the fangs pierced his neck.