They didn't take him back to the holding cell this time. This time, Starline's suits bundled Minjun straight into a sleek black sedan with tinted windows and leather seats that smelled like money and power and stale air.
Sunho didn't ride with him. Minjun caught one last glimpse of his old friend on the curb, head bowed, phone pressed tight to his ear — a puppet on a golden string.
Minjun almost felt sorry for him. Almost.
The car glided through Seoul's neon arteries like a shark through blood. The driver didn't speak. Neither did the big man in the passenger seat, earpiece coiled like a snake behind his ear. Minjun leaned his forehead against the window, watching the city blur by: rooftops, billboards, alleys still echoing with his stolen anthem.
He wondered how many kids were still humming it right now, while he was boxed up again, gift-wrapped for Seojin.
The Starline tower loomed against the night sky, all glass and ambition. A hundred stories of bright corridors, mirrored elevators, conference rooms where billion-won deals were signed with the same ease that dreams were bought and sold.
They didn't make him wait. They swept him through the marble lobby, past a row of starlet trainees practicing smiles in the reflection of the glass doors, past a pair of guards who didn't even bother to hide the stun batons clipped to their belts.
They deposited him in a conference room on the 42nd floor. Polished table, minimalist chairs, a wall of windows that turned Seoul into a glittering chessboard.
And at the head of that table — Seojin, immaculate as always, hair perfectly slicked, suit dark enough to swallow the room's light. His smile was the same shark's grin that had once promised Minjun the world for the price of his soul.
"Minjun-ah." Seojin's voice was soft, warm, the voice of an uncle who'd bring candy to family gatherings. "You look tired. Prison food doesn't suit you, hmm?"
Minjun didn't sit. He braced his hands on the back of a chair and met Seojin's gaze head-on. "You're going to kill me this time?" he asked, and he was only half-joking.
Seojin chuckled — a sound as cold as the boardroom's AC. "Oh, come now. We're not savages. We're a business. I've invested too much in you to waste your pretty face on an obituary."
He gestured to the empty seat opposite him. Minjun didn't move. Seojin sighed, as if disappointed in a stubborn child.
A slim folder sat in front of Seojin, the Starline logo embossed in silver. He flipped it open, tapping a manicured finger on the top page.
"Do you know what this is?" he asked, voice gentle.
Minjun didn't look. "Another leash."
Seojin's smile widened. "Your contract. The original one you signed when you were sixteen — when your mother brought you to my office and begged me to see what I could make of her talented boy."
Minjun flinched — a tiny crack in the wall he'd built around that memory. His mother's hands, rough from working three jobs, clutching his demo CD like a lottery ticket.
Seojin leaned forward. "You see, Minjun-ah, the law is very clear. You are still under exclusive binding to Starline until your twenty-fifth birthday. Any unauthorized performance, any breach of non-compete clauses — that's a lawsuit that will bury you, your family, and every rooftop kid who sings your name."
He flipped the page, revealing a single line highlighted in yellow: "All original compositions created during the term of contract shall be the sole property of Starline Entertainment."
Minjun stared at that line — the words might as well have been a chain around his throat. His songs. His rooftop anthems. His defiance. All of it — technically — theirs.
Seojin's voice dropped to a whisper, conspiratorial, like he was telling a bedtime story. "It's very simple, Minjun-ah. You sign this addendum — you publicly apologize, declare you were misled by radicals, hand over all rights to your so-called 'movement.' In exchange, you come back. We clean you up. Maybe you lead a new boy group, something we control properly this time. And the world forgets this ugly mess ever happened."
Minjun felt the floor tilt under him. He thought of Jiwoo — bruised fingers pounding guitar strings. Miri — hacking public screens to show his face. The kids who painted his lyrics on cracked alley walls.
All of it could be swept away with a single signature.
Then he remembered something. A night alone in the old studio, the one Sunho had slipped him into. A contract printout, half-shredded, a desperate kid highlighting every line he didn't understand. And the tiny margin note he'd scrawled in pencil, a question he'd never dared to ask back then: "Who owns what if they never file it?"
His heart stuttered — then roared to life.
He looked Seojin dead in the eye and laughed. A raw, reckless bark that echoed off the glass walls and startled the suits at the door.
Seojin's smile faltered. "What's so funny?"
Minjun stepped around the chair, planted both hands flat on the table, and leaned in until he could see the faint pulse beating at Seojin's temple.
"You never filed the copyright transfer, did you?" he said, voice sharp as broken glass. "You thought you'd break me so fast I'd never check. But I did. And guess what — my songs are still mine. Legally. Every rooftop chorus, every subway verse, every bootleg recording the kids are playing on street corners. It's mine."
Seojin's mask cracked — just for a second. Rage flickered in his eyes, then vanished under a polite veneer. "You think you can win this?" he asked, almost tender. "You think they care who owns a chorus when I own the courts?"
Minjun pushed off the table, standing tall in the city's cold neon glow. "You don't own the streets. Or the rooftops. Or the kids who already believe it's theirs."
He turned for the door. The guards didn't move — they just looked to Seojin, waiting for a signal that didn't come.
Seojin sat frozen, fingers drumming the folder's cover — the broken leash that could strangle him instead.
Minjun didn't wait for permission. He stepped back into the corridor, heart pounding, voice humming low under his breath. He could feel it rising again, unstoppable.
The contract was broken — and so was the machine that thought it could own his voice.