The air in the Aura Management conference room was thin and sharp, each breath a shallow intake of pure tension. The ultimatum delivered by Da-eun and Ji-won still echoed in the silent space. Yoo-jin stood at the head of the table, looking at the fractured, suspicious faces of the team he had built—the family he was on the verge of losing. He had made his choice. A terrible, necessary, and monumentally risky choice.
"You're right," he began, his voice quiet but resonating with a finality that made everyone sit up straighter. "I haven't been honest with you. I have been keeping a secret. A very large and very dangerous one." He looked directly at Da-eun and Ji-won, acknowledging their accusations without flinching. "And you deserve the truth."
He turned his head slightly towards the corner of the room where Min-ji stood by her laptop, a silent sentinel waiting for her command.
"Play the recording," Yoo-jin said, his voice hard as stone. "All of it."
Min-ji's fingers tapped a single key. The silence was broken by the sound of a cheerful, welcoming female voice, emanating from the high-fidelity speakers set into the walls. It was Min-hee, the recruiter from Innovate Dynamics.
"Hana-ssi! It's so amazing to finally meet you. I am a huge fan of your music…"
The team listened, their expressions shifting from suspicion to deep confusion. Who was Hana? What was this meeting? Chae-rin, who knew what was coming, stared at her hands in her lap, her heart pounding a frantic rhythm against her ribs.
They listened as the conversation unfolded, as the sweet, innocent voice of Hana—coached to perfection by Chae-rin—asked her seemingly naive questions. They heard the recruiter's slick, practiced praise, the corporate buzzwords about "synergy" and "art-tech."
Then, they heard Min-hee describe the company's business model.
"…we help them find their most marketable essence… We acquire the commercial rights to their core artistic components. We would essentially be co-owning your artistic identity."
A collective, sharp intake of breath came from Da-eun. Her eyes widened in horrified understanding. She looked at Yoo-jin, the suspicion on her face melting away, replaced by the dawning recognition of a much larger, uglier truth. This was what he had been fighting in the shadows. This was the real face of their enemy.
Kang Ji-won listened, his rigid posture slowly softening. He heard the cold, clinical language of commodification, the reduction of art to a set of ownable "components." It was a philosophy so antithetical to his own that it made him feel physically ill. This was no simple media spat. This was an ideological war.
Then came the final, devastating part of the recording. Hana's innocent question about other artists, and Min-hee's proud, boastful answer.
"…the artist who inspired that whole 'Producer's Challenge' initiative of yours… the one they call Ryu? He was one of our first successful acquisitions. A talented asset."
The sound of the name "Ryu" detonated in the room.
Kang Ji-won physically recoiled, his face paling as if he'd been struck. The blood drained from his face. It all crashed down on him at once. The impossible coincidence of the melodies. The anonymous email that had stoked his paranoia. The "Producer's Challenge" that had saved them. It wasn't a miracle. It wasn't a manipulation by Yoo-jin. It was a trap. A deeply laid, terrifyingly personal trap that he had almost walked right into. His suspicion, his anger, his accusations toward Yoo-jin—all of it had been based on a lie fed to him by the enemy. A profound, gut-wrenching shame, hot and sharp, washed over him.
The recording ended, leaving a silence that was heavier and more profound than any before it. The full, unvarnished, and terrifying truth was now in the room, a living entity.
Yoo-jin didn't let the silence fester. He began to speak, laying the rest of the cards on the table. He explained the entire "Honey Trap" operation, from Chae-rin's discovery to coaching Hana, to the impossible choice the recording had presented them with.
"The 'Producer's Challenge' was a lie," he admitted, his voice raw with the exhaustion of carrying the secret. "A desperate, last-minute gamble to save us from a plagiarism scandal that Nam Gyu-ri had perfectly engineered. We were checkmated. It was the only move I had left."
He then explained the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction. He told them how the very recording that proved OmniCorp's villainy also contained the proof of his own grand deception. He explained that they possessed a nuclear bomb that would kill them all if they ever dared to use it.
He finished, his confession laid bare. He had shown them the full, ugly machinery of the war they were in. He had shown them the lie at the heart of their greatest victory. He stood before them, not as an all-knowing leader, but as a flawed, desperate commander who had made an impossible choice.
And then, he did the last thing any of them expected. He turned to Da-eun and Ji-won, his gaze direct and his posture stripped of all its usual authority.
"I am sorry," he said, the words simple, direct, and devoid of any pride or justification. "I chose to protect the secret instead of trusting my team. I saw the doubt growing in this room. I felt the trust breaking. And in my attempt to shield you from the danger of this secret, I broke that trust myself. I was wrong to carry this alone. I should have trusted you with the truth from the beginning."
This act of genuine humility, this admission of fault from their brilliant, often intimidating leader, was more powerful than any strategic explanation could ever be. It was an offering of vulnerability, an admission that he, too, was just a person struggling under an impossible weight.
The anger and suspicion that had been festering for weeks could not survive in the face of such raw honesty. It all dissolved, leaving behind only the sober, terrifying understanding of the razor's edge they had all been unknowingly living on. They were not just fighting a media war for the charts; they were in a real, high-stakes intelligence conflict against a ruthless, global power, and they had only survived by the skin of their teeth and a lie of beautiful, audacious proportions. The truth, in all its ugly, complicated glory, was finally in the room, and the family of Aura Management would either be forged into something stronger by its heat, or be consumed by its fire.