Even the Soju tastes stale. I’m sitting in the living room of our dorm. OUR dorm ... yeah well, I guess it still is, although we hardly ever stay here anymore. Most of the time we’re busy with our own schedules and when we do SHINee stuff we only crash here after 20 hours of practice and sleep for a couple of hours.

I don’t know, why I came here tonight, of course there’s nobody here.

SHINee is still immensely successful. We’re one of the favourites in this year’s MMA ratrace again. And we’re all doing great in our separate activities, subunits, musicals, dramas and radio-shows. And I’m doing lots of voice-acting lately which is really fun.

I can’t find a good reason for being depressed ... or maybe I can. It’s funny but I miss being the leader although I never really felt I was good at it and of course I’m still SHINee’s leader officially, but there’s not much left to lead. We’ve grown, we’re all men now. Even Taemin finally put the “oh you’re all mature now” remarks behind and is treated as an adult.

I’ve wandered through the rooms: the place I shared with our manager who moved out two month ago, since it didn’t make sense for him to live at a place where he hardly ever met us, Minhos neat single room, Taemin’s and Jjong’s shared refuge and Kibum’s surprisingly messy chamber.

I picked up a fake rose in Kibum’s room that smells of expensive perfume he could probably tell me the name of and play with it while I’m switching through TV-channels in search of a reason to stop thinking.

Minho is in Thailand for a drama-shooting and Jjong is recording a rock-album in Japan. Kibum is in ing New York City for musical rehearsals and I’m not really sure about Taemin. I think there’s some ballad-singing competition going on he wanted to join in.

While I slowly get drunk my phone vibrates and when I take it out there is a message from a suppressed number. I open it carelessly and a video starts that shows a room lit by a single light-bulb beneath which a chair is placed.  There is a person tied to that chair.

“HA HA”, I say out loud and I’m ready to delete the obvious prank when something catches my eye. The person’s feet don’t even touch the floor, like he is really short ... or a child.

And as if the sender of the video knows what I think the camera zooms in and although it’s warped by the fish-eye lens I clearly recognize the face:

Jesus Christ, they’ve kidnapped Yoogeun.