My Idol Lives Next Door (And He's Pretending to Hate Me)

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*"Make my grandsons love each other again, and I will give you more money than you could spend in ten lifetimes."*

The richest man in the country said it like a command, but his eyes were begging.

She sat across from him in a study the size of her family's entire house, and for a moment she forgot to breathe. He was old now, and tired in a way money could not fix. Behind him hung a photograph of four small boys in matching suits, shoulder to shoulder, smiling as though nothing could ever break them.

"That was taken before the crash," he said quietly.

She knew the story. Four brothers, his sons, had boarded a plane for a business meeting and never returned. They died on the same day, as close in death as they had been in life. Their sons inherited the company, the fortune and the grief. They did not inherit the friendship.

"They hate each other," the old man said. "And I do not know why."

Hatred like that always had a reason. Behind the marble and the family name, each cousin carried a story no one else knew.

Then he named the amount.

Her parents' debts. Her dance group's dream. A future with no struggle in it. She should have asked questions. Instead, she lifted her chin.

"I'll do it."

For the first time that day, the old man smiled. "Good. You will need courage. They are not easy boys."

---

On moving day, she stood at the gate and stared. The house was a palace dressed as a home, its glass throwing the sunlight back in gold, its chandeliers falling like waterfalls of light.

The housekeeper led her through it. Downstairs, two rooms stood side by side behind wide glass doors, and beside them a third, so much larger it seemed a kingdom of its own. Upstairs was one enormous room, and across from it, a smaller one.

"That is yours."

The bed was draped in silk, and the window opened onto the garden. It was the loveliest room she had ever seen, and it felt like a room in a house where she was not quite welcome.

"And the young masters?"

"The first is the CEO. He has the largest room downstairs. No one knows what he does in there. He hardly comes out, except for breakfast and personal needs." The housekeeper's voice lowered. "The second is a doctor at the family hospital. The third, a gamer, runs the family game club. They have the rooms side by side."

"And the one upstairs?"

"The fourth young master. He stays indoors and speaks to almost no one. When he is offended..." She hesitated. "It is better not to offend him."

*And my door,* she realized, *faces his.*

---

That afternoon, the first three young masters were out. Only the fourth remained, shut away behind his door.

The silence pressed on her, too vast and too empty. She knew only one thing that could fill a silence like that.

She was the leader of a five-girl dance group, and she had founded it for a single reason: a musician. He had once been the most beloved voice in the country. His mother, a dancer, had taught him everything, and together they performed one last love song so tender that it became his most famous work. Then she died. He stopped singing, stopped dancing, and pulled every song he had ever made from the world.

A few fans had kept his music like a secret treasure, and they kept dancing to it, as though dancing could bring him back.

She was one of them.

Next month, her group would perform his last song on a concert stage. She had rehearsed every turn until she could do it in her sleep. She owed him that much.

She connected her phone to the speaker in the living room, turned the volume as high as it would go, and the first note filled the house.

She began to dance.

---

Upstairs, behind a heavy door, a chair scraped back.

The fourth young master had not left his room since morning, and he did not like noise. He liked it even less when it rattled the walls of his own house. His jaw tightened beneath the black mask that covered the lower half of his face.

*Who is making that racket?*

He came down the stairs with long, irritated strides, one hand sliding along the rail, his eyes cold and half-lidded. He was headed for the living room to put an end to it.

He never reached the bottom step.

---

She had come to the final sequence, the one she had practiced a hundred times: a long slide across the floor, a spin, then a deep backward arch, trusting the air to hold her.

Her bare foot slid a little too far across the polished marble.

The arch became a fall.

She gasped, her arms flying out, and then something solid caught her: an arm locked around her waist, a hand braced at the small of her back. The room tilted. They went down together onto the couch.

When the world stopped spinning, she was lying across him.

Her palms rested on a hard chest. His hand had slipped beneath the hem of her top and settled against the bare skin of her waist, and the heat of it traveled through her entire body. Her hair had fallen around them like a curtain, shutting out everything else.

Neither of them said a word.

His breath came warm and uneven through the thin fabric of his mask, brushing her lips. His thumb pressed once into her skin, slowly, almost against his will, and a shiver ran down her spine.

She should have moved. She knew she should have moved.

She looked up instead.

His eyes were dark and sharp and only inches from hers, and they were not looking away. They dropped to her mouth, lingered there, then rose to meet her gaze again. The music played on, but she could no longer hear it. She could hear only her own heartbeat, and beneath her palm, his, as loud and as unsteady as hers.

His arm should have let her go. It tightened instead.

The air between them grew thick, as if the whole house were holding its breath. Somewhere deep in her mind, a small voice reminded her of what the housekeeper had said: *It is better not to offend him.*

She had been in this mansion for three hours. She had signed a contract worth a fortune. And she was lying across the one young master no one dared to touch, and he was not pushing her away.

His eyes searched her face, slowly, as though he were trying to understand something he had no name for. His lips parted.