Chapter 51

Beom-hee’s car roared to life with the ferocious growl of a cornered beast the second he turned the ignition.

Jo Yeon-oh drove his fair share of luxury vehicles, but uncharacteristically favored sleek sedans; this was Gi-hyeon’s first time behind the wheel of a convertible. When he had casually asked about the price tag, Beom-hee had veered wildly off-topic.

“You do realize… Chairman Jo’s obsession with the family bloodline is absolutely psychopathic, right?”

He wondered where she was going with this, but it was an old story he knew intimately. With the driver’s side window rolled down, Gi-hyeon listened in silence, his long index finger tapping a steady rhythm against the steering wheel. He understood her concern perfectly. Letting out a low hum, he offered Beom-hee—who was standing anxiously beside the car—a facsimile of a smile.

“I’ll figure it out somehow. For now, I’m moving to Ilsan. Keep that strictly between us.”

“Yeah, right, like I’ll be the only one who knows. Do you honestly believe Jo Yeon-oh won’t track your every move?”

He probably would. But Gi-hyeon had reached a point where he simply didn’t care. The fragile tether binding them had inevitably, irrevocably snapped. Whether Jo Yeon-oh knew his whereabouts or not was entirely irrelevant to his life now.

“I know that look. You’re plotting something terrible again,” she accused. “Listen to me. If you cut ties with me too, I swear I will hunt you down. Do you understand?”

“How could I possibly cut ties when I’ve stolen your car? I’ll have to see your face at least once when I return it.”

“Dr. So, I told you to stop making jokes with that deadpan face,” Beom-hee shivered, crossing her arms and rubbing her shoulders theatrically. Chuckling at her dramatic display, Gi-hyeon shifted into gear and peeled out onto the street.

His immediate plan was to head home and finish packing. A crushing wave of exhaustion washed over him, though he couldn’t quite decipher if it was a symptom of simple sleep deprivation or a byproduct of violent hormonal shifts. Driving with deliberate caution, he managed to reach his apartment in one piece. He immediately headed upstairs and tossed a few things into boxes before collapsing into bed. By the time he dragged himself awake the next morning, his phone was flooded with notifications. Alongside bewildered texts from the hospital staff asking if he had truly quit, a message from Beom-hee sat at the top of the pile.

—“Resignation processed. You ruthless bastard.” 09:48 AM

The rest were from Damon, the man from yesterday. His messages were perfectly polite, flawlessly spelled inquiries checking if Gi-hyeon had gotten home safely. When Gi-hyeon typed out a brief note of gratitude for his concern, Damon immediately replied, insisting on offering a proper reward. Apparently, his agency had berated him for merely dropping Gi-hyeon off at the hospital and letting him leave empty-handed.

“God, this is annoying…”

Clicking his tongue in pure irritation, Gi-hyeon watched the unread indicator disappear beside his message, instantly followed by an incoming call. With an expression of profound weariness, he lifted the phone to his ear.

“…Yes.”

“Hello, this is Damon.” 

“Yes, hello.”

“Ah… You weren’t replying, so I thought I should call.” 

If someone didn’t reply, a normal person would take the hint and leave it at that. Staring blankly at the wall, Gi-hyeon forcibly wrung out the last drops of his social etiquette. “I see.”

“The agency severely scolded me and insisted I treat you to a meal. If you’re amenable, I’d love to take you out to dinner…” 

Gi-hyeon tried his hardest to decline, insisting it was entirely unnecessary, but the man was relentless.

As the grueling phone call dragged on, Gi-hyeon was the first to wave the white flag. Given his tightly packed schedule for the impending move to Ilsan, his free days were practically nonexistent. Praying for a rejection, he casually tossed out a highly inconvenient time slot, only to instantly regret it when Damon enthusiastically agreed. Fortunately, the restaurant Damon suggested was right in Gi-hyeon’s neighborhood. Without a second thought, Gi-hyeon agreed to meet him there. It was a spot he had frequented with Jo Yeon-oh a few times, making it comfortably familiar territory.

After severing the call, he instinctively prepared to skip breakfast, only to catch himself. Rummaging through the refrigerator, he pulled out a quick meal. Jo Yeon-oh had left behind quite a stockpile of food.

“The food didn’t commit any crimes. That bastard is the only guilty one here.”

Muttering the quiet justification to his empty kitchen, he shoved the container into the microwave and choked it down. He had a marathon of errands ahead of him. Beom-hee had scheduled his hospital appointments for the afternoon, making the morning the perfect window for a reconnaissance trip to Ilsan.

The pre-noon weekday traffic was mercifully light. Navigating the ostentatious convertible felt painfully unnatural, yet an undeniable rush of adrenaline thrilled him as he tore down the Gangbyeon Expressway. The raw power purring beneath the hood was exhilarating. It made him itch to unleash the beast on a stretch of freshly paved asphalt. He wasn’t particularly depressed. For Gi-hyeon, sorrow wasn’t an acute event; it was the bedrock of his existence, a perpetual hum radiating in the background. It was only then that a cruel realization struck him: even at the height of his relationship with Jo Yeon-oh, he had lived every single day nursing the exact same agonizing heartbreak he felt now.

Exhaling a sharp sigh, he merged onto the Jayuro Highway.

Since the villa was tucked away near Jeongbalsan Station, he was forced to rely entirely on the navigation system once he hit downtown Ilsan. The unit had been leased out until last year, but perfectly fortuitous timing had left it vacant after the tenant moved out early this spring. Dropping by the real estate agency managing the property, he informed the agent—a familiar face he’d seen a handful of times—that he intended to convert the listing to an owner-occupied residence and called off the search for a new tenant. She looked visibly crestfallen.

“Oh my, what a shame. A lovely couple toured the place just the other day and absolutely fell in love with it. They promised they’d scrape together the deposit in no time…”

“Please pass along my apologies. And I’m deeply sorry for the inconvenience to you as well, ma’am,” Gi-hyeon offered politely.

“Oh, no, it’s perfectly fine for me, but…” She still looked wistful. Because she had consistently found him excellent tenants in the past, Gi-hyeon offered a deep bow of genuine gratitude before exiting the agency.

He settled for a quick bowl of kalguksu near Jeongbalsan Station for lunch. Slurping the warm noodles, he scoured the internet for local interior design firms. If he was going to raise a child there, stripping the place down and completely renovating it before moving in was the only logical choice. Striking gold, he stumbled upon a company whose schedule had suddenly freed up due to a canceled contract, allowing them to begin construction immediately. He paid them a visit and signed on the dotted line. Hearing that he planned to live there with a child, the owner naturally assumed Gi-hyeon was a married Beta man, launching into painstakingly detailed proposals for both the master bedroom and the nursery. When Gi-hyeon dismissed the master bedroom as an afterthought and firmly requested that all resources be poured into perfecting the nursery, the owner flashed a warm, genial smile.

“With a father this devoted, your wife is going to be absolutely thrilled.”

Gi-hyeon simply offered a faint smile in return. It was vastly easier than explaining that he would be the one birthing the child, that he had less than zero intention of ever marrying, and that there would certainly never be a wife in the picture.

Wrapping up the last of his errands, he raced back to Seoul, tearing into the hospital parking lot at exactly 4:30 PM. He was practically vibrating with anxiety over being five minutes late. Today’s gauntlet was the OBGYN; tomorrow would be the pheromone clinic. Sitting in the sterile examination room, the doctor officially reaffirmed his pregnancy, echoing the exact same clinical diagnosis he had received in the emergency room. Unconsciously rubbing the lingering chill of the ultrasound gel from his abdomen, Gi-hyeon carried the grainy black-and-white printout from the reception desk down into the dim cavern of the parking garage.

“…It’s incredibly small,” he whispered.

Staring blankly at the smudge of pixels, he finally let his forehead collapse heavily against the steering wheel.

A ragged sigh tore itself from his lungs. A suffocating wave of doubt crashed over him—he had absolutely no idea what the hell he was doing.

Was he making the right choices?

He had executed his decisions with ruthless efficiency because he believed it was his only path forward, but the heavy knots twisting in his gut told a different story. And then there was his father; the sheer dread of figuring out how to break the news to the man loomed like a dark storm cloud.

His father—a rigid, immovably conservative man—had willfully turned a blind eye to the reality of Gi-hyeon’s military discharge. He had brazenly ignored the fact that his son had been violently targeted and ostracized until his ankle was utterly pulverized. It was a desperate, fanatical denial, a refusal to believe his own flesh and blood could be so pathetically weak. For a time, Gi-hyeon had tragically deluded himself into believing that this very denial was his father’s twisted form of paternal love. But eventually, even that fragile thread had snapped. Disappointing his father, morphing into the worthless son, had slowly become entirely painless. …Why had I surrendered completely back then? he wondered.

Though he had never truly cherished himself, his pure, unyielding devotion had been shredded to ribbons over the grueling course of his relationship with Jo Yeon-oh. Wallowing in misery had been so violently out of character for him. His libido might have withered into nothingness now, but back then? Jo Yeon-oh merely had to claim the seat next to him and utter a single syllable, and Gi-hyeon would instantly find himself half-hard. The sheer pathetic nature of it all—lusting after a man who harbored zero desire for him, drowning in his own repulsive greed—had sickened him.

His depression had peaked at a terrifying crescendo when his ankle was destroyed.

Paralyzed by the sheer terror of what might spill from Jo Yeon-oh’s mouth if he discovered the truth, Gi-hyeon had practically begged Beom-hee on his hands and knees to fabricate the medical records. The entire world could know his shame, but he had needed Jo Yeon-oh to remain utterly oblivious.

Naturally, a man of Jo Yeon-oh’s staggering influence could have easily unearthed the true cause of the injury. But because Lee Beom-hee, the attending physician, had officially diagnosed the shattered bone and torn ligaments as the result of a clumsy fall, Yeon-oh had accepted the lie without a flicker of suspicion.

If the medical report had cited evidence of blunt force assault, Yeon-oh would have unleashed hell. He would have turned the entire military hierarchy inside out, ruthlessly hunting down every single bastard involved, from the brigadier general down to the lowest staff sergeant. Jo Yeon-oh was exactly the kind of man who would scorch the earth for So Gi-hyeon. But Gi-hyeon hadn’t wanted his bloody vengeance. He had been brutally targeted not because of his own personal failings, but because his forbidden, unnatural relationship with an Alpha—while inhabiting the body of a Beta male—had been exposed. And he had desperately needed Jo Yeon-oh to be the one person in the universe who never learned that truth.

Perhaps the monumental effort of burying that secret had drained the last dregs of his soul, because from that moment on, every single relationship in his life had catastrophically unraveled. The relentlessly strained dynamic with his father had shattered completely, and the fragile bond with Yeon-oh—the very connection he had bled to protect—had begun to rot. It felt as though a violent infection had spread through his veins, and he had fatally missed the window for amputation. The festering wound had turned necrotic, yet he had blindly allowed the gangrene to consume him, utterly ignorant of how to ventilate the rot. So Gi-hyeon had abandoned So Gi-hyeon. He had simply endured, clinging to his own destruction with a pathetic, agonizing stubbornness.

Perhaps that was precisely why this brutal excision of the infected flesh—despite the searing, phantom agony it left behind—was finally bearable.

The stark realization that he was standing at the very precipice of recovery brought a strange, trembling joy to his heart. And looking down at the grainy ultrasound photo in his hands, he knew the door had been thrown wide open. Gi-hyeon swore it to himself, carving the vow into his bones. He was going to be an exceptional father. He might be the only parent this child would ever know, but he would pour every ounce of his soul into ensuring they never felt the agonizing ache of a void.

He turned the key, the engine roaring back to life.

He had mountains of work ahead of him.

He could have easily stayed there, clutching the steering wheel and drowning in the miserable tragedy of his own fate, but he wanted to offer something infinitely better to the tiny, pinpoint speck growing inside him.

Gi-hyeon desperately needed an entity to pour his love into.

***