Chapter 60

The head of the 9-iron smashed into the life-support monitor.

Sparks erupted from the shattered machine, spitting electricity into the sterile air.

The crash echoed through the VIP ward, met by the frantic thud of medical staff sprinting down the corridor, their footsteps mirroring the urgency of a nurse’s alarm. Jo Yeon-oh merely cast a glacial glance toward the hospital room door.

Catching his silent cue, Manager Yoo released a heavy sigh and stepped out into the hallway to intercept the oncoming crowd and explain away the chaos.

While Manager Yoo placated the staff with reassurances that nothing was amiss, Yeon-oh hoisted the golf club once more, utterly deaf to the commotion outside. This time, the brutal swing found the frame of the bed where Jo Seong-heon lay, the metal buckling under the immense force until it caved inward and dangled precariously. Despite the deafening shriek of iron colliding with iron, an absolute, chilling void masked Yeon-oh’s face.

“Yeon-oh, why are you doing this? What’s wrong with you, Yeon-oh?” Yeongwon stammered, flailing in a helpless attempt to stop her son, but the sheer menace radiating from him forced her back, leaving her to stamp her feet in despair.

Whether she cowered or cried, the cacophony of shrieking metal continued to ravage Seong-heon’s room. Long reduced to a vegetative state, Seong-heon lay blissfully ignorant that his sole heir was the one orchestrating this violence against his comatose form, merely jolting and swaying with every savage impact that rocked the bed.

Tears finally brimmed in Yeongwon’s eyes.

Earlier that afternoon, Yeongwon had visited Haeseong Hospital to pick up hypertension medication for her former father-in-law, Jo Gyu-deok.

There was only one reason the formidable patriarch consistently relegated her to performing the mundane errands of a secretary. It was sheer spite, a cruel reminder that since she had failed to serve as a proper role model for Yeon-oh before the divorce, she now had to grovel for whatever scraps she wished to glean.

Although Yoon Yeongwon hailed from the lineage of a venerable brokerage firm, albeit not quite on par with Haeseong, her pedigree meant nothing before Gyu-deok. She desperately craved Yeon-oh’s ultimate success, a vulnerability the old man exploited with flawless precision.

That alone explained why, long after divorcing Seong-heon, she still found herself summoned to clean up the Haeseong family’s messes. Gyu-deok despised her, and she lived in perpetual terror of the disadvantages her son might face because of it. Knowing full well that the patriarch prized his bloodline and prioritized his eldest grandson above all else, she would still walk through fire for her child. Thus, she had arrived at the hospital today.

Usually, her hospital visits began with a detour to her ex-husband’s room, where she would unleash a torrent of curses upon his insensate face to vent her frustrations. Today, however, an unexpected presence in the room startled her, the shock morphing into sheer horror when she realized the intruder was her own son, poised to bring a golf club down upon the unconscious patient.

“What on earth is going on?” she pleaded.

Yeon-oh offered no response, methodically obliterating the room’s furnishings. The 9-iron cleaved into the leather sofa, tearing a gruesome gash through the upholstery, yet throughout the carnage his face remained terrifyingly blank. Knowing all too well that her son’s most explosive rages were always masked by this absolute lack of emotion, Yeongwon felt true dread curl in her stomach.

Unable to bear it any longer, she whipped out her phone with trembling hands. “Why are you acting like this? I need to call Gi-hyeon, if I just leave you like this—”

Yeon-oh closed the distance in a single stride, snatched the phone from her grip, and hurled it against the wall. The device shattered into a spectacular spray of glass and plastic. As Yeongwon stared blankly at the ruined pieces in utter devastation, he let out a scoffing laugh, delivering a withering reprimand.

“Have some conscience.”

“…What?”

“I told you to stop playing the parent,” he sneered. “Where were you when that piece of shit tied me up and pulled his fucked up stunts? Oh, right. You were too busy running around trying to find me a new stepfather.”

The words were barbaric, yet undeniably true.

Back then, their marriage had degraded into a toxic wasteland, prompting Yeongwon to seek an affair as a means of escape. She had felt completely justified; Seong-heon had strayed first, after all. But she never could have imagined that on the day she left the house, a drug-addled Seong-heon would seize his son, who hadn’t even turned ten, and parade his own infidelity right in front of the boy.

He had strapped his screaming, thrashing son to a chair and forced him to watch.

Because Gyu-deok had mandated that no one was to intervene when Seong-heon was high, Yeon-oh had been abandoned to his nightmare. He had thrashed until he collapsed in a pool of his own vomit, remaining strapped to that chair for over ten agonizing hours. When he finally lost consciousness, he hadn’t woken for four days, burning with a blistering summer fever.

Furious that his heir had caused the eldest grandson to collapse, Gyu-deok had ruthlessly stripped Seong-heon of his management rights. The core tragedy, however, lay in Seong-heon’s profoundly warped, garbage-tier humanity; unyielding even to his father’s wrath, he continued dragging his beta lovers into the house, having learned absolutely nothing from his son’s near-fatal collapse.

After rising from his four-day fever, Yeon-oh developed a profound, simmering disgust for beta males, the very demographic of his father’s paramour. In middle school, this hatred had culminated in him violently beating a beta classmate, landing the boy in the hospital. While exorbitant settlements and Haeseong’s elite legal team successfully secured his middle school diploma, his family dreaded what his increasingly volatile high school years might bring. Fortunately, reuniting with Gi-hyeon, who attended the same school, seemed to anchor him.

Tragically, Yeongwon had still been lost in her own wanderings back then, struggling merely to survive another suffocating day in that house. Only after she finally clawed her way out of that grotesque mansion did she remember she even had a son.

But it was too late.

Her little boy had grown up far too quickly. Between the bottomless chasm that had formed between them and the guilt of her own disgraceful choices, she had forfeited any right to reprimand him, no matter what atrocities he committed now.

While she drowned in a tearful reverie of regret, a loud clatter shattered the silence as Yeon-oh discarded the golf club. Sweeping his disheveled hair back from his forehead, he fixed his mother with a chilling stare.

“Why do you keep crawling back here, pretending you can do anything for this fucking corpse?”

“That’s not it, I just…”

“This is exactly why I told you to take a long vacation to Nice or Sicily,” he cut her off, his voice dripping with icy disdain. “Having you hovering around is an absolute nuisance.”

Having delivered his piece, Yeon-oh stalked over to the bed and seized the collar of the hospital gown. He viciously slapped the comatose Seong-heon across the face, not once, but several times. The impacts didn’t produce a sharp sting; instead, they emitted a sickening, bone-rattling thud that echoed through the room. The sheer brutality of the sound sapped the strength from Yeongwon’s legs, sending her crashing to the floor.

She remained paralyzed there until he finally marched out of the room, wearing the satisfied expression of a man who had neatly concluded his business. Even as the medical staff flooded in, scrambling to connect Seong-heon to the newly wheeled-in machines, she could only blink vacuously at the chaos. Manager Yoo gently hauled her up, depositing her onto the mutilated sofa where the golf club had left its mark. Offering a stiff bow, he quickly retreated to chase after his employer.

“Madam’s complexion looked incredibly pale…” Manager Yoo ventured hesitantly.

“You possess an unusually bleeding heart, Manager Yoo,” Yeon-oh remarked, throwing him a sidelong glance as he stepped into the newly arrived elevator.

The patients and guardians already inside unabashedly locked their eyes onto his face. It was as if they refused to miss the spectacle of his objectively breathtaking beauty, a striking contrast where an imposing, powerfully built physique melded flawlessly with remarkably delicate features. Entirely accustomed to the scrutiny, Yeon-oh merely offered a lopsided smirk to a small child who caught his eye before shifting his attention back.

“…Give me the report again.”

Only then did Manager Yoo recall the true reason his boss had abruptly descended upon Haeseong Hospital to visit his vegetative father. The colossal crisis that had been temporarily eclipsed by the sudden violence now loomed ominously before him.

A cold sweat prickled at the nape of his neck.

He had been forced to hail a bullet taxi just to chase down his superior, who had driven himself here before Yoo could even finish his initial sentence. The manager was terrified of what cataclysm might unfold once he delivered the full report.

Thankfully, the elevator doors slid open. While it didn’t spare him from his duty, he reasoned that a wider space was infinitely preferable when dealing with a superior poised to transform into a madman. Mentally counting to three, Yoo took a deep breath and confessed.

“Mr. So is currently on the run.”

“…”

Yeon-oh temporarily halted his brisk strides, though he didn’t interrupt the report. Yoo wondered if he should count it a blessing that his boss hadn’t immediately bolted for the hospital this time. Swallowing his nerves, he continued.

“Around 3:00 PM yesterday, the new car Mr. So recently leased departed from his villa’s parking lot. It immediately merged onto the Gangbyeon Expressway, bypassed the Jayuro Highway, and headed straight for the Siheung Haneul Rest Area. And then…”

“And then?” Yeon-oh prompted, glancing back with a slanted, chilling smile.

An oppressive wave of dominant pheromones crashed down, physically crushing the air from the corridor. The concentrated pressure made Manager Yoo’s hand tremble violently as he reached up to adjust his glasses. Yet, trapped under the expectant gaze of his superior, he had no choice but to finish.

“…And then he vanished.”

“What kind of nonsense is that?” Yeon-oh smiled again. It was a remarkably constrained expression, resembling an adult patronizing a child spouting utter absurdities.

“He—he seemed to have gone to the restroom, but the parked car has remained in the exact same spot for twenty-two hours,” Yoo stuttered. “We dispatched personnel to investigate, but they confirmed he isn’t inside the rest area, the restrooms, or anywhere in the vicinity. The area behind the facility is heavily forested, and the terrain leading to the nearest private residence is far too rugged to traverse on foot. Given the condition of Mr. So’s ankle, it’s highly improbable he could have crossed the mountain.”

Yeon-oh’s eyes narrowed into dark slits, his mind visibly racing. Finally, he spat out a command. “He’s spiteful enough that he might have actually crossed that damn mountain. Deploy more men.”

An indescribably tyrannical aura poured from the impassive superior.

Manager Yoo desperately wanted to escape outside before the passing patients collapsed from the sheer weight of the pheromones. He had only discovered Gi-hyeon’s disappearance earlier that afternoon. He had planned to deliver a fruit basket to Gi-hyeon’s home in Ilsan, stepping in for Yeon-oh, who had been too swamped with the patriarch’s menial tasks for days. When no one answered the doorbell at the villa, Yoo had prepared to leave the basket at the entrance.

However, the sight of Lee Beom-hee’s Mustang parked in the lot had stopped him dead in his tracks.

He had rushed back inside and pounded on the door, but Gi-hyeon never emerged.

Sensing something fundamentally wrong, Yoo immediately reported the anomaly to Yeon-oh. His boss had offered only a single, chilling response.

Is that so.

And then the line had gone dead.

As Yoo stood frozen, unsure of his next move, his phone had buzzed again. Officially, it was a call from the secretarial office operating under the gallery, a specialized team paid directly out of Yeon-oh’s pocket and completely insulated from Gyu-deok’s influence. Their duties closely mirrored Yoo’s own.

Manager, the Director has ordered your immediate return.

Rushing to the gallery, Yoo had received a compiled briefing of Gi-hyeon’s movements, hastily tracked down by Yeon-oh’s private secretaries. They had designated Yoo as the messenger, nonchalant about the possibility of the information reaching Gyu-deok’s ears. But the second he had opened his mouth to deliver that compiled report, Yeon-oh had instantly hopped into his car and sped off toward Haeseong Hospital alone.

“Before heading to the rest area, it appears he withdrew cash from an ATM near his villa,” Yoo added, snapping back to the present. “He lingered there for roughly five minutes. We’ll need cooperation from the authorities to ascertain the exact amount, so we don’t have that figure just yet.”

Yeon-oh remained silent. Even as he felt Manager Yoo’s anxious gaze boring into him, his mind was already miles away. He found it almost comical how glaringly obvious it was to pinpoint exactly where everything had begun to unravel. The complications had festered slowly since middle school. He had always known Gi-hyeon reached out through his mother. Yet, even as the news filtered through the grapevine, he had never once entertained the thought of seeking him out.

Years had already bled past since the day Gi-hyeon abandoned him. Even knowing now that no ten-year-old possessed the power to defy their guardian’s demands, Yeon-oh still couldn’t fathom how the boy had drifted away so effortlessly.

If it had been me, I would have acted differently.

Since the other boy had surrendered his place by Yeon-oh’s side with such infuriating ease, he saw no reason to cling to that hollow vacancy. That fateful day had been Gi-hyeon’s birthday, a date Yeon-oh had spent years trying, and failing, to forget. Like clockwork, whenever the autumn winds began to bite, the memory of the birthday he used to celebrate religiously resurfaced, an unstoppable force of nature. Consequently, a foul mood had anchored him from the moment he woke until the final school bell rang.

Utterly exhausted by the charade of indulging classmates who clung to him in faux camaraderie, he had kept his mouth shut the entire day. Leaving school hadn’t offered any true reprieve, yet the desperate urge to escape clawed at him. Staring aimlessly out the window through every class, he had finally packed his bag at a glacial pace once the day concluded.

Back then, Yeon-oh rarely went anywhere without his scarf.

As puberty struck, he had grown increasingly agitated by the distinct scent of pheromones blooming from the nape of his neck. The mounting disgust stemmed from a singular, horrifying realization: his own scent mirrored Seong-heon’s.

Despite his excruciatingly slow departure, he had nearly reached the school gates before realizing he had left the scarf behind. Had it been a day his chauffeur was scheduled, it wouldn’t have mattered, but days ago his grandfather had confiscated the chauffeured car to punish Seong-heon for some perceived insolence. Catching a bus wasn’t the issue; exposing his scent in the cramped, suffocating quarters of public transit was simply out of the question.

Pivoting at the gates, he trudged back against the tide of departing students. His steps remained infuriatingly sluggish. By the time he finally dragged himself back to his floor, the classrooms had long been deserted.

Inside his classroom lingered a single beta boy.

With his pale skin and the razor-sharp clarity of his monolidded eyes, he bore a striking resemblance to Gi-hyeon. Because of that likeness, Yeon-oh had meticulously avoided exchanging a single word with him. The solitary boy stood near Yeon-oh’s desk, head bowed, burying his nose into something held tightly in his hands.

Yeon-oh froze, his brow furrowing in confusion.

For a fleeting second, he debated abandoning the scarf and just heading home, utterly repulsed by the prospect of striking up a conversation. But the very instant his eyes registered that the object in the boy’s hands was his missing scarf, something inside him snapped.

When clarity finally returned, the boy was writhing and sobbing on the classroom floor. A single, bloody permanent tooth rolled across the linoleum. Offering neither an apology nor a shred of pity, Yeon-oh merely uncurled his bloodied fists, retrieved his scarf, and tossed it into the trash can at the back of the room before walking out.

The bizarre dream haunted him that very night.

Gi-hyeon appeared, the overgrown, older Gi-hyeon whom Yeon-oh had sought out on his most unbearable days, only to watch from afar. It was his first wet dream. He had merely stood there, locked in Gi-hyeon’s quiet gaze, yet his groin throbbed with a relentless ache and his chest constricted painfully.

The alien sensation jolted him awake.

Immediately, the heavy, suffocating stench of his own pheromones invading the bedroom hit him, inducing a sudden wave of nausea. He sprinted to the bathroom and heaved until his stomach convulsed. The growing awareness of the damp stickiness between his thighs amplified his revulsion to an unbearable peak. Through the agonizing spasms tearing at his stomach, Yeon-oh forced his bloodshot eyes open, fighting with everything he had to scrub Gi-hyeon’s smiling face from his mind.

From that night onward, Yeon-oh repeatedly found himself going into heat over Gi-hyeon. Through his first rut, and every one that followed, the dreams relentlessly pursued him. And in every single one, Gi-hyeon stood there, offering nothing but a quiet smile.

The day after he had brutally beaten his classmate, his grandfather’s cane had ruptured the muscles in his thigh as punishment. Yet the physical agony paled in comparison to the psychological devastation of that night. The sickening realization that he had committed the exact same atrocity as Seong-heon, going into heat over a beta, over Gi-hyeon, shattered him.

Years had bled past since then. Yet Yeon-oh still couldn’t curb the grotesque, Seong-heon-like habit of lusting after a beta. And now, as if desperate to empirically prove the fucking idiom that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, he had slept with someone else while already possessing a lover. Thus, even in this catastrophic mess, he rationalized that they were finally, perfectly even.

Gi-hyeon had always been a flight risk, while Yeon-oh had whimpered like a castrated dog, burying the boiling lust in his gut. When his rut hit, he hadn’t even tried to fight it, carelessly burying himself in the wrong hole.

So this time, he resolved, he would be the one doing the hunting.

He absolutely refused to squander this perfectly balanced opportunity to collect what he was owed.