Chapter 66

“Oh, Yeon-oh-ya.”

The only reason Yeon-oh halted his stride instead of ignoring the voice was the sudden, comforting realization that he possessed highly advantageous medical records. Thanks to his mother, Yeongwon, practically dragging him to the hospital over his recent bout of severe insomnia and razor-thin nerves, he had been officially diagnosed with chronic sleep deprivation and relapsed depression. This documented history provided the perfect, legally bulletproof excuse of diminished capacity should he decide to cave his cousin’s face in right here in the lobby.

He was getting bored of punching heavy bags anyway. Beating Jo Yeon-shin, who had materialized out of thin air, to an absolute pulp probably wouldn’t even earn him that much grief from their grandfather.

The patriarch’s nagging was always fucking irritating, but the sheer nuisance of it was what truly drove Yeon-oh insane. Just the other day, the old man had summoned him, furiously demanding why he had completely trashed Seong-heon’s hospital room. Yeon-oh had smoothly replied that he felt bad missing Parents’ Day, so he had simply dropped by to give his comatose father a golf swing clinic. That snark had earned him two stinging slaps across the face.

Dealing with the obscenely wealthy, aristocratic wives who frequented the gallery with a busted lip had proven far too bothersome, forcing him to delegate sales entirely to the curators. Predictably, revenue had plummeted, leaving Yeon-oh in a thoroughly foul mood.

Channeling that festering irritation, he hoisted the corners of his mouth into a chilling smirk.

“Oh, hyung. Fancy seeing you here,” Yeon-oh drawled. “You’ve got some sleep in your eye, by the way.”

He watched with profound amusement as Yeon-shin offered a faint, strained smile and subtly brushed the inner corner of his eye, pretending not to care.

“Other side,” Yeon-oh added smoothly.

Only then did Yeon-shin’s face flush a violent, uncontrollable shade of red. Yet witnessing his cousin’s humiliation offered Yeon-oh zero genuine satisfaction. Lately, every external stimulus felt utterly tasteless and dry. Anticipating that beating the man with his fists would feel just as hollow and unfulfilling as destroying him with words, Yeon-oh instantly wanted to abandon the conversation.

And he would have, had Yeon-shin not opened his mouth.

“I guess you haven’t… been hanging out with that friend of yours lately?”

Ah, never mind. Yeon-oh decided it was perfectly acceptable to beat the living shit out of him today. Rolling his shoulders, he deliberately loosened his stiff neck muscles, silently prepping his body to launch a devastating right hook.

“Why the fuck do you care, hyung?” Yeon-oh sneered. “If your dick is bored, go call some escorts. Fuck ’em, get fucked, or run a train on them—do whatever the hell you want, just keep it to yourself.”

“No, I was just…”

Yeon-shin managed to maintain his sickeningly pleasant smile, proving his age wasn’t entirely for show. Suppressing his reaction to the blatant insult definitely elevated him above the rest of their male cousins, whose skulls were packed with nothing but fertilizer. Still, his older sisters were infinitely more competent; the only reason their grandfather funneled more power to Yeon-shin was because the women were recessive Alphas. Not that it mattered much, considering Yeon-shin himself was a pathetic, ambiguous middle-ground between a dominant and recessive Alpha.

“I was just wondering how your friend was doing…” Yeon-shin continued.

That persistent, obsequious grinning, an expression that mirrored his father Jo Seong-cheol far more than Seong-heon, thoroughly obliterated Yeon-oh’s mood. If the bastard had just taken the bait and fought back, Yeon-oh would have had the perfect justification to strike. But his cowardly smiling only stoked Yeon-oh’s rage. There was clearly an ulterior motive for him hovering around; he was obviously fishing for something, which made entertaining him even more exhausting.

Yeon-oh was already drained. He had just escaped a grueling dinner meeting orchestrated by a politician who had purchased a painting at a steep discount last month. In nine cases out of ten, when Naban Gallery unloaded art at rock-bottom prices, it was to facilitate corporate bribery. They would intentionally lose exorbitant sums in high-stakes golf matches or hwatu games, effectively funneling slush funds to the target, who would then use that exact money to purchase a masterpiece. When the gallery delivered the painting, they would discreetly slip the purchase cash back to the buyer inside a luxury wine box as a gift.

Without fail, those corrupted officials would end up panting and begging for more scraps like trained dogs at Yeon-oh’s feet.

However, these government parasites, despite operating purely as transactional merchants masquerading as public servants, often wielded their bloated egos like weapons, making them excruciatingly difficult to domesticate until they were fully addicted to the feed.

Today’s charade at the hotel’s fine dining restaurant had been orchestrated to beg the esteemed assemblyman for a legislative amendment regarding patent rights. Yeon-oh had let his guard down lately, resulting in Jo Gyu-deok finally escalating to actively threatening Yeongwon’s safety.

“Stop doing things that make your parents suffer. Do you think she actually wants to bow down at this family’s doorstep? She’s only groveling to survive for your sake,” the patriarch had lectured.

When Yeon-oh had snapped back in pure annoyance at the twisted reprimand, the old man had exploded, screaming at him to get the hell out of his sight. Storming out, Yeon-oh had loudly complained to the secretary.

“Did his hearing aids break? He’s screaming his head off at someone with perfectly fine hearing. Take him to an ENT clinic. Doesn’t he feel it’s a waste of the health insurance premiums he pays every month? How much could a new pair possibly cost…”

In response, a heavy crystal ashtray had shattered against the doorframe right beside his head.

Oops, guess he heard that perfectly, Yeon-oh had smirked before leaving the estate, the old man’s furious roars echoing behind him.

Ultimately, he had only attended tonight’s dinner because he was sick to death of his mother being used as a hostage. Over the past ten days, Yeon-oh had consumed exactly six meals and slept perhaps thirty-four hours in total. He had incinerated the remaining time obsessively scrubbing and sanitizing his own estate, Gi-hyeon’s Seoul apartment, and the Ilsan villa.

His mental health was dangling by a microscopic thread. Playing the gracious host required him to aggressively rub his palms together in supplication until his fingerprints wore off, a deeply humiliating endeavor under the best of circumstances. It was exhausting enough when he was in his right mind, but the politician had exponentially worsened the situation by dragging along a pretty Omega, heavily implying he wanted to introduce them.

“The old man is seriously out of his fucking mind,” Yeon-oh had seethed internally. “No matter how hard I suck up to him until my dick practically falls off, he expects me to put on a show in front of a complete stranger? This motherfucker is taking me for an absolute ride.”

“Oh, Director Jo, why are you using such harsh words? This is our youngest,” the assemblyman had laughed, utterly oblivious. “You said you were treating us to a delicious meal, so I brought the kid along. Is setting one more place at the table really that difficult?”

Yeon-oh had lifted a pine-needle-skewered ginkgo nut to his mouth, sliding the nut off before securing the empty pine needle between his lips with a cold smirk. What an absolute load of bullshit. If that Omega were genuinely the assemblyman’s child, the gallery’s intelligence network would already know. In reality, Naban’s secretarial office had personally arranged an overseas language study package for the politician’s two legitimate Alpha sons. Even if the man possessed a wildly passionate marriage and had spawned a late-in-life child with his legal wife, there was zero chance the kid was already fully grown and sitting at this table.

Therefore, the Omega was undeniably a sugar baby, a hidden mistress funded by the politician’s illicit allowances. The underlying scheme was glaringly transparent: the assemblyman wanted Yeon-oh to take the Omega as a lover, effectively making them tunnel brothers. Tethering his own pawn to Yeon-oh was a calculated move to block other vultures from swarming the Haeseong family’s bottomless vault of wealth.

Who the fuck does he think I am, a sex-starved animal? Yeon-oh had thought bitterly. Lately, if I don’t think about So Gi-hyeon, I can’t even get hard. Even if I genuinely tried to fuck that thing right now, the only result would be rumors spreading that Director Jo Yeon-oh is an impotent bastard who couldn’t even perform as a human dildo.

“Ah, never mind. Eat as much as you want, old man. I’m leaving first, so enjoy the meal or book a room upstairs and fuck ’em,” Yeon-oh had dismissed them, casually slapping the top of his left fist into his right palm before standing up and walking out.

He was marching through the lobby, desperate to escape, when he had unfortunately collided with Yeon-shin.

Yeon-shin’s oily, lingering voice finally dragged Yeon-oh back from his brief, cynical reverie. “Make sure you pass along my regards to that friend. He seemed like a genuinely good person. Maybe I’m just getting older, but I find myself preferring calm, grounded people these days.”

“If you’re so worried about getting old, visit a dermatologist, hyung. You’ve got age spots blooming everywhere,” Yeon-oh countered, flashing a brilliantly empty smile before turning his back on the man’s blatant bait.

Outside the lobby, Manager Yoo idled in the driveway, waiting with the car.

Before sliding into the open backseat, Yeon-oh issued a chilling directive. “Jo Yeon-shin’s background is shady as fuck. Dig into him and find something I can hang him with.”

“Yes, sir. Understood.”

“And what about the other matter?”

“Operations are currently underway, sir. We have no concrete leads as of yet.”

Gi-hyeon’s factory-reset phone had been recovered from a trash can at the rest area where he vanished. Before that, his call logs were entirely clean. When Yeon-oh had personally tracked down Beom-hee, the woman had reacted with explosive, genuine irritation, vehemently denying any knowledge of Gi-hyeon’s whereabouts. Judging by the sheer exhaustion and annoyance on Beom-hee’s face when Yeon-oh barged into her hospital like a deranged loan shark, she wasn’t lying.

Admitting he had severely underestimated Gi-hyeon’s tactical capabilities, Yeon-oh had deployed operatives to monitor literally everyone the man had ever known. There had to be at least one point of contact. He had even assigned tails to Gi-hyeon’s estranged military peers, leaving absolutely nothing to chance. Yet the net remained agonizingly empty.

“…I see,” Yeon-oh murmured, finally sliding into the vehicle. The door slammed shut with a heavy, final thud.

***