Chapter 70

What did I leave behind? 

Gi-hyeon glanced back, but his vision was entirely empty. Resigned, he had no choice but to keep walking forward. Suddenly, a blinding light seared his eyes, forcing a sharp frown. The instant he recognized the harsh glare as the ceiling lights of an emergency room, the chaotic, overlapping noise of the hospital crashed over him like a tidal wave.

“…”

Right. Why am I here again? 

Staring blankly at the ceiling tiles, Gi-hyeon slowly pieced together the chaotic moments right before he lost consciousness. Shifting slightly, he noticed a heavy, solid weight resting on his uninjured thigh. Glancing down, he saw Jo Yeon-oh sitting perfectly still, his head bowed and his forehead buried directly against Gi-hyeon’s leg in a stupor.

A heavy sigh escaped Gi-hyeon’s lips. He already knew exactly why Yeon-oh was acting this way. After a moment of bleak contemplation, he simply surrendered to the inevitable. The brief, secluded peace he had scraped together in the countryside was officially dead; he was being dragged right back into the suffocating mud. Judging purely by the stubborn set of his shoulders, Yeon-oh clearly had absolutely zero intention of returning to Seoul and leaving Gi-hyeon behind.

“…Why didn’t you tell me those fucking bastards did that to you?”

Just as Gi-hyeon had silently acknowledged Yeon-oh’s presence, Yeon-oh had apparently sensed him waking. The muffled, agonizing question hit Gi-hyeon like a physical weight in his chest. Out of all the furious, deranged accusations Yeon-oh had hurled at him outside the greenhouse, this was the only issue that actually triggered genuine guilt. He had concealed a mountain of explosive secrets, but hiding the truth about his ankle felt like the heaviest sin.

“Because I knew you’d lose your goddamn mind like this,” Gi-hyeon replied, his voice raspy. “Look at what you just did out there. Beating a man like a butcher slaughtering livestock. You looked like a rabid fucking animal.”

Yeon-oh let out a faint, scoffing laugh. It was a hollow sound, merely the corners of his mouth twitching upward. Because his forehead remained glued to Gi-hyeon’s thigh, his eyes were hidden, but Gi-hyeon knew the laugh carried absolutely zero genuine amusement.

“…Even knowing that, you still didn’t tell me. You crazy bastard.”

Exhaling the words like a ragged sigh, Yeon-oh finally lifted his head. He didn’t look at Gi-hyeon; he stared rigidly straight ahead, his arms tightly crossed over his chest. His profile looked utterly hollowed out. Even without meeting his gaze, Gi-hyeon could feel the agonizing, empty void radiating from him. Gi-hyeon swallowed a slow, heavy sigh.

“Then it must have been fucking hilarious watching me throw a fit all this time, constantly nagging you about when that garbage ankle of yours was finally going to heal, huh?” Yeon-oh asked bitterly.

Gi-hyeon took a slow breath to steady himself. When he answered, his face was entirely devoid of expression.

“Yeah. It was fucking hilarious, and I was grateful.”

Hearing that, Yeon-oh finally turned his head to look at him. His eyes were boiling, saturated with a chaotic swarm of intense emotions. It looked like raw, violent resentment, yet simultaneously held something far more delicate and shattered. It had been a very long time since Gi-hyeon had seen Yeon-oh’s eyes convey such deafening agony.

“You really are a piece of shit,” Yeon-oh muttered, his voice ragged and choking on the words.

Gi-hyeon slowly nodded in agreement. Yeah. I honestly don’t know why we do this to each other. Right? But he kept those thoughts buried, choosing silence instead.

***

Yeon-oh seemed to be aggressively filtering his next words. His jaw clenched so hard the muscle visibly bulged, radiating a desperate, unspoken interrogation. An indecipherable, volatile energy swirled across his profile as he seemed to obsessively chew over questions he couldn’t bring himself to ask.

Gi-hyeon simply averted his gaze.

Judging by the modest scale of the ER, they were likely in a local general hospital rather than a massive facility back in the capital. Content to wait him out, Gi-hyeon kept his mouth shut. As long as he hadn’t been kidnapped and hauled back to Seoul while unconscious, he could manage the situation.

He desperately wanted to ask about the fate of Yeon-shin and his junior officer, but a strange, heavy lethargy had been seeping into his bones for a while now. He was slowly realizing this physical slackness was a direct biological response to the dense cloud of Yeon-oh’s pheromones saturating the air around them. Just as he felt an embarrassing flush of heat creeping up his cheeks, he let out a frustrated sigh.

“…You.”

Yeon-oh finally forced the word out. Gi-hyeon knew exactly what was coming. When Yeon-oh’s intense gaze locked onto him, Gi-hyeon naturally turned his head to meet it.

“This bullshit about becoming an Omega… what does it mean?”

His voice sounded remarkably unstable, completely lacking its usual arrogant edge, just as it had outside the greenhouse.

Biting his lip, Gi-hyeon was forced to look back at him. Their eyes clashed in the sterile air. Gi-hyeon was genuinely shocked to find Yeon-oh staring at him with such raw, unmasked desperation. It stalled his response. In that brief hesitation, Yeon-oh pressed forward.

“If you turned into an Omega…”

Yeah? If I did, then what? Gi-hyeon’s sarcastic internal defense mechanism flared up automatically. He kept his mouth clamped shut, but hearing the question voiced aloud made him feel like a pressure cooker on the verge of exploding.

“…The doctor earlier said… you’re pregnant…”

Highly uncharacteristic of him, Yeon-oh failed to finish the sentence. He dragged a palm over his mouth, violently averting his gaze as he took a massive, shuddering breath. Watching the broad muscles of his back visibly flex beneath his dress shirt with every desperate inhale was a bizarre sight.

When he finally seemed to cement his resolve, Yeon-oh locked eyes with Gi-hyeon again, his stare painfully lucid. Their gazes collided unexpectedly.

Gi-hyeon froze. Yeon-oh’s eyes were glittering with a terrifying, indecipherable light. It contained the exact same lethal, violent promise he had displayed while methodically crushing Yeon-shin, yet it was simultaneously laced with an unsettling, almost manic anticipation.

Unable to decode the exact meaning behind that terrifying gleam, Gi-hyeon kept the faint frown etched between his brows and delivered his answer.

“Hey, don’t harbor any garbage thoughts. This happened after we broke up.”

Assuming Yeon-oh believed he had manifested as an Omega and gotten knocked up by someone else while they were still dating, Gi-hyeon’s response was understandably hostile. For the entire duration he had loved Yeon-oh, Gi-hyeon had been utterly devoted. While he may have fantasized about escaping every single second of the day, he had never once harbored a single thought of betrayal.

At the clarification, Yeon-oh’s face violently contorted. He looked as if he were in excruciating physical agony.

“Are you fucking kidding me… right now…”

Swallowing the rest of his rage, Yeon-oh looked like a man enduring unspeakable torture. He darted his tongue out to wet his lower lip, then, fixing Gi-hyeon with bloodshot eyes mapped with burst capillaries, he demanded again.

“I asked whose kid is growing in that belly, So Gi-hyeon.”

His tone was razor-sharp and dangerously impatient. Gi-hyeon stopped breathing. Even though he had fully anticipated the interrogation, hearing the demand directly from the source generated a fundamentally different shockwave. When Gi-hyeon hesitated, Yeon-oh pounced on the silence.

“But where the fuck did that bastard go, leaving you all alone in a shithole like that?”

That was entirely unexpected. Thrown completely off balance, Gi-hyeon could only stare blankly as Yeon-oh, looking legitimately ill as he scowled, unable to contain the fury boiling in his eyes, seemingly directed his rage on behalf of the very man who was now a single, pregnant father.

Judging by the violently fluctuating pheromones, Yeon-oh was undeniably furious, yet he wasn’t displaying the explosive, unhinged brutality he had unleashed upon Yeon-shin and the junior officer. He was clearly suppressing his worst impulses, either because he remembered they were in a hospital or because he was actively accommodating Gi-hyeon’s fragile medical state. That familiar, calculated restraint felt so characteristically Jo Yeon-oh that Gi-hyeon couldn’t help but sigh.

“…Is it that son of a bitch, Yang Jisu?”

“What?”

That was an incredibly bizarre leap in logic. Watching Gi-hyeon’s face twist in genuine bewilderment, Yeon-oh’s grip on the metal bed frame tightened so fiercely the steel audibly groaned and bent before he finally shot to his feet.

“Why the fuck didn’t that piece of shit even bother following you to the hospital?”

Barely catching the rapid, murderous mutterings of I’m going to kill him that followed, a shocked Gi-hyeon half-sat up in the bed.

“What are you talking about? It’s not the Captain.”

“Then who. That tennis guy? No, just tell me.”

Yeon-oh glared at Gi-hyeon, practically demanding an immediate confession, before abruptly turning his head away again as if physically incapable of looking at him. He looked like a man in pure agony, fighting a losing battle against his own instincts. The veins on the back of his hands and his neck bulged grotesquely. With his head turned, the frantic, violent pulsing of his carotid artery was impossible to miss.

Wondering exactly how dangerously high the man’s heart rate had spiked for his pulse to be that visible, Gi-hyeon reached out and grabbed Yeon-oh’s wrist. Yeon-oh slowly lowered his head, staring blankly at the hand gripping him.

“Why do you care about the father?” Gi-hyeon asked.

“…Why do I care about the father?”

As if the dam he had been desperately holding back had finally ruptured, Yeon-oh’s voice dropped to a terrifying, ruined gravel. Because he had been averting his gaze, Gi-hyeon hadn’t realized his eyes were blood red, looking ready to burst. The flush extended violently across his face and down his neck, coloring him a uniform, angry crimson.

Gi-hyeon flinched involuntarily.

“You show up knocked up, God knows what you did or with what bastard. You vanished in the middle of the night like you were fleeing for your life… Where the hell is that bastard, and what the fuck is he doing instead of being here?”

Only then did the pieces finally click together in Gi-hyeon’s mind. Yeon-oh genuinely believed Gi-hyeon had fled to the countryside because of the baby’s father. …Which wasn’t entirely inaccurate. Gi-hyeon had indeed gotten pregnant with Yeon-oh’s child and fled in a panic, terrified that Jo Gyu-deok would discover the truth.

So that’s why he’s so furious… Even in this chaotic mess, Gi-hyeon found Yeon-oh’s aggressively loyal, tear-jerking friendship simultaneously fascinating and bitterly depressing. The sharp sting of disappointment, despite having expected nothing, made it even worse.

In the blink of an eye, Yeon-oh’s expression completely transformed as he perched gently on the edge of the bed. The gaze fixed upon Gi-hyeon was suddenly saturated with an uncharacteristic, tender warmth. The whiplash-inducing shift made Gi-hyeon involuntarily narrow his eyes. Yeon-oh began speaking in a remarkably soft, coaxing tone, clearly attempting to soothe him.

“Just tell me. We need to take action, right? I heard your test results. The doctor said your pheromone levels are dangerously weak. Hm?”

His voice was cloying and sweet. While it wasn’t exactly rare for Yeon-oh to act this way, Gi-hyeon inherently distrusted the motive and leaned back defensively. Unbothered by the retreat, Yeon-oh leaned in and gently stroked Gi-hyeon’s cheek.

“Your face is all swollen, too. Let’s just find that bastard first. Just tell me what kind of guy he is.”

“…”

When Gi-hyeon remained silent, Yeon-oh offered a charming smile and pressed further.

“You don’t know? …Where did you meet him? A club?”

Despite maintaining the sugary tone, the instant he asked about a club, Yeon-oh’s pheromones violently spiked into the air, heavy and suffocating, before rapidly crashing back down. It was a terrifying display of suppressed volatility.

Gi-hyeon refused to answer. Setting aside the condescending attitude, he was deeply unnerved by the indecipherable, manic gleam swirling in Yeon-oh’s eyes. This wasn’t the clean, focused rage he had used to beat Yeon-shin; this was a toxic, contaminated fury laced with something far darker. After a brief hesitation, he replied defensively.

“Why do you need to know?”

“Why do I need to know? Fuck, ha…”

He mimicked Gi-hyeon’s words before instantly devolving into curses. Involuntarily, Gi-hyeon’s gaze dropped to the throbbing veins bulging in Yeon-oh’s neck. The violently clenched jaw completely betrayed the fake, gentle facade.

“I need to know so we can fix this. Gi-hyeon, are you stupid? I’m asking why you’re sitting here all alone in this state, hm?”

His tone mimicked a parent who was furious at a misbehaving child but desperately trying to coax the truth out of them first before dealing out punishment.

Only then did Gi-hyeon realize Yeon-oh was treating him like a naive, ignorant teenager who had accidentally gotten knocked up and abandoned. Scoffing in pure disbelief, Gi-hyeon snapped in annoyance.

“It was consensual, and I don’t mind being pregnant. You know I like kids.”

“…What?”

Yeon-oh froze instantly. He looked like a man taxidermied mid-shock, staring blankly without blinking, completely paralyzed by the revelation. Unable to comprehend the reaction, Gi-hyeon reiterated his stance.

“I already told you, this happened after we broke up. …Even if it was impulsive, I don’t care. In fact—”

A hand violently shot forward, brutally clamping over Gi-hyeon’s mouth. The grip was so ferocious, crushing his cheeks inward, that it legitimately hurt. Before Gi-hyeon could even muffle a groan, he found himself staring directly into Yeon-oh’s bloodshot, terrifyingly luminous eyes. Yeon-oh practically chewed the words as he spat them out.

“You show up knocked up by some nameless bastard, and you think you have the right to run your fucking mouth like you’re proud of it? Are you fucking retarded?”