Chapter 20

In fact, he had already confessed everything. The moment Yu Jeong-ham landed a single punch to his eye, Im Gyun-il had babbled how he had gone bust at the gambling den right before arriving in the village, lost his shirt, run into Lee Hee-joong on the mountain path, agreed to smuggle him for cash, beaten him black and blue when told to wait for liquidation, and fenced him off to a fence.

On top of that, he had eagerly volunteered every surrounding detail: how Lee Hee-joong claimed he had to return to Geum Seoul, how he figured the kid held something valuable, and how he had lain in wait at the rendezvous house.

To the question of why he had driven the runner without an upfront deposit, he had confessed that he looked like a gemstone omega, so I figured I could always sell him if he reneged, rounding out every cause, effect, and narrative beat. In other words, he was an exhausted husk devoid of further utility.

“If you bite down tight and keep them in your mouth until I return, I’ll let you live. Got it?” Gwichang offered.

“Mmph! Mmph!”

“Spit out even one, and I pull double,” Gwichang added with a lethal grin. “Understand?”

So why the hell is our Deputy Director seeing red? Releasing the mouth of the frantically nodding captive, Gwichang reached for the doorknob as if to leave.

“Tsk… but wait,” Gwichang murmured to himself.

Pausing mid-stride as though suddenly recalling something, he froze. Yu Jeong-ham knew. A man whose nerves were rubbed that raw would never simply walk out after doing only this much. The fact that he hadn’t removed those black latex gloves meant he had further monstrosities planned.

Hand resting on the doorknob, Gwichang tilted his head halfway back. Rather than turning his shoulders, he cocked his head diagonally back over his shoulder; that obscured angle looked almost playful, yet so unspeakably horrifying that Im Gyun-il wet himself.

Turning halfway back, Gwichang murmured in a pitch-black register, “I didn’t get an answer to my fucking question, did I?”

“Mmmph!”

Shift.

Ignoring the squirming freak, Gwichang straightened his neck and released the latch. Clang. The inner spring recoiled with a hollow ring that sounded to Im Gyun-il’s ears like the Grim Reaper descending onto earth, sending his eyes rolling white.

“You were going to fuck Geum Seoul, weren’t you?” Gwichang demanded, taking a slow step closer. “Huh?”

“Mmm! Mmmph!”

“You were,” Gwichang concluded with a lethal smirk. “You planned to fuck him. Pop his little ass.”

Im Gyun-il’s eyeballs bugged out of his head. How on earth was he supposed to answer with a mouthful of bloody teeth? Yet Gwichang glared as if he would gouge out his eyes instead of his teeth if he failed to respond this very second. Poised on the precipice between spitting them out or answering, Im Gyun-il made his choice.

Gulp… swallow.

His blood-slicked throat bobbed up and down in frantic succession. Ugh. At that spectacle, even Yu Jeong-ham winced in disgust.

“No, thir! Not at all… never…!”

Possessing enough low cunning honed across gambling tables, he grasped that only one acceptable answer existed. Whatever his vile intent had been, the answer had to be ‘no.’ Naturally, Gwichang’s conclusion had been set in stone from the start as well.

Step—tread.

He returned. For a fleeting second, Im Gyun-il wondered whether this creature truly was a demon come to swallow his flesh and soul whole. The terror far eclipsed the excruciating agony.

Creak.

Gwichang gestured with a gloved finger. “Say ‘ah’.”

Towering height over a massive torso. The imposing frame bent forward. Trembling so violently that the chair scraped against the concrete, Im Gyun-il shrank back as Gwichang leaned down to peer deep into the empty cavern of his mouth.

“Ah… ah…” the captive whimpered, stretching his torn jaws apart.

A look of pure revulsion crossed Gwichang’s face at the realization the man had swallowed every single tooth. “Ugh. You sure have a cast-iron stomach.”

“Huuu… ngh.”

Then a dazzling, gorgeous smile broke across Gwichang’s face. “Let’s see if we can swallow ten next.”

“N-no… hurk… agh…!”

Gwichang added smoothly, “It’s not mandatory.”

I never force anyone. Gwichang put on an act of sheer hypocrisy.

“If you don’t want to swallow them,” Gwichang said, “get up and spin ten elephant trunk spins.”

“Guh!”

Grinning down at him, Gwichang ordered, “All right, begin.”

A cheerful, melodious voice tangled with desperate shrieks. It was hardly a command one could demand of a man bound hand and foot to a chair. Yet what proved truly terrifying was that Gwichang’s smiling face—delighted with his own dark joke—remained radiant as ever.

Scrape.

Watching Im Gyun-il’s gaping jaw get seized once more as the man stammered, Yu Jeong-ham quietly rose to his feet. There was nothing left for him to do here. Looking at the scene, their boss was intent on scrubbing Im Gyun-il raw in one way or another, and his own turn was never going to come.

“Whoa, you’re actually trying to stand?” an amused voice called from behind with a snicker. “Might as well sing a song while you’re at it.” But that was unmistakably pissed-off mode. Yu Jeong-ham would have staked his entire fortune on it.

Click.

Yu Jeong-ham slipped through the door, acknowledged the curt salutes from the squad at the entrance, and climbed the basement stairs. The screams behind him diminished only after the heavy door swung shut.

“What’s going on? Is the Deputy Director handling it in person?” Choi Da-ol asked in a low whisper.

“Yeah.”

Da-ol’s eyes widened in panic. “Why on earth… wait, don’t tell me.”

“One-Pin Alert,” Yu Jeong-ham confirmed flatly.

“Ah! Why now of all times!” Da-ol groaned, clutching his head.

It was an unwritten emergency code circulating within headquarters, a barometer measuring how thoroughly that Ghost’s fury had ignited. Ranging from One-Pin to Three-Pin, the metaphor counted live fragmentation grenades—marking the scale of the impending blast.

A One-Pin alert typically claimed roughly five sacrifices. Lately, it had been declared only on rare occasions courtesy of Noh Pil-gyu, during which everyone kept a low profile and scrupulously avoided anything that might grate on his nerves. While he was never gentle by nature, a minor transgression on an ordinary day might earn nothing worse than a cold glare in place of a barrage of curses; under One-Pin conditions, absolute vigilance was mandatory. An operational blunder on such a day meant literal hell.

By ordinary arithmetic, a Two-Pin alert ought to demand ten scapegoats, yet regrettably, it scaled by squaring the initial tier to twenty-five. Once things escalated to that point, internal damage control was impossible, necessitating an ‘appropriate sacrificial lamb’ to absorb his wrath. When timing favored them, newly collared suspects served that purpose admirably. After he ran wild like a rabid hound, the alert would downgrade to One-Pin or half a pin.

Lastly, Three-Pin was not the cube of One-Pin, but the cube of Two-Pin. Meaning it demanded well over ten thousand casualties—a state of total war—though Da-ol had never witnessed such a catastrophe since being assigned to this unit.

Even Yu Jeong-ham, who had stood at his flank since their days clawing upward from the bottom, claimed to have seen it only once. Yet as if by tacit pact, not a single detective ever inquired what incident had ignited that blaze, nor how it had been resolved. Words carried weight, and invoking them was an invitation for calamity. None of them harbored the slightest desire to witness it in the flesh.

“I mean, how… isn’t he just a cheap gambler? Was he really that stubborn?”

Yu Jeong-ham trailed off with a noncommittal grimace. Part of why the Ghost’s fury had spiked was surely their squad’s blunder in ruling Im Gyun-il out of the suspect pool from the start.

Yet it felt deeply unfair. The empty cargo bed of Im Gyun-il’s three-wheeler had been clearly recorded on camera. Furthermore, zeroing in on this bastard simply because the count of booze bottles in the back remained identical was something no one on earth aside from Gwichang could have deduced. The monitoring hub covered not just this village, but routes shared across neighboring and lower sectors—high-crime districts teeming with all manner of suspicious vehicles. Flagging an anomaly on such a minuscule detail would have meant they’d still be stuck analyzing the first hour of footage.

Having strained his eyes for days reviewing recordings from over twenty feeds frame by painstaking frame, Da-ol whined under his breath.

“Haaah, my shins are going to get kicked black and blue, aren’t they?” Da-ol complained. “Besides, that scumbag Im Gyun-il is always wandering through the village at random hours anyway!”

The younger detective surely understood that this was a matter of instinct rather than intellect. To be sure, Yu Jeong-ham possessed a fair share of such intuition himself.

Yu Jeong-ham cut him off. “Where is Geum Seoul?”

“Sent him to the Deputy Director’s quarters, just as you ordered earlier…”

Noticing Da-ol’s gloomy tone—as though anticipating he was next in line after Im Gyun-il—Yu Jeong-ham offered a consoling pat on the shoulder. Having nearly fumbled a critical suspect, an earful of venom was inevitable. Empty platitudes like ‘it’ll be fine’ were useless; praying their boss vented every ounce of his temper down below before emerging was far more practical.

Yu Jeong-ham’s gaze drifted toward the window, then toward the basement.

Yet what if… what if the true catalyst for this One-Pin alert—the fury driving him to personally stomp and grind every joint of a suspect who had already surrendered all his intelligence—was Geum Seoul? That was Yu Jeong-ham’s gut feeling.

“…Choi Da-ol. When you escorted Geum Seoul over, did you catch any pheromone scent off him?”

“Um, no? Nothing much came off him. Well, as long as he keeps up with his shots, there won’t be any, right?”

“Hmm…”

Once, Gwichang had told him to “describe the smell of Geum Seoul’s pheromones.” Since then, whenever the man came close, Yu Jeong-ham had flared his nostrils a little wider and sniffed diligently, but beyond an instinctive “omega feeling” he could never put into words, he had never once caught a distinct scent.

Where an ordinary omega in a wretched or stressful situation would burst out pheromones beyond all control, even earlier—when Im Gyun-il had nearly caught him with the broken bottle—Geum Seoul had let out no scent whatsoever.

No matter how recessive he might be… was he not an omega at all? And yet he had clearly shed tears, and they had even tested what they converted into—gemstones. Could he simply have been getting his shots? From a backwater that destitute?

‘He told me he had to come back for Geum Seoul.’

Why had Lee Hee-joong said such a thing to Im Gyun-il? What had Lee Hee-joong handed over to Geum Seoul at dawn that day? Yet to assume Geum Seoul held the ultimate key seemed far-fetched.

‘Would a streetwise fox like Lee Hee-joong really hand a lethal ledger to someone he’d known for five minutes?’

Hardly likely. Lee Hee-joong was every bit as calculating as Gwak Chun-young. In any event, Lee Hee-joong had long since bolted, and the rat who helped him was in irons. Having launched a dragnet for the fence near the gambling den who reportedly bought him, they would likely collar him shortly. All they could do was pray the knot unraveled. Shaking the dizzying fog from his mind, Yu Jeong-ham massaged his neck.