Chapter 57

<珠惑失眞>

‘Deluded by jewels, forfeiting truth.’

Such was the creed mounted inside the massive framed plaque hung upon the solid wood wall behind the desk in the CEO’s office of Iljang Trading. Gwak Chun-young, a self-proclaimed romanticist, loved jewels. It was an inclination that mirrored the person he loathed most in this world.

His alpha father, who had hoarded gems since he was very young, hid pretty stones deep in the wardrobe and polished them day after day, even as their household sank into bottomless ruin. Every weekend, that father would abandon his only son and husband to run off to see a gem omega. Born a beta between two second-gender parents, Gwak Chun-young could not understand such a father in the slightest.

Seven days a week, long before daybreak. Waking at three in the morning to peddle fish on the outskirts of Seoul, his other dad must have felt his insides rotting to pieces. Yet, inherently gentle by nature, the man never showed a hint of grievance, merely brushing back Chun-young’s hair with a tender stroke.

‘It’s just because your father has too much love in him.’

His dad’s face had looked poised between tears and a smile. That cramped single room, thick with the stale, pungent stench of boiled fish, was the seventh place they had been driven to after his father sold off home after home to finance trips to gem auctions.

Eventually, his father stopped coming home altogether. Chun-young seemed to dimly recall him claiming that the suffocating room stifled him, that looking at a foolish husband and a son born a beta filled him with an unbearable guilt. Even at that young age, however, Chun-young knew those words were nothing but excuses.

‘Here. A birthday present for my son.’

When he was around thirteen, his remaining dad placed Chun-young’s first gemstone into his palm with swollen, chapped hands. He should have said he wanted nothing to do with any jewel that had left his dad so lonely, yet the orange stone nestled against his skin was so exquisite that Chun-young burst into tears the instant he received it. It grieved him that something so beautiful could be impossible not to love, and infuriated him that, in the end, he had inherited the taste of the person he hated most.

‘I’m glad you take after your father, Chun-young.’

His dad stroked his hair as he murmured those words, but Chun-young gripped that rough, fish-scented hand and swore to himself. No matter what happened, he would never live like his father. He would never let something pretty steal his very heart and drag him into squalor.

From that day onward, even after becoming the president of a trading firm, Gwak Chun-young poured all his strength into holding that perilous boundary. Whenever his eyes threatened to go blind to anything other than money, whenever instinct and aesthetic taste tried to overpower reason, he conjured the memory of that dingy, stale single room and held fast with bitter tenacity.

No matter how deeply he adored glittering, breathtaking jewels, he always calculated immediate gain first and refused to accept a loss. Being a beta—immune to the mind-clouding seduction of second-gender pheromones—was an outright blessing. Once he closed his fist around something, he hated letting go, yet he could concede a lesser prize when a greater instrument of power dangled within reach. He despised poverty, and the thought of a life stripped of refined taste turned his stomach. Thus, Gwak Chun-young remained thoroughly satisfied with the careful balance he had carved out for himself.

Only as he neared thirty, once his assets had begun accumulating in earnest, did he start collecting according to his own tastes. Opening the door to his private exhibition hall revealed rows of high-value gems, classical music drifting through the air, and all ten of his fingers weighted with jewel-encrusted rings. Around that same period, he began receiving injections that allowed him to perceive the scent of second-gender pheromones. Every bit of it was in service of pure, uncompromising aestheticism.

To be more honest, though a grand ambition now lay right before his eyes, his initial foray into arms trafficking had also been born of this aesthetic craving. Weapons and gemstones—what a fantastic combination. Even if others dismissed it as gaudy, standing in an exhibition hall plastered in dazzling gold and gems, its walls lined with firearms standing in crisp rows, was enough to make him feel full even when starving.

“This lock deadbolts permanently if you break the door lock,” a subordinate reported. “We have to tear the whole door off.”

Gwak Chun-young clicked his tongue in irritation. “Ah, what the hell did he do to his own place? Get on with it.”

Whirrr—.

Lost in his memories, Chun-young regained focus at the drone of the spinning equipment. A rhythmic reverberation. Metal shrieked in protest, vomiting showers of sparks. Along with a grating screech, violent vibrations shuddered straight into the floorboards. Beside him, a subordinate tapping away on a notebook-sized laptop tilted his head in confusion.

“The signal jamming isn’t taking either,” the tech muttered. “I’ll try again once the door is breached.”

“What is this, a bank vault? Just who the fuck is this guy?”

Irritation gradually flared within him. Giving Lee Hee-joong a clean death without torture earlier just because the bastard had spouted some romantic nonsense was a minor blunder born of getting too drunk on sentimentality; breaking into Gye Do-hyeop’s residence now was meant to make up for that mistake. Yet breaching the entrance was proving troublesome from the start. Gwak Chun-young rubbed the ring on his finger and clicked his tongue.

Screeech—!

Of course, breaching the place only required more brute labor. It was neither an impenetrable bunker nor a bank vault; with enough physical force, nothing here was truly impossible to break through. Watching his men chew into the steel door with abrasive, grinding crunches, Chun-young clicked his tongue, popped open a canned coffee, and swallowed a mouthful or two. Off to one side, Bunhong sprawled in a drug-induced stupor, already stripped of any further usefulness and reduced to shallow, labored breathing.

The only reason he had bothered coming in person when he could have simply dispatched his men was to provoke Gye Do-hyeop—repaying him in kind after the man had turned an entire neighborhood upside down while impersonating Gwak in search of the ledger.

“The alert was triggered, right?” Chun-young asked.

His subordinate nodded crisply. “Yes. We have about eight minutes before the nearest operative can deploy.”

“We breach in one minute.”

“Understood,” the man replied.

Sip, sip. Sucking down his canned coffee, Gwak Chun-young fixed his gaze upon the gap in the doorway as it warped and bent apart.

They called him a ghostly bastard, and indeed, almost nothing was known about him outside of his past entanglement with Gye Gyeong-mu. This entire situation was baffling in itself. Why hadn’t he slaughtered Geum Seoul and Park Gil-pyeong back in that neighborhood instead of hauling them away? Was Park Gil-pyeong in this apartment too? If so, why had he stepped out earlier with only Geum Seoul? Chun-young had far too many questions.

Skrrr—.

Spinning so fast that it blurred into an elongated oval, the rotary saw blade had been hurling geysers of sparks for quite some time. Hasn’t a minute passed already? Just as Gwak Chun-young crushed the empty can in his hand to snap a reprimand, one side of the door tore loose with a sharp, wrenching crack.

Screeech—slam!

“Door breached. Commencing signal jamming,” a henchman barked.

Stepping forward, Chun-young commanded, “Step aside.”

When the metal door was completely mangled and pried away at last, he ordered everyone back a pace and strode inside first.

“…What the hell?”

Yet there was no need to advance deeper in search of a hiding place. The young man they were looking for stood right in the center of the living room. Chun-young narrowed his eyes slightly. Stiff and staring blankly into the distance, the youth slowly turned his head.

“…Did you come… to take me?” Geum Seoul asked in a trembling whisper.

Amber eyes tinged with gold beneath the overhead lights. Muted brown hair. Moist rims around his eyes from fearful tears, framing a small, neatly defined nose. Pale cheeks and crimson lips. A fair, exposed neckline. And the faint yet unmistakable alpha pheromones coating him from head to toe.

Chun-young crossed his arms over his chest. “…Well, doesn’t the picture speak for itself?”

The moment he caught sight of the youth’s upturned face, fists trembling as they clenched tight, Gwak Chun-young instantly saw through the inner motives of Gye Do-hyeop, who was not even present.

“I’ll go. Just… please don’t hit me.”

Inside Chun-young’s white-hot, sizzling brain, the reality that he had just illegally raided the private home of none other than the NSSA Deputy Director dissolved into foam like the crest of a breaking wave. One realization alone remained painfully vivid: the boy standing before him possessed the very face he had spent years scouring the world to find. That discovery seized control of his limbs. A prickling thrill raced through all five senses, snapping every thread of logic and calculation he had carried across the threshold.

Ah. So this is why Gye Do-hyeop brought him back and kept him at home?

Lee Ho-hoon stepped forward with a harsh warning. “Scream and you get hurt. Keep quiet.”

Following Lee Ho-hoon’s harsh words to Geum Seoul, a black cloth was yanked down over the light brown hair. With his face completely concealed, the youth’s remaining form looked so much like a decapitated corpse that Chun-young broke into a delayed chuckle.

Rustle.

“I—I can walk on my own,” a muffled voice whimpered through the cloth.

Though the trembling voice pleaded through the fabric, Lee Ho-hoon paid no heed whatsoever, hoisting the youth upside down and slinging him over his shoulder.

With the target yielding so meekly without resistance, the rest of the operation proceeded swiftly. The thugs who had battered down the door swept through the interior to check for anyone else inside.

Gwak Chun-young gestured toward the hallway. “There won’t be much inside. Wrap it up and clear out in one minute.”

“Yes, sir.”

There was no way Gye Do-hyeop would have kept anything else in this house besides this boy. Just looking at Geum Seoul’s appearance made him certain of it. Sending Lee Ho-hoon ahead with Seoul draped over his shoulder, Gwak Chun-young walked out. Dangling limply without offering the slightest struggle, the youth’s feet were clad in white socks, his toes curled tightly in dread. Chun-young rolled his tongue slowly inside his mouth.

He had never truly expected to recover the ledger from this apartment. Seeing that Gye Do-hyeop had brought the boy into his private sanctuary, Chun-young had simply concluded that the kid mattered—whatever his precise purpose—and planned to kidnap him, threaten him, and use him either to barter for the ledger or grind down Do-hyeop’s resolve. If the ledger had already fallen into Do-hyeop’s hands, the man would eventually have to raid Chun-young’s own estate to crack the lock anyway. Striking first was therefore also a preemptive declaration of war.

Yet now that he had actually laid eyes on Geum Seoul, Chun-young found himself itching to scour away every trace of the pheromone layered over him and claim the boy as a personal trophy. It had nothing to do with cheap affection or love. This was a question of beauty—something, in his mind, far above such base emotions. A face he wanted to possess even if he had to carve away the limbs attached to it. A living work he wanted to put on display. The collector’s impulse inside him boiled like molten stone.

Yes. This was precisely what his father had meant when he said jewels would devour a man’s reason stride by stride. ‘Deluded by gems, forfeiting truth.’ The crossroads that had inevitably arrived. Gwak Chun-young exulted with all his might, while simultaneously burning with bitter fury.

“Watch his feet,” Chun-young instructed curtly.

When Gwak Chun-young stepped into the passenger seat without haste, a subordinate hurried over to the open car door and leaned in.

“For starters, there was nothing in the bedroom drawers except extra-large condoms.”

“…What?” Chun-young muttered, his brow furrowing.

Seeing his boss’s expression twist into a bizarre scowl, the subordinate hastily offered an explanation.

“We found gems and syringes on the table. They look like they belong to Geum Seoul.”

Chun-young waved a dismissive hand. “Ah. That’s plenty.”

Just as he thought. Glancing back at Geum Seoul, who sat stiffly under the black hood, Gwak Chun-young offered another crooked smirk. It was the exact exhilarating thrill he had felt upon clutching his very first gemstone. The thirty-nine-year-old Chun-young was thrown straight back to age thirteen.