Chapter 84

The number of times he had considered snapping the necks of every bastard in front of him and heading back to Seoul was thirty-nine, and the times he had resolved to empty his magazine into the room was forty-six. Gye Do-hyeop had endured countlessly. He did so because he knew the second he gave in, the day he could return to see Geum Seoul would be pushed back by another day. If acting on those impulses could have hastened his return, he would have blown the whole place to hell and returned within twenty-four hours of leaving.

Leaving someone behind at home while he went into the field was far more fucked up than he had ever imagined. He didn’t technically have a home, so the phrase had always sounded like an idiom other people used. Yet thinking of Geum Seoul himself as the place he returned to was a strange, alien sensation, and the boy’s absence had stirred emotions Do-hyeop had never known how to name. He swallowed hundreds of curses a day, and before sleep he jerked off while reconstructing the scent of Geum Seoul’s skin from memory.

On the fifth day, when he woke up to a wet dream sparked by nothing more than a fleeting glimpse of Geum Seoul in his sleep, he had laughed long and incredulously. It was a first in his twenty-nine years as a dominant alpha. All this time, he thought his finger had merely been pinched by the edge of an open clamshell, only to realize he had been swallowed whole by a whale the size of a house.

Gye Do-hyeop’s gaze was obsessive enough to count every single strand of Geum Seoul’s hair. While suffering those searing headaches across the border that felt as though his brain were being sheared apart, he had even thought he should have severed one of Geum Seoul’s fingers to keep in a small glass vial—and there wasn’t a shred of jest in that thought. To Gye Do-hyeop, who lived shackled to chronic neurosis, Geum Seoul’s absence was exceptionally tormenting.

The thing he had been starving for all month was finally right in front of him. The only reason he didn’t cross those six or seven paces, seize Geum Seoul by the nape, and drag him away on the spot was the cluster of useless shits filling the monitoring room, gawking at the feed as though they had bought tickets to a movie.

It didn’t take a genius to imagine the rumors that had circulated through headquarters while he had planted the boy here and vacated his post. If he ordered them to eat dirt, they would crunch and swallow it in front of him, putting on a show of blind obedience, but seeing a special hire casually installed in his absence was another story altogether. They had undoubtedly sized him up with judgmental calipers, wondering what kind of bastard he was to have caught Deputy Director Gye’s eye out of nowhere. And in trying to weigh this and that with their meager wits, they wouldn’t have been able to separate that connection from his face. It was tiresomely one-dimensional.

Gye Do-hyeop knew in his bones that even if you took every mediocre bastard parked on their asses snorting foul sneers in this room and lumped them together, they wouldn’t measure up to the dirt beneath the toenails of Geum Seoul’s talent and worth. The reason he was scraping the dregs of his bone-dry patience wasn’t on account of those useless shits, but because of Geum Seoul, who had endured those gazes all throughout his absence.

Geum Seoul was precious. Having discovered him with his own two hands, Gye Do-hyeop knew that better than anyone on this entire peninsula. He would never tolerate anyone treating him carelessly. Naturally, he could drag every last one of them out and beat them until their foreheads struck the tips of Geum Seoul’s shoes. That would certainly be the easiest route, but Geum Seoul was someone more than capable of standing above others on his own merits. This single span of space was the absolute limit of Gye Do-hyeop’s patience.

While a dark, possessive urge crawled up inside Gye Do-hyeop, the center screen continued displaying the scene on the ground. Arriving at the spot Geum Seoul had indicated, the field operatives cleared away boxes and piles of trash stacked against the wall, thoroughly examining the surface for seams before pressing a palm-sized scanner against the wall and sweeping it across. It took roughly twenty seconds to locate the concealed gap and hinges.

Kzzzzt.

“There’s a breach gap. Looks like we can pry it open without shaped charges. Breaching immediately.”

“Copy.”

Along with the brief report, a beep sounded from the edge of the device. At once, what appeared to be solid wall pulled open like a door.

Screeech.

“Go.”

Pushing through a haze of dust and smoke, the operatives moved inside, raising their firearms in coordination with hand signals. A bellowed warning echoed over the comms: ‘National Special Security Directorate! Disarm and surrender immediately!’

Clack.

“Clear. No hostiles. Investigating evidence.”

There were, however, clear traces of recent human habitation. Atop a battered table in the center of the space lay a clutter of maps, laptops, two-way radios, and unidentified mechanical components, while sheets of newspaper had been crudely plastered across one wall. Angled across them in crimson spray paint was a slogan.

KILL!

IF REBELLION IS A SIN, THEN WE ARE THE GODS OF SIN

Krrk.

“Confirmed. This is a Node stronghold.”

“Headquarters to team. Retrieve all available data and plant wiretaps. Watch out for booby traps.”

Having said that, Choi Da-ol gave Geum Seoul a thumbs-up.

“Seoul-ssi pulled off something huge on his very first day. Great job. I’ll take it from here.”

Step.

Gye Do-hyeop took a step forward. Coming to a halt directly behind Geum Seoul, who was leaning forward and completely engrossed, he stared down at the rounded back of the boy’s head and crown. Had he kept his pheromones properly under control? The scent was faint. Gye Do-hyeop opened his palm.

Grip.

“Gasp!”

Geum Seoul jolted upright and whipped around. Someone had clamped a heavy hand around the nape of his neck.

“Dep… Deputy Director?”

Geum Seoul clamped a hand over his mouth, eyes widening round.

At the rather loud cry, nearby staff, including Choi Da-ol, turned around in surprise, but only for a fleeting second. Greeting a returning superior ought to have been standard etiquette, but Deputy Director Gye was an exception. Acknowledging him would only invite foul-tempered abuse about why they were acting buddy-buddy and kissing his ass.

Only the sole person who could acknowledge him without catching a mouthful of abuse scrambled to his feet.

“You said you’d arrive tonight, so how are you already…”

Geum Seoul clenched both hands into tight fists and swallowed hard, gulping repeatedly. At the sight of him looking ready to burst into tears at any moment, Gye Do-hyeop finally offered a faint smirk, releasing the boy’s nape to cup his jaw instead.

“Why. Did I come back too soon?”

“……”

For a moment, Geum Seoul couldn’t say a single word.

He had tossed and turned all night. No matter how much he tried to clear his mind, he hadn’t had the slightest clue where or how to begin. He had resolved to tell him how glad he was to see him first thing when they met again, yet even those words melted away into nothing. He simply wondered if, perhaps, this was all a dream.

The rim beneath his eyes stung hot. He knew he shouldn’t make his joy too obvious with other people around. Yet even knowing that, seeing the man before his eyes for the first time in nearly a month caused an unidentifiable lump to surge up, threatening to choke his throat.

“Um…”

Gazing down at that near-tearful face, Gye Do-hyeop gave Geum Seoul’s hair a gentle pat. His fingers, sliding downward, brushed the boy’s earlobe as if by accident.

“Ah. So out of all the bastards sprawled around here, this newborn babe is the only one earning his paycheck?”

The room turned dead silent at those words. The fact that Deputy Director Gye was pawing and stroking the special hire’s face while using a term like ‘newborn babe’ was shocking enough, but far more critical was the fact that he was revving up to unleash hell. Getting on Gye Do-hyeop’s bad side right now was the worst possible scenario in every respect. Muffled apologies broke out as chairs scraped back one after another; people bolted upright and scattered like cockroaches caught in a room when the light suddenly flicked on. Keeping their heads bowed low, they scurried away as if stepping on a landmine that would detonate the moment they made eye contact.

In an instant, only the two of them and Choi Da-ol remained in the monitoring room. Since even Yu Jeong-ham had seized the chance to slip away, Choi Da-ol—the sole operative on duty—sat stranded alone, folding his broad shoulders as tightly as he could in a desperate bid to erase his own presence.

“Follow me.”

Only when Gye Do-hyeop’s order finally registered did Geum Seoul scurry after his long, wide strides without hesitation. The swelling tears felt ready to rupture his entire body, prickling all over from the crown of his head down through his cheeks, the backs of his hands, his waist, and his shins. Swallowing several times, Seoul strove to keep his eyes fixed straight ahead as he stepped out through the open door.

Meanwhile, the team members, having had the good sense to scatter and clear the path to the deputy director’s office, were buzzing with whispers. Deputy Director Gye was never one to lay a hand on another person’s body unless he was beating them to a pulp, so the speculation that his soul had been swapped while serving his disciplinary suspension drew widespread agreement.

Only after whispering among themselves for quite some time did the groans erupt about how, now that Deputy Director Gye was back, they’d be buried in work for a good long while. Yet considering they’d just been reamed out for failing to earn their paychecks, everyone looked quite animated, their expressions laced with clear relief. Leaving aside how revolting it had been to watch Noh Pil-gyu’s line or the Node throwing their weight around, this was fundamentally the innate presence and gravitas Gye Do-hyeop carried.

That incident had been the catalyst for the disciplinary action. Noh Pil-gyu had thrown a furious tantrum, threatening immediate penalties if they failed to report in, yet when the dust settled, Gye Do-hyeop was the only one actually punished. Given his temperament, no one imagined he had nobly volunteered to shoulder the blame. Even so, Yu Jeong-ham and Choi Da-ol, who knew him well, and even Noh Pil-gyu himself had taken it for granted that Do-hyeop would absorb the consequences alone, suspension or otherwise. It had nothing to do with skin-crawling sentimentality—no secret affection for his staff, no martyrdom hiding beneath all that hell-raising. Gye Do-hyeop simply understood, with absolute clarity, the weight and reality of the deputy director’s seat he occupied.

Yu Jeong-ham mused as he herded the team members in the hallway back toward the office. Gwak Chun-young had struck by latching onto Gye Do-hyeop’s past and a hostage, brandishing Noh Pil-gyu as his weapon. Yet the reason he had met with such an unprecedented turn of events was that he had overlooked a few of the most critical factors.

The biggest of those was Gye Do-hyeop’s unhinged lunacy, blowing a civilian house sky-high without giving a damn about the fallout. The second was the underlying truth of real authority. Gwak Chun-young had assumed that simply because Noh Pil-gyu sat higher in rank than Gye Do-hyeop, he held a rock-solid backer capable of crushing him. That had been an utter misjudgment. On the third floor of the bureau, the true master of the Special Security Department was not Noh Pil-gyu. Relief bled into the long breath Yu Jeong-ham let out.

Beep.

● SYSTEM ACCESS

ID: NSSD-DIR-2

ACCESS GRANTED

The door to the deputy director’s office, outside which he had paced now and then during Gye Do-hyeop’s absence, finally slid open. Geum Seoul pressed his lips tightly together, then cautiously stepped inside. Having worked hard to swallow down his tears while walking through the corridor, he was at least capable of speaking now.

“Deputy Director. I…”