Chapter 41

“Didn’t say much?”

Instead of answering, Ham Su-ah showed him the screen displaying the messages she had received from Mugyeol. Her face looked thoroughly exhausted.

— Ham Su-ah: Mugyeol-ah, I know you’re mad at me right now so it’s a bit awkward to reach out, but…    [10:02 PM]

— Ham Su-ah: Did you hear the rumors going around? They’re insane. They’re saying you proposed to Yi-seon on graduation day? On your knees? The talk even reached me. The kids are going crazy, are you okay?    [10:02 PM]

— Ham Su-ah: Aren’t you going to do damage control? Want me to meet the underclassmen and talk to them? Just say the word and this noona will smooth it over for you.    [10:03 PM]

— Ryu-obsessed freak: It’s fine. Just come to the wedding dinner later and I’ll buy you a meal.    [11:21 PM]

— Ryu-obsessed freak: By the way, Ryu Yi-seon said what he did with you wasn’t even a kiss. Said no tongues were involved.    [11:21 PM]

— Ham Su-ah: Oh, right haha    [11:23 PM]

— Ham Su-ah: I’m so relieved you seem fine hahaha    [11:24 PM]

A wedding dinner? What is a wedding dinner?

He wasn’t entirely sure what it meant, but hearing it come from Yeon Mugyeol made the word feel inexplicably offensive…!

With the back of his neck burning crimson, Yi-seon sank into mortification. Mugyeol struck him as truly extraordinary all over again. It also gave him a glimpse of just how blind and reckless a person could become when consumed by spite. Well, that was why he had thrown such a fit demanding marriage in the first place.

“Anyway, Mugyeol seems fine, and as for you… well, it’s not like you were the one throwing a fit, so you seem okay too.”

“…Yeah. Are you doing all right, noona? People must be bringing you up while talking about me and Mugyeol. Since Mugyeol went around shouting that he liked you.”

“Why wouldn’t I be fine? I’m completely irrelevant here anyway. If you two actually got married, my only worry would be how much of a miserable time you’d have, Yi-seon.”

“…”

“Then again, from the sound of it, it doesn’t seem like you’re actually getting married… It looks like Yeon Mugyeol was just pitching a fit on his own, which puts my mind at ease. I’m taking off now.”

Seeing Ham Su-ah’s relieved expression, he couldn’t bring himself to tell her that their families were actually discussing marriage…

I’ll tell her later once it’s finalized. Dumping too much information on her at once would be too hard for her to swallow.

Having talked her fill, Ham Su-ah rose from the bench. When he asked who she was meeting this late at night, she smiled and said her boyfriend was waiting for her.

“You got another one already?”

“Of course. There are way too many men in the world.”

“Fair enough.”

“See you later, then.”

Waving a hand, Ham Su-ah disappeared. Left behind on the bench, Yi-seon gazed up at the dry, bare branches before gently closing his eyes. The breeze rustling past his ears felt cool and crisp. It was nice that it cooled his cheeks, which heated up on their own the second he thought of Yeon Mugyeol.

‘There are way too many men in the world.’

Ham Su-ah’s voice lingered softly in his ears. Su-ah was right. The world was full of men, full of alphas, full of people. The problem was that there was only one Yeon Mugyeol. Because there was no one else so bizarre, yet so deeply endeared to him.

Because in the entire world, Yeon Mugyeol was the only person he loved that much.

As if Mugyeol’s marriage proposal hadn’t been purely impulsive, his parents had approached Yi-seon the night before, asking for his thoughts in all seriousness and urging him to lean toward marriage if at all possible.

“We asked Chairman Yeon to help resolve the foundation’s debt. He promised he would do so if our families were bound by marriage.”

The bond between the two households traced back to their grandfathers’ generation.

In their youth, the brilliant doctor friend who had taught Chairman Yeon—then illiterate—how to read and write was none other than Yi-seon’s maternal grandfather, Ryu Sanho.

Ryu Sanho had been the benefactor who risked his own life to save Chairman Yeon when he was stabbed in a syndicate brawl. He had also been the dear friend who handed him the funds to step out of the underworld and establish a construction firm, providing him with a launchpad into legitimate society.

The empire of construction and finance Chairman Yeon commanded today would never have been built without a friend like Ryu Sanho.

Because it was such a precious, irreplaceable connection, Chairman Yeon had been furious when the pheromone accident occurred, and it was likely why he welcomed the talk of marriage with open arms the moment it arose.

The mid-to-large hospital where Yi-seon’s father—a son-in-law married into the Ryu family—served as director was struggling with declining profitability. A new university hospital had recently opened nearby, leaving them reeling. The festering strain of aggressively leasing state-of-the-art medical equipment to stay competitive was an added burden.

It was amid all this that the accident with Mugyeol occurred, handing them a golden opportunity to overcome their institutional debts under the pretext of this incident. The condition of Chairman Yeon’s cash injection must have been an immensely tempting prize for his parents.

According to his mother, Chairman Yeon had coveted the Ryu bloodline since their parents’ generation, eager to forge a matrimonial bond between the families.

However, because everyone in Yi-seon’s family was a Beta, it had been impossible. Now that the topic of marriage between Yi-seon and Mugyeol was on the table, Chairman Yeon was reportedly overjoyed.

“They called each other friends, but Chairman Yeon practically revered my father. Honestly speaking, a family that only ever threw punches should be grateful to mix their blood with a line of scholars.”

“I know, right? In the past, how could we have ever gotten entangled with a crude family that only knows brute force? Both you and I, all of us are smart people who use our brains.”

Overhearing his parents whispering those words in the living room one day had made Yi-seon’s chest ache. Frankly, hearing his parents speak of Chairman Yeon in such a manner made them look ugly to him for the very first time.

Yi-seon had never harbored negative thoughts about his parents until now. He had only ever felt grateful to people who had no duty to raise him nor any obligation to support him, yet funded him so that he could grow properly into adulthood. Even when he lived in Jeju, they had provided financial support without stint.

They would visit Jeju from time to time to show their care, and during his second year of high school, they took him back in and supported him directly. They permitted him to call them Mom and Dad, and even told him they loved him. Had he been sent to an orphanage, he would never have experienced such affection and grace.

How many tragic fates awaited abandoned children?

Yet this time, his disappointment ran deep. Chairman Yeon treated them with genuine goodwill, yet behind his back, they looked down on him and spoke of him that way…

For the first time, he resented his parents.

Regardless, family circumstances like cash infusions and stabilizing hospital funds were not what mattered to him. Those were merely secondary conditions. While he was eternally grateful to the parents who had taken him in, he had no desire to sacrifice his own body to marry someone he despised.

The crucial point was that this condition came with the premise of marrying the person he loved.

The very boy he had dreamed of and longed for.

Sitting in the exact same spot, the tip of Yi-seon’s nose grew icy cold. Fiddling with his frozen earlobes, Yi-seon continued to think. Honestly, he felt greedy. It wasn’t that he coveted the Yeon family’s wealth, nor was he thinking about repaying his parents’ kindness.

He simply, purely wanted to have the person named Yeon Mugyeol.

It felt as though every opportunity had been handed to him. A raging current was steering him straight toward Yeon Mugyeol’s side, completely fair and square.

So…

“Would I be an idiot not to grab this?”

Yi-seon bit down on his cold lip.

Lingering in the cold had cleared his head to a calm, orderly state.

He liked Yeon Mugyeol, and Yeon Mugyeol’s family had proposed marriage. Yeon Mugyeol had rolled right into his lap for free.

Let’s think about this objectively.

Could there ever be another person like Yeon Mugyeol in the world?

Would someone else ever appear who could shake his heart like this, throw him into such turmoil, and refuse to leave his mind all day long?

Yeon Mugyeol seemed playful yet warm; threw fits like a madman yet behaved more gently than anyone else in the world; lost his temper in strange ways from time to time, but ultimately lavished affection and treated him like something precious. How could he not love him?

He recalled Yeon Mugyeol’s smile as he pulled him into an embrace and said he had missed him every time Yi-seon tried to stop liking him; Yeon Mugyeol’s thoughtfulness as he carried him on his back while swimming across the pool; Yeon Mugyeol’s devotion as he came running at midnight in the dead of winter carrying a birthday cake.

Yi-seon couldn’t even begin to imagine it. Harboring someone other than Yeon Mugyeol in his heart was something he could not picture, no matter how hard he tried.

If he let this opportunity slip away, he would have no choice but to stand by as a ‘friend’ and congratulate Yeon Mugyeol when he married some other Omega.

The moment his thoughts reached that point, his mind sorted itself out rapidly.

Fine. Let’s do it. Let’s make this happen.

Mugyeol wouldn’t have known. He probably never dreamed in a million years that a guy like Ryu Yi-seon would actually accept the proposal. Once he came to his senses, he might try to run for it, but by then it would already be too late.

Yi-seon blamed Mugyeol in his heart. Right, who told you to recklessly bring up such nonsense in the first place? It’s all your fault.

Having made up his mind, Yi-seon stood up abruptly.

Let’s get married.

I’m going to marry him.

Yi-seon finished steeling himself to marry Yeon Mugyeol.

It was a remarkably simple decision. Mutual understanding, love, whatever—what did any of that matter? Yeon Mugyeol was willing to marry based purely on circumstances and conditions anyway. All Yi-seon had to do was pretend ignorance and wrap his arms around the stroke of good fortune that had rolled right into his lap.

Having firmly resolved to marry, Yi-seon clenched his fists tightly.

Now, Yeon Mugyeol is… legally mine.

❖ ❖ ❖