Chapter 2

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Years prior, on the day their paths first crossed, Lee Jaeha had left home completely unprepared for the violent twist of fate awaiting him.

He was on his way to a social gathering he had absolutely no desire to attend. However, because it had been arranged at the behest of Kim Ranhee, his ambitious stepmother and the mother of his younger half-brother, Jaeho, he could not simply refuse to go.

Kim Ranhee pursued Jaeha with a persistence that bordered on obsession. She alternated between blatant attacks and exhausting schemes so convoluted that they resembled labyrinths. Yet her ambitions always struck the same immovable ceiling, shackled by the enduring legacy of Jaeha’s late grandfather, Lee Wonwoong.

As the spiritual pillar of the Yooshin Group, the former chairman had cast a shadow so vast that even Jaeha’s father, Lee Ik-hyeong, did not dare fully indulge his new wife’s desire to displace the rightful heir.

Knowing she could not strike at him directly, Ranhee resorted to attrition.

She relentlessly forced Jaeha into decadent, hollow soirées, surrounding him with minor sycophants and drug-addled socialites in a transparent attempt to drag his spotless reputation through the mud. Nevertheless, Jaeha never avoided her traps. It was not out of defiance or spite. He was simply too consumed by a chronic, lifelong ennui to care.

Attending these garish gatherings was marginally less exhausting than enduring Ranhee’s endless nagging.

“There’s a massive feast laid out, yet all you’re doing is drinking,” an unremarkable Alpha slurred as he leaned entirely too close. “If you’re bored, at least chew on some of the weed.”

“I don’t have a hobby like that,” Jaeha replied coldly, his spine stiffening as though a steel rod had been driven through it to keep the man at a distance.

The suffocating boredom was so complete that the financial statements of a person’s parent company often surfaced in Jaeha’s mind before he even registered their face. If he did not recognize someone, their net worth was rarely significant enough to warrant a reply.

Then his wandering gaze caught on something.

Amid the sea of intoxicated flatterers and cheap indulgences, two figures stood entirely apart, neither of them blending into the vulgar room.

One was Jaeha himself.

The other was an Alpha whose aura was so intensely isolating that the crowd seemed to divide around him without conscious thought.

The sycophant hovering beside Jaeha followed his gaze and offered an unsolicited identification.

“That’s Director Jang from Janghan Construction,” he said, his voice dripping with mockery.

Within elite society, Janghan Construction was widely regarded as little more than a corporate gang.

The company had built its third-generation empire from the grimy back alleys of Jongno, surviving by ruthlessly gutting rival firms and forcing its way into metropolitan apartment developments. To a director of the Yooshin Group, a conglomerate ranked among the country’s top ten by the Bank of Korea, Janghan was merely another pack of thugs dressed in expensive suits.

And yet, Jaeha could not tear his eyes away.

Their gazes tangled across the crowded, smoke-filled room.

A scorching heat ignited in the pit of Jaeha’s stomach, sudden, violent, and completely unbidden.

Panic seized him.

Someone called his name, but Jaeha turned and fled the venue like a man engulfed in flames. He summoned the chauffeured car he rarely used, threw himself into the back seat, and tried to convince himself that the dizzying heat was nothing more than the alcohol.

It was not.

That night, a sudden and brutal rut crashed over him.

That was the first meeting between Lee Jaeha and Jang Taegeon.

***

Did I even sleep?

Jaeha slowly sat up, his body heavy and aching as he stared into the quiet bedroom. Dim blue dawn filtered through the curtains, making the room feel like the crushing floor of the deep sea. He wanted to collapse back onto the mattress, but resting on a weekday was out of the question. Stretching his stiff neck, he reached for the intercom on his bedside console.

His personal secretary, who lived in the mansion’s staff wing to handle private matters outside Yooshin Group’s corporate office, answered immediately.

—“Yes, Director.”

“If Instructor Park is available, tell him I’d like to see him in the basement ring immediately.”

—“Right away, sir.”

Jaeha generally controlled his rut cycles with heavy medication. During the rare months when his doctor warned him against developing pharmaceutical tolerance, he hired an Omega for clinical relief.

Bringing a partner back to the main mansion, however, was out of the question. Kim Ranhee would undoubtedly exploit any morning-after discovery to force him into a scandalous marriage, devaluing his position and destabilizing the corporate line of succession.

As a dominant Alpha and the eldest son, inheriting the Yooshin Group was not a desperate obsession. It was a quiet, undeniable birthright. Reaching the top of the pyramid would also be the ultimate blow against the mistress and half-brother who had slipped into the mansion while his biological mother lay dying.

He did not hate Ranhee enough to wish for her death, but neither was he kind enough to pass up an opportunity to crush her.

Between the political risks and his own profound incapacity for romance, Jaeha kept his intimate life sterile.

Since his mother’s bones had returned to the earth, the very concepts of warmth and affection had been scrubbed from his psyche. Yet the previous night, his rut had struck without a single warning. The mere sight of Jang Taegeon had triggered a violent and entirely involuntary biological collapse.

After fleeing the party, Jaeha had dry-swallowed a premium suppressant formulated to be twice as potent as standard medication, then attempted to handle the agonizing urges himself in the dark.

The desperate friction had done nothing to calm his body.

The veins in his forehead had throbbed for hours before the suppressant finally blunted the worst of the fever at around four in the morning. As a result, he had awakened feeling bruised from the inside out.

“What brings you down here for such a brutal session this early, Executive Director?” Instructor Park grumbled, rubbing his trembling legs as Jaeha finally climbed out of the basement sparring ring.

“Tell me about it,” Jaeha murmured.

He lightly tapped the instructor’s shoulder with his remaining laced glove, and a faint, unusually genuine smirk tugged at the corner of his mouth.

Having known Jaeha for years, Instructor Park blinked in confusion at his apparent good mood.

“You must have received some good news.”

Good news? There was no such thing.

And yet, despite the agonizing night and the reckless dose of suppressants, Jaeha did not feel terrible. The heat still lingering in his veins felt inexplicably electrifying.

As someone intimately familiar with his own rigid, inflexible nature, Jaeha could not make sense of his reaction.

Instructor Park gave him a sidelong glance. “This is highly unusual. You’ve always despised exercising in the morning.”

“I still hate it,” Jaeha replied flatly.

There was nothing more to say.

He loathed morning workouts, detested the suffocating smell of sweat, and felt an absolute aversion toward any Alpha whose pheromones were so violent and invasive.

Yet, for reasons he could not explain, the name Jang Taegeon remained branded into his mind.

***