Chapter 26

“Give me the full breakdown of how the purge at Myeongwon Construction proceeded,” Jaeha ordered as he strode into Yooshin Group’s corporate headquarters.

Manager Lim immediately fell into step beside him and handed over a sleek tablet. “I just received the finalized materials from the Strategic Planning Office. I also prepared a formal press release for the mainstream media, but Strategy believes it would be far more destructive to leak the financial ledgers anonymously online first and allow public outrage to reach its peak.”

“Excellent. Initiate the digital leak immediately, then forward the relevant bribery evidence to my secure terminal one more time.” Exhaustion bled into Jaeha’s voice, but it did nothing to dull the severity of the command.

He had made a silent and vicious vow. While orchestrating this strike, he would systematically shake Myeongwon Construction down to its foundations.

Those filthy bastards had punched a lethal hole through Jang Taegeon’s abdomen. Was Jaeha, as the man’s legally bound spouse, supposed to forgive them with a slap on the wrist?

Absolutely not.

Lee Jaeha possessed his own terrifying method of hunting prey.

Now that he had sunk his teeth into the nape of their corporate neck, he had no intention of timidly concealing his fangs. He intended to tear their carotid arteries out. Jaeha had never favored a single, mercifully swift strike.

His true specialty lay in slowly and methodically torturing an opponent toward financial and social death, regardless of who they claimed to be.

It was a filthy, sadistic tendency that stood in stark contradiction to his immaculate, polished exterior, and one of the many darker traits he grimly attributed to his father’s cursed genetic legacy.

After marching directly into the secretarial suite upon arriving at work and issuing his kill orders, Lee Jaeha decided to brew himself a cup of strong coffee on the way back to his office.

He had barely touched Jung Mihee’s extravagant breakfast, having concluded that skipping the meal altogether would have been preferable to aggravating his persistent nausea. Caffeine, however, was an entirely different physiological necessity. At this point, he needed it injected directly into his exhausted bloodstream.

He attempted to slip quietly into the executive break room before Manager Lim could spring from her chair and insist on serving him, but the veteran secretary stopped him with a sharp call from behind.

“Executive Director.”

“…Yes, Manager Lim?” Jaeha answered with a flawlessly blank expression, even as an unusual twinge of guilt pricked at his chest.

The protective staff had already lectured him several times about why a billionaire director insisted on personally operating an espresso machine.

Jaeha was ordinarily softhearted toward maternal figures, particularly women such as Jung Mihee at the main estate and Manager Lim Yujin at the corporate tower.

Because those particular women treated him with sincere, unfiltered affection, he found it profoundly difficult to respond to them properly. He had been conditioned from childhood to socialize through prescribed corporate etiquette, calculated courtesy, and hollow formalities.

Yujin, however, delivered a completely unexpected report.

“Well… you currently have an unscheduled guest waiting inside the Executive Director’s office.”

“A guest?”

There was no one who possessed the security clearance necessary to enter his private suite at such an ungodly hour.

For a fleeting second, he remembered that his arrogant college friend from the newspaper conglomerate had texted him the previous day, demanding an extravagant meal.

Jaeha dismissed the ridiculous possibility almost immediately. He could not imagine the media heir dragging himself out of bed and appearing at Yooshin headquarters this early like some unemployed loafer with nowhere better to be.

He instinctively turned toward the heavy double doors of his private office.

The blood in Lee Jaeha’s veins froze.

A massive Alpha leaned casually against the reinforced steel doorframe, one broad shoulder braced against it as pitch-black eyes fixed intently on Jaeha.

“Your marriage is fucking rock-solid, isn’t it?” the man drawled, a dark grin spreading slowly across his face. “I had to drag myself all the way down here in person just to catch a glimpse of my own husband.”

Beneath the low, rumbling timbre of the Alpha’s voice, Jaeha thought he heard a faint clinking sound. Jang Taegeon was casually rolling a hard lemon candy around inside his cheek.

Jaeha could only stare blankly at the breathtaking sight. In that moment, he forgot his corporate surroundings, his crushing exhaustion, and the basic necessity of breathing.

Perhaps noticing Jaeha’s paralyzed, deer-in-the-headlights expression, Jang Taegeon lazily bent one arm and gestured toward the interior of the luxurious Director’s suite. His face wore that achingly familiar expression of profound boredom.

“I saw a fancy crystal candy basket sitting on your coffee table, so I helped myself,” Taegeon murmured as the candy clicked against his teeth. “What’s with the terrified look? Do I have to pay you for it?”

“…No.”

Jaeha breathed, rejecting the absurd suggestion at once. He could easily purchase entire factories around the world dedicated solely to producing that particular candy.

It was not that Jaeha begrudged him a piece of sugar. He was simply overwhelmed by the pathetic realization that he felt genuinely delighted to learn Taegeon liked the inexpensive lemon drops he kept stocked for visiting clients.

Even in the middle of this terrifying, high-stakes reunion, that microscopic discovery filled him with a profound and idiotic joy.

The instant Jaeha’s denial left his lips, Jang Taegeon surged forward.

His enormous hand closed around Jaeha’s wrist with vise-like force, and a dark growl tore from his chest.

“Really? Since you’re claiming the candy is completely free, why don’t you repay me with something else?”

Taegeon’s voice dropped until it was thick with menace. “I’d sincerely appreciate some acknowledgment for all the time and effort I wasted busting my ass trying to find my runaway husband.”

Without giving Jaeha even a second to formulate a response, the Alpha dragged him effortlessly into the Director’s suite.

In the reception area, Manager Lim shot to her feet in shock. She caught only a fleeting and horrifying glimpse of the manhandling before the heavy mahogany doors slammed shut with violent finality.

Jang Taegeon loomed directly in front of him. Behind Jaeha, the reinforced steel-core door had sealed with airtight precision.

For the first time in his meticulously controlled life, Lee Jaeha felt the suffocating reality of being trapped between an apex predator and a literal wall.

Taegeon’s territorial pheromones flooded the enclosed suite, expanding with predatory force until there was nowhere left for Jaeha to retreat.

Although the Alpha stared down at him through a mask of bored indifference, the invisible scent spreading across the marble floor felt lethal enough to draw blood.

The ten-centimeter difference in their heights, a gap usually rendered insignificant by Jaeha’s own dominant presence, became terrifyingly apparent when they stood pressed so intimately together.

If Jaeha lowered his head even slightly, his forehead would collide directly with Taegeon’s exposed collarbone.

It was an overwhelming sensation of physical inferiority, one he had never experienced before any other Omega or Alpha.

Taegeon leaned closer, moving near enough that the arrogant slope of his nose, as unapologetic as the man himself, cast a dark shadow across Jaeha’s face.

A dense and intoxicating cloud of wild rugosa rose drifted toward him.

Jaeha knew all too well that the sweeter the floral undertone became, the more violently furious the Alpha truly was.

Yet, paradoxically, a profound and perverse wave of relief swept through him.

After ten agonizing days starved of the man’s presence, Jaeha’s thoughts immediately seized upon whether the catastrophic wound in Taegeon’s abdomen had fully closed. The slight hollowness in his cheeks bore grim witness to the painful and arduous recovery he had endured, and the sight made Jaeha’s chest constrict violently.

Considering the horrific depth of the puncture and the catastrophic amount of blood that had soaked through their bedsheets, even someone with Taegeon’s monstrous constitution must have spent days struggling merely to regain consciousness.

Jaeha desperately wanted to ask whether the pain had subsided. The frantic question struck against his clenched teeth, then sank heavily back down his throat without ever being voiced.

As though Jaeha’s internal turmoil were entirely irrelevant, Taegeon crushed the lemon candy ruthlessly between his molars. The sharp artificial tang of citrus spread through the heavy air, mingling almost perfectly with the terrifying sweetness of his pheromones.

Does he actually prefer lemon candies?

Even now, Jaeha’s corporate mind automatically cataloged the trivial detail, already planning to stockpile only that particular flavor in the future.

Taegeon’s dark brows twitched with lethal irritation.

“You’re spacing out again. Un-fucking-believable.” His grip tightened around Jaeha’s wrist. “You run away, blatantly ignore my warnings, and now you’re completely disregarding me while I’m standing right in front of you. You really do know exactly how to get bastards like me violently turned on.”

Jaeha said nothing.

“Or what?”

Taegeon growled at point-blank range, his voice sinking into a sadistic rumble.

“Did you deliberately choose a gangster’s dick just so you could fuck with it? I’m genuinely curious how you manage to pull off such turn-on-worthy shit without even trying. I’m absolutely fucking crazy about this kind of thing. Did you know that? Or was it already obvious?”

The sheer volume of raw profanity and degrading insults overwhelmed Jaeha’s blue-blooded sensibilities, making the actual meaning nearly impossible to process.

One fact alone remained unmistakably clear.

Jang Taegeon was enraged beyond reason.

Apparently unbothered by Jaeha’s silence, the Alpha extended his tongue and slowly dragged it across his lower lip. Dissolved sugar coated the slick muscle, leaving it wet and glistening.

Jaeha became transfixed by the obscene sight.

He snapped violently back to reality a moment later, utterly dumbfounded by his own pathetic inability to tear his gaze from the man’s mouth during what could reasonably be considered a life-or-death confrontation.

Fortunately, Taegeon appeared entirely indifferent to the Director’s mesmerized stare and continued his lethal verbal assault.

“Executive Director, I’m so turned on it physically hurts, and I am fucking furious.” His voice remained low and merciless. “You genuinely considered running away and abandoning a man who was bleeding out through a hole in his gut. You look so fucking innocent in those tailored suits, but you really know how to play people, goddamn it.”

Look innocent? Who?

The absurd accusation jolted Jaeha from his spiraling panic, but his attention immediately snapped back to the mention of Taegeon’s abdominal wound.

A ghostly pallor had drained the warmth from the man’s ordinarily sun-bronzed skin. How had he managed to leave his bed and cross the city so soon after suffering such catastrophic internal damage? He must have endured blinding fevers for days.

A flood of desperate questions clawed at the back of Jaeha’s throat. Terrified of burdening the injured man with his anxiety, however, he allowed only one fragile inquiry to escape.

“…Is the wound… all right?”

“No.” Taegeon sneered, sudden heat flashing through his eyes. “I’m so fucking furious right now that it feels like the lining of my stomach is tearing itself apart.”

“Is it… is it bleeding again?” Genuine alarm sharpened Jaeha’s voice as he reached toward him. “We need to go to a hospital immediately.”

Taegeon answered his frantic concern with a sharp, cutting scoff.

There was no amusement in the sound. It was the mockery of a predator savoring the blind audacity of its prey.

“Listen carefully, Director.” Taegeon’s voice turned darkly taunting. “If you were really that fucking worried, you should’ve stayed beside me like a good, obedient spouse. You should’ve kissed me and dutifully applied that stinging antiseptic you love so much. Why the hell did you run away and get me this worked up instead?”

“…There were unavoidable circumstances,” Jaeha whispered, lowering his gaze.

“What circumstances?” Taegeon demanded. “Sneaking behind the Myeongwon bastards’ backs so you could slit their throats?”

His fury vanished beneath that terrifyingly blank mask of indifference. Taegeon wrapped a heavy arm around Jaeha’s waist and wrenched him flush against his body.

The abrupt contact reminded Jaeha that they were standing in the middle of Yooshin Group’s executive suite. He writhed instinctively against Taegeon’s hold. Such intimate and openly possessive contact inside this corporate sanctuary felt profoundly illicit.

Sensing the resistance, Taegeon only tightened his arm around the Director’s waist. A low, condescending hush slipped from his lips, as though he were soothing a hysterical child.

“Stay completely still,” Taegeon warned softly. “Unless you want my stitches to pop open.”

The threat paralyzed Jaeha instantly.

His spine stiffened like iron, and he stopped moving altogether, terrified that even the slightest struggle might cause Taegeon further agony.

Taegeon held the rigid Director in absolute silence for several agonizing minutes. At last, his voice sank into a dangerous, probing murmur. “But why did you go after the Myeongwon syndicate? Were you trying to avenge your poor wife?”

Pressed directly against the Alpha’s broad chest, Jaeha could feel the low, guttural resonance of every syllable vibrating through Taegeon’s ribs. The dark frequency traveled straight into his bones, reducing his thoughts and muscles to molten slag. Even so, this was no time to lower his corporate defenses. Taegeon had not yet demanded the unvarnished truth.

True to form, the Alpha eventually leaned back just far enough to imprison Jaeha beneath the oppressive weight of his gaze. “I’m only asking so I can eliminate every variable. Does our high-and-mighty Director harbor some deeply personal grudge against Myeongwon Construction?”

At the pointed question, Jaeha straightened and raised his chin to meet the man’s pitch-black stare. He knew with absolute certainty that his next sentence had to be calculated with surgical precision. During the ten days he had spent wandering the streets, he had devoted countless agonizing hours to rehearsing this exact confrontation, simulating a thousand possible permutations in his mind. All he had to do was execute the script precisely as planned.

Yet, at that critical moment, the memory of his original marriage proposal crashed into his consciousness and violently hijacked his thoughts.

What had the gangster said when the chaebol heir had formally asked for his hand?

.

.

.

“It makes absolutely no fucking sense.”

“…”

“Do you actually like me?”

On that fateful afternoon, Lee Jaeha had been fundamentally incapable of forcing the word yes past his lips.

Governed by the sterile logic of the boardroom, he had considered only the tangible assets he could leverage to sway Jang Taegeon. The gangster would surely require concrete financial incentives before accepting such an absurd proposal.

So Jaeha had focused entirely on negotiating the terms. He had desperately wanted to enumerate every asset he possessed, the immense political power at his disposal, and the limitless corporate advantages Taegeon would gain by signing the marriage registry. In his arrogance, he had assumed that presenting a flawless balance sheet would somehow communicate the agonizing sincerity of his heart.

He had yearned to explain, eloquently and without restraint, why he needed to remain at the Alpha’s side forever. Instead, all that emerged from his mouth was a dry, clinical inventory of his own elite wealth.

That catastrophic miscalculation had poisoned everything.

Jang Taegeon had immediately recognized the hollow corporate pitch and driven the final nail into its coffin.

“So tell me what I actually get, not the political garbage I’m supposedly entitled to receive.”

Should Jaeha have cast aside his pride and spoken the harrowing truth then? Should he have admitted that the only prize he desperately coveted was the colossal, predatory presence of the Alpha himself? That his all-consuming obsession with Jang Taegeon was the sole reason he had made such a lunatic, blasphemous proposal to his own fiancé’s hidden lover?

“You just said you don’t even like me.” Taegeon had scoffed and leaned across the table during their first negotiation. “So what exactly is this insane marriage proposal built on? Do you possess some mystical ability to read fortunes, Director? What could possibly compel a man like you to entrust his entire life to a violent street thug like me?”

“That is entirely incorrect,” Jaeha had murmured, his hands trembling in his lap.

“Then explain it to me. What makes you treat holy matrimony as if it were some trivial, effortless transaction?”

Jang Taegeon had reclined in his seat with careless grace and clicked his tongue in sharp disapproval. He looked like an exhausted mentor chastising a sheltered child who had lived his entire life without a shred of common sense.

The Alpha’s dominance came so naturally that Jaeha suffered a brief lapse in memory, entirely forgetting that he was the older man in the room and that they were actively debating the terms of their own marital contract.

Yet that single, mocking accusation had burrowed deep into his psyche and refused to let go.

Marriage is easy?

Even if every other arranged corporate union in the world were a simple and painless transaction, binding himself to this particular gangster would undoubtedly prove torturous and impossibly difficult.

Where on earth does a perfectly easy marriage even exist?

Jaeha had entered the room fully prepared to negotiate the terms of a hostile takeover with ruthless efficiency. Never once had he anticipated being interrogated about his emotional motives.

Desperate for moisture, he slowly dragged his tongue across his parched lips.

“What I gain from this arrangement is…”

It had been physically impossible to confess his agonizing infatuation beneath the sterile, unforgiving light of day.

He could not admit that he had been incapable of purging the Alpha from his thoughts since the violent shock of their first encounter, or that Jang Taegeon ravaged him in his wet dreams every single night, even if Jaeha still refused to comprehend the devastating implications of those fantasies.

He lacked the fundamental courage to confess that he was desperate to steal his own fiancé’s lover before another predator could stake a claim. Such a twisted, possessive admission would surely have made him look utterly deranged in Taegeon’s eyes. Even if Jaeha somehow managed to vomit the truth across the table, the hardened gangster would not believe a single word.

That catastrophic lack of credibility was not even Taegeon’s fault.

From the moment realization first struck him, Lee Jaeha had found it nearly impossible to trust the validity of his own sudden, alien emotions.

They had occupied the same space only a handful of times. Yet the instant their eyes first met across that crowded room, the psychological impact had been devastatingly bizarre. Because he had been violently thrown into a rut that very night, Jaeha had ruthlessly rationalized his obsession as nothing more than a biological malfunction caused by unstable pheromones. Then, without warning, Jang Taegeon had appeared in the private hotel dining room, occupying the impossible role of Kim Sumin’s secret lover. By Jaeha’s immaculate and logical standards, the entire sequence of events defied reason.

Brazenly courting someone else before his current, high-profile engagement had even been officially terminated was unconscionable. It did not matter how shallow his political betrothal to Sumin was, nor how deeply entrenched the Omega’s illicit relationship with Taegeon had become. Jaeha felt absolutely no romantic love for his fiancé, but he had operated under the assumption that they shared a basic degree of corporate trust. Even knowing Sumin had shattered that trust first by cheating, the old Lee Jaeha would have demanded a lengthy and respectful cooling-off period before daring to approach the mistress.

He possessed the ironclad rationality required to calculate the morality of any transaction with clinical detachment. Had the man sitting across from him that afternoon been anyone other than Jang Taegeon, Lee Jaeha would have reached a swift and logical judgment, then severed the engagement without hesitation.

Even if he had found the hidden lover mildly attractive, he would have dissolved the merger officially and observed an appropriate period of social quarantine before initiating contact.

No, that was a lie.

Under ordinary circumstances, he would never have felt even the faintest spark of attraction toward his fiancé’s sidepiece in the first place.

But rationality had abandoned him entirely.

Before his brilliant corporate mind could register the full insanity of his behavior, his entire universe had narrowed into a single, violent obsession with Jang Taegeon. He had begun operating like a terrified racehorse trapped behind leather blinders.

Being consumed so completely by an irrational impulse was a horrifying first in Lee Jaeha’s meticulously curated life.

The avalanche of frantic, unfamiliar emotions rushing through his veins without permission left him profoundly dizzy. Worse was the catastrophic realization that he possessed no ability whatsoever to apply the brakes.

That profound lack of self-understanding was precisely why he had failed so spectacularly to convince the Alpha of his intentions. The terrifying tempest drowning Lee Jaeha was the very emotion he had spent thirty years vehemently denying. He had always assumed, with bitter cynicism, that if true love existed, his biological mother would not have rotted away in such agonizing and solitary misery. The romantic fairy tales celebrated in literature and film were obvious fabrications. Real love was a slimy, clinging, inherently sinister plague, oppressive and drenched in gloom. For his entire life, Jaeha had successfully walled himself off from that toxic underside of romance.

Consequently, even while his rigid habits and entire philosophy of existence were being systematically dismantled by his carnal desire for the gangster, he had failed to recognize the fatal infection until it was far too late. The emotion remained a hopelessly vague and terrifying fog. His binary nature, belonging to a man who worshipped the absolute clarity of zeroes and ones, right and wrong, blinding light and pitch darkness, demanded the same empirical evidence from his own psychological state.

That was the true source of his failure at the negotiating table.

He did not understand the mechanics of his own broken heart. How, then, could he possibly convince this towering mountain of a man to accept a lifelong marriage proposal?

The task was insurmountable.

He could not confess that he had fallen violently in love after a single passing glance, that the Alpha had brutally colonized his wet dreams ever since, and that his devotion had only festered and deepened with time. He lacked the courage to demand acknowledgment for such a pathetic confession.

To the elite Director of Yooshin, his own fragile heart felt like little more than a poorly researched business proposal constructed upon shifting sand.

The violent thug seated across from him had instantaneously become the most vital entity in his universe. Jaeha refused to insult a man of such overwhelming presence by offering a disorganized emotional collapse as collateral. Faced with an impossible dilemma, a meticulously constructed corporate lie felt infinitely safer.

Jaeha straightened and restored his immaculate, frozen mask, the same predatory expression he wore while gutting hostile buyers in the boardroom. It was armor forged through decades of cold survival.

“A legal marriage to you, Director, is simply a strategic escape for me,” Jaeha lied with effortless smoothness. “I’ve devoted an immense amount of effort to surviving the corporate battlefield, but I’ve finally decided that I want out of the rat race. Marrying a man of your particular background would serve as both a direct and indirect declaration of my complete withdrawal from the Yooshin succession war.”

“No. That’s absolute bullshit, Lee Jaeha.”

Jang Taegeon severed the shallow justification with a single merciless stroke. Despite the polite honorific attached to the end of his name, the dismissal struck like a brutal slap across Jaeha’s face.

Jaeha bit the inside of his cheek to keep his expression from collapsing. Across the table, Taegeon narrowed his eyes with ravenous intensity, as though eager to strip the flesh from Jaeha’s bones and devour him alive.

Has he seen through me?

Panic lanced through Jaeha’s chest. Perhaps the apex predator had already caught the scent of his pathetic, bleeding heart. In the cutthroat heights of high society, marriages founded upon the exchange of liquid assets were standard practice. Claiming to exchange actual hearts, however, would annihilate every trace of corporate credibility.

Jaeha prayed that the Alpha would not penetrate the façade. He prayed Taegeon would fail to recognize the desperate and utterly enamored way Jaeha was staring at him.

Instead, a dense layer of territorial pheromones pooled around Jaeha’s ankles and began rising like floodwater, expressing the gangster’s silent, boiling fury.

“If all you need is an underworld excuse to destroy your reputation, there are plenty of disposable options besides me. Don’t act as though I’m the only heavily armed thug wandering the streets of South Korea.”

Taegeon was undeniably furious. The crushing weight of his scent communicated that violent anger with unmistakable clarity.

Why the hell is he so angry about a mutually beneficial contract?

Jaeha’s corporate mind could not grasp the emotional nuance underlying the rejection.

“Tell me the real reason you want to shackle yourself to me.” Taegeon’s voice descended another octave. “Out of all the filthy, disposable thugs scattered across this city, why the hell does it have to be me?”

Pinned beneath the incendiary force of the Alpha’s glare, Jaeha felt as though he might spontaneously combust. In the end, he broke like a fragile prisoner surrendering beneath prolonged torture. He pried his jaws apart and relinquished a sliver of the truth.

“Because you were dating Kim Sumin, were you not?”

“Who?”

Taegeon paused, and genuine confusion crossed his features for the briefest instant.

“Oh, right. That Omega.”

He raised one dark eyebrow, seemingly recalculating every variable in the conversation, then allowed a slow, predatory smirk to curve across his mouth. He deliberately pressed his tongue against the inside of his cheek, an unapologetically feral gesture that separated him at once from the polished, bloodless aristocrats Jaeha was accustomed to navigating.

“Well, fuck me. I’ve never received such a heart-fluttering confession before.” Taegeon’s voice dripped with dark irony. “Let me make sure I understand. Are you seriously proposing marriage just to piss off your cheating fiancé? You want to reduce me to some pathetic, kept concubine so you can punish that Omega?”

The Alpha’s pheromones surged violently, bursting outward as though a dam had ruptured. In an instant, the scent sharpened into something suffocatingly aggressive. Jang Taegeon ground his jaw and spat the final accusation like venom.

“Who the absolute fuck got under your skin badly enough for you to concoct such a cute little revenge scheme? Tell me every excruciating detail, Executive Director, because I’m rapidly beginning to feel like absolute shit.”

“No. That isn’t it. If the family learns that I married the very Alpha who used to date Kim Sumin, they’ll abandon me completely. What I want is freedom from their control.”

It was a blatant fabrication.

Jaeha had never harbored any grand or poetic longing for freedom. Yet it was precisely the sort of pretentious nonsense third-generation chaebol heirs used to justify their petty rebellions. Even his worthless stepbrother, Jaeho, frequently muttered such drivel.

The familiar song of freedom would not sound entirely out of character.

With his palms slick from cold sweat, Jaeha summoned every fragment of mental discipline he possessed and focused on persuading the enormous man seated across from him.

Jang Taegeon’s eyes narrowed, dark and calculating, as though he were dissecting the excuse to determine exactly how much truth it contained. Trapped beneath that terrifyingly frigid stare, Jaeha’s heart pounded so violently that he feared it might tear through his ribs.

He had prepared several backup explanations, but regardless of which method he used, Taegeon had to believe the marriage served Jaeha’s strategic interests alone. Jaeha needed to erase the Alpha’s suspicions and artificially inflate the corporate value of their union. Yes, he was presenting the marriage as an act of greed, but buried beneath that greed was a desperate and foolish desire to give Jang Taegeon anything the man could possibly want.

Therefore, Jaeha had to define the marriage as a transactional exchange and convince Taegeon that whatever he received was merely fair compensation.

He had to conceal the single fatal truth: his own heart.

“Abandon everything at Yooshin and surrender to me. Then, who knows? Perhaps it won’t matter to my pride that you were born an Alpha.”

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.

.

Taegeon’s earlier offer echoed mockingly through Jaeha’s memory.

It had been maddeningly ambiguous.

Abandon his entire empire?

If Jaeha did so, he would lose every asset he could offer the man. This marriage promised Jang Taegeon a deluge of wealth and power, while Jaeha required nothing beyond possession of the man himself.

Consequently, if Taegeon questioned his motives now, Jaeha had to cling to the corporate script. His genuine feelings had to remain buried.

Taegeon would not have believed him anyway. He would probably have sneered in that blunt, sardonic manner of his and asked, “Director, do you actually do cute things like that?”

Jaeha needed to project a flawless, cold-blooded motive for dismantling Myeongwon Construction, ensuring that not a single trace of devotion escaped. He parted his lips several times and struggled to steady his voice before finally speaking.

“Myeongwon Construction once submitted a bid for the development of a Yooshin shopping center. During the process, they organized a massive bribery campaign targeting our executives. They later used the illicit paper trail to blackmail one particular executive, ultimately driving him to suicide.”

“And?”

“The dead executive’s nephew is Jaeho. My stepbrother.”

The central elements were factual, although grotesquely distorted.

The man had not committed suicide. The incompetent wretch had simply drowned beneath gambling debts and severe alcoholism before dying in an accidental fall. He had been a distant cousin of Kim Ranhee, and Chairman Lee Ik-hyeong had ruthlessly torn into her for placing such a liability in a corporate position.

To Jaeho, the deceased executive had been a maternal uncle he had barely known.

Yet when corporate maneuvering was involved, Jaeha never hesitated to sell his stepbrother’s name to legitimize a narrative.

It was a scapegoating method he had perfected over the years, making the lie almost impossible to penetrate. Despite his composed exterior, Jaeha routinely blamed his own minor mistakes on Jaeho.

To this day, Jaeho genuinely believed he had shattered their grandfather’s prized Joseon white porcelain vase during winter break in sixth grade, simply because Jaeha had calmly told him so. Jaeha had even forced out a false tear while scolding his sobbing stepbrother for being more careful.

Considering the mountain of genuine disasters Jaeho had forced him to clean up over the years, the karmic balance seemed more than fair.

“You were that close to your stepbrother’s uncle?” Taegeon studied Jaeha with a heavy expression, carefully weighing every word. “That’s completely unexpected.”

Jaeha silently endured the suffocating scrutiny.

Counting the seconds in his head, he deployed the final anchoring lie. “Besides, Grandfather specifically asked me to handle it.”

Although Jaeha had not dismantled Myeongwon Construction for that precise reason, it was a documented fact that the late Jang Changsik had made such a request. A lie became perfect only when it was woven seamlessly through the truth.

Jaeha carefully audited his composure, ensuring that not even the faintest tail of genuine affection remained visible, then braced himself for Taegeon’s reaction.

If the Alpha became furious, so be it. Taegeon was the one who had stubbornly ignored Chairman Jang’s dying requests.

Yet after hearing the explanation, Taegeon did not abandon his nonchalant façade. His dark eyes merely locked onto Jaeha’s with piercing intensity.

They had still made no effort to separate. In truth, their bodies touched in more places than they did not. Jaeha endured the heat pouring from Taegeon onto his face and waited in agonizing suspense while the silence stretched between them.

“Ha.” Taegeon’s jaw clenched hard. “So you decided to chew up whatever miserable scraps of life Myeongwon had left.”

The murderous intent in his voice was unmistakable, although it was clearly not aimed at Jaeha.

Dazed by the sheer masculine force radiating from the prominent muscle flexing along Taegeon’s jaw, Jaeha struggled to restart his thoughts.

“So no,” he said. “It wasn’t done without reason.”

That much was entirely true.

The deepest and most overwhelming reason Jaeha had annihilated the rival company was that he had been blinded by a white-hot, wholly uncharacteristic fury after learning they had dared to harm Taegeon. He was not some hormonal middle schooler, yet the rage had consumed him so completely that remaining still had become impossible.

Yes, there had been a reason.

It was simply one he intended to carry into his grave.

“Is that so?” Taegeon murmured.

His deep voice vibrated directly through the nonexistent gap between their chests.

God, I like that far too much.

Even in the midst of such terrifying tension, their physical proximity intoxicated Jaeha and threatened to drag him under.

Taegeon cleared his throat, producing a low, guttural vibration. “I still don’t understand.”

“What?”

“I thought the Executive Director was exacting bloody revenge on those bastards because he was secretly fond of me.”

Taegeon delivered the words with infuriating casualness while pulling Jaeha flush against his hard chest. The sudden friction sent a bolt of electricity screaming up Jaeha’s spine, immediately followed by a spike of panic.

“Your wound…”

“I came here to offer my exclusive services to my husband as a reward for a job well done.” Taegeon cut him off smoothly, his hands sliding down to seize Jaeha’s hips with possessive firmness. “I bathed, put on my best cologne, and even brought condoms.”

“What?”

“Are you pretending not to understand, or are you genuinely this dense?” Taegeon’s expression remained completely deadpan. “I said I came here to be cute.”

The absolute seriousness of his face only made the statement more absurd.

Jaeha stared at him in paralyzed disbelief, but the Alpha did not loosen his hold by so much as an inch.

Taegeon tilted his head and swept his gaze around the room.

“Is the soundproofing good in here?”

***