Chapter 4

Did incubi originally take the form of rival Alphas?

Lately, Lee Jaeha had begun to feel as though he were genuinely losing his mind. Night after night, he dreamed of an Alpha whose biology was identical to his own, spending every hour meant for sleep trapped in the grinding friction of their bodies. As a result, Jaeha woke each morning to the pathetic evidence of his own lust drying across his stomach.

At first, he vehemently rejected the psychological implications. He convinced himself that the dreams were nothing more than a temporary side effect of overdosing on premium suppressants during his last unexpected rut.

He ordered an exhaustive series of blood panels from his personal physician and even submitted to consultations with a recommended psychiatrist. Yet despite receiving a clean bill of health from both, the vivid, explicit nightmares continued to plague him.

“You’re crying because you love taking it. I’ve never seen an Alpha take a cock this well.”

In the dreams, the man always delivered those filthy, degrading praises with shameless pleasure. As the nocturnal torment stretched into weeks, Jaeha’s denial curdled into a profound suspicion of his own nature.

Why am I in this position?

Not once in his waking life had he entertained a fantasy of sexual submission. Jaeha possessed far less carnal appetite than the average Alpha and generally regarded sex as a tedious, messy chore. Yet there was no room for doubt. In the vivid landscape of his subconscious, he was the one receiving. He was the one begging for more. He had never imagined that such a deeply submissive, twisted craving could exist inside him.

Whenever the imaginary Alpha plunged into him, however, Jaeha’s fragile reason shattered into a million pieces. The violent excitement that boiled through him in his sleep refused to subside even after he dragged himself out of bed and stood beneath a freezing shower.

As the phantom Alpha annexed his nights, his days grew increasingly precarious. Years of corporate experience allowed him to perform his duties at Yooshin as naturally as breathing, but the instant a meeting adjourned, his mind went blank and drifted into a helpless daze.

Had this merely been a matter of pent-up biological desire, he would have picked up a random Omega or Beta and burned it out of his system in a single night.

The terrifying problem ran much deeper than biology.

Why do I want to see him?

That was the fatal weakness in his armor. He was desperate to see the man again.

He remembered the unlit cigarette caught casually between the man’s lips, the severe slash of his eyebrows, and the messy, unruly hair spilling across his forehead with a dangerous lack of civility. He remembered the jawline carved like that of a carnivore, the thick, corded neck, and the hands broad enough to palm a human skull.

How did I memorize him in such excruciating detail after less than five minutes?

The thought made Jaeha sick to his stomach. Despite physically fleeing the hotel, his mind’s ability to render Jang Taegeon had grown more precise with every passing day.

The massive Alpha came into sharper focus throughout Jaeha’s waking hours, haunting him in merciless, ultra-high definition before utterly ravaging him the moment he closed his eyes.

As the weeks bled into a full month, Jaeha felt as though he were systematically losing his mind.

His subconscious had been thoroughly colonized by the vivid phantom of the other Alpha. He found himself desperately longing for the wild fragrance of rugosa roses and the sharp, briny tang of sea salt that had filled the private dining room.

His fixation eventually deepened to the point that he caught himself wishing he could hurl his own body from a windswept coastal cliff merely to feel the crushing pressure of the ocean. Only then did a profound sense of psychological crisis finally take root.

His state of mind was nowhere near normal.

As the explicit, inescapable dreams continued to repeat every night, Lee Jaeha realized there was only one way to arrest his descent. He would have to carry out the task he had been desperately avoiding.

He had to stop running.

He had to acknowledge the truth.

“Sumin-ah.”

“Jaeha-ssi, please, let me explain! What happened at the hotel… it wasn’t what it looked like! I was actually…”

Exactly one month after the disastrous three-person dinner, Lee Jaeha finally answered the relentless calls he had spent weeks ignoring and granted Kim Sumin a meeting at a secluded luxury hotel coffee shop in Gangbuk.

Kim Sumin was already waiting for him, a stark anomaly in their relationship. The moment Lee Jaeha slid into the booth and unfastened the lower button of his suit jacket, the Omega erupted into a frantic torrent of words, desperately attempting to defend his infidelity.

Lee Jaeha did not listen to a single syllable.

He cut through the panic with a flat, clinical instruction and told Kim Sumin to choose between tea and coffee.

When Sumin shook his head, his hands trembling too violently to hold the menu, Jaeha refused to relent. He stared at the Omega until Sumin grudgingly opened the leather-bound pages. They placed their orders in a tense, frigid vacuum, after which a heavy silence settled over the table as the waiter quietly arranged their drinks.

During the lull, Lee Jaeha turned his gaze toward the expansive glass windows.

Perched high on the crest of Namsan, the hotel offered a sweeping panoramic view of downtown Seoul and the muddy curves of the Han River winding far below.

The request he was about to make, with all its corporate consequences, was one he loathed to voice. Even after explicitly acknowledging the direction of his instincts, Lee Jaeha found it laughable that this had become his final contingency. His first experience with love was beginning not with warmth, but with the bitter, inward mockery of his own undoing.

Lee Jaeha slowly turned back to face his partner. “Let’s call off the engagement.”

“…What?”

Kim Sumin’s face instantly drained of color. Before the word had fully left his lips, his hand jerked reflexively, sending the entire contents of his porcelain cup splashing across Lee Jaeha.

A thick, dark, viscous liquid trickled down Jaeha’s cheek.

Sumin had defied the season by ordering a rich hot chocolate, following Jaeha’s clinical advice that he drink something warm to counteract the sticky, suffocating humidity of the June air before the monsoon. Now that sweet, lukewarm drink was dripping from Jaeha’s jaw.

The moment the heavy scent of sugar and dairy coated his face, Jaeha’s personal secretary, who had been monitoring the meeting from a discreet distance, hurried toward the table in alarm. Jaeha casually raised one hand, halting the staff member mid-stride with an unyielding gesture, then picked up a linen napkin and roughly wiped his cheek.

Across the booth, Kim Sumin was unraveling. His hips shifted restlessly against the chair while both hands gripped the edge of the table. It was a remarkably unhinged display of anxiety from an elite political scion.

“I… I’m so sorry, Jaeha. I didn’t mean to. It’s just… I…” Sumin stammered, his skin completely ashen. He looked as though he were the one who had been violently doused, despite being the person whose hands had thrown the weapon.

The Omega’s psychological stability was visibly fracturing before Jaeha’s eyes. Lee Jaeha, however, was too consumed by his own impending ruin to prioritize someone else’s comfort.

If a person possessed the sheer, reckless audacity to bring a hidden Alpha lover to an official dinner with their prospective fiancé, then they should have been fully prepared for the possibility that the fiancé might steal that lover away.

“Consider our engagement null and void.” Jaeha wiped the remaining film of chocolate from his skin, his voice devoid of warmth. “The truth is, I’ve developed an interest in your man. In Jang Taegeon.”

“…What?”

Sumin stared at him as though he had been hexed in broad daylight. The expression on his face went beyond simple disbelief. It was one of profound, existential shock.

Watching the Omega’s features twist grotesquely, Jaeha pressed his advantage with cold, unrelenting calculation. “If it isn’t a serious relationship, Sumin-ah, end it now. I don’t think I’ll be satisfied with simply keeping that man as a hidden lover.”

“Jaeha, do you even hear the words coming out of your mouth right now?”

Sumin’s face flushed a violent crimson as his shock transformed into raw, unvarnished rage. Beneath the anger, a pathetic shred of remorse flickered in his eyes.

That was the price he had to pay for bringing that particular Alpha into Jaeha’s space.

Had it not been for that fateful ambush in the hotel restaurant, Lee Jaeha would have safely formalized his alliance with Kim Sumin. He would have married him without a single corporate complication, sired a pair of Alpha and Omega heirs to satisfy the lineage, and inherited absolute control of the Yooshin Group without a stain on his record.

In retrospect, Sumin had been the sole architect of that perfect plan’s destruction. Yet the Omega behaved as though he were entirely blameless, twisting his features into the righteous mask of a devoted spouse betrayed by his partner.

“Ha… fuck. Both of you.” Sumin’s voice trembled with venom. “Fine. You two perfect, terrifying bastards can do whatever the hell you want. Even so, I still…”

“Don’t swear,” Jaeha interrupted flatly.

“Hah! Even at the absolute end, you’re still an unfeeling prick…”

Sumin’s fury was understandable to a point. Although their arrangement had always been bloodless, it had endured for years.

The only physical intimacy they had ever shared was purely functional, limited to the occasional stabilizing grip on Sumin’s wrist whenever the Omega’s notoriously weak ankles threatened to give way on a flight of marble stairs. Still, the sheer accumulation of time was a powerful variable, and the abrupt severing of that shared history left a bitter, metallic taste in Jaeha’s mouth.

Why him? Jaeha questioned his own sanity for the thousandth time. Why that particular Alpha? Why did the target of my defect have to be Janghan’s thug?

They had not even shared a real conversation. Outside the explicit, degrading scenarios engineered by his own subconscious, there was no tangible connection between them. Logically, he had no reason to dismantle a flawless, multimillion-dollar corporate engagement over a mere fixation.

Lee Jaeha’s fastidious nature, however, made peaceful compromise impossible.

Lying beside one partner while his mind remained occupied by the ghost of another would constitute a betrayal he could not tolerate. Dreaming of another man’s hands while allowing himself to be called someone else’s spouse violated every principle at the core of his identity. Even if this fixation remained entirely one-sided, pathetic, and unrequited, wrong was still wrong.

It did not matter that the rest of high society existed in a perpetual cycle of infidelity and convenience. Not everyone could clear a high-jump bar, and not everyone could stomach cucumbers. Lee Jaeha happened to excel at the high jump, possessed no dietary restrictions whatsoever, and harbored a clinically fastidious streak when it came to the mechanics of loyalty.

Trembling beneath the weight of the insult, Sumin shot violently to his feet and stormed out of the hotel coffee shop without a single backward glance.

Only after the glass doors swung shut behind the Omega did Jaeha’s secretary finally hurry to the table and offer him a fresh silk handkerchief. Jaeha shook his head, his expression smoothing once more into an indifferent void.

“It’s fine. It was only a minor spill.” Jaeha displayed the stained paper napkin. “I’ve already wiped most of it from my face.”

“…Executive Director, it’s caught in your hair,” the secretary murmured.

His expression tightened with professional distress as he extended the handkerchief once again.

Jaeha frowned slightly and lifted his fingers toward his brow. “Where?”

Before he could locate the stain, a massive hand emerged from the space behind him. It appeared without warning, sudden and startlingly intrusive.

The hand was enormous, with thick knuckles, prominent veins mapping the back, and several faint, pale scars scattered across the skin. It resembled the hand of a man who had spent years working with concrete at a rough Jongno construction site. Yet its texture was not entirely coarse, hinting at a layer of luxury laid over the violence.

Before Jaeha’s mind could fully register the intrusion, an overwhelming wall of Alpha pheromones slammed into his nervous system, triggering an involuntary physiological response he could not control.

The intense, suffocating scent of wild rugosa roses blooming along sharp coastal cliffs flooded his senses, mingling with the briny bite of thrashing sea salt. Its raw, animalistic force was almost hypnotic.

It was Jang Taegeon. His presence alone seemed to displace the air around the table.

“Right here,” Taegeon’s deep voice rumbled directly above Jaeha’s shoulder. “It’s running down your neck.”

The Alpha’s heavy index finger brushed against the sensitive nape of Jaeha’s neck. The thick digit slipped effortlessly beneath the starched, tightly fastened collar of his dress shirt and grazed his bare skin with slow, deliberate pressure.

The sensation was indecently intimate. It felt as though the man were forcing a wedge into a narrow, restricted opening. At the exact point of contact, Jaeha’s skin erupted with blistering heat so intense that he felt as though the touch might physically scald him.

Caught entirely off guard by the ambush, Jaeha tilted his head back and stared at the massive Alpha in dazed, uncharacteristic silence.

Taegeon answered his panic with a faint, razor-thin smile. “Hello, Executive Director Lee Jaeha. I’m Jang Taegeon of Janghan Construction.”

Ah.

Jaeha’s thoughts short-circuited beneath the pressure.

So this really is a dream. If it weren’t a hallucination born from my fractured mind, then…

“Do I really need to repeat that we’ve met before?” Taegeon continued, the corners of his dark eyes creasing with dangerous amusement. “Every time I see your face, you run away before I can finish a proper greeting. Exactly how long do you intend to keep making me introduce myself? My mouth is starting to hurt.”

Jaeha held his breath as his chest locked tight.

It has to be a dream.

The real, flesh-and-blood man standing before him possessed a devastating gravity that Jaeha’s subconscious had utterly failed to capture. His nocturnal fantasies had not reproduced even ten percent of the sheer, suffocating pressure Taegeon radiated in reality.

From the place where Taegeon’s finger remained lodged beneath his collar, a terrifying, electrifying heat began to gather, spreading rapidly down Jaeha’s spine.

***