Chapter 7

For the first time in thirty years, Jaeha was suffering from trauma to his inner thighs as the direct aftermath of a sexual encounter.

At first, his intellect had failed to identify the biological source of the pain. Lee Jaeha, a man who took immense pride in his flawless physical conditioning, was utterly appalled by the sharp and visceral rebellion of his own body. Every attempt to take even a single step sent his legs trembling beneath the strain, feeding the irritation steadily mounting inside him.

He meticulously reviewed the mechanics of his workouts, unable to understand how a man who never neglected his heavy lifting could have developed such an oddly specific weakness. Then a crude fragment of memory broke through his denial. He must have been made to spread his legs repeatedly to accommodate another Alpha’s massive frame.

Only then did the clinical source of his agony become devastatingly clear.

“Spread your legs wider for me. You’re the one who begged me to fuck you, so you’ll have to cooperate if you expect me to put in the effort.”

That was right. He remembered the exact tone in which Taegeon had delivered those words. Since the command to spread wider allowed for no alternative interpretation, corporate or otherwise, it was perfectly logical that his inner thighs had been stretched beyond their limits.

The realization sent a scalding crimson flush racing up his neck and across his face. He shook his head violently, then buried his burning face deep in the down pillow. He skipped every meal, groaning aloud whenever jagged fragments of the encounter surfaced in his mind, only to surrender to exhaustion once again. That was how the prospective heir to Yooshin Group spent his entire weekend, trapped in an endless cycle of physical pain and psychological ruin.

Then Monday arrived, a corporate reality even an elite chaebol could not escape.

“We have a high-level briefing with the development team this morning, Director.” His assistant arranged a stack of folders across the desk. “The deputy general manager will be presenting the metropolitan expansion blueprints.”

Jaeha answered with a curt, perfunctory nod.

His lower back ached so intensely that he could barely keep himself upright in the ergonomic leather chair. Because of his unusual proportions, with long, elegant legs and a comparatively short torso, he had never experienced lower back strain in his life. The discomfort was entirely foreign to him, which made every involuntary flash of Taegeon’s heavy features across his mind the most excruciating variable of the morning.

Even as the throbbing pain tormented him through one endless board meeting after another, his mind refused to accept the reality of what had happened. He could not fully comprehend the concrete truth that his body had been thoroughly taken. Although he had assumed the weekend would provide sufficient time to recover, receiving another Alpha while possessing an Alpha’s biology had left his cognitive functions completely shattered.

Whenever a brief interval opened between meetings, he found himself fading beneath a bone-deep lethargy that left him dazed and sluggish. The moment his final routine briefing ended, Jaeha issued a flat directive to his driver and ordered him to head directly to his private apartment, bypassing the family mansion entirely. As soon as he crossed the threshold, he stripped and showered in a haze. Without touching a single bite of food, he collapsed into bed.

When his eyes finally opened again, the soft blue light of dawn filtered through the blinds. Three full days had passed since the incident. For the first time, the overwhelming physical exhaustion had receded enough for his rational mind to reclaim control. He could now construct a clear and logical chain of thought.

Unfortunately, his corporate intellect still offered no viable countermeasures.

“What the hell am I supposed to do now?” he whispered into the empty room.

Although the finer details of that night remained sealed behind the blackout, the visceral traces left across his body suggested only two possible explanations. Either the encounter had been mutually consensual, or Jang Taegeon had merely indulged Jaeha’s deranged, one-sided advances.

Logically, Taegeon had absolutely no biological or social reason to spend the night with another Alpha.

Furthermore, Jaeha was legally bound to Sumin, the very Omega who had claimed Taegeon as his secret lover. It was the worst possible entanglement that could have formed between people connected through the same relationship.

Jang Taegeon did not seem like a man ruled by carnal impulse. He did not fit the profile of someone who would seize an opportunity for casual sex simply because it had been offered. Unless a lifetime of effortless conquests had finally driven him to boredom, he would not have been desperate enough to attack a fellow director. Such an encounter could only have taken place if someone had aggressively provoked him.

In that case, eighty percent of the debauchery had been entirely Lee Jaeha’s fault. It seemed mathematically certain that he had been the sole instigator. His pride made it impossible to imagine himself begging and pleading for sex, yet the alternative explanation made even less sense. The idea that Taegeon had initiated the encounter clashed too violently with the man’s habitual arrogance and detachment.

I must have demanded it while I was drunk.

Unable to distinguish between the explicit dreams that had tormented him for the past month and the reality unfolding before him, he had effectively surrendered his body to the man’s mercy. Jaeha considered himself a reasonably sensible and highly disciplined individual. Unfortunately, his psyche had been subjected to a relentless assault of obscene dreams for an entire month.

The simple sight of Taegeon loosening the top button of his dress shirt at the table must have looked like an unmistakable invitation to make the fantasy real. Since the two of them had been alone inside that sealed room, the dangerous misunderstanding had deepened entirely within Jaeha’s own mind.

Besides, he had been completely wasted. He possessed a notoriously ironclad tolerance for alcohol and had never blacked out once in his adult life, which meant he had no data whatsoever on what his truly intoxicated self might be capable of. Perhaps some latent and pathetic drinking habit had surfaced after the age of thirty, one that drove him to cling violently to the object of his fixation and beg to be physically overpowered. He desperately wanted to believe he was not such a miserable and compromised human being, but the evidence carved into his thighs suggested that he had transformed into exactly that.

Lee Jaeha was undeniably intelligent, and his temperament became almost clinically cold whenever a corporate crisis arose. Unfortunately, he was now attempting to navigate the volatile and entirely uncharted terrain of his first love.

That was the fundamental flaw in his reasoning. He had begun his analysis by assigning absolute blame to himself without knowing which critical pieces of information were still missing from the equation. He never realized that his entire hypothesis, along with the elaborate chain of self-punishing logic built upon it, was completely worthless.

His thoughts always spiraled toward the same conclusion. The root of the disaster was his decision to sit in a hotel room and drink with Jang Taegeon while his hormones and pheromones practically boiled with an unwanted and terrifying longing for the man. A single drink, originally intended to ease the tension and allow him to explain his fixation with some measure of composure, had careened entirely beyond his control.

A bitter, ashen taste filled Lee Jaeha’s mouth, the unmistakable residue of panic. He felt utterly unmoored by the sudden and painfully intimate collision with another Alpha, especially one so devastatingly specific: his own lover’s prospective fiancé.

For days, Jaeha gnawed relentlessly at his self-reproach and regret.

His own foolishness consumed him so completely that skipping meals became routine, his appetite dwindling into nothing. He had lived his entire life according to a flawless, preprogrammed corporate manual, and the strict standards governing his nutrition and sleep, both of which had always been impeccable, now collapsed into uncharacteristic ruin.

His first love, acknowledged only recently in the privacy of darkness, steadily stripped away his peace of mind. Lee Jaeha could feel his cool, rational composure slipping from his grasp, like an old friend quietly abandoning him to face the darkness alone.

And so, exactly one week after the incident, he committed an act the sane and calculating Lee Jaeha would never have considered. No, even an ordinary person with no principles restraining them would have lacked the sheer desperation required to attempt such a thing.

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