Chapter 8

“Are you completely out of your mind?”

His stepmother’s rebuke was pure theater. Even the question of whether he had lost his sanity carried a sickening trace of amusement, the gleam of perverse delight in her eyes betrayed her true thoughts.

Now it’s done. At last, the heir has destroyed himself.

Jaeha’s brow furrowed sharply, the last of his patience fraying beneath the crushing weight of his recent failures. Regrettably, however, the woman was right. He was unquestionably insane. Had he not been completely severed from reality, he could never have engineered such an absolute and unmitigated disaster.

With a clinical, bloodless flick of his fingers, Jaeha reached out and straightened his dinner knife, which rested slightly askew against the crisp linen tablecloth. That evening’s menu consisted of a traditional, rustic Provençal dish, the kind Kim Ranhee had often enjoyed during her youthful years studying abroad. Lee Jaeha, for his part, had always preferred the clean, mathematical precision of Italian cuisine to the heavy, performative structure of French cooking. On any ordinary evening, he would have avoided the family dinner altogether or sustained himself on a sterile meal replacement at the office.

Tonight, however, he had come to deliver a definitive statement.

He was there to notify his family of a severance. His engagement to Kim Sumin was over, and Jang Taegeon was the sole architect of that rupture. Jaeha needed to make it devastatingly clear to everyone in the estate that this was not some fleeting indiscretion committed by an Omega. He had been the one to fall for the thug first.

His father, who had been lazily nursing a crystal glass of cognac as an aperitif, froze. He looked as though his ears had fundamentally misheard a critical piece of corporate data, and when he finally spoke, it was only to demand the most basic clarification.

“…Who, exactly, is Jang Taegeon?”

“Honey… you know.” Ranhee’s voice slid smoothly into the silence, a sharp, mocking smile playing across her lips. “The man from Janghan Construction.”

Before his stepmother could finish identifying him, Lee Ik-hyeong’s features contorted into a truly bizarre and unhinged expression. Jaeha could state with absolute certainty that, in all three decades of being the man’s son, he had never once seen his father’s aristocratic composure collapse so completely.

Even Jaeha, who rarely smiled and possessed even fewer reasons to do so in front of his own bloodline, released a low, dry chuckle at the sheer absurdity of the sight.

Only then did a darker truth reveal itself. He had actively wanted to tear that exact mask of horror from his father. He had never imagined there could be such intoxicating, addictive pleasure in violating Lee Ik-hyeong’s corporate expectations and shattering the rigid, flawless role he had been bred to perform. After his biological mother’s death, he had never once rebelled, simply because he had never felt an operational need to do so.

Now, as he watched his father’s dignity collapse, understanding finally struck him. He had wanted to commit this betrayal all along. With sudden, electrifying clarity, he realized that he desired to sabotage his father’s dynastic ambitions more fiercely than anyone else alive.

To Jaeha’s profound satisfaction, Lee Ik-hyeong began to tremble with naked rage, his manicured cheeks quivering.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean? Another Alpha…?” His voice rose into a furious snarl. “You intend to ruin this conglomerate over some gangster bastard?”

“I’m currently dating him.” Jaeha’s voice remained as smooth and unyielding as a sheet of ice. “And if circumstances permit, I intend to marry him.”

The strike had been launched.

The family dinner, which had begun as a simple and bloodless notification of a broken contract, was instantly devoured by violence.

Lee Ik-hyeong did not hesitate. He seized the crystal glass of white wine intended to accompany the approaching fish course and hurled it directly at Jaeha’s chest.

“Honey!” Ranhee shrieked with exquisitely simulated horror.

Beneath her high-pitched scream, the sound of heavy crystal shattering against Jaeha’s sternum was surprisingly muted. White wine immediately bled through the fabric of his tailored shirt, spreading like the stain of an entry wound.

A shard of glass sliced a narrow line across his neck, and a dark bead of blood swelled against his collar. No one seated around the mahogany table cared about such a trivial injury.

Not even Lee Jaeha himself.

It seems that whenever I say his name, people develop an irresistible urge to drench me in something.

The thought passed through him with detached, clinical amusement.

Jaeha glanced briefly at his father’s furious, purple face. Then he calmly turned toward his younger stepbrother, Jaeho, who was watching the corporate wreckage unfold with both hands pressed over his wide, horrified mouth.

“I’m not the only child operating within this estate, Father.” Jaeha’s murmur dripped with absolute frost. “If all you require is a functional stud to preserve the lineage, Jaeho would not be a poor candidate for the merger.”

“W-what?!” Jaeho recoiled in his chair.

“Oh, my goodness, Jaeha-ya!” Kim Ranhee cried, her complexion turning instantly ashen. “How can you utter such vulgarities in this house?”

Her performance was undeniably first-rate. Even within the hypercritical circles of the chaebol elite, she possessed the kind of manipulative talent that could have earned her an Oscar or a selection at Cannes. Jaeha fixed his cold, punishing gaze directly upon her. Then he released a sudden, weaponized surge of dominant Alpha pressure and watched Kim Ranhee gasp.

Her throat seized. Under the suffocating atmospheric weight, she choked on her own breath.

Jaeha had never confronted his stepmother directly, not because he feared her influence, but because he considered her an exhausting and trivial nuisance.

She was not the monster who had killed his biological mother. His mother had already been shattered by profound depression long before Ranhee ever crossed the threshold of their home.

For years, she had stared at her own long hair in the mirror with an expression that suggested she was calculating, over and over, whether the strands might be strong enough to hang herself.

Jaeha therefore possessed no desire for dramatic revenge. He had simply avoided Ranhee because she was tiresome, petty, and fundamentally filthy.

“My apologies, Mother,” Jaeha whispered, his voice cutting through the silent room like a razor. “I forgot myself.” A brief pause followed, deliberate and merciless. “A recessive Alpha such as Jaeho would not be biologically sufficient to serve as a proper corporate stud, would he?” His gaze shifted toward his stepbrother. “My apologies, Jaeho. It appears my calculations went too far.”

Ranhee’s complexion surged from pallor into a violent, livid purple. Naked malice blazed in her eyes, the look of a woman who regarded any biological insult directed at her son’s origins as a fatal assault upon her own survival.

Without the slightest trace of regret, Jaeha rose from the table and walked out of the mansion.

He had never truly possessed a mother within those walls. There was no one left in his bloodline he wished to protect, and certainly no one capable of protecting him in return. Yet the absolute panic on his family’s faces stirred a sudden and stubborn determination within him. The urge to keep his word hardened in his chest.

Throughout the weekend, his thoughts had remained fluid.

He had told himself that it might be easier to move past this fixation, or that he could contain the consequences and deal with them later. Now those thoughts burned with belated and unbreakable obstinacy. In the entirety of his carefully calculated existence, Jaeha had never once made an impulsive decision.

Since the night he met Jang Taegeon, however, Lee Jaeha had felt as though the manual governing his life had been reduced to ash.

He drew his phone from his pocket and swiped through the encrypted call log. Beneath the recent history sat an unfamiliar eleven-digit number. He pressed it deliberately. His fingers moved with slow, clinical precision, without so much as a microsecond of hesitation, as he lifted the device to his ear.

Jaeha narrowed his eyes and shut them against the harsh glare of the streetlights while the connection established.

The signal rang once, then twice. A sharp click followed as the other party answered.

—“Did you enjoy yourself?”

Taegeon’s deep, heavy voice rumbled through the line without offering even the pretense of a social greeting. Dry, mocking cruelty threaded every word.

—“You fucked me, then ran off like a thief in the night?”

Jaeha squeezed his eyes shut, his knuckles whitening around the phone. He forced his constricted throat to open.

“I have something to say to you.”

That very evening, amid the wreckage of his lineage, Lee Jaeha resolved to propose to Jang Taegeon.

***