Even in District 4, where everything was scarce, there were newspapers. Eddie worked part-time at a small newspaper office on weekdays, which meant he was better informed than anyone about news both inside and outside the country. The office in particular was a place where a lot of information that never made it to print tended to circulate. Coming from Eddie, that kind of information was worth trusting.
Looking for a recessive omega. Under normal circumstances, it was information Seohan wouldn’t have given a second thought — but the Seohan of right now was different.
“The Executive Director of Herald?”
“Yeah. You don’t know him? Cesare Herald.”
“Of course I do.”
How could he not, when he had eyes and ears.
Among the people living in District 4 — no, among everyone living in the Graven Federation — there couldn’t be a single person who didn’t know the name Cesare Herald. Even a three-year-old child would know it.
A far-dominant alpha and a man infamous for his brutality. Someone who held every conceivable form of power beneath his feet and treated human lives as less than worthless. And on top of that —
“He’s incredibly rich!”
The money behind the Graven Federation.
As Executive Director of Herald Financial, he presented a fairly capable face to the world as a businessman. And he truly was. It was simply that the direction of that capability pointed in many different places.
Herald Financial ran both a legitimate investment and loan operation and a loan-sharking operation side by side.
The side Cesare Herald ran was the latter. His capabilities shone brightest in the dark — and because of that, Herald Financial had risen to the very peak of wealth.
There was nowhere in the Graven Federation where Cesare Herald’s money didn’t flow. And among those who had failed to pay back that money, there was not a single survivor.
The methods he employed against those who didn’t repay what was his were nothing short of brutal. It had even become a dark joke — that hanging yourself was preferable to borrowing his money.
“He’s looking for a recessive omega? What for?”
Seohan tilted his head with a puzzled look.
There was one reason an alpha sought out an omega. To release built-up pheromones and satisfy physical desire. Or to reproduce more trait-bearers through pairing with a dominant omega.
But knowing the other party was that Cesare Herald made it hard not to wonder. Was he really in a position where he needed to go out looking for an omega? He was a man who could reach out and take whatever he wanted in the first place.
More than anything, being a far-dominant alpha, it seemed like a dominant omega would suit him better. The amount of pheromones a person was born with differed between dominant and recessive to begin with.
“How would I know that? Probably just a pervert with weird tastes.”
“I guess……?”
Well, it was true that there were people who specifically wanted recessives.
Recessive omegas had diminished reproductive capability. Low chances of pregnancy, and physically weaker too. Being individuals with no social protection made them easier to use and discard. In short, they tended to become targets for the worst kinds of people.
It was a world where beggars littered the streets and all manner of criminals ran rampant.
The devastation that humanity’s progress had brought about had sent the world into regression, and for those whose only goal was survival, there was no reason to protect the weak.
That was also why Seohan — despite having quite good looks — had always been careful to keep a low profile.
“Wait, are you actually interested?”
Eddie blinked at him in surprise and tore off a piece of bread to pop into his mouth. Knowing how Seohan normally wanted nothing to do with things like this, even just seeing him show curiosity was enough to fill Eddie’s face with shock.
“Yeah, completely. How much are they paying for it?”
“Hey, don’t even think about it. You have no idea what kind of trouble you’d be walking into.”
“Forget that! How much are they paying, I said.”
Seohan grabbed Eddie’s hand firmly as he waved it around in a gesture of dismissal. Trouble was already happening inside his own body. What problem could be worse than being terminal?
“It’s… five hundred Krang a week?”
“F-five hundred Krang?!”
Seohan’s jaw dropped. Five hundred Krang was exactly ten times his weekly rent. And that was being offered as a weekly wage. The man had to be drowning in money.
The eyes of Seohan — who had been sunk in despair since receiving his terminal diagnosis — lit up in an instant. The terrifyingly dangerous figure of Cesare Herald suddenly felt like a gold nugget.
He didn’t deliberate for long. Like a fish lunging madly at bait dangling from a hook, Seohan latched onto Eddie’s trouser leg and refused to let go.
“I want to do it!”
“Are you out of your mind?!”
“I’ll do it, me. Introduce me, come on?”
Color rushed into a face that had never shown much greed before. Chestnut-brown eyes sparkled above flushed cheeks. He was so anxious not to let this money-making opportunity slip away that he was even nibbling on his plump lower lip.
“Come on, just go find some other guy. Why don’t you ever cash in on those looks? You could walk up to anyone on the street and they’d be shoving wads of cash at you.”
Eddie shook his hand free and shouted in exasperation.
And fair enough — Seohan was genuinely the owner of quite striking features. Not just pretty in a vague sense, but the kind of face that made anyone who passed him stop and take a second look.
The regular customers at the laundromat had all made remarks about it in their own colorful ways. The reason the gambling den owner kept calling Seohan in every weekend despite him constantly tripping over things and causing accidents was entirely because of that face. Just the face.
“Which is exactly why I’m saying I want to put them to use now. Five hundred a week!”
“We’re talking about Cesare Herald — that changes everything, you idiot! And it won’t work anyway. Every omega who’s gone in for an interview has been turned away on the spot.”
“That’s exactly why I said let me at least try going.”
He’d never had any intention of getting treatment to begin with. Money and time were both in short supply, but more fundamentally, he didn’t have enough attachment to his life to go that far. Seohan had always lived without particularly wanting much.
But he did have a desire — to live boldly, at least once. Things like walking into a fancy restaurant and ordering expensive food without a second thought. Or buying and wearing clean, decent clothes for once.
For that, he needed money. Five hundred Krang a week meant he could spend his last month before dying lavishly, throwing money around without a care.
“It’s not like I can even introduce you. I just picked up the rumor secondhand.”
“Why are you giving up before we’ve even started? Who’s got connections as wide as yours? Just once. Come on? If I make money, it’s good for you too.”
Seohan lay down flat on the floor and started pleading like a child throwing a tantrum.
“Ugh. Who could ever stop you.”
Eddie, who had somehow already emptied an entire bag of bread, let out a sigh and made a call.
* * *
A deep layer of city lights had settled over the gloomy city visible through the floor-to-ceiling glass.
The disorderly glimmer was too sparse to call a skyline, yet too stubbornly alive to call ruins. The nights in this city were always like this.
“Fuck……”
A curse slipped from the handsome mouth of a man sitting like a painting. He brushed his showy golden hair back with irritation and muttered a low, self-deprecating laugh.
His nerves, already sharp at the best of times, had been wound even tighter after spending his last rut in a complete mess. His shirt buttons were already hanging loose, sleeves pushed up to his elbows.
“Shall I bring in more omegas to see?”
“No need.”
Cesare, leaning sideways against the chaise longue, flicked his hand in dismissal. The whiskey glass on the sofa table was about half empty. The ice had long since melted.
He’d seen five omegas today alone. They’d been brought in through an interview process handled by what he considered a reasonably reliable broker — and yet, not a single one had failed to be repulsive.
Having this much trouble just finding someone to fuck. It was frankly pathetic.
“Was the ventilation run properly?”
“Yes, we’ll run it again.”
His secretary, Colin, contacted the building manager and had the ventilation system activated.
He’d deliberately held the interviews downstairs to prevent any unpleasant pheromones from drifting up, yet the pheromones that had clung to various parts of his body refused to wash off. Even after showering twice, the same.
In truth, they might already have been gone long ago. What refused to disappear wasn’t the omegas’ pheromones — it was Cesare’s revulsion toward them.
The list of things Cesare Herald loathed was endless. Anything noisy, disorderly, or chaotic. People who clung to him. Types who rambled on and on. And at the very top of that list — omegas as a species.
Particularly the sticky, sickeningly sweet pheromones that were distinctly omega, and those eyes overflowing with want — they made him nauseous.
But regrettably, he was still an alpha, and he had no choice in the matter. An omega’s pheromones were something he couldn’t do without. A truly irritating state of affairs.
If he wanted to find an omega who was at least less repulsive than the rest, he had to assess their pheromones directly. Which meant Cesare had inhaled that nauseating pheromone five times already today alone.
“Have a doctor come in the morning.”
Cesare snatched up his whiskey glass with irritation and snapped out the order. Unable to hold back, his hand clenched — and the glass shattered, sending shards tumbling down across the carpet.
“Pardon? But managing it with suppressants——”
Colin, who had been jotting down instructions, asked back in a worried voice. His gaze moved to the sharply scattered glass fragments, to the large hand encased in a leather glove, and then to the deeply scowling face.
As a far-dominant alpha, the amount of pheromones accumulating in Cesare’s body was considerable. There was a limit to how much suppressants could hold it down, and a few months ago, his doctor had expressed concern that that limit was approaching. In fact, during the most recent rut, the dosage of suppressants had been doubled — but all it had done was send his pheromone levels into disarray.
Right now he was managing by sheer force of his monstrous constitution, but how long that would last was anyone’s guess. That was why Colin had set aside all other work and thrown himself into the search for an omega.
But no matter how weak-scented an omega he brought in, Cesare turned them away. Even the slightly more tolerable ones never made it to a second night in his bed. It wasn’t even clear whether that single encounter had gone properly. For some reason, the day after bringing an omega into his room, Cesare’s condition was consistently worse.
Thanks to all of this, the contract he’d prepared months in advance was still stuffed inside a drawer where it had been sitting untouched.
“Wouldn’t it be better to see a few more omegas, sir?”
Colin ventured the question carefully. But before he could even finish the sentence, a lethal look cut through the air, and he dipped his head in a deep bow.
“You want me to go through this again tomorrow?”
“……I’ll call first thing in the morning.”
“Get out.”
“Please rest.”
Colin straightened into a precise bow and turned on his heel quickly.
And so — it was entirely by chance that a single résumé slipping out from his folder fluttered through the air and landed on Cesare’s knee.
“I — I’m so sorry.”
Knowing Cesare’s intolerance for even a single mistake, Colin went pale and moved to retrieve the résumé. He would have, had Cesare not picked up the paper himself.
“Who is this? This isn’t a face I saw today.”
A thick, long finger pointed at the photo on the résumé. In it, a face that was somehow unpolished and clear-eyed was wearing an awkward little smile.
“Yi Seohan?”
He murmured the name written on the résumé, brow furrowed.
It wasn’t a common name in this city. And yet, at the same time, it was a name that gave him a strangely familiar feeling.
