My heart that had been melting from the sudden contact found its original state again. The emotion that had been consumed by sadness disappeared smoothly, and only absurdity and anger remained to fill that empty space.
I tried to shout and push his shoulder away, but Baek Sahyun was immovable. Baek Sahyun, maintaining the force gripping my forearm, examined my complexion. With an expression like ice, with no trace of playfulness left.
After scanning my eyes, nose, and mouth evenly as if conducting an inspection, he seemed about to let me go, but when I grimaced for a moment, he tilted his head toward my lips again. I screamed convulsively.
“You rub lips while considering the context, you crazy bastard!”
“You don’t like it?”
“Is that even something to say…? Of course I don’t like it!”
It was absurd. I wasn’t the one to talk, having suddenly cried out a woman’s name after asking him to pour me a drink, and crying while getting angry, but still, Baek Sahyun was really an uncontrollable bastard.
If he was going to steal a kiss so unreasonably like this, what was the point of making a bet?
Baek Sahyun sighed and asked.
“Should I continue, or should I stop?”
“Fuck, would I tell you to continue if I were crazy?”
I pushed away his upper body with both hands. Baek Sahyun, pushed back as is, just stared at my overheated face without any change in expression. When I stuck veins out on my neck to protest actively, Baek Sahyun was rubbing his temples with a tired expression.
He spat out:
“That’s enough, so go upstairs and sleep.”
“Wh-what’s this all of a sudden?”
“I won’t count what just happened, so go to sleep without worry.”
When he was persistently pressing on me, and now he’s waving his hand dismissively as if annoyed. Huh. Is this bastard’s mind also coming and going? I couldn’t keep up with his change of heart at all.
“What do you mean sleep?”
Irritation rising, I poured the barely remaining whiskey into Baek Sahyun’s glass.
“I’m not going to sleep until you get drunk.”
Then I lifted that glass up to his eye level. We’re both missing screws, so I couldn’t be the only one leaving behind a dark history.
❖ ❖ ❖
4 AM. I was humming. After more than 3 hours of bitter struggle, I had succeeded in getting Baek Sahyun drunk.
Looking at him with his arms crossed and head dropped down, I smiled sinisterly.
Of course, since we had amicably shared two bottles of whiskey, my condition wasn’t good either. A dizzying headache followed, as if someone was hammering nails into my skull.
I laid my flushed, heated cheek on the table and breathed heavily. My condition was terrible, but seeing Baek Sahyun who had become a wreck together with me, even the pain seemed to fly away.
I laughed hollowly. He ended up passing out after drinking whatever was given to him. As if he didn’t know I would go this far with determination, he was caught helplessly.
“Disgustingly heavy.”
I carried Baek Sahyun on my back. He didn’t look it, but when I actually lifted him, he was considerably heavy. The place I staggered toward while leading the dead-drunk guy was a solitary room located under the stairs going to the second floor.
Baek Sahyun had briefly gone in and out of here during the day, and from what I observed, it looked like an old storage room where he kept luggage and such. He even locked the door with a key after coming out of that storage room.
Having witnessed the metal key going into his back pocket, I was curious about the identity of that storage room. I wondered what he was hiding beyond the door that he secured so tightly.
What, is there a safe or something? In a household that keeps whiskey worth hundreds of millions in a cabinet, it wouldn’t be strange if there was cash piled up in one corner of a room.
I didn’t want to become the protagonist of embezzlement, so I wasn’t interested in money, and what I wanted was actually just one thing. To successfully confine Baek Sahyun in that solitary room.
This is all a winning strategy to return his karma.
“This guy should experience it at least once to come to his senses. He needs to be trapped somewhere and feel powerless.”
In front of the door with a gray wood grain pattern, I stopped walking. Rationally thinking, I should go straight to the second-floor bedroom. To try to lock someone up because I’m crazy.
However, if I stopped here, I would have to play his lackey forever. Thinking like this made me so angry I didn’t want to act rationally.
A trash bastard who torments people as he pleases should face a backlash someday. This bastard doesn’t act rationally either, so there was absolutely no reason for only me to act according to reason.
After turning the doorknob, I entered the dim interior with difficulty. After readjusting the body pressing down on my back and shoulders once, I reached out and fumbled for the switch.
With a click, the lights turned on and the interior brightened.
“Ah, dust.”
It was narrower, damper, and gloomier than I thought. The only window was a small vent located in the upper right, and the wallpaper had dirty yellowish stains.
The mattress placed near the wall had severe pilling as if someone had clawed it with their nails. A cotton blanket was also covered on top of it, but it was old and worn, with the fabric even torn here and there.
“Did they raise a puppy or something?”
If the puppy’s disposition was even lively, this would be an understandable scene. After looking around the messy room state one by one, I laid Baek Sahyun down on the mattress.
When the weight that had been pressing on my shoulders and neck disappeared, my spine ached belatedly. Tapping the painful area with my hand, I pushed Baek Sahyun’s body, who was sleeping soundly, slightly to the side.
It was when I reached my hand toward his back pocket where the key was.
“…What’s that?”
I saw white pill bottles rolling around above the mattress. I brought them over while being as careful as possible with my movements to not wake Baek Sahyun. I heard the sound of pills rattling.
“Are these emergency medicines? Hmm, but they look quite suspicious for that.”
There were two pill bottles in total. I picked up one of them that was wrapped in outer packaging. Along with a male model smiling and showing even teeth, advertising phrases reminiscent of energy enhancers were engraved.
Sex with your lover that keeps going wrong, do you want to advance my cycle?
For you who want to drive your husband crazy tonight, who refuses pheromone showers!
Gagasion is responsible for your rut cycle!
If you just take Gagasion, you too can be an invincible Casanova!
Rut, rut, rut.
I repeated the word that seemed familiar in my head.
What flashed through my mind in an instant was a scene I read in <Excessively Brilliant>. The scene where Chae Eunwoo, who hated Baek Sahyun, unintentionally ended up sleeping with him. The trigger for that was the rut cycle.
So this means it’s an energy enhancer after all? This bastard Baek Sahyun, did he play around with omegas every time he came to the villa? Thinking it was strange, I checked the other pill bottle.
Very ominously, a large red X mark was drawn on the outer surface. At a glance, it looked like it was drawn with a thick marker pen.
“Alpha… manifestation agent.”
I read along the letters written on the back of the pill bottle. Just from the letters, I couldn’t guess the purpose at all.
After confirming again that Baek Sahyun was completely asleep, I carefully opened the mysterious pill bottle. As if it had been taken once and left, white pills the size of a thumbnail were piled up abundantly. There was even a small note at the end. Oh, it’s an instruction manual.
This product is a supplement that promotes trait changes and is not a pharmaceutical drug.
※ Dosage and Administration ※
- Take 1 tablet once daily with sufficient water.
- Avoid direct sunlight and hot, humid places, and store in a place with low humidity and dryness.
.
.
- When accompanied by a pheromone shower from an alpha in rut cycle, the drug’s effect increases. (Limited to dominant alphas)
※Special caution from guardians is necessary as abnormal behaviors such as mental confusion, hallucinations, and suicide attempts may appear.※
Unfortunately, it was full of phrases I absolutely couldn’t understand.
“What’s a pheromone shower again?”
But intuition is scary—I felt an inexplicable sense of foreboding and put the instruction manual back in. Naturally, I hurriedly pushed the lid closed too. Because I felt like I had touched something I shouldn’t have touched.
It was when I carefully approached the front of the mattress to return the pill bottle to its original position. I froze in place.
Dozens of pill bottles caught at my toes.
The red X marks written on the ‘Alpha Manifestation Agent’ were embroidered without exception on those pill bottles too. As if they were traces of repeated trial and error to pick out effective drugs.
“…What are you doing?”
“Huk!”
Because I had frozen blankly, I didn’t even know that Baek Sahyun, who had awakened from sleep, was reaching out to me.
Looking at the white hand landing on my shoulder with a thud, I flinched as if I’d seen a ghost. I urgently hid the pill bottles I was holding behind my back.
Baek Sahyun stared at me intently with unfocused eyes full of fatigue and hangover. Like a thief caught stealing from a safe, I hurriedly attempted an excuse.
“Ah, no. I was going to the second floor but it was too hard so I came here. You’re seriously heavy. Haha.”
Baek Sahyun showed not an inch of change in expression, and only after a bout of silence passed did he slowly open his mouth.
“Have you calmed down?”
“Huh?”
“I’m asking if you’ve felt much better.”
I had planned to shoot back sharply whatever words came, but I felt an indescribable emotion at Baek Sahyun’s face being unexpectedly plain. It was quite different from when he was eagerly watching for opportunities to flirt to win the bet. He looked quite serious, as if he was really worried about my condition.
“If you’ve calmed down, let’s sleep. I’m tired because of you, Nam Heejae.”
Before I could finish thinking, Baek Sahyun pulled my shoulder into an embrace and collapsed onto the mattress. I tried to get up while groaning, but the strength of Baek Sahyun, who had fallen into slumber, was the strongest of the strong.
Still tightly gripping the hard pill bottle in my hand, I had no choice but to squirm and find a comfortable position.
Rut cycle, alpha manifestation agent, pheromone shower.
When I recalled the complicated words, drowsiness naturally rushed in.
