Prologue
If anyone were to ask whether Cesare Herald frightened him, Seohan could answer clearly, without a moment’s hesitation.
He was frightening. Of course he was.
The ice-cold gaze that felt like it could crush his throat. The brutally volatile temper. Not to mention the fact that this was a man who could kill him effortlessly, anytime he wished. Even down to the leather gloves Cesare always wore, right down to the cigar dangling from his fingertips — all of it frightened him.
There was not a single thing about Cesare that didn’t fill him with dread.
So what. Whether I die this way or that way, dead is dead.
But he was going to die in four months regardless — that was his fate. Even if that end came a little sooner, there wasn’t much to mourn.
Even if it was only four months, living freely and dying on his own terms was Seohan’s goal. That was precisely why he’d volunteered to be Cesare’s outlet — a role everyone else avoided like the plague.
And Seohan had adapted fairly well to the process of exchanging pheromones with him. On rare occasions, he even found Cesare… comfortable.
“This is a secret, okay?”
Seohan, buried up to his nose beneath the blanket, whispered in a voice that was barely audible.
Cesare clicked his tongue, brow furrowed, but still strained his ears toward that small voice. The way it always sank low and crept inward — just like the man’s personality — meant that if he wasn’t paying attention, he’d miss it entirely. It had a habit of leaving him vaguely dissatisfied.
Strange. He had always found meaningless chatter absolutely unbearable. Yet somewhere along the way, that babbling little voice had started to taste sweet.
“Actually, I always wanted to sleep with a guy as good-looking as you. Got my wish fulfilled and made money on top of it. I think I really lucked out.”
“Ha! Your guts are showing. Keep that kind of thing to yourself.”
At the cold dismissal and the frigid look that came with it, Seohan’s shoulders gave a small flinch. But despite the way he curled in on himself, he didn’t look particularly scared.
Having been worn out all night and unable to even climb out of bed, it was almost funny how his eyes stayed bright and clear.
“Oh, um… if I keep talking, are you going to kill me?”
“I’ll think about it.”
With a short, deflated laugh, Cesare yanked away the blanket and climbed on top of Seohan. He’d been certain he’d fully worked through the pressure building inside him, but desire was rising again, unbearably, cresting once more.
It seems like I’ll need to extend the contract with this one. He had no need for any other partner.
“Even your scars are handsome, Cesare.”
Unaware of the fate being decided right in front of him, Seohan started to smile — soft and a little dopey. The moment he saw that clear, open face saying his name, the craving stirred in him so sharply that his pheromones refused to settle.
“Stop trying to sweet-talk me and spread your legs.”
Cesare whispered it, pouring out pheromones and heat all at once.
* * *
Staring up at the massive banner plastered on a crumbling building in District 4, Seohan couldn’t hide his bewilderment.
The decrepit two-story structure and the flashy banner were jarringly out of place with each other. Which made it all the more eye-catching.
Who in the world puts out a wanted notice like this. What an obscene waste of money.
The large face printed on it was unmistakably his. From the mole near his ear to his shoe size, down to every minor detail listed out — it all pointed straight at him, leaving no room for denial.
But the description written beneath it was something he absolutely could not accept as referring to him.
〈Fiancé of the Herald household. Fled with a family heirloom.〉
Why am I Cesare’s fiancé?!
And just like that, the moment Seohan escaped his terminal fate, he became a fugitive.
But his escape didn’t last long. Within the Graven Federation, there was not a single district beyond the reach of Cesare Herald’s influence. He was, quite literally, the kind of man who could shake out even the smallest rat hole.
“W-why did you come looking for me……”
“Why?”
Having finally tracked Seohan down, Cesare asked it back with a murderous expression. If the Grim Reaper existed, it would look exactly like this. No — right now, Cesare truly was no different from the Grim Reaper coming to collect him.
“When a lover you’ve been seeing turns around and stabs you in the back, isn’t it normal for anyone to snap? If you didn’t want to be dragged back, you shouldn’t have played games with me.”
“W-who said we were lovers?”
“You and me.”
The arrogant tilt of his chin, as if asking why Seohan was questioning something so obvious, was infuriating. With every exchange, cold sweat trickled down his spine.
What was this lunatic talking about. Even if he was going to die, he had to correct what was wrong.
Seohan was the type who’d make himself sick if he couldn’t say what he needed to say. So even as he shrank his shoulders in, he opened his mouth anyway.
“Th-the contract ended. We were never in a relationship — how could we possibly be lo-lovers……”
“Ha! You’re saying that’s not what this was?”
A low murmured curse, followed by the horrifying sound of grinding teeth that reached Seohan’s ears.
“Fucking hell, if you’ve bewitched someone, you take responsibility.”
It was the moment those sweet three months curdled into terror.
Chapter 1
The aftermath of an era torn apart by chaos.
The Graven Federation was a land of opportunity and a continent of hope for the humans who had survived.
But those who had put down roots in District 4 were, with only the rarest exceptions, all cut from the same threadbare cloth. Hope was a foreign concept — lives that barely scraped by day to day were everywhere you looked.
Yi Seohan’s life was one of them.
On weekdays, he worked half-day shifts at a laundromat, earning just enough to keep himself fed. On weekends, he helped clean up at a gambling den, using those earnings to cover the rent he always came up short on.
Saving money was something he could only dream about. There was no room in his life to even struggle properly.
But for someone from District 4 who was also a recessive omega, the fact that he was given part-time work at all was a miracle in itself.
Yi Seohan worked hard, even under terrible conditions.
Hard enough to paste pretty pictures on the walls of his mold-smelling room, to make the effort to build small hobbies that gave him something to live for. Hard enough to imagine sunshine while staring up at the perpetually grey, rain-soaked sky of Graven.
So this. This was truly a tragedy even the gods would shake their heads at.
“You have four months left.”
From the mouth of the doctor seated in the small, cluttered examination room came words like a thunderbolt out of a clear sky.
As the doctor delivered what amounted to a death sentence with a look of sympathy, Seohan sat there and blinked blankly for a long moment. It took quite a while for the words to make sense.
No matter how deflated he got, Seohan was rarely at a loss for words. But this kind of thunderbolt was an exception.
“…Pardon?”
However many times he had cleared his throat beforehand, his voice still cracked terribly. But no one in that examination room paid any attention to something like that.
“Acute myeloid leukemia. Without prompt treatment, you won’t live longer than four months at most.”
“Me?! What are you talking about? I just came in because my nosebleeds got more frequent……”
For nearly a month straight, he’d been doing laundromat shifts on weekdays and filling in at the gambling den every weekend. With not a single day off in a week, it was only natural that he’d feel exhausted.
He had noticed that his body, already weak to begin with, felt like it had been dragging on too long. Three consecutive days of nosebleeds had finally even stained some of the laundry, so he’d come to the clinic after putting it off for as long as he could.
And yet, for that alone — a terminal diagnosis.
“That can’t be right.”
The words that left his lips in that drained voice were denial. The doctor made a sound with his mouth, as if he’d expected exactly that reaction.
This was the only clinic in District 4. A few worn-out machines, a slipshod system where even the listed specialties weren’t clearly defined. If not for the sign barely cobbled together from scavenged scraps of metal, you might have mistaken it for an antique shop.
Even so, the price was whatever they felt like charging — he’d had to pay the equivalent of five days’ worth of food money just to get his name on the intake list. And what he got in exchange for that amount was a terminal verdict.
“Y-you might have… made a mistake……”
Seohan stared blankly at the chart laid out in front of the doctor. Among the words densely packed in whatever order only the doctor understood, there was no medical terminology Seohan could make sense of.
“Have you been getting out of breath easily, or lost weight suddenly? Have you been sleeping more than usual?”
“Y-yes, but… you can’t call that leukemia based on that alone.”
It was true that his stamina, already poor to begin with, had been getting noticeably worse lately.
But Seohan asked with hope threaded through the question. His trembling lips were something he couldn’t do anything about, so he pressed his hands together tightly, like a prayer.
Right up until he’d walked into the clinic, he’d assumed all of this was because of his pheromones. As a recessive omega, Seohan’s pheromones had always been unstable, and that instability tended to bring a cascade of other problems along with it.
But the doctor’s response was firm and cold.
“These are your blood test results.”
The doctor, as if tired of repeating himself, turned the battered black-and-white monitor screen toward him. An age-spotted hand tapped on one section of the display.
“You see this?”
“I can see it, but……”
Medical terms and numbers were lined up one after another. The doctor’s voice continued, explaining the values. It came to Seohan like sound heard from underwater — buzzing and humming, cutting in and out, arriving muffled and broken. Words like bone marrow, cells, proliferation, chronic floated in and out without connecting to each other.
But the final sentence came through crystal clear.
“Given the blood count results and the bone marrow test findings, there is no doubt.”
And so, Yi Seohan received a terminal diagnosis.
At the tender age of twenty-two, having never once been in a relationship, having never taken a single trip.
