Perfect Companion

Chapter One

The bouquet in my hands is already wilting in the heat, the cellophane crinkling against my palm as I stand in the courtyard with the rest of the graduating class milling around me.

My mom wrapped the stems in a wet paper towel this morning and told me to keep them out of the sun, but I’ve been holding them for two hours through the ceremony and the photos and the endless rounds of bowing to teachers I’ll never see again, so the petals are starting to droop.

I’m examining a particularly sad-looking carnation when an arm drops heavy across my shoulders and nearly sends me stumbling sideways.

“Can you believe a bunch of idiots like us actually graduated?”

Hongjoong’s grin is so wide it carves that dimple deep into his left cheek, his eyes crinkling at the corners as he shakes me by the shoulder.

His graduation gown is already unzipped to his waist, the sleeves tied around his hips like some kind of fashion statement, and underneath he’s wearing a loud red t-shirt with a brand logo splashed across the chest in gold lettering.

His cap is gone entirely. Knowing him, he probably threw it into the crowd and beaned some poor underclassman in the face.

Hongjoong doesn’t even flinch. He just laughs, a bright, careless sound that carries across the courtyard and turns a few heads.

He’s never been bothered by his grades, or by much of anything, really.

Lee Hongjoong is the heir to a car empire and a department store fortune, to him, academic performance is more of a formality than a requirement.

Not that he’s stupid. He’s actually sharp when he wants to be, infuriatingly. He just never wants to be.

“Details, details,” he says, waving a hand dismissively. Then he leans in closer, his arm still draped across my shoulders, and his voice drops to a quieter register. “Hey, you’re coming tonight, right? To celebrate?”

I eye him sideways. The way he says “celebrate” has a very specific energy to it, one I’ve learned to be suspicious of after four years of friendship with this particular group of alphas.

“Are you guys planning on getting shit-faced?” I ask flatly.

“Naturally,” Hongjoong answers without a shred of hesitation or shame. Then he holds up a hand, palm out, and adds quickly, “But you don’t have to drink, obviously. You can just come for the good time. You know, the vibes, the memories, the brotherhood.”

“The brotherhood,” I repeat, deadpan. “You mean me watching six drunk alphas try to fight each other on a rooftop somewhere while I make sure nobody falls off the edge.”

“That’s an exaggeration and you know it.” He pauses. “It was only four of us fighting that one time, and nobody was even close to the edge.”

“Dokyeom literally dangled Jaeho over the railing by his ankles.”

“And Jaeho was fine! He said it was fun!”

“He was crying, Hongjoong.”

Hongjoong waves this off too, and then he does the thing I hate.

He turns to face me fully, both hands coming up to grip my shoulders, and he pushes his bottom lip out in an exaggerated pout, his brows drawing together in a ridiculous puppy expression that looks absolutely absurd on a six-foot-two alpha with sharp cheekbones and a model’s jawline.

He starts making kissy faces at me, leaning in and puckering his lips obnoxiously.

“Come on, Yoonjae-yah,” he wheedles, his voice pitched high and saccharine.

“You know you love us. This is our last chance to all be together before everyone splits off and goes their separate ways. You’re going to miss us when we’re gone.

Don’t you want to make one last memory with your favorite people in the whole world? ”

I lean back from the kissy faces, holding the bouquet between us like a shield. “You’re disgusting.”

“You love me.”

“Gross.”

He puckers harder, making wet smooching sounds, and I shove the bouquet directly into his face. He sputters, spitting out a carnation petal, and I let out a laugh helplessly. He grins through the petals, triumphant, because he knows that laugh means I’ve already caved and we both know it.

I shake my head, sighing. “Fine. Fine, I’ll come.”

Hongjoong pumps his fist and whoops loud enough that a group of parents nearby turn to stare. I rub my temple with my free hand and wonder, not for the first time, what exactly I did in a past life to end up as the sole omega in a pack of feral alphas.

The sun is sitting fat and orange on the horizon when we gather behind the school, the seven of us crouched in the overgrown bushes that line the back perimeter fence.

The campus is technically closed for the evening, the graduation festivities long since wrapped up, which is exactly why we’re here.

There’s something about doing things you’re not supposed to that makes Hongjoong and his crew light up like children on a sugar high, and apparently the fact that we’ve officially graduated and will never set foot in this school again as students isn’t enough.

No, we have to break back in one last time, for old time’s sake.

“Shh, shh, shut up,” Hongjoong hisses from somewhere to my left, crouched behind a bush with his bright red shirt practically glowing in the fading light like a beacon. Stealth has never been his strong suit.

“You shut up, you’re the loudest one here,” Dokyeom fires back in a whisper that isn’t really a whisper at all.

“Both of you shut up,” I mutter, parting the branches in front of me to get a better look at the fence.

It’s the same chain-link fence we’ve been scaling since second year, the one with the bent section near the bottom where someone, probably one of us, kicked it loose ages ago.

The school never bothered to fix it, which tells me either the maintenance staff didn’t care or they quietly accepted that a certain group of delinquents was going to keep using it regardless.

We go over one at a time. Jaeho first because he’s the smallest of the alphas and the quickest climber, then Dokyeom, then Pilkyu, then Seungwon.

Hongjoong goes next, hauling himself up and over with an easy athleticism that he makes look annoyingly effortless, dropping down on the other side with a soft thud and a grin tossed back over his shoulder at me.

I hand the last guy, Wonjoon, the bag of snacks in my hands, and then I grip the chain-link and pull myself up.

The metal bites into my palms, familiar and cold, and I swing my legs over the top and drop down onto the patchy grass on the other side.

Wonjoon tosses the bag over the fence. I catch it one-handed.

We cross the darkened grounds in a loose cluster, keeping to the shadows along the building walls more out of habit than any real concern about being caught.

The school is empty, the windows dark, and the only sound is our sneakers on the pavement and Dokyeom’s badly muffled snickering every time someone stumbles over something in the dim light.

The service entrance is around the back of the main building, a heavy metal door with a lock that the custodial staff uses.

I’ve picked it before, twice, both times on dares that Hongjoong instigated and I was too proud to back down from.

The guys crowd around behind me as I crouch in front of it, pulling a bobby pin from my pocket.

I always carry one. Not because I’m some kind of criminal mastermind, but because my hair gets in my face during PE and also because, apparently, being the omega in a group of alphas means you end up being the one with all the practical skills while they stand around being useless.

“Give him some room,” Hongjoong says, waving the others back even as he himself leans in closer to watch over my shoulder. I can feel his breath on the back of my neck, warm and smelling faintly of the mint gum he’s been chewing all day.

“You’re not giving me room either,” I point out without looking up.

“I’m supervising.”

“You’re hovering.”

“Supervising,” he insists.

I roll my eyes and focus on the lock. The pin slides in, I feel for the tumblers, apply pressure with the tension wrench I fashioned from a second bobby pin, and after about thirty seconds of working the pins, there’s a satisfying click. I pull the door open and stand up, brushing off my knees.

The guys erupt. Hands slap my back, someone ruffles my hair hard enough to mess up the style I spent twenty minutes on this morning, and Dokyeom lifts me off the ground in a bear hug that I immediately protest by kicking at his shins until he puts me down.

“See?” Hongjoong throws an arm around my shoulders again, pulling me against his side as he addresses the group with the pride of a parent at a school play. “Yoonjae’s always been the smartest of our crew. What would you idiots do without him?”

“Die, probably,” Jaeho says cheerfully.

“Get arrested,” Seungwon adds.

“Both,” Pilkyu confirms.

I duck out from under Hongjoong’s arm before the flush I can feel creeping up my neck becomes visible, and I gesture toward the open door. “Are we going or are we going to stand here complimenting me all night? Because I’m fine with either, honestly.”

We pile into the stairwell, our sneakers squeaking on the concrete steps as we climb.

The sound echoes in the narrow space, amplified and overlapping, and someone starts humming a song that the others pick up until we’re all half-singing, half-whispering the chorus of some pop hit that’s been stuck in everyone’s heads for the past month.

Hongjoong takes the stairs two at a time, his long legs eating up the distance, and I keep pace beside him because I’ve always been able to keep pace with him, with all of them, even though I’m the omega and supposedly I should be trailing behind, delicate and winded.

My brothers cured me of that particular expectation a long time ago.