Chapter Twenty-Three #2
Sihwan lets out a breath that sounds more like a tire springing a leak than a human exhale. He squares his shoulders—a physical reset I’ve seen him do before swim meets—and turns on his heel. I follow a step behind, the weight of the whiskey bottles clinking softly in the bag against my hip.
I watch the tension in his neck. It’s tight, corded.
The guy is walking into his own home, but the pheromones rolling off him smell like he’s walking into a courtroom for sentencing.
It’s bitter, sharp. It makes the hair on my arms stand up, my own instincts prickling with a need to find the threat. But there is no threat. Just a house.
Or a palace. Whatever this is.
The doors swing open, revealing a foyer that could double as a skating rink. And the staff.
I suppress a frown. There are four of them standing there. Two maids in crisp uniforms, a man who looks like he takes his job as a butler way too seriously, and someone else hovering in the back. For a family of three? It’s ridiculous. It’s theater.
"Welcome home, Young Master Sihwan," they chorus.
Sihwan nods, stiffly acknowledging them, avoiding eye contact as he ushers me past. "Thanks. Just... take the bags to my room."
I hand off the overnight bag to the butler but keep the gifts. I’m not trusting a stranger with vintage whiskey.
We move deeper into the house, and the feeling of walking through a museum intensifies.
I scan the room as we pass through the main hall.
It’s loud. Not in volume, but in design.
Everything is gold, marble, or velvet. The furniture looks brand new, the kind of stiff, uncomfortable seating you buy to impress guests, not to actually sit on.
There’s a massive vase that probably costs more than my tuition, positioned just so the light hits it.
But it’s what’s missing that bothers me.
I look at the walls. Abstract art. Generic landscapes. Mirrors with gilded frames.
There are no photos.
No embarrassing baby pictures of Sihwan.
No graduation shots. No candid family moments from a vacation.
My parents are stiff, traditional intellectuals, and even our house has a designated hallway for the family lineage.
This place feels sterile. Impersonal. Like a staging area for a lifestyle magazine rather than a place where people actually live.
"Living room is through there," Sihwan mutters, gesturing vaguely to a cavernous space on the left. "Dining room is down the hall."
He sounds like a tour guide who hates his job.
"Nice place," I lie. It’s terrible. It has no soul.
Sihwan just hums, a non-committal sound, his eyes darting toward the staircase like he’s calculating the fastest escape route. "Yeah. It’s... a lot."
I look at him, really look at him, standing there in his perfectly tailored suit against a backdrop of aggressive luxury. He fits the aesthetic perfectly, on the surface. But underneath the expensive cologne and the gelled hair, he looks small. Isolated.
I shift the bag of gifts to my other hand. "Where are the parents?"
"Drawing room," Sihwan says, his voice tight. "Waiting."
Of course they are.
The clicking of heels against marble echoes down the hall before she even appears. It’s a sharp, rhythmic sound. Click. Click. Click. Like a countdown.
Sihwan stiffens beside me. His posture, which had been mostly relaxed in the car, snaps rigid. He straightens his tie for the third time in ten seconds.
Then, Choi Yerim rounds the corner.
She is a striking woman. I can see exactly where Sihwan gets his bone structure—the high cheeks, the strong jawline.
But where Sihwan is expressive and loud, she is frozen in a layer of icy perfection.
Her hair is an immaculate bob, dyed a jet black that absorbs the light, and she’s wearing a cream-colored suit that drips with luxury.
She smells like lilies, alpha heavy.
"Donghwa," she says, her voice smooth, practiced. She stops a few feet away, her eyes sweeping over me with a calculating warmth. "I’m so glad you could make it. It’s been a while since we’ve had a guest of your... caliber."
I know the code. Caliber means pedigree. She likes my last name. She likes that my grandfather was a Minister.
I bow. A perfect, respectful forty-five degrees. I’ve had etiquette beaten into me since I could walk, and I know exactly how to play the dutiful junior when I have to.
"Thank you for the invitation, Mrs. Oh," I say, straightening up and offering the bags with both hands. "It’s a pleasure to be welcomed into your home. A small token of gratitude."
She takes the bags, peeking inside just enough to catch the label on the whiskey and the packaging of the ginseng. Her smile ticks up a fraction of an inch. Genuine approval. Or as genuine as she gets.
"Wild ginseng," she notes, handing the bags off to a hovering maid without looking away from me. "You have excellent taste. Your parents raised you well."
"I try," I say dryly.
Then, the warmth evaporates.
She turns her head three inches to the right. Her gaze lands on Sihwan.
The change in the air pressure is immediate. It’s not that she looks angry; it’s worse. She looks disappointed. She looks at her own son the way an art critic looks at a forgery—searching for the flaws in the brushwork.
"Sihwan," she says. No greeting. No 'how have you been.' Just his name, flat and heavy.
"Mom," Sihwan says. His voice is smaller than I’ve ever heard it. He tries to smile, that dazzling, camera-ready grin he uses on everyone at school, but it falters at the corners.
She steps closer, reaching out. For a second, I think she’s going to hug him. Sihwan seems to think so too; he leans in slightly.
But her hand doesn't go to his shoulder. It goes to his hair. She pinches a lock of the chestnut-brown strands between her manicured fingers, her nose wrinkling in distaste.
"Still this color?" she sighs, dropping his hair like it’s dirty. "I told you last break it looks cheap. It washes you out."
Sihwan flinches. He actually flinches. "It’s... it’s the trend right now, Mom. Everyone wears it like this."
"Everyone isn't the heir to a hotel empire," she counters, dusting her fingers off on her pants. She steps back, her eyes raking down his body. "And this suit. It’s pulling at the shoulders. Have you gained weight?"
"It's muscle," Sihwan defends weakly, his hand coming up to cover his stomach instinctively. "I've been training for the swim team—"
"You look bulky," she interrupts, cutting him down with surgical chill. "Like a bouncer at a club. It lacks elegance, Sihwan. We’ve talked about this. You need to look like an executive, not a laborer."
I stand there, watching the swaggering hothead I know crumble into a pile of insecurities in under thirty seconds. Sihwan’s jaw works, his eyes dropping to the floor as he nods, accepting the criticism without a fight. He looks humiliated.
A sharp, hot spike of irritation flares in my chest.
I look at Sihwan—broad, strong, objectively attractive, currently ranked top of his class in swimming—and then at this woman who is nitpicking him apart because he doesn't fit her narrow, aesthetic vision of what an Alpha should be.
It annoys me. It annoys me that he takes it. It annoys me that she does it in front of a guest. But mostly, it annoys me because, despite our arrangement and his general idiocy, he’s mine. And I don’t like people touching my things with dirty hands.
I keep my face blank, locking my hands behind my back, but I make a mental note to tell Sihwan later that the suit fits him fine. Just to spite her.
If the foyer was a museum, the rest of the house is a showroom for a department store that doesn't exist yet.
Mrs. Oh leads the way, her heels clicking a sharp, authoritative rhythm on the marble floors. She walks with the kind of posture that suggests she’s balancing a book on her head, or perhaps the entire crushing weight of her social climbing ambitions.
"We had the architect fly in from Milan," she says, gesturing vaguely at a vaulted ceiling that looks exactly like every other vaulted ceiling I’ve ever seen.
"He didn't understand the vision at first—he wanted something more rustic—but I insisted on the clean lines. Minimalism is key, don't you think?"
I look around at the gold-leaf molding, the crystal chandeliers that look like frozen explosions, and the velvet drapes that are heavy enough to suffocate a man.
"It's certainly... distinct," I say smoothly.
Sihwan is trailing three steps behind us, silent as a ghost. The swagger he carries around campus like a weapon is gone, replaced by a slump in his shoulders that makes him look inches shorter. He’s staring at the floor, probably praying for a sinkhole to open up and swallow the entire estate.
"And this," Mrs. Oh says, pausing dramatically at the entrance to a cavernous sitting room, "is the Grand Salon."
She sweeps her hand toward the far wall.
"We acquired this piece last spring. It was a private auction in Hong Kong. The artist is notoriously difficult to get a hold of, but my husband pulled a few strings."
I follow her gaze to the massive canvas dominating the room. It’s an abstract expressionist piece—bold strokes of crimson and charcoal, aggressive and chaotic. It’s clearly meant to be the centerpiece, the thing that screams culture to anyone who walks in.
I suppress a snort.
I know this artist. One of my mentors was obsessive about his early work. I also know that the artist in question has been dead for five years, and his estate is notoriously litigious about reproductions.
I step closer, clasping my hands behind my back, playing the role of the impressed guest.
From a distance, it’s convincing. But up close? The texture is wrong. The impasto is too uniform, lacking the erratic, violent layering the artist was famous for. And the signature in the corner... it’s a little too neat. A little too perfect.