Chapter Three
Istep inside as Hyunwoo holds the door open for me, the familiar smell of his apartment rolling over me. Expensive candles, the leather of his furniture, and the faint musk of alpha. The smell of Hyunwoo.
Before I can even set my bag down, he’s already reaching past me to grab the handle of the suitcase I’m dragging behind me with one hand and lifting the duffel off my shoulder with the other.
I let him take both and bend down to unlace my sneakers at the entryway, toeing them off and lining them up against the wall out of habit.
“This is it?” Hyunwoo asks from behind me. I can hear the skepticism in his voice. He’s eyeing the single suitcase and bag like they can’t possibly represent the sum total of my worldly possessions.
I nod, straightening up. “That’s all I need right now. Clothes, toiletries, my game controllers, my laptop.” I tick them off on my fingers. “The essentials.”
“And the rest of it’s with the movers I sent over this morning?”
“Yeah.” I step past him into the apartment, padding across the hardwood in my socks. “It was a bit overkill, by the way, sending a full moving crew for a studio apartment’s worth of stuff. I could’ve brought most of it on my own, especially since you told me to just toss my old furniture.”
Hyunwoo shrugs, carrying my bag on one shoulder and rolling the suitcase with his other hand.
“It was all secondhand and falling apart anyway. You’re not bringing that stuff into my apartment.
” He says casually like the concept of secondhand furniture in his life is mildly offensive.
“Did you break the news to your landlord about moving out?”
I snort. “Yeah. You should’ve seen his face.
” I turn around, walking backward for a few steps so I can properly convey the scene.
“Especially when I handed him a fat stack of cash to cover all three months of late rent plus the fee for breaking the lease early. The man went from furious to confused to suspicious in about three seconds flat.” I snap my fingers for emphasis.
“He kept looking at the money and then back at me like he was trying to figure out if I’d robbed a bank or started selling organs. ”
Hyunwoo loops my bag over the back of a dining chair and frowning the way he does when something offends his sense of how the world should work.
“You should’ve told me how much you were paying in rent in the first place.
You were getting scammed for that price on an apartment of that size, in that state, in that neighborhood.
” He ticks off the grievances on his fingers, mirroring what I’d done a moment ago but with considerably more indignation.
“The plumbing was a disaster, the walls were paper thin, and that man hadn’t done a single repair in the two years you lived there.
I should’ve sent my lawyer over instead of just the lease-breaking fee.
Could’ve probably gotten your money back and then some. ”
“Well,” I say, smirking, “I won’t be sorry to see the place go. It served its purpose, but I’m not going to miss the leaking ceiling or the neighbor who played trot music at full volume every morning at five AM.”
Hyunwoo makes a displeased sound through his nose, personally offended on my behalf by the existence of my former living situation.
“When you do eventually look for a place of your own again after this is all over, you’re going with my realtor.
I’m not letting you get swindled by another predatory landlord. ”
I open my mouth to argue that I’m perfectly capable of finding my own apartment, but my track record kind of speaks for itself, so I just close it again.
I follow Hyunwoo into the main living area, and the rapid click of nails on hardwood gives me about a half-second of warning before Hyunwoo’s two Belgian Malinois come barreling around the corner from the living room.
Their tails are whipping back and forth so hard their entire back ends are swaying, ears pinned flat against their skulls in excitement, and the air fills with high-pitched yips and whines that echo off the high ceilings.
My face splits into a grin so wide it hurts. I drop into a crouch and hold my arms out. “Hey! Hey, come here, come here—”
Kal reaches me first because he’s always been the faster of the two, shoving his blocky head straight into my chest with enough force to rock me back on my heels.
He whines high in his throat like he hasn’t seen me in months instead of four days.
His tail is going so fast it blurs. Machete is right behind him, smaller but just as frantic, squirming against my side and getting her tongue on every inch of my face she can reach.
I laugh and wrap an arm around each of them, pulling them both in.
Kal’s fur is warm and coarse under my fingers, and Machete’s whole body is vibrating against my ribs.
I release them and bounce back on my heels, then lunge forward with my hands out like I’m going to grab Kal.
He barks, sharp and loud, and dances backward on his front paws, his eyes bright and locked on me.
The second I pull back he lunges after me, and I dodge sideways, which sends Machete scrambling around to cut me off from behind, her teeth catching the hem of my hoodie and tugging.
“Oh, you think you’re sneaky?” I say to her in the high-pitched, stupid voice I only use with dogs. “You think you’re gonna get me?”
She releases my hoodie and barks twice, her tail going wild.
I fake left, go right, and Kal catches me around the knees with his full body weight, which is enough to take me down because he’s thirty-five kilos of muscle and momentum and I wasn’t braced for it.
I go down on my back on the hardwood with a thud and both dogs are on me instantly, Kal’s paws planted on my chest and Machete worming her way under my arm to press her nose against my neck.
I’m laughing so hard my stomach cramps, one hand buried in Kal’s thick scruff while Machete drags a wet stripe up the entire side of my face from jaw to temple.
“Disgusting,” I tell her fondly, wiping my cheek on my shoulder. She does it again.
Hyunwoo stands over the three of us with his arms folded across his chest, watching the pile of man and dogs writhing around on his pristine hardwood floor with an expression between amusement and resignation.
“Those two might be the happiest ones about this whole arrangement,” he says. “They’ve been restless all day, like they knew something was happening.”
Machete whines and licks at my chin, her tail smacking against the floor in a steady, rapid beat. I scratch behind her ears and she melts against me, her eyes going half-lidded. Kal, not to be outdone, shoves his head under my other hand and huffs until I give him equal attention.
Honestly, I think, they might not be the only happy ones. Hyunwoo’s apartment is a massive upgrade from my old place by any measure, but the dogs are one of the biggest perks. I’ve always loved these two.
When Hyunwoo first brought them home a few years ago as eight-week-old puppies, I thought he’d completely lost his mind.
He’d flown all the way to Belgium personally to pick up the pair—Kal and Machete, unrelated, from a premiere working-line breeder—and brought them back on the flight himself.
Knowing Hyunwoo, that probably meant first-class seats for the puppies too, maybe with their own little blankets and complimentary treats.
I’d taken one look at the dogs, already intense and alert even as tiny puppies with ears way too big for their heads, and told him he was nuts.
Belgian Malinois from military working lines weren’t pets.
They were whip-smart, had energy that never quit, and were basically biting machines that needed constant mental and physical stimulation or they’d eat your furniture, your walls, and then whatever was left of your sanity.
I’d warned him that he was signing up for a full-time job keeping the pair busy, and that Hyunwoo—who had never shown sustained commitment to anything that required real effort in his entire life—would be in over his head within a month.
But to my utter astonishment, he’d thrown himself into it.
Not halfway, not with the lukewarm enthusiasm he applied to most things before getting bored and moving on.
He went all in. He researched training methods obsessively, hired specialist trainers to learn from rather than just handing the dogs off, put them into agility courses and bite work programs, and spent his weekends taking them on long hikes and running them through exercises until they were two of the most well-trained dogs I’d ever seen.
He issued commands in full Belgian Dutch—“hier” and “af” and “loslaten”—and the dogs responded instantly every single time, no hesitation, no second command needed.
It was genuinely impressive and probably the only thing about Hyunwoo that made me think the man had actual depth beneath the designer clothes and cocky attitude.
Kal and Machete grew into happy, healthy, well-balanced animals under his care, and Hyunwoo adored them with a tenderness that was almost comical coming from someone who presented himself as too cool to care about anything.
He’d sit on the floor with them for hours, letting Machete sleep with her head in his lap while he watched TV, or he’d spend an entire afternoon in the park running Kal through scent-tracking drills just because the dog enjoyed it.
It was a side of him that most people never got to see.
The dogs had naturally grown used to me too, since I was over at Hyunwoo’s apartment so frequently I might as well have had a key. They associated me with playtime and treats and roughhousing, and their excitement whenever I showed up never got old.