Chapter Seven #4
“They’re bound by attorney-client privilege. They couldn’t disclose it even if they wanted to.” He pauses, then adds more quietly, “Yuggie, I wouldn’t let that happen to you. Your parents won’t hear about this from my family. I promise.”
I search his face for a long moment. But his expression is steady, his jaw set, and I know Hyunwoo well enough to recognize when he’s being genuine versus when he’s performing.
I nod and look away, my hand finding Machete’s head again, my fingers sinking into her fur. She licks my wrist once, a warm wet swipe, and settles back down.
Because the truth is, if my parents found out about this, it wouldn’t just be embarrassing.
It would break them. My mother and father are both betas—quiet, hardworking, proud people who spent their entire lives in service to the Seo family.
They cooked and cleaned and maintained the estate and raised me in the servants’ quarters with the understanding that I would grow up to be independent, self-sufficient, respectable.
They scrimped and saved to send me to college.
They cried when I graduated. They’ve never once made me feel lesser for being an omega in a world that treats omegas as lesser, because in our household, behind closed doors, my status didn’t define me.
If they learned that their son—their only child, the one they sacrificed everything for—was pregnant by the Seo family’s heir, unbonded, in an arrangement that amounts to surrogacy for money, with no intention of raising the child or being part of its life …
I can’t even finish the thought. My mother would be devastated.
My father would be furious. And both of them would blame themselves, would wonder where they went wrong, what they failed to teach me, how they let this happen.
The shame of it—an unbonded, pregnant omega, carrying the child of the family they served—would follow them for the rest of their lives in their community.
So no. They can’t know. Not now, not ever.
The food arrives about forty minutes later, delivered by a driver in a black sedan who hands the bags to Hyunwoo at the door with a small bow.
We eat at the kitchen table, the containers spread out between us.
I’m ravenous. I eat my entire portion and then half of Hyunwoo’s, reaching across the table to drag his container of galbi-jjim toward me when he pauses to check his phone.
He raises an eyebrow but doesn’t comment, just pushes the japchae toward me too.
After dinner, I take a shower. The hot water feels good on my tired muscles, steam filling the bathroom as I stand under the spray longer than I need to. When I step out and towel off, I pull on a pair of gray sweatpants and nothing else, padding barefoot into my room.
I stop in front of the full-length mirror that Hyunwoo installed on the back of the closet door.
My reflection stares back at me—bare-chested, my skin still flushed pink from the hot water, droplets of moisture trailing down my shoulders and chest. I look the same.
Same broad shoulders, same defined pecs, same lean waist tapering down to the low-slung waistband of my sweatpants.
My abs are still visible, the lines of muscle definition unchanged.
Nothing about my external appearance suggests that anything is different.
I turn sideways and press my palm flat against my lower belly, just below my navel.
I push gently, feeling for something—any change, any swelling, any sign that what the ultrasound showed is actually happening in there.
My skin is warm under my hand, my abs firm, and beneath them …
maybe something. A subtle resistance that feels different from the usual give of muscle and tissue.
Or maybe I’m imagining it. Maybe I want to feel something so badly that I’m inventing sensations where there are none.
I’m still standing there with my hand on my belly when there’s a knock on my door.
It opens before I can respond—Hyunwoo never waits for permission, never has, a habit born from years of treating every space I occupy as an extension of his own—and then he’s leaning against the doorframe, one shoulder propped against the wood, his arms crossed loosely over his chest.
His gaze travels over me. Slowly. Starting at my face and dropping down my bare chest, lingering on my hand pressed against my stomach, then continuing lower to the sweatpants hanging off my hips.
When his eyes come back up to meet mine, they’re half-lidded, his pupils slightly wider than they should be in the warm lamplight of my room, and there’s a look on his face that makes my throat go dry.
That heavy, intent look. The one where his jaw relaxes and his lips part just slightly and his brown eyes get that sharp, predatory gleam that I’ve come to recognize with the same certainty I recognize thunder before rain.
I know what it means. And I also know it shouldn’t still be happening, not now that we have confirmation. The whole point of the sex was conception. Mission accomplished. The pregnancy test is positive, the ultrasound confirmed it, the doctor documented it. There’s no justification for continuing.
But things have been different since my heat. I know that. I’ve known it for weeks, even if I haven’t let myself think about it.
During those three days of heat, I demolished every boundary I’d set.
Not Hyunwoo—me. I’m the one who grabbed him.
I’m the one who kissed him first, who climbed into his lap and sealed my mouth over his.
I’m the one who dropped to my knees and took his cock into my mouth without being asked, without being coerced, without the excuse of his pheromones since he’d been keeping them locked down for my benefit right up until the moment my heat pheromones ripped his control away too.
I did that. Delirious with heat or not, it was my hands on his chest, my mouth on his cock, my voice begging him to knot me.
And ever since, Hyunwoo has treated that as permission.
Not aggressively, not pushily—but with the quiet confidence that he’s been given a green light and sees no reason to stop.
The strict penetration-only, no-kissing, no-foreplay, no-extras arrangement I’d insisted on?
Gone. Obliterated by three days of me wrapping myself around him like my life depended on it.
What’s worse is that I haven’t been stopping him.
After the heat broke and I came back to myself, there was a window.
A clear, rational window where I could have sat Hyunwoo down and said: that was the heat talking, it doesn’t change anything, we go back to the original terms. I had the opportunity.
I was lucid, clearheaded, fully in possession of my faculties. And I didn’t do it.
Two days after my heat ended, I was lying in bed, wide awake, staring at the ceiling and listening to the quiet hum of the apartment’s air conditioning.
It was past midnight. The dogs were asleep in their crates.
The apartment was still. And then my mattress dipped, and Hyunwoo’s body slid in behind me—warm, solid, smelling like his expensive body wash and underneath it, that sandalwood alpha scent that my brain now associates with safety and sex.
His hand ran down my side, over the curve of my hip, and slipped between my cheeks.
His fingers found my hole and circled it, slowly, spreading the slick that was already gathering there because Hyunwoo’s proximity was sufficient cause for arousal.
Two fingers pushed inside me, and I let them.
I didn’t flinch, didn’t tense, didn’t tell him to get out of my bed.
I lay there and breathed and felt his fingers open me up.
Then his other hand came around and tilted my chin back toward him, and he kissed me. Slow and deep and unhurried, his tongue sliding against mine, his fingers still working inside me. I kissed him back. I opened my mouth and let him in and made a sound against his lips.
And when his cock nudged against my entrance, found the slick, and pressed in—I arched my back and pushed onto him.
It happened again the next night. And the night after that.
And then it stopped being a nighttime thing and started bleeding into the rest of our day.
Hyunwoo stepping into the bathroom while I showered, the glass door sliding open and his body appearing behind me in the steam, his hands on my hips turning me around before pressing me back against the cool tile, my shoulders flat against the wall and my legs around his waist. Or in the morning before work—me bent over the kitchen counter with my sweatpants around my ankles, Hyunwoo behind me with one hand braced beside mine and the other gripping my hip, both of us trying to be quiet because the dogs were in the next room and for some reason that felt like it mattered.
Or on the couch after a gaming session, Hyunwoo’s hand migrating from the armrest to my thigh to the inside of my thigh to the front of my pants, and twenty minutes later I’d be sinking down onto his cock with my knees on either side of his hips, the game paused on the TV behind us, both controllers abandoned on the floor.
It became easy. And I stopped pretending to resist because the pretending felt more dishonest than the act itself.
I had the excuse, at least, that we weren’t sure I was pregnant yet. That the continued sex was insurance. A reasonable, practical justification that let me avoid examining why I was letting him fuck me on a daily basis when I’d originally agreed to the bare minimum.
That excuse is gone now. The test is positive. The ultrasound confirmed it. There is a baby in my womb. There is no practical reason to continue having sex with Hyunwoo.
And yet here he is in my doorway, looking at me like that, and my cock is already twitching in my sweatpants and I can feel slick starting to leak between my cheeks.