Chapter Fifteen #4
Hyunwoo meets our collective gaze without flinching. “You don’t have to worry about any of that,” he says evenly, “because I have already legally claimed Yugyeom. It’s done.”
“What are you talking about?” I say, my voice barely above a whisper.
My mother starts to protest, her hands fluttering, saying surely not, they would have been informed, there would have been documentation, a ceremony, something.
But Hyunwoo is pulling his phone from his jacket pocket, navigating to a screen with a few taps of his thumb, and holding it out.
“It’s right there,” he says. “The claim was registered with the bureau months ago, after the pregnancy was confirmed.”
My parents take the phone, their heads bending together over the screen, and I watch the confusion on their faces shift to shock and then to cautious, trembling relief as they read whatever’s displayed there.
My father’s hand tightens on my mother’s knee.
My mother’s breath hitches and she presses her fingers to her lips.
I can’t sit still. I push myself up from the sofa, my belly making the motion graceless and labored, and lean over to look at the screen in my father’s hands.
The official government bureau website. The claim registry, time-stamped and authenticated. Hyunwoo’s full legal name on the alpha line. And beneath it, on the omega line, my name. Sung Yugyeom. Registered, filed, legally recognized.
My blood goes cold and then very, very hot.
Hyunwoo continues speaking, his voice smooth and assured, telling my parents that they needn’t worry, that he will take full responsibility for me and our child, that everything has been done properly and through the correct legal channels.
He promises them that I’m being cared for, that I’ll want for nothing, that their grandchild will be raised with every advantage the Seo family can provide.
My parents settle gradually, still shaken but visibly soothed by the official documentation and Hyunwoo’s composed reassurances.
My mother cries quietly into my father’s shoulder while my father asks Hyunwoo careful questions about the living situation and the plan for after the birth, and Hyunwoo answers each one calmly, he sounds like he’s thought this through from every angle.
I sit beside him and say nothing. My jaw is clenched so tight my teeth ache.
My hands are fisted in my lap, hidden beneath the curve of my belly where no one can see them shaking.
I smile when my mother looks at me, I nod when my father asks if I’m happy, I let Hyunwoo’s hand rest on my lower back as we say our goodbyes and I hug both my parents and promise to call more often and let them know the moment the baby comes.
I hold it together through the hallway, through the front entrance, down the steps to the car.
I hold it together as the servant loads the last of the supplies into the trunk and Hyunwoo opens my door and helps me lower myself into the passenger seat.
I hold it together as Hyunwoo starts the engine and pulls away from the estate, the house shrinking in the side mirror until the trees swallow it.
We’re halfway down the private drive, gravel crunching under the tires, the winter-bare trees sliding past the windows, when Hyunwoo glances over at me and says carefully, “Are you going to say anything?”
I turn to look at him and let the fire I’ve been banking for the last twenty minutes blaze to life.
“How?” I say, low and shaking with a fury that surprises even me. “How could you claim me legally and not even tell me? You told me those papers were fake, Hyunwoo! You looked me in the eye and said they were fake! I didn’t agree to a real claim!”
Hyunwoo winces, his hands tightening on the steering wheel until his knuckles go pale.
He keeps his eyes on the road and says, “I did intend for them to be fake. At first. That was the plan.” He pauses, his jaw working.
“But my parents checked the official registry, which would have shown nothing filed if the documents were forged. So I went back to Mr. Lim and asked him about just filing the real claim temporarily, as a placeholder, while he looked into the legal pathway for annulling it afterward. He told me he could find a way to reverse it, so I just had you sign the real papers for the time being to satisfy my family.”
“And?” I say, my voice hard. “Did he find a way?”
Hyunwoo clears his throat. His fingers drum against the leather of the steering wheel once, twice. “No,” he admits. “Actually. Legally there isn’t a way to reverse a registered claim.” He glances at me and then quickly back at the road. “So you’re mine. Legally.”
I stare at him. The words sit in the air between us, enormous and irreversible, and for a full minute I can’t produce a single sound because my brain is trying to understand the sheer scope of what he’s telling me.
That I have been legally claimed, officially and permanently, as Hyunwoo’s omega, without my knowledge or informed consent, for months.
That every day I’ve spent in his apartment, in his bed, carrying his child, I have been his legal property and didn’t know it.
“Are you out of your mind?” I finally manage.
Hyunwoo gets defensive immediately, his shoulders squaring, his chin lifting in that stubborn way I’ve known since we were children. “Well, does it even matter? We’re bonded. I already have a biological claim on you. Does it matter that it’s legally recognized too? Either way, you’re mine.”
“What if I didn’t want to belong to you?” I say, my voice cracks on the last word in a way that embarrasses me. “What if I’d said no?”
Hyunwoo’s eyes cut to me, dark and sharp and searching, and he says quietly, “Would you have?”
I make a frustrated sound that’s half growl and half groan, my hands pressing flat against my belly where the baby is kicking, apparently energized by my elevated heart rate. “That isn’t the point, Hyunwoo. This isn’t what I agreed to. You took that choice away from me.”
Hyunwoo’s jaw flexes visibly, the muscle jumping beneath his skin, and then without warning he pulls the car sharply to the right, the tires crunching over gravel as the Maserati rolls to a stop on the shoulder of the private drive.
He kills the engine. The sudden silence is deafening, just the ticking of the cooling engine and the distant sound of wind through bare branches.
He turns fully in his seat to face me, one arm braced on the steering wheel, and the look on his face stops me cold.
“What is it that you want, then?” he asks, lacking his usual confidence, his easy charm and cocky certainty. He sounds open. Exposed. “What do you want that I can’t give you? What do I have to do to make you want to stay?”
I stare at him, at the real emotion in his eyes that he’s not bothering to hide or dress up in humor or deflection.
I can see actual fear in the slight tension around his mouth and the way his fingers grip the steering wheel like he needs something to hold onto.
This isn’t the alpha posturing, the territorial declarations, the “you’re my omega” pronouncements that I’ve been pushing back against. This is Hyunwoo, my best friend of twenty-six years, asking me not to leave him.
I swallow hard. “I didn’t think you took any of this seriously,” I say slowly, the anger draining out of me in increments, in its place is a much more complicated emotion.
“I thought it was all just convenience and sex and the arrangement. I thought you were going through the motions because your instincts told you to, not because you actually wanted this. Wanted me.”
Hyunwoo shakes his head once, firmly. “Well, I do. I don’t want you to be with anyone else. I don’t want you to leave after the baby’s born. I want this to be real, Yugyeom.”
I open my mouth and close it again. “But you don’t do exclusive,” I say, grasping at the last argument I have left, the one that’s felt like the safest barrier between me and the terrifying possibility that this could actually work.
“You’ve never wanted to be bonded to anyone.
You said so yourself, a hundred times. You don’t settle down, you don’t commit, you can barely commit to the same restaurant twice. ”
“I didn’t want to be exclusive with anyone except you,” he says, the simplicity of it knocks the breath out of me.
“You’re the only person I’ve ever wanted by my side constantly, Yuggie.
I’ve never wanted anyone to stay the way I want you to stay.
” He pauses, his throat working as he swallows.
“I think maybe I always felt this way. You were always my favorite person, always the one I wanted to be around, always the one I came back to no matter who else I was with. I just didn’t recognize what that meant until we started sleeping together and I realized you were everything I wanted.
The bond only confirmed what was already true. ”