prologue

By then, my cheeks were so soaked that I couldn’t even tell if it was rain or tears.

Had I ever been this afraid in my life? While I was running in a panic, I spotted a car. It was an expensive one that didn’t belong in this alley. I could guess whose it was.

I was so startled that I couldn’t bring myself to pass it, and I slipped into the alley to hide. But I had run straight into a dead end.

"Haah, haah..."

My terrified eyes darted around helplessly. Before I had jumped off the railing, the face I had met, Cha Seonwoo’s face, was still vivid in my mind.

In the end, I hid inside the parking lot of the villa there. Crouched behind a large car, I buried my face between my knees and sobbed. My rain-soaked body kept shaking without end.

How much time had passed like that?

I couldn’t hear anything through the rain, but I sensed it anyway, instinctively. Cha Seonwoo’s pheromones were getting closer.

I curled up as much as I could, suppressing my presence, and squeezed my eyes shut.

But even if I tried so hard not to see him, I couldn’t stop sensing his pheromones.

Before long, the dominant Alpha’s pheromones filled my lungs, and the rain that had been pouring violently over my head suddenly stopped. More accurately, the rain had stopped falling only over my head.

My blue lips trembled. Feeling the dominant Alpha’s pheromones tightening around my throat, I slowly lifted my head.

"You came a long way, Haemin."

Cha Seonwoo was looking down at me, holding a hand out to shield me from the rain.

* * *

"Don’t!"

My shout echoed through the narrow alley. The more I struggled to break free, the tighter the arms wrapped around me squeezed, until I could hardly breathe.

Still held against him, I was carried out of the alley, where the car I had seen earlier was waiting for us. My face went pale in an instant. I felt like I was being dragged to a slaughterhouse.

I used every last bit of strength I had to shove at Cha Seonwoo’s chest, but it was useless. The car door opened, and I was shoved inside.

"Ungh!"

The seat was a mess from the rain, but Cha Seonwoo didn’t care. Soon after, I heard the door lock.

"I hate things that are a pain in the ass and need too much attention."

Cha Seonwoo ran a hand through his hair irritably as he looked at me, dumbstruck, staring at the closed door.

"If I’ve gone this far for you, don’t you get it by now?"

I panted harshly and shook my head. Gripped by fear, I couldn’t even make sense of what Cha Seonwoo was saying.

"Let me out..."

I grabbed the door handle and pulled, but the tightly locked door wouldn’t budge. Without any regard for my frantic struggle, the driver in the front started the car.

"Please, let me out."

My dulled voice cracked pathetically.

"Why."

My body was shaking, whether from the rain or from Cha Seonwoo, I couldn’t tell. I bit down hard on my already shredded lips and shouted.

"Why? Because I don’t like you anymore. Because I have no reason to be by your side anymore...!"

At that moment, Cha Seonwoo’s sharp pheromones swept over me without leaving a single gap. It wasn’t just the intention to pin me down. They leaked out randomly, as if beyond his control, and poured down on me, pulsing with an unbearable sense of unease.

I had always thought I was the one who faltered in front of him. But Cha Seonwoo’s pheromones made even me feel restless.

And Cha Seonwoo quickly realized that I was thrown into confusion by his pheromones. A faint laugh touched his lips as he met my wavering gaze, and he said, as if it wasn’t surprising at all,

"How sudden..."

Unlike the surging pheromones, his low voice was calm.

"I didn’t know you’d even leave your younger brother behind. And to leave him like that when he was sick."

His gaze, unlike usual, seemed hungry as it swept over me.

"That won’t do anymore... I’ll have to hold onto you some other way. What should I do?"

The car, from which not even music was playing, rang with the sound of rain battering the windows. Inside that eerie silence, broken only by the noise, Cha Seonwoo slowly closed his eyes and opened them again. The unease in his eyes had disappeared completely, replaced by certainty.

A vague sense of foreboding slowly swallowed me whole. My skin prickled, and a chill ran through me. Before I knew it, I was shaking my head, and Cha Seonwoo’s voice broke the silence.

"Haemin. You really need to get pregnant."

"...What?"

"I think that’s what’s needed between us."