Baek Kanghyeon didn’t shrink in the slightest under Haeil’s pressure.
Alphas who’ve been crushed beneath a Dominant Alpha’s pheromones say the sensation is damn near pain.
An immense weight like several times the gravity applied to you alone, a razor-edged prickling and throb like sparks flying from every direction—some even feel a dizzying headache and chills when it’s bad.
Alphas who know that pain try to get out of there the instant they realize the other is a Dominant Alpha. At least, every Alpha Kwon Haeil had pinned with his pheromones had done exactly that.
But Kanghyeon didn’t.
He was meeting Haeil’s rough pheromones head-on and batting them away. Not cowed—his eyes said, if you’re going to push, then go ahead and try me.
Kwon Haeil swallowed the admiring thought, This bastard, huh?, and asked:
“Are you a Dominant Alpha?”
Haeil was already sure the new neighbor was a Dominant Alpha.
So he knew the answer to his own question, but he still didn’t withdraw his pheromones. He pressed harder, like he wanted to test his strength for once against a fellow Dominant Alpha.
Kanghyeon, also a Dominant Alpha, felt that plainly.
He didn’t like the man in front of him.
Is he a brawler.
The Omega who’d enjoyed pheromone violence was long gone.
Even so, Kwon Haeil was acting like picking fights with other Alphas was his daily routine. Those rough pheromones that seemed to think only of smashing someone down were deeply unpleasant.
And the way he’d opened with rude, casual speech to a stranger added its full share to that displeasure.
“Do I need to answer that?”
“Don’t if you don’t want to.”
Haeil lifted a shoulder. As if to say he could guess that much without an answer.
Then he abruptly reeled in his pheromones and simply stuck out his hand. His palm faced up, less a request for a handshake than like he was asking for something to be placed in it.
Kanghyeon looked down at Haeil’s outstretched hand. The bones were a little thicker than his, the fingers a touch longer. Even that rubbed him wrong.
“What is this hand supposed to be?”
When Kanghyeon asked, Haeil grinned.
“Housewarming rice cakes.”
“…?”
At the out-of-nowhere demand, Kanghyeon genuinely wondered how Kwon Haeil’s head worked.
Faced with a situation he found unintelligible, he gave no reply to Haeil’s words and held to a cold silence instead.
After a few seconds of stillness, Haeil’s face twitched with a hint of impatience.
“Ah, you know, it’s the usual thing people do. You don’t know? When you move in, you go around to the neighbors with rice cakes and say something like, ‘nice to meet you, please be good neighbors’—”
Thud—!
Before Haeil even finished, Kanghyeon shut the door. Very mercilessly, very decisively.
Left out in the cold, Haeil let out a soft, deflating laugh.
“Little shit. Prickly as hell.”
His easy grin faded.
Doesn’t seem like a particularly polite bastard, but a Dominant Alpha…
In his head, the moment he’d clashed pheromones with Kanghyeon replayed.
He’d felt it with the Omega earlier, and he’d felt it again just now.
The faint sweetness hidden inside Baek Kanghyeon’s heavy, saturated Alpha pheromones.
What Alpha in the world gives off a sweetness like that?
The sweetness itself was very faint. Let your guard down and you’d lose it in an instant.
But the scent was sweet enough to snap you clear in a heartbeat. It was a strange aroma on a different level from pheromones he commonly sensed from Omegas.
A dominant trait is, by nature, exceptional at discerning and feeling others’ pheromones.
Haeil in particular was highly sensitive to the fragrance pheromones carried. That sensitivity was keen enough to pick out, at a glance, someone with the scent he wanted from among hundreds of Alphas and Omegas.
Which was why the new neighbor struck Kwon Haeil as odd.
He had Alpha pheromones powerful enough to stand against Haeil—and hidden in them was a sweetness you could not possibly dismiss.
Holding onto that puzzlement, Haeil stood for a while in deep thought in front of Kanghyeon’s door.
***
Perhaps because of the unexpected commotion, Kanghyeon felt a pointless fatigue and fell asleep early. Maybe it was that the tightly wound routine he’d run until now had slackened a little.
Waking before dawn, as early as he’d turned in, he finally took his time to look around the interior.
The new place was definitely large.
Absurdly, uselessly so.
Even excluding the bedroom, study, private office, dressing room, and three bathrooms, there were seven rooms left with no particular purpose. With the split-level layout and the wide upstairs living room, two large families could live here in plenty.
At this scale it might be about the size of an annex at Cheongunjae.
Cheongunjae was the traditional-house estate where the Baekcheong Group’s chairman—Baek Kanghyeon’s father—lived. Divided into the broad main quarters and two annexes, it had a reputation as the largest and most imposing residence among the homes of Korea’s conglomerate heads.
So measured purely by overall area, even this vast top floor couldn’t presume to compare to Cheongunjae. Which meant there was no reason he couldn’t accept this level of ostentation.
It only made him think the movers must have been rather taken aback by how little there was to bring over from his previous place.
Maybe I should fill in some furniture.
The basics were mostly in place, yet here and there the emptiness felt like it would let a chill bleed in. Every word he spoke boomed back like a cave.
…No hurry. He must have deliberately left it for me to furnish with whoever’s to be my match, anyway.
His father, who hadn’t interfered much with where he lived until now, had personally chosen this place. He wasn’t dull enough to miss the meaning.
Dropping onto the living-room sofa, Kanghyeon looked out through the broad windows where the sunlight poured in.
Beyond glass spotless as if no hand had ever touched it, the serene clouds in the clear sky floated large. Staring at them, it felt as if he were alone, quietly afloat above the sky. The tension in his whole body unwound at ease.
At least it’s not a bad place to rest for a while.
Except for the weird Alpha next door.
Kanghyeon’s brow creased faintly as Kwon Haeil’s face came to mind.
In the end, to wipe that unpleasant image from his head, he had to pick up a thick stack of documents early.
That evening.
Timed to dinner, his third brother Baek Heeu came by.
“You haven’t eaten yet, right?”
At the door, he was grinning with two hefty bags in hand. A stout bundle of green onions poked out past the top and bobbed with his smile.
Seeing Heeu’s thin arms without a hint of muscle, Kanghyeon snatched the bags away in one motion. Unlike Heeu, who’d been straining, Kanghyeon held both in one hand at once without the slightest sign of effort.
“Why are you carrying this by yourself? What’s the driver doing?”
“I sent him to go eat. And I can carry this much.”
“You’ll wreck your wrist. Next time just call me instead.”
“Yes, yes, got it—”
With his red lips cutely jutting, Heeu stepped into the house without waiting for permission.
“What is this, why is it so cold?”
Reaching the living room, Heeu hunched his shoulders and pulled a face.
“Ugh, you still like it freezing? Or does it feel colder because there’s no furniture?”
Kanghyeon, who had set the grocery bags on the kitchen counter, ducked into the dressing room and came back out.
“You just get cold easily. If you’d told me you were coming, I would’ve turned the temperature up.”
He draped a cardigan from the dressing room over Heeu’s shoulders. He also didn’t forget to raise the temperature for the whole place.
At his gentle care, Heeu smiled brightly.
“Hehe, thanks.”
For a moment, Kanghyeon thought of yesterday’s Omega.
The compact height with a head that came to about the shoulder, the slender limbs—especially the big eyes—were quite like Heeu. Maybe that was why he’d meddled so uselessly.
Heeu carefully put his arms through the cardigan Kanghyeon had settled on him. Once he did, the sleeves fell in a thick swath to about his fingertips.
Looking faintly like his pride had been pricked, Heeu let Kanghyeon smooth his hair with a gentle hand.
“What did you buy so much of?”
“I’m going to cook things that keep well. Otherwise you’ll stock the fridge with nothing but bottled water and black coffee again. Plus those tasteless energy bars.”
“Maybe you just don’t understand the phrase ‘respect my preferences.’”
“Can you really wave that off as a preference? You’ll collapse at this rate. You’ve picked up someone’s taste for that unhinged-dominant nonsense.”
“What does ‘unhinged-dominant’ even mean?”
“You don’t need to know.”