For three days after that rainy night at the crosswalk, Seo-jun had a fever.
Not a blazing fever, but a stubborn, low-grade fever that ebbed and surged in his wrist like the phantom pulse from where he had brushed against the stranger.A dull, burning pressure at the back of his skull as he sat in the back row of his architecture lecture, tracing idle patterns onto his drafting paper with his tongue.
One moment the scent of dry-erase markers and burnt coffee grounds that clung to the lecture hall was familiar; the next, it had soured into a thick, choking miasma of unfamiliar chemicals.
A metallic tang rolled off the Alpha three rows in front of him, and a sickly-sweet, powdery musk clung to the Omega by the door.Betas didn’t have pheromones.
They didn’t have scents.
It had been twenty-three years since his first pack meeting, when the world had opened up to him in a riot of color and sound, and he hadn’t understood what any of it meant.
But now, the lecture hall reeked of crowded bodies.
“You look like a corpse, Seo-jun,” , his classmate Ji-ho murmured, his nose crinkling as he leaned over to smell Seo-jun’s neck.
He paused, plucking idly at the hem of Seo-jun’s sleeve, his brows knitting together in a puzzled frown.
“Wait, is something wrong?
Your soap changed, didn’t it?
Whenever you move, there’s a faint smell…
winter flowers?
Camellias?” Seo-jun’s heart gave an anxious lurch.
“I’m coming down with something,” he lied, shoving his sketchbook and a growing stack of doodled papers into his school bag with shaking fingers.
“I’ll go to the clinic.” He used up the last of his discretionary budget for that week to afford an emergency appointment at the National Genetic Research Center later that afternoon.
If his senses were malfunctioning, Seo-ah wouldn’t allow him to waste any more time.The clinic smelled of antiseptic wool and burnt incense, but Dr.
Yoon Seung-woo was everything the newspapers had written about him: an approachable, human face framed by silver-framed glasses, his white coat carefully ironed over neatly pressed slacks.
He gestured for Seo-jun to have a seat in front of the large, bright monitors that displayed his blood test results.
Behind a row of standard-issue medical scans, red banners of alarm scrolled horizontally across the screen.
UNREGISTERED AUTOSOMAL RECEPTORS .
0.00% MATCH WITH KNOWN OMEGA GENETIC SIGNATURES .
ROYAL PRIME LINEAGE .
Dr.
Yoon didn’t seem particularly surprised.
In fact, the careful, calculating creases in his face deepened as he read the results.
His heart pounded in his throat.
He had chased this boy’s genetic code for fifteen years, across abandoned laboratories and sealed government vaults.
And now, whoever had tucked this boy in the shadows of the pack had made a grave mistake in trying to hide him, because his genetic disguise had failed, leaving him vulnerable.
“Doctor,” Seo-jun said, his voice barely more than a whisper, “is it serious?” The words came out in a trembling puff of breath as Yoon closed the test results.
He stood, giving the boy a reassuring smile that didn’t touch his eyes.
“Nothing a light dose of nerves won’t fix, Seo-jun-ssi.” He tapped a few keys on his keyboard, bringing up a new series of standard health maintenance protocols on the monitor.
“When the body fails to compensate for extreme physical stress, phantom smells and sensations are common.
Your body has simply reverted to its natural state, Seo-jun-ssi.
It seems you were born a Beta, not an Omega, after all.
Here, take these.” Seo-jun let out a long, relieved sigh, bowing deeply as he accepted the prescription slip.
“Thank you, Doctor.
Thank you so much.” As usual, the gentle doctor’s smile vanished the moment Seo-jun left the room.
He turned away from the observation window, pulling out a mobile phone from an inner pocket of his coat.
“Did you get it?” “It was difficult,” Cha Do-yoon’s voice rumbled from the other end of the line, “but yes.” Yoon’s lips quirked into a satisfied grin.
“Shut it down for now.
The boy turned up at my clinic today.
His body is failing to mask its natural state, Do-yoon.” He paused, a glint of feral satisfaction in his voice.
“His first heat is coming, and I’m looking forward to finally seeing him when it does.” A long silence stretched between them.
“We’ll take him,” Cha said quietly.
“As soon as it happens.”