Chapter 108

Yo Han Sung was the illegitimate child of a chaebol family.

A fifth-generation heir to a conglomerate everyone would recognize by name.

Judging by the title alone, it might have sounded fairly dramatic or impressive, but once you picked apart the details, it was nothing more and nothing less than one filthy, tangled family tree.

A reality so unrealistic it belonged closer to the gutter. The third-generation heir of that company had five children, and among them, the third son, Kim Inhoo, had never been interested in the inheritance war with his siblings to begin with. He was also far removed from management or academia—a complete bastard of a delinquent.

Yo Han’s grandfather, who had long since realized he couldn’t handle Kim Inhoo, exiled him to America under the pretext of “studying abroad.” But changing the ground a person stood on didn’t change their nature. He was an Alpha in the worst possible way and couldn’t keep his hot-blooded cock under control. The range of people he fucked was varied too, from some family’s cherished only daughter to Omega entertainers and bar hostesses.

Kim Inhoo loved drinking, music, and women far too much to care about chaebol dignity, and there was no way he had the presence of mind to take hormone regulators. During his rut, he often took whoever was available without even distinguishing his partner.

Because of that, several Omegas ended up pregnant.

Yo Han Sung’s mother, Hanna Sung, was merely one of them.

To be perfectly clear, Yo Han Sung felt not even the slightest pity for his mother.

Birds of a feather, as they said.

Hanna Sung, the Korean-American daughter of second-generation immigrants, was half Korean and half American. She lamented the poverty of her family, who barely scraped by running a dry cleaner in a poor neighborhood, and ran away from home before she became an adult.

As a dominant Omega, the only thing she had was her beautiful face. She survived by using that beauty, and in the process, she met Yo Han’s father and became pregnant.

Any other time, she might have taken some harsh drug bought through shady channels as belated contraception, or gotten rid of the child.

But this time, there was no reason to.

Because the reason Hanna Sung had borrowed even her friend’s most expensive dress to attend that party in the first place was “Kim Inhoo,” the Alpha said to be the son of a Korean chaebol family.

In the end, Hanna Sung succeeded.

And because of that, she failed.

Whatever her purpose had been, she was hardly the only Omega who came looking for Kim Inhoo, Yo Han’s biological father, claiming to be pregnant with his child. Kim Inhoo, drunk on rut and alcohol when he first met Hanna Sung, did not recognize her at all.

“Is it even mine?”

He asked indifferently while groping between another Omega’s legs, then knocked that Omega down beneath him and added,

“Go to the hospital and bill me afterward. Or if you feel wronged, give birth and bring me the genetic test results.”

That was the end of it. With sex unfolding right in front of her eyes, Hanna Sung couldn’t just stand there and endure it, so she stormed out in a fury.

Then she really did give birth and returned to Kim Inhoo with the genetic test results.

“This is insane.”

Unlike before, Kim Inhoo was sober and properly dressed, and he burst into amused laughter.

He even rose from his seat to check the face of the baby in Hanna Sung’s arms. Though his expression showed no particular emotion.

After sitting back down, Kim Inhoo asked several questions. Did anyone around her know it was his child? Did anyone know she had come to see him today? Questions like that, confirming his own safety.

Hanna Sung answered “no” to all of them, and Kim Inhoo let out a mocking laugh.

“So I really got caught, huh?”

After a few insincere compliments about how impressive her effort was and how hard she must have worked to pull such a petty scheme, Kim Inhoo said he would take the documents.

“...I had two originals issued, and I have copies too.”

Hanna Sung warned him, as if telling him not to try anything like destroying the papers.

“Don’t worry. I plan to send them to my father as proof.”

Kim Inhoo answered with an easy smile.

He wasn’t trustworthy, but when Kim Inhoo insisted she wait just one week, Hanna Sung had no choice but to return with the baby to the old apartment where she was behind on rent.

Exactly three days later, a lawyer and an employee dressed in a black suit came to Hanna Sung’s home.

Hanna Sung wrote a statement, signed several documents one after another, and received more money than she could have gotten her hands on even if she had worked for the rest of her life.

The next day, she packed her few belongings into suitcases any way they would fit, took the plane ticket she had received the day before, and headed to the airport.

***

This was where Yo Han Sung’s earliest memories began.

Yo Han and his mother never stayed in one place for long. Sometimes one year, sometimes as long as three. They moved from state to state, drifting through various middle-class neighborhoods.

Most of the time, the problem was romantic entanglement. Hanna Sung had long depended on others and survived through them, and having a child did nothing to improve her pattern of moving from one Alpha to the next.

Hanna Sung had no eye for people. Or perhaps she simply didn’t bother to consider anything if an Alpha showed interest in her. Among them were several pieces of trash, and some raised their hands against young Yo Han.

It wasn’t that he never appealed to his mother. But someone who had only had a child as a means to an end was never going to have anything like maternal love.

She got angry, turned away, then expressed affection toward Yo Han whenever she felt like it. She hugged him, fell into men’s arms, cried, drank, got high on drugs, avoided him, ignored him, then told Yo Han she loved him again.

“Mom can’t live without you, Yo Han. I’m only alive because of you.”

Ridiculously, when Yo Han was young, he thought those words were sincere. He thought his mother truly cherished and loved him endlessly.

At the same time, with a childish mind that barely worked properly, he constantly thought that maybe his mother really might not be able to live.

A synonym for not being able to live was death.

His mother’s words, actions, bizarre behavior, and lovers all planted a suggestion-like anxiety inside Yo Han.

There were people in the world who did not take kind eyes off children, so when he was young, there were a few who worried about Yo Han and asked after his safety. Women in the neighborhood, schoolteachers, and sometimes social workers.

But while Hanna Sung had no maternal love, she did have a strong possessive streak. Her twisted obsession with what belonged to her was tremendous, and whether in the form of love or fixation, it applied to Yo Han all the same.

She thoroughly gaslit young Yo Han. She “protected” the child by any means necessary. She did not let him be “taken away.”

Then his half-sibling was born.

What he learned belatedly was that around that time, Yo Han’s biological father, Kim Inhoo, had died under mysterious circumstances at his home in New York.

As Yo Han grew older, he became more and more meticulous.

He had the money his mother had secured by using him as collateral, a sharp mind, and physical ability superior to others.

On top of that, after his trait manifested, he presented as an extremely dominant Alpha. He had inherited his biological father’s trait exactly.

When he earned good grades and smiled smoothly with a face that had not one flaw to spare, everyone vaguely mistook him for the eldest son of some wealthy, prestigious family.

The truth didn’t matter.

Because by the time the truth came out, they would inevitably have moved somewhere else.

***

Several times, Yo Han considered cutting his mother off with his own hands.

It was not something he would have thought of if he had been alone, but after his sibling was born, he kept turning the thought over in his head.

He was enough contamination.

He was enough sinking.

Whenever he looked at his much-younger sibling, Yo Han was seized by an indescribable emotion.

He could not understand why his mother did not feel this emotion toward him, her child who was not his sibling.

On the day he beat down his mother’s lover for trying to put his hands on his sibling, Yo Han packed his things and got into a car with the child.

But in the end, after driving several kilometers, he returned home.

He had no choice but to return to the home where his mother was.

***

By the time Yo Han entered high school, his mother was in a terrible state.

The accumulation of years spent living abnormally had diseased both her body and mind. Even while dragging around a vulnerable body, she continued to crave something like someone who could not break an addiction.

Looking back, it was something that would never have been filled anyway.

Money could not fill it. Children or family certainly could {N•o•v•e•l•i•g•h•t} not. Love was not the answer either.

Then what was she thirsting for?

What was she pursuing and craving?

The day Yo Han learned an answer even she had never found would never come. Because when Yo Han was nearing graduation, she died after suffering from a chronic illness for years.

As he patted the back of his sibling crying in his arms, Yo Han did not feel even a little sadness.

Instead of sadness, the thought that followed was:

It had taken so long.

Did everyone have such a thing as heavenly luck? The person who stayed beside Hanna Sung during her final years, when she had grown as weak as she possibly could, was truly a good man.

He had come from South Korea and was an assistant pastor at a local Korean church. ℯℯ𝘭.

Yo Han did not care whether the man’s prayers had lessened his mother’s sins, or whether his mother repented and went to heaven.

What mattered was that even if it was a miracle that happened to coincide with the period when his mother had weakened, because of him, their family had been bound together like a family for at least a few years. What mattered was that he looked after Yo Han’s sibling like a real father.

The man whom Yo Han and his sibling called “Uncle” said he had been an actor in South Korea when he was young.

“Yo Han. When I saw you act last Christmas, I thought you might have a talent for acting.”

That had only been part of a church event he’d participated in because he couldn’t stand listening to his mother whine. A flimsy little skit. Yo Han dismissed the man’s words as a joke.

Then, at last, when his mother met her death.

When he finally felt as if his life had become his own.

“I want to go to South Korea.”

Yo Han said the one sentence to him that would change his life.