Chapter 238

Right—he would have.

When Gezar Bazelli, the first alpha, altered his own traits to cure a genetic disease, he could not have foreseen innocent people dying as a consequence.

“But, uh.”

Dropping the eager, detective-like posture and returning to his usual self, Siron glanced at Isaac and asked cautiously,

“Do you think Gezar is in his right mind?”

“What do you mean by that.”

When Siron hesitated to go on, Baekgyeong stepped in.

“Your foster father killed Yuri Berec and your brothers, then tried to set himself on fire. They said he did it because he went insane.”

At Baekgyeong’s rude, blunt words, Isaac slightly raised one eyebrow. After a long moment, he leaned back in his chair and answered in a quiet voice.

“Gezar suffering from mania and killing Yuri Berec and my brothers... that’s an interesting interpretation.”

“So it’s not true?”

Isaac lowered his gaze to his rough hands and gave a gloomy laugh.

“Close. He wasn’t insane, but he looked like someone who was.”

Baekgyeong drew in a short breath of exasperation.

“It’s important, so say it properly. Why did Gezar Bazelli kill Yuri Berec and your brothers?”

At Baekgyeong’s unvarnished question—he had no patience for circling around things—Isaac went still.

“No, then why did Gezar spare you?”

Planting his hands on the table and leaning forward as if to browbeat him, Baekgyeong demanded,

“Haah, just talk. Do you really think Gezar will hand over the method of imprint to you? Huh? It’s fucking important, so stop dragging it out and answer.”

Isaac tilted his head. His eyes, fixed on the edge of the table, grew gradually sharper. Exhaling slowly, taming the heat that had flared up, he rose to his feet.

“Gezar and I share the same objective. So he will cooperate with me.”

Still unconvinced, Baekgyeong asked coolly,

“Objective? What objective?”

After a brief silence, a strange, sardonic smile touched Isaac’s lips—a chill indifference laced with a hot, consuming passion. An ominous smile.

“The eradication of alphas.”

An uncomfortable air spread among the three of them. Isaac field-stripped the slide of his pistol, laid the pieces out on the floor, and inspected each part. The way he swabbed the barrel and applied lubricant—so grimly resolute it was like watching a soldier marching off to war—made Siron fall silent and watch his face.

Once he learned the method of imprint, Isaac would kill Baekgyeong. Everyone here knew that. For a man whose goal was the eradication of alphas, Baekgyeong’s death would be nothing more or less than yanking out a tuft of weeds.

When Siron contemplated the possibility that Baekgyeong might die, even his hatred for the bastard thinned. He could see his own future: wearing black for the rest of his life, honoring the bastard’s death, laying out a spread at the graveside with kimchijjigae and egg roll that Baekgyeong liked, and drinking soju by the bowl until he was blind drunk.

He couldn’t live out the rest of his life like that.

Even with a life like a candle in the wind, Baekgyeong was still working hard, digging through materials. Watching him do that didn’t sit right with Siron either.

What if Siron asked Isaac to spare Baekgyeong in exchange for imprint with himself? If Baekgyeong somehow wrung a cure out of Vile Group, maybe he could treat the disease that sent alphas into early brain death. But as Siron watched him, immersed and tireless in the search, he couldn’t bring himself to say such a thing out loud.

Then came a loud clatter of metal and plastic. Isaac was sorting the laid-out firearms into the sniper rifle case, the field pack, and the gun trunk. He finished swiftly, let out a short breath, and stood. He looked about to carry everything at once, but he clearly didn’t have enough hands.

“I’ll help you carry them.”

Without waiting for Isaac’s reply, Siron snatched up the rifle case from his hands.

“It’s fine.”

“Your hand’s hurt. Where are we moving them?”

With two bag-sized cases—each as big as a golf bag—slung over both shoulders, Siron asked.

“I’ll carry them. Give them here.”

“Forget it. You just finish what you were doing.”

Stopping Baekgyeong as he tried to stand, Siron put distance between himself and the two men. With no better option, Isaac picked up the remaining loads and started walking.

He headed to the study at the end of the second-floor hallway. Setting the cases and trunk down between the window and the fireplace, he took the case from Siron and slid it under the sofa. Then he opened the trunk, took out pistols and spare magazines, and placed them in the desk drawers, one compartment at a time.

“Do you have something to say to me?”

Siron couldn’t quite get the words out; he drew a deep breath.

“Thinking it over... this is probably not going to be easy for you.”

“Not easy? What do you mean.”

After hesitating, Siron forced himself to speak.

“Meeting Gezar.”

Isaac stopped what he was doing.

“If you’re worried it’ll mess up the operation, then that—”

“No! No, that’s not why I brought it up.”

Startled, Siron flapped his hands and spoke hurriedly.

“You lost your family. ...I thought it would be hard on you.”

It was, moreover, kin murdering kin. A family he had been close to killing another family he had been close to. As if he had no wish to speak on it any further, Isaac looked at Siron with a hardened expression.

“It was so long ago I don’t feel anything anymore. You don’t need to console me.”

At Isaac drawing that line, Siron scratched the back of his head, awkward. Isaac finished sorting the guns and sat down in the desk chair. On one side of the desk, the disassembled parts of a laptop were laid out—earlier that dawn, while fleeing Hybris, he had jumped into the river and soaked the machine.

How long would they have to live on the run? If he imprinted with an alpha, could he really blend in and live an ordinary life among other people?

Isaac looked like he wanted to wipe out the human subspecies called alpha altogether. Siron wondered—half not wanting to know—whether the targets of that eradication included not only Baekgyeong but Isaac himself. In any case, Siron felt that the journey binding the three of them would end before long.

“If I imprint with you... is that the end of it?”

At the sudden question, Isaac frowned slightly and looked over at him.

“You want to know if we won’t interfere in each other’s lives after that?”

Siron wasn’t sure that was what he wanted, but he nodded for now. Isaac, his face impassive as he regarded Siron, dropped his gaze back to the desk and answered,

“That’s how it will be.”

“...So I can go back to my everyday life?”

Checking each component one by one, Isaac raised his head and met Siron’s eyes.

“Yes.”

But Siron read a flicker of conflict in Isaac’s gaze—the look of someone who thinks he ought to lie yet can hardly resist the temptation to tell the truth.

This untrustworthy man would use him like a part and discard him. Even the only omega, Yoon Siron. Gezar Bazelli had also survived all this time through his imprint with Yuri Berec, and in the end Yuri Berec had been killed by Gezar.

“You’re lying.”

Siron glared at him.

“Another lie. What are you hiding?”

Isaac shook his head indifferently.

“Other than the fact that imprint erases pheromones from other trait-bearers, I don’t know anything either. Not knowing, what else can I do but lie.”

Siron studied his face carefully, searching for traces of falsehood. But whether it was a lie or the truth, he had no way of confirming it.

Isaac silently met Siron’s upturned gaze. From anger at sixty degrees to depression at eleven degrees, a face neither warm nor cold enough to freeze over suddenly blurted something absurd.

“Are you going to kill yourself later?”

Ha. Isaac was impressed.

“Why do you think that.”

He asked almost reflexively—then realized that in saying “the eradication of alphas,” he had included himself.

“You said you’d eradicate alphas. You’re an alpha too.”

“I said that, but it isn’t something that can actually be done. I can’t take them all on by myself.”

Siron narrowed his eyes at Isaac with a distrustful look and jutted out his lips.

“Don’t kill Baekgyeong. You need him alive to make a suppressant.”

“I can’t promise that—but I’ll try.”

Isaac returned to his work. It was a firm statement not to bother him any further. With a shadowed face, Siron looked at him, then stood. He pulled a random book from the study shelf, sat on the sofa, and opened it.

Seeing the title of the book Siron had taken, Isaac’s expression turned peculiar. The one he’d picked up was Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. A classic novel of obsessive love and hate and longing that crossed life and death—Heathcliff and Catherine.

As he so often did, Isaac told Siron one more lie. Imprint had a side effect of binding two people together emotionally. No matter how far apart they were, like entangled particles that shared a single fate, an alpha and an omega who had imprinted experienced identical emotional responses. It was a ravaging, desolate longing.