Chapter 260

Siron and Baekgyeong, with Isaac, left the warden at the entrance to the sealed isolation ward and passed through the steel door. At the end of the long corridor, behind a wall of reinforced glass ten centimeters thick, a man in a white jumpsuit was waiting for them.

Sitting on a concrete bed built flush into the wall, he rested his hands neatly on his knees, spine straight, chin lifted without the slightest movement. He had been murmuring nonstop—like a man thinking out loud—until the sound of footsteps drew near; then he closed his mouth.

The instant Siron saw Gezar, he felt certain there had to be some inherited strain of bleak, decadent aura in the Bazelli line. People give villains alluring narratives, surely because of men like this.

He had the air of a fallen prophet locked in a psychiatric ward. The hollows of his eyes were dark and reddened, as if he might spill tears of hatred at any moment.

Under the bright fluorescents recessed in the ceiling, his irises showed stark cerulean. Expressionless, he regarded the three who had come to the front of his glass, one after another. His indigo gaze lingered longest on Isaac’s face.

“You live. The god of death still shows you mercy.”

He began in a language Siron didn’t understand, words with cadence, like a line of verse. Then the speech stopped—as if he had suddenly forgotten how to speak.

Siron stole a glance at Isaac. Time was slipping away, and no one said anything. But he wasn’t sure he had the right to speak first, so he let the silence cover him too.

Instead he studied Gezar—the man who, in three days, would no longer belong to this world.

Though they were uncle and nephew, Isaac and Gezar resembled each other so strongly they might have been father and son. If Isaac spent twenty years in prison, he would become just like Gezar.

Gezar seemed the sort to keep tight control of himself. Even after nearly two decades in a solitary cell no one visited, he hadn’t lost track of his haircut cycle, hadn’t entirely forgotten to shave. In his sixties, he looked barely past fifty. Aside from a faint burn scar on his left cheek, he bore none of the melted flesh Siron had imagined from the stories about him. He had hardly any gray; his hair was a dense black. WritersResources

He almost never blinked. Staring at his face gave Siron the eerie sense of peering into a vast hole that opened onto ruins.

Where skin lay bare, faint traces of self-harm remained. The crease between his brows was warped like a crumpled sheet of metal, as if no moment of happiness could ever smooth it out.

His mind did not seem present here. His eyes grew emptier, as if he carried the punishment of being chained for eternity while an eagle tore out his liver—unease and solitude borne alone, an atmosphere of pain.

Paradoxically, that suffering left a strange impression on Siron. A middle-aged man destroyed to the marrow looked holy and beautiful, like a messiah from a master painting.

People were fickle. Even while spying on another’s pain, instinct judged beauty and ugliness. Guiltily, Siron looked away.

Beautiful or not, there was a serious problem. Gezar didn’t seem sound of mind.

He thought: I’m going to lose it. After everything it took to get here.

The hope that this man’s help would end all their hardship evaporated. Then again, this was the man who had killed his partner and adopted son and tried to burn himself alive. And he had spent some twenty years sealed away, suffocating in loneliness without contact with the outside.

Twenty years. An unbearably long time. No one could endure it without going mad.

Or could they?

Siron jerked his head up.

He had done the interview with Reporter Spencer. He’d planned to write a memoir.

A murderer of two, planning a memoir to varnish his crimes? A person calculating like that wouldn’t break down in spirit during confinement.

Siron drew breath to speak.

“Hey, you two. I figured you’d have a lot to say to each other after nearly twenty years, so I was trying to read the room, but it’s already been ten minutes.”

Arms folded, Baekgyeong pushed up the lock of hair slipping over his brow, irritated. He strode right up to the glass and snapped his fingers.

“Hey. You with us?”

Gezar’s vacant gaze shifted to him. Like someone with too many thoughts to register external change, he stared for a long moment and finally spoke.

“You must be Baekgyeong.”

“Hm? Yeah. Yes. That’s me.”

Gezar’s eyes drifted lazily from Baekgyeong to Siron.

“You’re the same as Yuri?”

It seemed the warden had passed along the message safely.

He had never thought a day would come when he would introduce himself as an omega. Flushing red as a radish, Siron nodded.

“Yes. That’s right. An... omega.”

Gezar’s clouded eyes fluttered rapidly. He let out a thin laugh.

“So they made one after all.”

“Sure did. They turned a perfectly decent man into an omega just to wreck his life.”

He hadn’t asked for agreement, but Siron found himself chiming in before he realized it. Feeling belated embarrassment under Gezar’s distant gaze, he asked as politely as he could:

“I know it’s presumptuous, but may I ask you something? I want to know the method for imprinting. As you can imagine, I’ve had a lot of trouble because of pheromones...”

Siron glanced at Baekgyeong and Isaac without meaning to, then asked with plain, urgent sincerity:

“There are more alphas than I can count, and I’m the only omega. If you’d tell me how to imprint... I would never forget the favor.”

He shone with the solemnity of a martial artist seeking out a hidden master to receive a secret technique. But the master, long sequestered in a prison cell, seemed to have no interest in some greenhorn.

Something in Siron must have touched him, though. Suddenly, life gathered behind Gezar’s once-empty eyes. Sorrow and rage, torment and regret—every burning passion that made a man feel his life as pain—spiraled inward into his gaze.

He let out a breathy laugh like wind.

“Because of pheromones... you’ve suffered?”

“Uh—yes. I mean... sort of.”

“Hah. Yes. Heh... heh.”

The hollow, futile laugh warped slowly into something feral. At last he burst out, clutching his stomach, wiping at a leaked tear.

“You—hahaha—know nothing. Hah! You really... know nothing.”

It took a long time for the laughter to fade. Even holding his mouth shut, it kept forcing its way out.

No one said he was insane, Siron thought, forcing a smile while the situation slid the wrong way.

Spent from the purge of laughter, Gezar rose with renewed animation and braced a palm against the glass nearest Isaac. Then he spoke again in the language Siron still couldn’t understand.

“Isaac.”

Gezar smiled gently.

“I thought if you ever made an omega of your own, you’d come crawling back—begging me for your life with no shame.”

At the word omega, Siron’s eyes slid to Isaac, and then, struck by a foreign feeling, fixed on him. Facing Gezar seemed to be too much for him. Beneath Isaac’s rigid expression, shame flickered like a faint mirage.

“How far have your symptoms progressed? There should be a pre–biological stasis stage as defined by BRI.”

Isaac dropped his eyes and let out a short, mirthless breath.

“How do you even know that.”

“In exchange for passing along data on alphas to the federal research institute, I received your daily reports. Until they shut the institute down, even this boring prison offered small amusements... So answer me, Isaac.”

Isaac replied in a tone leveled flat. “I’ve entered Stage Two.”

“So you’ve reached the phase of vertigo and delayed recovery. Not much time left for that life of yours.”

Gezar studied Isaac’s exceptional pallor and the stoop of his back, then abruptly changed the subject.

“A beautiful youth.”

Isaac hesitated, eyes flicking to Siron’s feet and away. “...More than beautiful.”

At that, Baekgyeong let out a dry laugh. Focused on Baekgyeong’s sour expression and the not-quite-friendly current between Gezar and Isaac, Siron felt a question rise.

“Do you understand him?”

He pressed close to Baekgyeong’s side and whispered in his ear. Baekgyeong covered the ticklish ear with a palm and nodded.

“Albanian. Not going to do live translation. I’ll tell you outside.”

Even Baekgyeong understood Albanian with ease, and Siron alone stood there like an alien, unable to parse Gezar’s words. Annoyed, Siron shot him a side-eye as Baekgyeong swept up his fallen hair and tipped his chin.

In the meantime, Gezar came a step nearer to the glass. Facing Isaac, he pointed at Siron, who couldn’t keep still, fussing with worried energy.

“Did you knot him?”

Isaac scowled at him, then finally nodded.

“Was it during overlapping cycles?”

“I did that.”

Baekgyeong slipped into the exchange smoothly. Gezar’s gaze shifted to him, then back past him to Siron a few steps behind.

“When our cycles overlapped, I knotted him and bit the pheromone gland. I met every condition for imprinting I’ve ever heard of...”

Cheeks flushed, Baekgyeong scratched at his face. “It was great, but nothing changed. ...Is it possible we imprinted and just don’t know it?”

Gezar slowly shook his head.

“The method wasn’t wrong. The conditions just weren’t perfect. And if imprinting had occurred, you couldn’t fail to notice it. Imprinting acts... immediately.”

Arms folded, Baekgyeong ran a hand down his jawline, thinking. After a brief silence, he asked at last:

“Didn’t feel a thing. So that means no imprint, for sure.”

“It might be better if you never know.”

“Better not to know?”

“Imprinting is an unpleasant experience. The problem is, you feel that unpleasantness until the day you die.”

Baekgyeong couldn’t make sense of it, so he held his tongue and waited for more. Gezar leaned his forehead against the glass. As if bored by a Q&A from which he stood to gain nothing, the light drained from his eyes again. Afraid he’d lose interest entirely, Baekgyeong blurted, urgent:

“Explain it. What is imprinting, exactly?”