Chapter 261

Baekgyeong’s prodding made Gezar smile faintly.

“It is... feeling the other’s emotions at every moment. It’s the process of going mad, buried under longing.”

Taken together, his words made imprinting sound like an experience where you react instantly to the other’s feelings while suffering unbearable yearning—as if the two of you shared a small portion of the brain, with parts of emotion and sensation linked.

Baekgyeong scowled. “Longing? You mean falling in love?”

He studied Gezar in silence. Every patch of exposed skin bore marks of injury and repair, over and over. Torture scars—or self-inflicted? Without taking his eyes off the milky film in Gezar’s right eye, Baekgyeong asked:

“You’re still imprinted?”

“...Yes.”

“You’re still imprinted with someone who’s dead?”

Gezar slowly lowered his gaze. Quiet settled over his eyelids. He looked like a man trapped in a dream. Staring somewhere near Siron’s feet, he answered in a low voice:

“Imprinting is not a blessing, but an inconvenient brand. That sensation never leaves you until the day you die. If one of the pair is lost first, the one left behind lives the rest of his life crushed under endless longing. As if... living forever while holding an unceasing hemorrhage.”

Baekgyeong pictured blood pouring without end from a severed limb. It wasn’t unfamiliar. In the four years he’d lived apart from Siron, he had gasped with loneliness, steeped in solitude, plagued by phantom pain as if a part of his body had been cut away.

He hadn’t undergone imprinting, but he knew: if Siron died before him, he would go mad.

You killed Yuri Berec yourself. Shameless bastard. Didn’t think it would hurt this much, did you?

He could hardly stand that he had to learn from this piece of trash who didn’t repent of the murder he’d committed and only pitied himself. Forcing patience, he asked:

“Side effects or not, I have to imprint. Like I said, there are countless alphas and one damned omega—him. And Hybris is hunting us. You... do you know what Hybris is?”

Gezar nodded without looking at him. Baekgyeong wondered how a man cut off in prison had learned of Hybris, but there was no time to ask. Less than ten minutes remained.

Only the most important question was left.

He swallowed and stepped closer to the glass, snapped his fingers at Gezar’s eye level to focus his attention. “Enough teasing. Tell me how to imprint.”

He smiled with a desperation that bordered on servile. “I’ve heard he has feelings. If you don’t want to tell him, then tell me alone.”

Wearing a mean, boyish smile, Baekgyeong ran his tongue over a canine and quietly watched for Isaac and Gezar’s reactions.

What would happen the moment they left the prison? Could their imperfect alliance hold? He’d brought a Glock 17 in without hesitation; with Siron between them, conflict with Isaac still felt inevitable.

Isaac, silent until now, stepped up and set a hand on Baekgyeong’s shoulder. “Doesn’t it occur to you I could torture you and find out?”

“Why assume I’d just let you?”

Torture or not, he would never let Isaac steal the chance to imprint. He would rather die than see Siron and Isaac pining for each other. Who else in this world would reach out, even with a half-baked plan, and say let’s escape the worst together?

Thinking of that moment made his chest heave. The name Yoon Siron had been carved into him like a blind religion. If he became a wanderer who couldn’t remain in the world called Yoon Siron, he would drift alone like an asteroid off its orbit, lost in endless foreign emptiness.

Restless, he glanced back at Isaac. If anyone should want imprinting with Siron as desperately as he did, it was Isaac—but Isaac seemed lost in a different thought, gazing at the man beyond the reinforced glass, a man slowly broken by merciless time, with a singular, private feeling.

As if the years had rinsed language away, they regarded one another in the hush.

“It’s my fault.”

Isaac spoke without thinking, inhaled sharply, startled at the unplanned words. But Gezar pressed in, as if he’d been waiting for this moment.

“Your fault?”

Isaac’s face crumpled in dismay. Avoiding Gezar’s eyes, he spoke like a man bearing heavy fatigue. “Failing to stop Ezra is on me.”

Gezar swallowed the thick saliva pooling in his mouth and pressed his body to the glass. His voice stuck in Isaac’s ears like syrup. “And you? Are you sure you didn’t violate Yuri?”

Isaac’s body locked hard in reflexive rejection. He shuddered, lifted his head, and glared at Gezar—wearing an uncharacteristically unguarded expression. Regret and remorse, hatred and sorrow, contempt and pity—raw primaries of feeling boiled together inside him, surging hot like molten metal.

“As I said—I don’t remember.”

“Hah. Of course you...”

“So I could neither prove myself nor deny it.”

Isaac gripped the glass, spitting the words. “But I think I can be punished. You want that too, don’t you?”

Like soothing a wounded animal, he said, “I know I still have feelings. But remember: there are people suffering because of the alphas you created. So let me erase ‘alpha’ from history—myself included. That way... I can atone for all of it.”

Across the face of the man who had created the world of alphas and omegas, a soft, lonely melancholy drifted. “Atonement... Hah. Grand. But there’s no need to be so solemn. I... never meant to hide anything in the first place.”

“...Hide what?”

“I wanted to tell you the conditions for imprinting.”

At Gezar’s easy cooperation, Isaac’s face twisted with suspicion and wariness. “You wanted to tell me? Why?”

“Because I don’t want your atonement. You are... a man who can imprint with no one. I want you to thrash through pain and regret and meet a death that means nothing.”

The smile deepened on Gezar’s face as he looked at his creation.

“Love.”

Eyes lit with certainty. The smile of a victor claiming his glory.

“That is the only condition for imprinting.”

Gezar let out a long, relieved breath, as if shedding the pain that had burned him for years. As if he’d woken from a long nightmare born of the flaws in the humans he created and finally had the chance to judge his creature. In his melancholy he watched Isaac’s blue eyes fix into a dull ash.

Then Gezar slipped into a kind of paralysis. As if the word love had dragged him into the damp marsh of longing, his eyes filled and he narrowed them, lingering in a trance of yearning.

What is with this vibe.

Siron’s eyes flicked fast. He couldn’t understand a word between Baekgyeong, Isaac, and Gezar, and he didn’t want to get in the way. One misplaced clearing of the throat felt like it could end the visit for good. So he studied their expressions, the set of their bodies, the shifts in their tones.

He was about to go crazy with nerves. Things were clearly drifting the wrong way. After barely dodging abduction, after scaling the walls of a federal supermax, to get nothing from Gezar?

Fine. Imprint or not, Hybris is still chasing us. No point despairing. The difference is only between the worst, and barely wriggling out of the worst.

If Hybris weren’t after him, imprinting might have meant a normal life. Not anymore. Imprinting would only mean he no longer sensed other alphas’ pheromones; it wouldn’t change the fact they wanted him. As Yuri Berec’s corpse had served as a specimen in the lab freezer, they would want Siron’s body too.

But he couldn’t back off here. His thoughts swung back and forth until he made up his mind. Before two socially stunted alphas could screw this up, he had to step in.

He leaned in to get a read, whispering to Baekgyeong: “Well? What is it—how is this going? Should I talk to Gezar? I should be the one, right?”

Baekgyeong slowly turned his head. He studied Siron’s face as if weighing many thoughts, then answered, “He told us.”

“The imprint condition?”

“Yeah.”

“What is it?”

Baekgyeong winced. He started to speak, stalled as if the words jammed, then let them out slowly. “When we’re out... I’ll tell you when we’re out.”

Siron eyed the grave mood in Baekgyeong and Isaac both. He was dying to know if learning the method was good news—or if things had become even more hopeless. But this wasn’t a time to dig his heels in.

“Okay. Tell me outside.”

Baekgyeong checked his watch. Less than three minutes remained. From the entrance came the sound of Warden Malcolm walking toward them—the quick, light step of the good leg alternating with the dull, heavy tap of the bad one. The neat rhythm gave Siron a small measure of relief.

“Time’s up. Let’s go back,” Malcolm called.

Baekgyeong tugged Siron’s arm. “Come on.”

Siron looked back at Gezar within the glass. His face had gone slack, as if submerged in warm honey. Like a happy dreamer—drifting from reality.

A man who left such a fierce impression would be gone in a few days, a bead of dew on the gallows. Siron couldn’t grasp it. Feeling a strange emptiness, he bowed to Gezar.

“Thank you for telling us the imprinting method. ...I hope you go without pain.”

He couldn’t bring himself to wish Gezar a better place, but he offered the most goodwill he could. Quietly, he turned and followed Baekgyeong into the sealed corridor, Isaac behind them. Then—

“Isaac! Let’s meet again. We’ll be seeing each other in Hell before long, so I won’t say goodbye!”

Gezar burst into cheerful laughter. Siron couldn’t help glancing at Isaac. With his back to Gezar, walking out into the corridor, Isaac looked exhausted. The sight made something in Siron boil, for reasons he couldn’t name. In the end, he couldn’t hold back; he ran back to the glass.

“You murdered Yuri Berec—and Isaac’s brother—and you play the victim?”

Leaning against the reinforced glass, Gezar looked at Siron with a strangely warm gaze. “I have a message for you.”

“Me? ...For me?”

“Someone will be coming to you soon.”

“...Hah. That sounds ominous.”

Siron swallowed. “Who?”

“I don’t know his name. He called himself the Architect. He wanted an omega as well.”

The Architect? Some cult leader? Siron saw Baekgyeong, now close again, beckoning urgently, and asked in haste:

“Like a cult thing?”

“Hah, maybe. He means to fulfill the promise God made to Ishaak—through an omega like you.”

“...What? Ishaak? What is that?”

Gezar narrowed his eyes and smiled as if an answer were unnecessary. “Make sure he never sees you. If you do cross paths—pull the trigger on your own head.”

“What the fuck is he talking about! Yoon Siron, we’re going!” Baekgyeong’s shout left no room for outrage. He sprinted over and yanked Siron’s wrist. Siron muttered, dazed:

“Ishaak.”

“Hm?”

“What’s Ishaak?”

“What are you talking about? Is that even English?”

“No—let’s just go.”

Dragged along by Baekgyeong’s urgency, Siron still looked back at the receding visitation room. Gezar’s sepulchral laughter followed them, echoing down the narrow corridor with an ominous ring.