DOTH Volume 4 Chapter 14.3

He could smell the stench of rotting flesh. Unlike Kim Chulwoo, who openly wrinkled the bridge of his nose, Director Yeon’s expression remained indifferent. The smell was like flies swarming rotting meat in the middle of summer, the stench harshly stabbing into their nostrils. After stepping out of the car, the man began striding forward without the slightest hesitation. If the stench was already this strong in the frozen winter, then once spring came, the rot would reek unbearably.

Director Yeon’s shoes landed on the top of the cage, his expression unmoved as he let his gaze drift downward. The old man visible through the iron framework hadn’t been properly washed; blood clung to him in patches, leaving his entire body a mess from head to toe. Curled up like a bug, his once formidable frame now looked shrunken.

“Chairman Jung.”

The clear voice cut through the winter wind, plunging down into the pit. At last, as if realizing the man’s presence, Jung Younggil snapped his head upward.

“Y-You bastard…!”

The whites of his eyes were shot with blood, giving him a demonic look, yet Director Yeon only tilted his head with a faintly bored expression.

“Our chairman here still seems pretty lively, doesn’t he?”

Coming from a man in a flawless three-piece suit draped with a perfectly tailored coat, the words were heavy with mockery. His polished shoes atop the rusting cage looked utterly out of place, his attire clashed grotesquely with the situation.

Director Yeon simply gazed at the old man writhing like a worm. How many alphas and omegas had come here seeking personal revenge? He neither knew nor cared.

“J-Just…”

The rasping metallic voice echoed hollowly within the deep pit.

“Cough, kill— me…!”

He must have had an agonizing time. Unable to eat proper food, shivering through the nights in the cold, and spending every day trembling in fear, never knowing who might storm into the flimsy cage at any moment. The only small comfort for the old man would have been that the ground beneath the earth was at least somewhat warm in the depths of winter.

“Why would I?”

Director Yeon’s lips curled in languid amusement. Granting death to one who desired it could be seen as an act of mercy, and unfortunately, he was not one to have a kind personality for such a thing.

With a faint sigh, he pulled out a cigarette. The flame of the lighter briefly painted his cold features red before vanishing. Acrid smoke rolled from his lips, but it stirred no satisfaction. It had been too long since he’d last indulged, and his craving had since faded.

After exhaling several times, he lowered his gaze. Through the lazy haze of his eyes, Jung Younggil’s face surfaced—desperate, craving.

“Ah.”

Director Yeon let out a soft chuckle. His hand flicked the fancy lighter open and shut, a sharp flame sparking against the icy air only to vanish again.

“This must be how you look when you’re so desperate.”

In the skin-piercing cold, he must have been desperate even for a warmth no bigger than a fingernail. Director Yeon tilted his head slightly and let the cigarette hanging between his fingers drop. Due to the omega who so often clung to his embrace, he had kept his distance and hadn’t tasted smoke in quite some time, but he felt no regret. Right now, he craved the scent of his omega’s pheromones far more than cigarette smoke.

The embers flickered as they fell beneath the flimsy cage. The thin, slender cigarette quickly burned out on the ground, beyond the old man’s reach.

Catching the old man’s gaze nailed into him, Director Yeon lifted the corner of his mouth again and casually tossed his lighter down. The motion was light.

“Director.”

Kim Chulwoo’s voice carried alarm, but Director Yeon didn’t look back. He only wondered how far the old alpha’s luck would stretch. The lighter clanged against the cage before tumbling down. Jung Younggil’s gray head darted toward it, frantic like a starved animal, but the small square quickly disappeared into the dirt below.

“No, no…!”

The old man’s cracked hands writhed desperately through the cage bars. Torn nails and bloodied skin went unnoticed as he clawed for something he couldn’t reach.

“Huff… haah, huff.”

The old man’s fingers twitched several times before he withdrew his hand from the cage bars, defeated. His trembling fingers fumbled inside his worn jacket, pulling out a pill bottle. It contained ‘legitimate’ painkillers, rationed daily on Director Yeon’s orders. The old man didn’t know that his shaking was caused by those very pills as  he shoved one into his mouth in a frenzy.

Crack!

The sound of the pill crumbling between his teeth rang like the screech of the iron cage clanking. Consumed with swallowing the painkiller, the old man did not notice the ladder descending into the flimsy cage, nor the large figure that followed.

The man who stepped onto the cage floor looked in with an expression devoid of feeling.

Once inside, the air that had already felt heavy from above grew even more stifling. Director Yeon moved only his eyes downward, not to the cage floor itself, but to the dirt beneath, resembling a bottomless pit. Empty pill bottles, filth, and scraps of waste had pooled in the mound of earth under the cage. By spring, it would surely swarm with maggots and flies. Other than a slight furrow of his brows, the man’s face hardly looked any different from when he had been standing above the cage.

“W-Why are you here!”

Finally spotting Director Yeon’s presence, Jung Younggil’s voice cracked out. His voice sounded surprisingly strong, considering the days of confinement and constant abuse he had endured inside the hutch.

“Why did you get so scared?”

Director Yeon’s tone was polite, but the trailing tone carried mockery.

Jung Younggil swallowed hard, staring at the young Alpha. Dressed in perfection from head to toe, the man’s flawless face seemed carved from stone. A statue looking very tough, impenetrable even by a knife. Looking at the expressionless face, his instinct screamed at him to flee.

“What did I even do…”

The man before him began slipping on gloves, made of ordinary leather people would use as winter wear.

“Do you know why I came here quite late?”

Each slow pull of the leather material over the large hands pressed a new terror into Jung Younggil’s chest.

“You know that my patience is long.”

As languid as his drawn-out tone, his unhurried movements draped the skin of a cruel beast over human flesh.

“If I put my hands on you first, what would be left for the others to enjoy? There’d be nothing worth touching, don’t you think?”

“J-Jung Heeyeon.”

Slurred by drugs, the old man’s mind betrayed him, speaking a name he should never have uttered.

“Jung Heeyeon?”

The gloves enveloping the alpha’s hands tightened with a sharp creak, leather grinding against leather.

“I-I’ll, hand him over. I’ll give him to you…!”

“Haha.”

Director Yeon’s laugh rumbled low in his throat. Who was giving Jung Heeyeon to whom?

He remembered all too clearly the face of the omega struggling in agony as his throat was being choked.

“Ack! Aaagh!”

The man strode forward without hesitation, seized the old man by the collar, and dragged him to the center of the iron cage. Even as the frail, cracked body scraped against the bars, crying out in pain, there was not a trace of mercy in his grip.

“Hoo….”

Throwing the old body aside, the man let out a long sigh and raked a hand through his hair. His neatly styled hair was crushed under the leather glove, but he was far too clouded by rage to care about such trivial things.

A few days ago, Director Yeon had reviewed the surveillance footage supposedly installed in the bedroom. It had been placed so meticulously that there wasn’t a single blind spot—every moment, from the slap to the strangling Jung Heeyeon received, had been recorded in detail. If not for his lover’s offhand request to visit Nam Soohyun’s house, Director Yeon would have come here that very day to kill Jung Younggil.

“Who to who, you dare say…”

Director Yeon muttered in a low, subdued voice.

He would hand him over? Jung Heeyeon was the omega he had imprinted. He couldn’t even perceive another alpha’s pheromones.

What Yeon Woobeom was waiting for was that moment of imprinting. Mutual imprinting between an alpha and an omega was synonymous with absolute ownership and exclusivity. In that sense, his possessiveness was still incomplete.

He had imprinted Jung Heeyeon, so Jung Heeyeon also had to imprint him. His lover, still unskilled at controlling pheromones, was struggling and straining for the imprint’s sake, but all he had to do was wait patiently.

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