Han Jiwon’s world had been strangely twisted from a very young age.
To his eyes, his family was nothing more than a collection of ghosts, hollow shells of people.
In the best room of the mansion, sitting in an antique rocking chair placed by a wide window where sunlight poured in, his mother stared blankly at the distant scenery outside.
She looked less like a living person and more like an elaborate doll that had exhausted all its emotions.
Her eyes were always hollow and unfocused, and no smile or emotion ever crossed her lips.
He could feel neither warmth nor affection from her.
His father was always busy.
He would leave the house early in the morning and return only after the sun had set.
After dinner, consumed in suffocating silence, he would inevitably head to the basement, taking along his reticent older sister and his inscrutable older brother.
Young Jiwon never knew what happened in that dark, secret space.
It was a solid, impenetrable world of their own that he could never enter.
Every time they returned from the basement, deep fatigue and a shadow of terror lingered on their faces, but Jiwon was too young to understand what it meant.
Though they lived together under the name of family, no true conversation or warm connection existed between them.
They floated like islands, holed up in their own rooms, indifferent to each other’s lives.
Young Jiwon, in his aching loneliness, yearned for his family’s love.
Once, he gathered his courage and approached his mother.
However, she only looked at him with cold, vacant eyes, as if she were looking at an insect.
At that gaze, Jiwon instinctively recoiled.
The coldness seemed to forbid even the act of speaking to her.
“Mom, please, just hug me once. Please?”
Despite this, when he clung to the old rocking chair where she sat, begging for a hug, she would look down at him for a moment with an expressionless, doll-like face, then stand up without a word and disappear into another room.
Her body always carried the scent of expensive perfume mingled with an indescribable fragrance of profound sorrow.
Every time that happened, Jiwon had to endure the deep despair of being abandoned alone in the world.
Unable to feel warmth from his mother, Jiwon naturally turned his gaze toward his father.
His father was always busy, but unlike his mother, he at least looked like a “person.”
A “great person,” at that. In his father’s study, which he occasionally snuck into, the walls were lined with awards and plaques proving how prestigious a researcher he was, along with countless photos taken with prominent social figures.
‘I’ll become a cool and capable person like Father, too. So… I will surely win his approval.’
To young Jiwon, his father was an object of respect and envy.
And that desire naturally led to jealousy toward his brother and sister.
Every night, they went to the basement with their father.
‘If I go there, will I be able to receive Father’s love?’
To Jiwon’s eyes, that place looked like a special space reserved only for the chosen, where one could receive his father’s love and recognition.
Jiwon wanted to enjoy that privilege himself.
So, one day, with a trembling heart, he asked his father to take him to the basement as well.
His father looked at Jiwon with an unreadable expression for a moment, then wore a chillingly sweet smile as he said, “Does our Jiwon want to help Father now? How admirable. If you present as a Dominant, you may come to the basement as much as you like.”
Time passed, and finally, Jiwon manifested.
The result was a Submissive Omega.
It was the moment all his expectations and hopes were shattered.
The warm smile on his father’s face as he waited for the results vanished instantly, leaving only cold, indifferent apathy.
As soon as he heard Jiwon was a Submissive Omega, he turned his back on him as if looking at a worthless object.
From that day on, Jiwon became like a ghost in the house.
His father no longer even glanced at him, and even the servants openly ignored him.
“Jiwon, let’s eat.”
Only his older brother, Jehoon, who had the Dominant trait, would occasionally knock on his door to check on him, but to Jiwon, already gripped by a deep sense of inferiority, his actions looked like nothing but pity or hypocrisy.
‘Because you’re a Dominant, I must look pathetic to you, right?’
Trapped in such twisted thoughts, he sharply pushed away even his brother’s small gestures of goodwill.
Eventually, Jehoon also grew weary and stopped approaching him.
Desperate to reclaim even a sliver of his father’s attention, Jiwon purposely caused trouble, both big and small, at school.
Drinking and smoking were basic, and he would steal friends’ belongings or start fights.
But his father effortlessly smoothed over all of Jiwon’s accidents with money and power, never uttering a word of reprimand or showing even the slightest interest.
Complete neglect.
It instilled in Jiwon a deep sense of frustration at being abandoned by the world, along with a fundamental skepticism about the value of his own existence.
In the end, he gave up on everything, letting empty time flow by without purpose or meaning.
His inner self withered like a desolate desert, and only anger and resentment toward the world grew like poisonous mushrooms.
Then one day, unable to bear the boredom, he followed a friend to a college entrance briefing held at a university in Seoul, and by chance, he attended an entrepreneurship lecture given by a young CEO, Cha Joowon, in the next auditorium.
And there, Jiwon met the one person who would shake his fate.
Cha Joowon stood on the platform.
His handsome, cool appearance, confident attitude, and above all, the overwhelming Dominant Alpha pheromones flowing from his body.
To young Jiwon, he looked as dazzling as a beam of light encountered in the darkness, or like a prince in a fairy tale.
‘That’s the person.’
An intense conviction rang in his head.
At that moment, for the first time in his life, Jiwon felt an uncontrollable, intense desire for possession alongside an overwhelming flutter of excitement.
If it were that person, if it were by that person’s side, he felt he could receive the recognition and love he had longed for so much.
After the lecture ended, Jiwon chased after him blindly, with the sole thought of wanting to greet him.
But what he witnessed upon reaching the parking lot was Joowon sharing a tender embrace with another man.
That man was pretty and handsome, but he was nothing more than a Beta without a single drop of pheromones.
“Hyung, today’s lecture was truly amazing!” the man whispered in an adorable voice, nestled in Joowon’s arms.
“Why did you come all this way in the cold? You should have been resting at home,” Joowon replied, looking at the man with eyes dripping with affection, gently stroking his cheek as if he were handling a treasure.
“It’s your first lecture, Hyung, of course I had to come as your partner!” the man laughed happily, burying himself deeper into Joowon’s embrace.
Watching this from the shadows, Jiwon was hit with massive shock and consumed by uncontrollable jealousy.
That perfect Dominant Alpha, Cha Joowon, was sending such affectionate gazes to a worthless Beta like that.
‘How can a mere Beta without pheromones hog his love? It makes no sense!’
At the same time, his possessiveness toward Joowon burned even more intensely.
‘If I could just make that Alpha mine… I could be as happy as that Beta. I could escape the shackles of being a Submissive Omega and live proudly, receiving his love.’
From that day on, the sole goal of Jiwon’s life became making Cha Joowon his own.
For several years, he hovered around him, spying on his every move.
His tastes, his daily routine, even the kind of relationship he had with his Beta lover, Seo Yoonwoo.
His obsession and possessiveness toward Joowon made his inner self increasingly twisted.
Then one day, after several years, he received a call from his father.
Jiwon, extremely nervous about his first one-on-one meeting with his father since his manifestation, headed to the study.
To Jiwon, who was frozen cold with tension, his father said nonchalantly, “I heard you’ve been struggling to get your hands on a certain Dominant Alpha lately.”
Jiwon trembled in fear at his father’s gaze, which seemed to pierce through everything he was, but unexpectedly, his father praised him.
“Well done. Even though you manifested as a lowly Submissive, it is commendable to see you struggling to obtain a Dominant trait. If there is something you want, you should win it by any means necessary.”
His father smiled with satisfaction and handed a small vial of medicine to Jiwon.
“Feed this medicine to that Alpha. Then he will become entirely your Alpha.”
Jiwon, who had been stalking Joowon for years and knew how deeply he loved Seo Yoonwoo, could not easily believe his father’s words that he could make him his own with just a single medicine.
However, his father laughed at his doubt and said, “You don’t need to worry about the effectiveness. I also obtained your mother with this medicine. That woman resisted me at first, but she eventually became mine.”
At those words, Jiwon felt a chill, thinking of his mother’s hollow eyes, looking only out the window without any emotion or hope.
But his desire to have Joowon overwhelmed all that anxiety.
He clutched the medicine he received from his father tightly.
Although he had obtained the medicine, Jiwon did not use it on Joowon immediately.
If anything were to go wrong with Joowon, that was not the result he wanted.
He wanted perfect success, and for that, he needed a test subject.
Someone easy, someone for whom failure wouldn’t be a big problem, and someone who could be easily played in the palm of his hand.
That was why he chose Kim Minjun. Jiwon intentionally approached him, having observed him previously—someone who seemed somewhat foolish and naive, seemingly ignorant of how the world worked.
With his background as the youngest son of H Pharmaceuticals, his flashy looks, and the Omega pheromones that seemed to bewitch people, it was only a matter of time before Minjun fell for Jiwon.
Jiwon had several meetings at bars Minjun frequented, pretending they were coincidences, and when he judged that his defenses had completely crumbled, he secretly mixed a tiny amount of the medicine he received from his father into Minjun’s drink.
And that night, Minjun collapsed helplessly before Jiwon’s pheromones.
Since then, Jiwon used Minjun to test the medicine’s effects, side effects, and the most effective addiction methods multiple times.
Controlling pheromone concentration, the interval of drug administration, and even psychological dominance methods.
Minjun, without knowing why, became Jiwon’s test subject and gradually became addicted to his pheromones, while Jiwon observed him, step by step, completing the scenario to make Joowon perfectly his own.
There was no guilt or hesitation in his eyes.
Only a twisted desire to possess Joowon flashed.
And finally, the day of the showdown.
Jiwon paid off a hotel employee he had bribed in advance and donned a uniform he had procured.
Having secretly mixed the medicine he received from his father into a wine bottle, he stood in front of room 1508 with a room service cart.
His heart was pounding like crazy.
With trembling hands, he pressed the bell.
He could hear the sound of Joowon’s approaching footsteps from inside. Jiwon wore a twisted smile.
‘After this night passes, Cha Joowon will be entirely mine.’
Click.
And finally, the door opened.
