The front door opens and closes. The lock beeps.
The apartment goes silent.
I clear my throat carefully and move for my bedroom, keeping my movements careful and unhurried even though every nervein my body is screaming at me to run. “We should get going too,” I say, stepping toward the hallway. I try to move past Hongjoong in the narrow space, angling my shoulder to slip by him, and his arm shoots out and his hand closes around my bicep hard enough to stop me cold, his fingers digging into the muscle through my sleeve.
I look up into his face, and my pulse jumps at what I see there. Controlled fury. His jaw is clenched so tight that a muscle jumps beneath the skin of his cheek, and his eyes are burning with an emotion that goes beyond anger into territory that’s near nuclear.
“You better start explaining.” His voice is a low, harsh growl, the kind of sound that vibrates in the chest of the person hearing it.
I hold his gaze and keep my voice as calm as I can. “Explain what?”
Hongjoong’s eyes narrow and he leans closer, his grip on my arm tightening until I can feel each individual finger pressing into the flesh. “Explain why that child looks like a carbon fucking copy of me.”
I shift my weight, testing his grip, but he doesn’t let go. My arm is locked in place and so am I, pinned by his hand and his stare and the fifteen years of lies that are crumbling around me. There is no lie in the world good enough to explain away what Hongjoong just saw with his own eyes. No excuse, no deflection, no convenient half-truth that can account for a fifteen-year-old boy wearing Hongjoong’s face like a mirror.
Hongjoong doesn’t wait for an answer. He steps closer, looming over me in the narrow hallway, using every inch of the height difference between us. “How old did you say he was again?”
I take too long to answer. I know I take too long because Hongjoong’s grip tightens another degree, his thumb pressinghard against the inside of my arm, and his expression tells me that silence is the wrong choice here but I can’t make my mouth form the words fast enough.
“Fifteen,” I say quietly.
I watch Hongjoong’s eyes flicker. I watch him do the math, watch him connect to the date. I watch the exact moment the math adds up because his whole face changes, the anger cracking open into a worse, more devastated emotion.
Hongjoong closes his eyes. He lets out a long, slow breath through his nose, the kind of breath someone takes when they’re restraining themselves from putting their fist through the wall beside my head. His chest expands and contracts with it, his nostrils flaring, and when he opens his eyes again they’re terrifyingly calm, the fury banked down into a cold and controlled look that makes my skin prickle with genuine fear.
“Yoonjae,” he says, and my full name in that voice, that careful measured voice, is worse than if he was shouting. “Is that my son?”
I think about denying it. The reflex is so deeply ingrained after years that the lie forms on my tongue automatically, ready, a dozen variations of no and you’re imagining things and it’s just a coincidence lined up and waiting. But Hongjoong is looking at me with those eyes that have always been able to see through me, that could see through me when we were eighteen and can see through me now, and I am so fucking tired. I’m tired of carrying this alone, tired of the burden of it pressing down on my chest every single day, tired of looking at my son’s face and seeing the father he doesn’t know he has.
I give up.
“Yes,” I say, the sound of it quiet and small.
Hongjoong takes a giant step backward. His hand drops from my arm and he staggers back like I’ve shoved him, his shoulders hitting the opposite wall of the hallway with a dull thud. I watchhim, every nerve in my body screaming, as he puts both hands through his hair and stares at the ceiling, his chest heaving. He paces the narrow hallway, three steps one way, three steps back, turns on his heel, and when his eyes meet mine again they look wild, unmoored, the composure from seconds ago shattered.
“When,” he says. “How—” And then he blinks. I watch the realization dawn on his face in real time, each piece falling into place one after another like watching a building come down floor by floor. His mouth opens slightly. His hands drop to his sides.
“The night of graduation,” he says, his voice hoarse. “It was you, wasn’t it? That omega scent all over the classroom.” He starts pacing faster, his strides eating up the tiny hallway, his voice rising with each word. “I thought I recognized that scent when I smelled you again at the hotel. I thought it was familiar, it drove me crazy because I couldn’t place it.” He spins and stares at me, his eyes boring into mine. “That was it, wasn’t it? Graduation night, when I went into rut. It was you I slept with.”
I stand with my hands clasped tight together in front of me, my knuckles white, too terrified to speak. So I just nod.
“Fuck!” The word comes out loud enough to echo off the walls of the small apartment, bouncing back at us from the kitchen and the living room and the ceiling. Hongjoong paces again, faster, agitated energy rolling off him in waves that make his pheromones spike hard, the smell of angry alpha flooding the hallway until it’s thick enough to taste on my tongue, bitter and sharp and suffocating. My omega body responds involuntarily, wanting to submit, to bare my neck, to make myself small, and I fight it, locking my knees and keeping my spine straight even as my hands tremble.
Then he whirls on me, and in his eyes I see betrayal and agony in equal amounts, unguarded in a way Hongjoong never lets himself be, not in front of anyone, not ever. The mask he wears for the cameras and the sponsors, and the rest of the world isgone, and what’s underneath is a man who has just learned that the person he trusted most in the world has been lying to him for half his life.
“And you just ran off?” His voice cracks on the last word, and he doesn’t seem to notice or care. “Fuck, Jae, why didn’t you just tell me instead of running? Instead of taking off with my child?”
I breathe out shakily, my ribs aching with the effort of holding myself together. “I didn’t know I was pregnant right away,” I say, and my voice sounds thin and reedy in my own ears. “Obviously. It was weeks before I realized, and by then you were starting university, starting your career. I didn’t want to be the thing that derailed all of it.”
Hongjoong laughs. The sound is mocking and hurt and nothing like his real laugh, sharp-edged and bitter, and it cuts through me worse than any of the words. “That wasn’t your choice to make,” he says, pointing at me, his finger jabbing the air between us.
He rakes a hand through his hair again, hard enough that the strands pull taut against his scalp. When he speaks again, his voice is ragged and sounds dangerously close to grief. “Fuck. Fifteen years, Jae. I have a fifteen-year-oldson.” He stops pacing and faces me, his chest rising and falling too fast. “Do you have any idea how unfair that is? I didn’t even know he existed. This whole time you knew, and you never said anything. You kept him from me. From even getting the chance to be his father.” His voice drops. “What did I do to deserve that? Was I so terrible to you that you would go to that much effort to keep my own child from me?”
“It wasn’t like that,” I say, but I can hear how inadequate the words are even as they leave my mouth. “I wasn’t trying to hide from you. I just didn’t want to impose on your life. I wanted to handle it on my own.”
“Yeah, and what about what I want?” Hongjoong fires back, his voice rising again. “You took the first fifteen years of my son’s life from me.” He gestures sharply around us, at the cramped hallway, the peeling paint on the doorframe, the apartment that suddenly feels even smaller than it is with his anger filling every corner of it. “I could have helped you. Yoonjae, you didn’t have to live like this. Sungyoon could have had a better life.”
My chin lifts. The defensiveness is automatic, bone-deep, forged from fifteen years of doing everything alone and refusing to apologize for it. “I never needed anyone’s help and I didn’t want it,” I say, my voice harder now. “Sungyoon had a fine life. I did everything I could for him.”
