Hongjoong eventually pulls the car into the garage bay and gets out to check the engine of one of the other vehicles parked inside, popping the hood and leaning over it with his sleeves pushed up, the tattoo on his right arm flexing as he reaches for something underneath. Sungyoon stays in the driver’s seat with the door hanging open, his face flushed and his hair damp at thetemples, grinning from the adrenaline with his dimple cutting deep into his left cheek. I push off the barrier and walk over, reaching into the cooler we brought and pulling out a cold drink and a bag of the spicy rice crackers Sungyoon likes.
“Here,” I say, holding them out.
Sungyoon takes them with a nod, cracking the seal on the drink and taking a long drink. I lean against the side of the car and tell him he’s doing well, that Hongjoong probably won’t say it outright because he’s too busy being dramatic about his impending death, but Sungyoon’s picking it up fast.
Sungyoon wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and grins. “Yeah, and Dad says maybe I might be able to race someday too if I keep it up.” He says it casually, tearing open the bag of crackers, but the word sticks in my throat. Dad. He’s already calling Hongjoong that, easily and naturally, no hesitation or awkwardness in it, like the word was always waiting for the right person to attach itself to.
I smile and tell him I’m happy he’s getting this experience, that he can relax a bit now and not stress so hard over school with Hongjoong around to support them both. Sungyoon glances at me sideways, his expression shifting minutely, the grin fading and becoming more serious, more searching. He crunches a cracker between his teeth and chews slowly before he speaks.
“This means you’re not going to work anymore either, right?”
I blink, caught slightly off guard by the directness of it. “No,” I say. “Hongjoong definitely wouldn’t allow it, even if I wanted to.”
Sungyoon looks down at the drink in his hands, turning the bottle slowly between his palms. His jaw works like he’s trying to figure out how to say something that’s been sitting heavy inside him, that tightening of the muscle that I’ve watched him do since he was a little boy. The silence stretches and I wait, not pushing, giving him the space to find the words.
“So you don’t have to let alphas hurt you anymore?” he says quietly.
Everything inside me goes still. My breath catches sharply and I stare at the side of his face, at the way he won’t meet my eyes, his jaw still tight, his fingers gripping the bottle harder than necessary. The question sits between us, so simple and so devastating that for a moment I can’t make my mouth work at all.
“Did you know?” I manage, barely above a whisper.
Sungyoon nods, still looking at his drink. “I never wanted to say anything because I knew you didn’t have a choice.” He pauses, swallows. “But I noticed. Whenever you’d come home with weird bruises on your wrists. Or when you’d limp for days after meeting with a client.” He lets out a breath through his nose. “Or when you’d move really carefully when you thought I wasn’t watching, like everything hurt.”
My throat closes up so tight I can barely breathe. I had no idea. I thought I’d hidden it well enough, thought the long sleeves and the excuses and the careful smiles were enough to keep him from seeing what this job cost me. But of course they weren’t. He’s too smart, too observant, too much like both of his parents to miss what was right in front of him.
“That’s why I always worked so hard in school,” Sungyoon says, he suddenly sounds much older than fifteen. “I thought that if I got good enough grades and got into a good college, I could get a good job and earn enough money to let you stop working for those alpha jerks.”
I look up at the sky. The blue expanse blurs and swims as my eyes fill, the afternoon sun turning into a bright smear behind the water building along my lashes. I breathe in slowly through my nose and hold it, my jaw clenched so hard my teeth ache, refusing to fall apart in front of my son on the side of a racetrack on a sunny afternoon. I hold the breath until the burning behindmy eyes recedes to something manageable, then let it out in a controlled stream.
“You never have to worry about that again,” I tell him, and my voice is stable even if the rest of me isn’t. “And you should do well in school for your own future, Sungyoon. Not mine. That was never supposed to be your burden.”
He nods, still not looking at me. “Right.”
From inside the garage Hongjoong’s voice carries out, calling that the engine checks out fine and they can go again whenever Sungyoon’s ready. Sungyoon sets his drink down on the asphalt beside the car and stands, brushing cracker crumbs off his lap. He starts to walk toward the garage and then stops and turns back, and before I can understand what’s happening his arms are around my shoulders, strong and tight, pulling me into a hug that’s brief and fierce. His chin hooks over my shoulder and he says against my neck, quiet enough that only I can hear it, “I’m glad we get to be a family now.”
Then he lets go and jogs back toward the car, calling out to Hongjoong that he wants to try going faster this time, and Hongjoong’s answering groan of theatrical despair echoes off the garage walls. I watch my son slide back into the driver’s seat, watch Hongjoong tighten his helmet strap with a look of genuine trepidation, and I stay standing right where Sungyoon left me with my arms hanging at my sides and my heart cracked open and a little more healed than it was an hour ago.
I try to keep my leg from bouncing in the front seat of Hongjoong’s car, my hands clasped tight in my lap as hedrives us through progressively wider, greener streets toward the outskirts of the city in the growing dark. The buildings thin out and the road opens up, dense urban blocks giving way to walled properties set back behind hedgerows and iron gates, neighborhoods where the houses aren’t visible from the street because the driveways are too long. We’re heading to the Lee family estate, Hongjoong’s parents’ home, and though I haven’t seen the property in over fifteen years my memory of it is vivid enough to make my palms sweat against my knees. I remember the first time I saw it as a teenager, trailing behind Hongjoong with my school bag over one shoulder and my mouth hanging open at the sheer scale of the place, the manicured grounds and the stone facade and the circular drive with a fountain in the center that I thought only existed in movies. I remember Hongjoong’s mother looking me up and down in the foyer with a carefully neutral expression, and his father shaking my hand with a grip that could crush walnuts, and the acute awareness that I was a noodle shop owner’s son standing in a house that cost more than my entire family would earn in several lifetimes.
“Stop fidgeting,” Hongjoong says without taking his eyes off the road, one hand on the wheel and the other resting on the center console.
“I’m not fidgeting.”
“Your knee is going to bore a hole through the floor of my car.”
I press my palm flat against my thigh to still it and stare out the window instead. Sungyoon is in the backseat, dressed in the nicest clothes Hongjoong bought him last week, a button-down shirt and dark slacks that make him look older, his hair combed neatly to the side. He’s been quiet for the last ten minutes, which is unusual for him, and when I glance back, I catch him picking at his sleeve with the air of someone who’s trying very hard not to look nervous.
Hongjoong broke the news to his parents the day after the paperwork went through, before it could hit gossip columns or society pages. He did it alone, drove out to the estate and sat them down and told them everything. He assured me afterward that it went fine, that his parents were shocked but not angry, that his mother cried and his father went very quiet for a long time and then asked when they could meet the boy. But I’m painfully aware that finding out about a fifteen-year-old grandchild’s existence this late cannot have been entirely welcome news, no matter how graciously they received it. There’s a difference between accepting something in the privacy of your own home and accepting it when the omega responsible for keeping the secret is standing in your foyer.
They insisted on a family dinner to welcome Sungyoon, and Hongjoong said there was no negotiating it, his mother had already planned the menu.
The gate appears ahead of us, tall wrought iron flanked by stone pillars, and it swings open automatically as Hongjoong’s car approaches. The driveway is exactly as I remember it, long and curving, lined with old trees whose branches form a canopy overhead. The house comes into view at the end of the drive, and it looks the same, sprawling and immaculate, stone and dark wood and climbing ivy on the east wing, generations of wealth in stone. The fountain in the circular drive is still there, water catching the last of the evening light.
Hongjoong parks and I sit there for a moment after he kills the engine, staring at the front steps through the windshield. My stomach is in knots. I can feel Hongjoong watching me from the driver’s seat and I know he can probably smell the anxiety leaking off me in my pheromones, sour and sharp beneath the baseline of his own scent that’s been saturating my skin for weeks now.
“They’re not going to bite you,” Hongjoong says.
“You don’t know that.”
