Chapter 16

Clack.

Bringing over two freshly steeped mugs, Gwichang set one down before Geum Seoul. Possessing far too finicky a stomach to drink from cups provided in a temporary safehouse, his own cup was a metallic tumbler he had specifically packed, etched with old scratches from long use at headquarters. Naturally, that one belonged to Gwichang; what sat before Geum Seoul was a chipped ceramic mug that had been lying around the kitchen.

As if he had never uttered those bold words moments ago, inquisitive brown eyes shimmered with curiosity, tracing the mug, the dangling paper tag, the white mesh tea bag, and the emerald green leaves glimpsed beneath the weave.

Geum Seoul hesitated, staring down at the steeping leaves. “Um…”

“Yeah,” Gwichang answered passively.

Seoul’s voice dropped to a troubled whisper. “Noki… was it pointless for me to hide him?”

It was an abrupt leap in logic, completely detached from the context. Yet in the words he had evidently chewed over in silence, heavy guilt was deeply tangled. Taking his seat once more, Gwichang merely sipped his tea without uttering a word.

Geum Seoul spiriting Lee Hee-joong away had certainly been a complication. Yet since the room had lacked a lock from the start, Lee Hee-joong could have slipped out of that building at any time.

However, Gwichang had fed Geum Seoul the pretext of ‘trying to reunite him with his parents.’ By that logic, Geum Seoul was indeed an obstructive meddler. If only I had coaxed him and kept him by my side, Noki could have met his parents right away. The thoughts churning inside that small head were as plain as day.

“Are they worrying terribly? That friend’s parents.”

Gwichang chose silence once again. Layering more lies was too much of a bother, and stoking further guilt hardly seemed useful in altering the situation. Instead—

Clatter.

Without making the slightest slurping sound, Gwichang took a swallow and set the cup down.

Gwichang steered the subject back on course. “Recall anything else he might have said?”

“Uh…” Seoul muttered, thinking hard.

Shifting the topic pulled the boy along effortlessly. While Geum Seoul unsuspectingly rolled his eyes upward to recall his previous encounter with Lee Hee-joong, Gwichang’s gaze drifted downward.

Whether from heat rash breaking out across his body, mottled red patches blotched the crooks of his elbows and the hollows running from his neck down to his collarbones. Because his skin was so pale, the marks stood out even more vividly along his exposed thighs and knees. Sitting without having pulled his chair tight to the table, every inch of revealed flesh showed unmistakable inflammation; seeing it this aggravated even after a dose of high-grade medication, his original condition was easy to imagine.

The parts covered by his shirt were surely worse. Looking at his arms alone, the tender flesh on the inside appeared far more swollen and inflamed than his outer forearms. Some blemishes formed round marks resembling bite impressions, but considering his delicate skin would have bruised a far darker purplish red under real suction, it didn’t appear he had been touched by anyone.

Seoul furrowed his brow earnestly. “That was really all. He said his parents were waiting, that he had to go, and begged me to help him…”

It was the exact same story as before. Listening without interrupting, Gwichang let his gaze wander further. Neatly trimmed fingertips pressed firmly against the white mug, rubbing the porcelain surface.

“If only I had told him to stay with me until the heat passed, he might already be on his way to see his parents by now. Since Im Gyun-il doesn’t know what Lee Hee-joong looks like, I told him to pretend he’d been bought by an auction guest and ride down when guided to the shuttle.”

Im Gyun-il was the shuttle driver who ferried guests on a small three-wheeled cart from the mountain mid-slope—where cars could go no further—up to the building where the auctions were held. He had supposedly been busy frequenting gambling dens in the neighboring district, rarely lingering at home and showing his face only on auction days to make cash. In the brief time he had, Geum Seoul had concocted a remarkably plausible escape route.

“What about you? No thought of leaving? Shoving your head under a staircase where people scrape their boot soles is your idea of cozy?” Gwichang asked in amusement.

Geum Seoul blinked in bewilderment once more. His sheer lack of comprehension served as answer enough. Knowing the neighborhood that intimately meant countless opportunities to flee, making Gwichang simply wonder why on earth he clung to that ruin, getting beaten black and blue by Park Gil-pyeong at every turn. Not that he harbored any meddling desire to urge a kid with no such intention to run. Nor did he intend to stir hollow illusions in someone destined to live out the miserable lot they were born into.

Gwichang switched topics once again. “What do you do during auctions, then? Haul Bacchus bottles?”

And so he switched topics once again. True to form, an obedient, docile reply came back.

“That’s when I’m busiest. I collect the gems to bring to the boss, and clean up the rooms because the guests are arriving. In summer, there’s a huge industrial fan in the storage shed, so I drag that out. If the broadcast is still blaring when it’s almost time for the guests to arrive, I hold onto the antenna too. And—”

The explanation died on his lips.

Gwichang demanded coldly, “You pull that antenna stunt every single auction?”

Unsure what Gwichang meant by ‘that stunt,’ Geum Seoul paused briefly. Ah. He presumably meant silencing the acoustic broadcast.

“Yes,” Seoul answered quietly. “If we’re lucky and the broadcast doesn’t go off on auction days, I run errands for the guests and earn extra cash.”

While Geum Seoul casually rambled on about his next chores as though it were nothing, Gwichang’s thoughts remained anchored to the preceding sentence. With every passing day, the heat grew more ferocious. Just today, having been exposed to the blistering midday sun for an hour and forty-five minutes, Geum Seoul had collapsed the very second he let go. A few minutes longer, and he could have died.

“In the winter, too?”

Geum Seoul knitted his brows in bewilderment, staring back as if the deputy director’s question made no sense at all.

“Auctions don’t have seasons, so…?” he countered with a blank shrug.

He pulled that stunt every single auction, whether in midsummer or dead of winter. Treating the rare silent days as lucky windfalls, he spoke of using that reprieve to scrape together a few extra coins. He claimed his errand fees depended on market rates, yet the value he assigned his own life amounted to mere pennies. Gwichang’s gaze drifted once more toward Geum Seoul’s mottled, chafed wrists.

“I’ll stay on the sofa. Please go inside and get some sleep. Ah—but I only used one side. The right side shouldn’t be dirty at all.”

Misconstruing Gwichang’s silence, Geum Seoul read his mood, stood up, and gathered his mug. Watching him carefully secure the foil-wrapped kimbap with a crinkle, Gwichang tilted his head. The boy, it seemed, was dodging his eyes.

“I’d love to, but I’ve got work left and need the living room,” Gwichang countered dryly. “Go finish sleeping on the left side, then.”

“Ah… yes, sir,” Seoul murmured softly, retreating toward the bedroom.

Though the command was born of sheer practical intent rather than gentle courtesy, Geum Seoul hesitated like someone utterly unaccustomed to receiving kindness before nodding obediently. Parting his lips several times as though wishing to say something, he swallowed the words in the end and stepped silently away.

Bowing respectfully, the boy slipped into the bathroom instead of the bedroom, only to emerge with an armful of his discarded clothes and the lumps of silicone padding. Depositing them inside the master bedroom, he scampered back to the bathroom to brush his teeth once more. It was behavior strikingly reminiscent of a small animal hoarding provisions into its burrow. Watching those bustling, soundless movements for a moment, Gwichang rose to his feet as well, intending to burn off the suffocating vexation seeded by their conversation through work.

By the time the man settled onto the couch in the darkened living room, donning thin half-rimmed spectacles and pulling up encrypted document files on his tablet, Geum Seoul emerged from the bathroom ready for sleep. Whispering a tiny “Good night,” he quietly pulled the bedroom door shut. Giving a curt nod in response, Gwichang finally raised his gaze from the screen.

“…”

Perhaps because he had received that restorative stabilizer shot earlier, Geum Seoul’s pheromones were so faint they were nearly imperceptible. While not erased entirely, at this concentration, ordinary alphas would remain completely oblivious.

Turning his head to cast a glance at the closed bedroom door, Gwichang tapped the tablet several times. A pulsing blue ring surfaced on the glass, displaying the prompt indicating an encrypted line was establishing connection.

—“Yes, Deputy Director.”

“Report,” Gwichang ordered into the comms link.

—“That relay box Geum Seoul was tampering with turned out to be the receiver, just as suspected,” Jeong-ham reported over the line. “If it stays deactivated for more than four hours, a ping routes straight to headquarters. Even so, silencing it for tomorrow alone can be done without leaving a trace.”

“What about killing it permanently?” Gwichang asked in a low voice.

— “Ah… the issue is that it would have to be done through the lines running underneath main headquarters. Masking it for a single day as a mechanical malfunction is feasible, but shutting it down completely would risk Noh Pil-gyu catching on if he decides to conduct a thorough audit later—it’s a heavy burden.”

An unnecessary risk. If they were going to leave an audit trail, there would have been no reason to time their call with Noh Pil-gyu so meticulously to avoid suspicion in the first place. Slouching back into the cushions, Gwichang clicked his tongue against his teeth with a slow scoff.

Gwichang demanded sharply, “What about the network hub? We have to nail whichever lackey helped Lee Hee-joong slip away, no matter what.”

—“I’ve had the boys running scans all day, but nothing stands out yet,” Jeong-ham reported in frustration.

“If I dig through it and find something you missed, none of you get promoted for three years,” Gwichang growled with a dark scowl.

—“Well, as long as you’re holding your post, Deputy Director, our promotions are already—”

“Shut your fucking trap and send the file,” Gwichang snapped.

Thoroughly immunized against his superior’s icy venom, Yu Jeong-ham transferred the data pack without hesitation.

—“Understood. File transferring now.”

“What’s Bae Seo-woo’s current assignment?” Gwichang asked.

—“Seo-woo? He’s currently out running the search grid.”

Bae Seo-woo was an omega. Since every detective on Gwichang’s squad was an active field agent deployed on frontline operations, their pheromones were diluted to near-beta levels, yet anyone possessing a secondary gender could instinctively gauge what another was. Concealing it deliberately required pumping expensive, toxic blockers for days on end, which hardly anyone bothered with in this day and age.

“Tell him to contact me the moment he wraps up,” Gwichang instructed.

—“He won’t be back from rotation until dawn—are you planning to stay awake? I’m on the graveyard shift tonight anyway, so if you have orders for Seo-woo, I could just—”

Gwichang cut in with a loud yawn. “Yaaawn. You sure talk a fucking lot.”

At the deliberately theatrical yawn blasted into the microphone, Yu Jeong-ham clamped his mouth shut. It was the man’s way of signaling that everything being said was useless chatter. He could easily have stated that he would convey the orders personally or told him to shut up as usual, yet he invariably selected whichever phrasing inflicted maximum emotional friction.

Was there truly not a single soul on this earth capable of shutting that Ghost’s mouth? Seeing that tongue struck completely dumb was his annual Christmas wish, yet the miracle never showed the faintest sign of coming true. Swallowing his exasperation, Yu Jeong-ham steered the conversation back to operational matters.

—“…Then shall we execute tomorrow’s operation as discussed earlier?”

At that inquiry, Gwichang tilted his head back and fixed his eyes upon the closed bedroom door. As though the boy had fallen straight to sleep without bothering to switch on a lamp, not a single ray of light seeped from the narrow crevice.

“Yeah,” Gwichang answered coldly. A customary smirk played across his lips. “Cast the bait.”