Pheromone Off Chapter 1

The household was turned upside down.

Thump, thump. The sound of excited footsteps could be heard from beyond the room. As Hajin blinked his heavy eyes and pushed his body up from the bed, the owner of the footsteps kicked open his room door without even knocking and barged in.

“Hey, what the hell kind of trick did you pull?!”

His half-brother, Seong Suhyun, stepped inside with a flushed red face. Hajin stared blankly at him with a bewildered expression.

“What are you talking about…?”

“What do you mean, what am I talking about, fuck. What kind of trick did you pull that Chairman Kwon is saying he’s going to marry you off to Kwon Sayoung?!”

Hajin heard Seong Suhyun shouting, but he couldn’t understand it at all. The Chairman… is making him do what?

“I—I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m asking what that means all of a sudden.”

Perhaps because he had fallen asleep after taking a nerve stabilizer and had just woken up, his mind was blank.

“Look at this bastard acting like he doesn’t know. Both households are in an uproar right now because of you. Don’t you know who Kwon Sayoung is dating right now?”

Of course he knew. The person dating Kwon Sayoung—the incredible second son of the HK Group, whom everyone was saying would be promoted to director this time—was currently his own half-brother and Seong Suhyun’s twin, Seong Yeonwoo. Seong Yeonwoo was the only Dominant Omega of this house, and a son cherished like gold and jade by the whole family. It was said that because of his outstanding beauty since birth, all the elders in the family couldn’t stop marveling at him.

Currently, in our country, Dominant Omegas were much rarer than Dominant Alphas, and to inherit dominant traits, one had to have a Dominant Omega spouse. Perhaps because lineage was such an important trait, Dominant Omegas were famous for being born only into families with long histories or families famous for being conglomerates for generations.

That incredible Dominant Omega and his own half-brother, Seong Yeonwoo, was precisely Kwon Sayoung’s lover. That was something both families knew, and it was a known fact to everyone that marriage talks were going back and forth between the two of them.

But what?

“Hey, don’t keep your mouth shut and say something!”

Seong Suhyun snapped in a fit of rage and roughly grabbed Hajin by the hair. In an instant, with a pain that felt as if his scalp was being torn off, his thoughts ground to a halt even further.

“How did you sweet-talk Chairman Kwon that talk about whether or not to marry you to Kwon Sayoung is coming out?!”

Whether he was thoroughly enraged, the strength in Seong Suhyun’s hand began to increase even more. Thinking that the violence was about to start like this, Hajin calmly closed his eyes. It was then.

“Stop it, Suhyun.”

Seong Yeonwoo, who had stood before the open threshold before anyone noticed, calmly restrained him. Hajin slowly opened his closed eyes and quietly looked at Seong Yeonwoo. A noble appearance, no matter when he saw it. A noble posture. Both his appearance and the aura he exuded were refined and elegant. He was so beautiful that anyone passing by would find it sacred, more than enough to steal one’s gaze. His genes and traits were so superior that any ordinary Alpha or Dominant Alpha would become a slave to just one glance from Seong Yeonwoo. To the point where he, a Beta, couldn’t even dare to look.

“Stop what? He’s saying he’s stealing your fiancé right now.”

“…It’s not like that.”

“What do you mean it’s not.”

Thinking that Hajin was talking back, Seong Suhyun roughly struck his cheek. This kind of violence was routine. It was because he was the only Beta born into the Seong family line, which had produced only Dominant Alphas and Dominant Omegas for generations, and he was the child of a concubine, not the legal wife. The Beta child of a woman who was neither an Alpha nor an Omega, but a Beta. Hajin was an ugly duckling and an uninvited guest here. Since his mother had passed away as soon as she gave birth to him, he didn’t even have a single shield to protect him.

“You followed Chairman Seong’s hospital room day in and day out, so I thought it was strange.”

“…I said it’s not like that.”

Hajin stared at Seong Suhyun with resentful eyes. Feeling that gaze was defiant, Seong Suhyun shook his hand that was gripping Hajin’s hair and slammed him against the wall.

“Where do you think you’re glaring at.”

“Ugh!”

“Seong Suhyun. I told you to stop.”

“Because you always let him off like that, this bastard climbs all over us.”

“I’m going to talk to Sayoung first.”

“There’s no point talking. Chairman Kwon, that old man said he’ll only promote Kwon Sayoung to director if he marries this bastard. Don’t you know what that means?”

Hajin didn’t know what was what. He didn’t know their business world at all. It was a completely different world from his, and since no one had ever included him as a member of the family, there was no way for him to know. However, whether Seong Yeonwoo knew the meaning of those words well, his face hardened quite a bit.

“It means he’s finally going to stand shoulder to shoulder with Kwon Sahui as a candidate for succession. The thing Kwon Sayoung wanted so, so badly.”

Kwon Sahui was currently the eldest daughter of the Kwon family holding the position of Managing Director at HK Group, and she was the person being talked about the most as the next successor. She was a female Dominant Alpha and the oldest among the children of HK Group and Seongsan Group, and she was a whopping 15 years older than Hajin.

“…Do you think Sayoung would marry him because of that condition?”

Seong Yeonwoo narrowed his eyes and continued as if it were absurd.

“No matter how much it’s something he wanted and wanted, how could he…”

“Don’t you know he can’t do anything against Chairman Kwon?”

“There’s no way that’s true, so stop it. It could just be something Grandfather said. And he’s not a guy to be shaken by something like that. Because you acting like this makes it look like you’re shaken by those absurd words instead, stop it.”

Seong Yeonwoo turned around, glancing at him with a cold gaze as if brushing past. He was calm and collected. While Seong Suhyun, who wasn’t even the party involved, rushed in with fire in his eyes like this, Seong Yeonwoo, the actual party involved, judged the situation as calmly as possible, and above all, trusted his lover whom he was dating deep in his heart.

Seong Suhyun, who couldn’t budge against his twin brother’s words, clicked his tongue once in disappointment at Seong Yeonwoo’s scolding, and then dropped the hand that was pressing down on Hajin. Only then, finding it easier to breathe, Hajin exhaled a rough breath, his shoulders heaving weakly.

“If you play any tricks and get caught by me.”

“…”

“You’re dead for real.”

Seong Suhyun muttered in a low voice, staring straight into his eyes. It was a warning and a threat. It felt as if the insidious pheromones peculiar to a Dominant Alpha were overflowing in those eyes. Of course, Hajin, being a Beta, couldn’t feel anything, but he knew well that his threat was not empty words. Because he had experienced it all too much while living in this house. Because he had excluded him with violence countless times and unleashed pointless anger on him just because he was a Beta and because their bloodlines were different.

Hajin fiddled with his hair without answering. It hurt like hell. His head was blank. It wasn’t easy for the things that passed in an instant to be organized in his stupid mind.

࣪˖ ִֶָ🍇་༘

As usual, Hajin bought a few books and puffed rice snacks from a street near the hospital and headed to the hospital where Chairman Kwon—that is, Grandfather—was admitted. This was Hajin’s daily routine these days. After graduating from high school, he had nothing to do, so he was working a part-time job or preparing one by one to do the things he had planned. However, since he didn’t have a fixed job yet, he headed to the hospital to see Grandfather whenever he had time. Perhaps because of that routine, Seong Suhyun seemed to have seriously misunderstood. Fearing that he might have pulled some trick using hospital visits as an excuse.

Passing through the door secured with triple guards and proving his identity to the bodyguards, the door to Chairman Kwon’s hospital room finally came into view. Just looking at the door, it was so luxurious that one wouldn’t feel it was a hospital room door. A place that was said to accommodate only the VIPs among VIPs. Furthermore, since Chairman Kwon made a huge donation every year to the foundation of the university hospital where he was currently admitted, it was natural for them to treat him with the utmost care.

Hajin knocked softly with his knuckles. HK Group and Seongsan Group were currently highly reputed as conglomerate families within the top five in South Korea, and what was just as famous in the world was the friendship between those two groups. It was a friendship that started from the time of the previous chairmen, who were their fathers’ fathers, and that close relationship had continued until now, several decades later.

Currently, Chairman Kwon, the previous chairman of HK Group, was aged but relatively healthy, while Chairman Seong of Seongsan Group had passed away a long time ago due to a chronic illness. Therefore, the position of chairman had been inherited by Seong Suhyun, Seong Yeonwoo, and his own father, Seong Myungtae.

Conversely, in HK Group, Kwon Iwhon—the father of Kwon Sahui, Kwon Sayoung, and Kwon Sabin—held the position of Vice Chairman, but due to his management ability being inferior to his children’s, it had been declared that the succession would be passed straight to the grandchildren’s generation. Because of that, since childhood, Kwon Sahui and Kwon Sayoung had continued a fierce, visible yet invisible battle. Of course, even now when they were over thirty.

Naturally, to Hajin, it was a story of a different world. He just didn’t know much other than the fact that due to the friendship between the two families, each other’s siblings often saw each other, so he had many occasions to see the faces of the three Kwon siblings. Other than that, what he knew was that Chairman Kwon fell into a fairly severe depression after the previous chairman of Seongsan Group, his only close friend, died. And that Chairman Kwon still missed Hajin’s deceased grandfather.

“Grandfather, I’m here.”

Hajin walked inside carefully and stepped into the hallway connected to the bedroom. Only then did the figure of Chairman Kwon sitting up against the bed come into view.

“You’ve come.”

Whether Chairman Kwon was in the middle of working, he was looking through the steel files piled on the temporary desk in front of the bed through reading glasses. At Hajin’s appearance, Chairman Kwon immediately took his eyes off the documents, took off his glasses, and welcomed Hajin with a gentle smile.