“What did you just, the wedding is when?”
“Ihyeok, did Seongha not know?”
But with the madam asking that in puzzlement, I couldn’t press it any further. And Baek Ihyeok tightened the hand holding mine as if to say shut up.
“Of course not. It’s so close that it must not feel real to him yet.”
“Ih...”
“It’s all right. All you have to do is stay by my side.”
Excuse me? A breath of disbelief escaped me at the gentle tone he’d never once shown before. He squeezed my hand right away, of course, so I managed to compose my face after a fashion, but I was so thrown that my lips kept curling inward and the corners of my eyes prickled.
Of course it doesn’t feel real. Because I just heard about my own wedding with no room left over to make it feel real!
By now my damn heart wasn’t even racing. It might honestly be better for my mental health if it simply stopped. I seriously needed to find out how much of what I ought to know Baek Ihyeok was withholding, and where the withholding began and ended.
“Dad! How could you do this to me? Who sets up a gathering like this and leaves only me out?!”
For now, though, getting through this crisis came first.
Baek Irang scanned the table and then pointed a finger at me.
“And you, you weren’t the housekeeper, you were my brother’s fiance?”
Her nails, already changed to a different color, caught the light and glittered. The look on her face, as though I’d betrayed her personally, made my hair stand on end. I hurried to explain myself.
“I’m sorry. It’s just, I was going to tell you, but it seemed like Ihyeok hadn’t mentioned me yet, so...!”
“No wonder. I should have caught on the second you started going on about ‘Ihyeok’!”
One thing was now clear. These two willful siblings had no idea how to listen to another person.
“You’ll be tired if you’re going through with it tomorrow. Go home early and rest.”
“We’ll take our leave, then.”
Maybe he’d inherited that gene from his father, because even in the middle of the uproar the chairman and Baek Ihyeok traded remarks placidly. His mother, too, showed no sign of fluster and only an elegant smile.
Baek Ihyeok stood, taking me with him, and held by him, I had no choice but to rise awkwardly too.
“What? A wedding out of nowhere? So he’s a dominant omega?”
“Irang, lower your voice.”
“I’m against this marriage! Who does this?!”
“Irang.”
Her mother and then the chairman both admonished her decorously, but whatever she found so unjust, she wouldn’t back down. It got to the point that she snatched my wrist as I passed by, following behind him.
“Are you really a dominant omega? Nobody acted strange around you when we went shopping!”
I broke out in a sweat. Her grip was strong enough to snap my wrist if I didn’t produce an answer she liked immediately. With one wrist surrendered to each sibling, I felt like a rabbit that had blundered into a tiger’s den and gotten caught.
Shouldn’t he have warned me his siblings would openly hate our marriage? Feeling like a criminal, I couldn’t bring myself to meet her eyes and lowered my head.
“I’m really sor...”
“Let go.”
“...ry. Ngh.”
Baek Ihyeok’s voice came out of nowhere, and then I was yanked forward and collided with him. My face, buried against a hard arm, stung. Rubbing at the sore spot, I looked back to find Baek Irang with a scowl and her hand raised slightly.
Baek Ihyeok pulled me in closer against himself.
“Looks like you still haven’t broken that habit with your hands. Whatever it is, keep it in moderation.”
“Oh please, you’re going to be like this?”
“Just don’t put your hands on what’s mine.”
With that he dragged me out, straight past the manager, who was wavering over whether he ought to see us off and looking back and forth between the room and him, and down to the first floor in one go.
I was half out of my wits right up until we got into the waiting car. What had just happened, and what I’d have to go through because of it, came rushing at me all at once and left me reeling.
I can get pregnant? So if I have sex with Baek Ihyeok and give birth to a dominant alpha, they’ll give me ten billion won? I actually have to have a baby? ...And the wedding is tomorrow? Not somebody else’s wedding, mine? And after that wedding is over I have to have a baby?
Wedding tomorrow, pregnancy, dominant alpha, ten billion won...
The words spun around in my head like a whirlpool, and I didn’t even notice I was sitting there vacantly with my jaw hanging open like an idiot.
“I don’t know exactly what’s got you so dazed, but there’s nothing for you to worry about.”
Heat shot up to the crown of my head at that.
“You don’t know what’s got me dazed? Are you serious? You’re not saying that because you actually don’t know, are you?”
“My point is, there are a lot of reasons it could be.”
“...At least conversation is possible with you.”
I pressed my throbbing forehead and sighed. I had no sense of where in this overwhelming mess to even begin. But of everything at the hotel, which had felt like a bomb going off, the most shocking was, of course...
“You don’t need to give the child talk any thought. If that had been the plan to begin with, I’d have put it in the contract.”
Baek Ihyeok said, as though he’d read my mind.
“Really? It’s not one of those things where you have to produce a dominant alpha to inherit the company?”
“If that happened, my father would certainly be inclined to hand the company to me. But I have no intention of having a child.”
“...What? So the condition for the inheritance isn’t a child?”
The firmness of it put me at ease inwardly and left me uneasy at the same time.
“Then what is the condition?”
“That’s none of your concern.”
The cold answer landed at once. It felt like he was drawing frigid lines between himself and me in long strokes, as if telling me to look closely.
“What kind of...”
“Party B shall not seek unnecessary knowledge about Party A. Forgotten already?”
“I have some right to know when it concerns the contract.”
“This concerns me more than the contract.”
Baek Ihyeok regarded me sidelong.
“Got your one billion and now the penalty clause is a joke to you? Or have you developed some pure interest in me? Either way it’s a breach of contract.”
“...”
“Your job is to keep this contract quietly and properly without anyone finding out. Is that hard?”
There was a lot I wanted to say and nothing more I could say. I shut my mouth the way he wanted and rummaged in my pocket.
He’d said I didn’t have to have a child, but there was no telling how his parents would act. In good conscience it seemed best to at least memorize the auspicious date they’d had selected.
The fact that my body could bear a child was shocking, but adapting to it quickly was the only approach available to me, and the one saving grace was that I didn’t have to try for a child right away.
Come on, surely I’m not actually going to end up having a baby.
I swallowed down a throat that kept going dry. Then I unfolded the small slip of paper the madam had given me.
「January 6, 01:30」
Today was January 3.
The wedding went by fast. It probably only felt that way to me, but in any case, the wedding everyone except me had known about proceeded in the blink of an eye.
One blink and I was in deep beige groom’s formalwear; another and I was sitting in the waiting room in it; another and I was standing beside Baek Ihyeok in front of the officiant, listening to the address; another and a famous singer was belting out a song. And when I closed my eyes and opened them once more, Baek Ihyeok’s face was right in front of my...
Hold on. What?
When I came to my senses, his sculpted face had come in close, right in front of me. Close enough that his breath reached me.
Wh-Whoa...?
And then, before I had a moment to be appalled, our lips were pressed together. A large hand cupped the back of my neck gently, and somewhere a flash went off with a click.
Time, which had been racing so chaotically, strangely felt slow for that one moment alone. As if the tape that had been winding forward so fast had overloaded.
The lips of Baek Ihyeok, who only ever spat out rotten things, were unexpectedly warm and soft. Through my wide open eyes I took in his dense lashes. Lowered slightly, they trembled and then withdrew from me along with the warmth. The hand that moved from my nape to my cheek swept a thumb across my face in a pretense of tenderness.
“You really are transparent.”
When I heard that low whisper, I blinked again.
I was lying under a blanket on a plush bed. Hawaii’s cool night breeze came in through the slightly open terrace door.
At some point I’d come to Hawaii with Baek Ihyeok on our honeymoon. I stared blankly at the light fixture on the ceiling, then turned toward a faint sound of water.
Shhhhhh.
In the bathroom attached to the room, Baek Ihyeok was in the middle of washing up. I couldn’t see him, but the sound of falling water came intermittently. Since our relationship was for show, I’d assumed we’d take separate rooms, but apparently he hadn’t wanted to hand anyone an excuse to make noise about it, so we were sharing.
Lying on one side of the enormous bed, I steadied my breathing. Without my knowing how the day had passed, the night was deepening. The clock on the wall showed that it had just gone past midnight.
It was January 6 now. The auspicious day his parents had hinted at.
