“CEO, may I come in?”
Kim Dae-hong cracked the door open and poked in his thick frame as he asked.
Cheon Tae-seong didn’t respond. He just stared silently at the monitor screen.
The moment Ha-jin had left the office, it was like a switch flipped—his heart throbbed painfully, his breathing grew ragged, and it became impossible to maintain his expression.
Just five days. That was all. It made the time he’d endured before finding Lee Ha-jin feel completely meaningless. He’d let the man go home for the weekend, and now his body was throwing a full-blown tantrum.
And this isn’t imprinting?
Tae-seong let out a dry laugh and pulled a small pill case from his pocket. He immediately popped two pills into his mouth, and Dae-hong rushed to bring him water.
But Tae-seong waved it off and chewed them dry, swallowing them with a bitter grimace. Dae-hong winced, watching with a strange expression.
“Just get to the point.”
“Ah, right. Professor Song contacted me about changing your medication. He said he’d like you to come pick up a new prescription, but I told him—no, we told him—you haven’t taken your meds in five days now, and probably wouldn’t need any for a while…”
“……”
“…That’s what I told him.”
As he spoke, Kim Dae-hong kept glancing toward the pill case in Tae-seong’s hand. He couldn’t see inside, but he had a pretty good guess at how little was left.
The pills that had been newly issued this past Monday were probably still untouched. He’d seen firsthand that Cheon Tae-seong hadn’t taken a single one in five days.
It had taken about four months to find that specific medication. And just as the dosage had been steadily increasing, he’d suddenly gone cold turkey—and it was all thanks to the manager.
If things kept going like this, even the sleeping pills and the rest of the cocktail he’d been taking would disappear too. Dae-hong had been quietly thrilled.
“He wants to change the meds? Jae-hyun does?”
“Ah—he said he got a call from the manager.”
“Of course he did. That little chatterbox… always butting in like he knows everything.”
Was it a complaint? A compliment? Dae-hong couldn’t tell. He stood there awkwardly, unsure of how to respond.
Tae-seong, now clearly exhausted, slumped back deep into his chair. As the medication started to kick in, and he heard that Ha-jin had contacted Professor Song, the mental chaos spinning through him began to settle.
The intrusive thoughts—Is this a dream? A hallucination? Am I going insane?—finally began to fade. Cheon Tae-seong managed to grab hold of the fraying edge of sanity again.
Right after losing Ha-jin off the cliff, Cheon Tae-seong had collapsed, vomiting blood. His already weakened body, poisoned and deteriorating, had never recovered after that day.
One night, when his condition had reached its limit, he began to believe in an absurd delusion—that he had imprinted on the dead, heat-suppressed Omega.
An Omega who didn’t even release pheromones.
Imprinted? On him?
At first, he denied it. Even though the thought came from his own head, it was absurd. Completely illogical.
Tae-seong had known Ha-jin hadn’t drugged him directly. But the fact that he’d accepted the job, lured in by money, was something he could never forgive. Betrayal was betrayal, even if just for a moment.
He had accepted money from those who wanted to harm him—and brought those drugs into his home. How dare he.
Tae-seong hadn’t planned to kill him, but he had intended to break a few limbs. If a person commits a crime, they need to be punished.
But then, Ha-jin had gone and died on his own terms. And to top it off, Tae-seong’s own body had imprinted on him.
How?
He’d searched for a way to undo it, but there was no answer to be had from a corpse.
When? Where? At what moment did I lose my goddamn heart to that bastard?
All he could do now was curse himself for being a fucking idiot. It was infuriating and humiliating.
And for someone who’s been imprinted and lost their pair, only a miserable end awaits.
On a day when the stabbing pain in his chest drove him mad, he’d downed a mix of booze and pills. When he opened his eyes… time had rewound.
In the last life, Ha-jin hadn’t been hired by him personally—the secretarial team had done it. He hadn’t even read his paperwork. For two years, Ha-jin had followed him around like a puppy, but now that he wanted to find him again, all he had was a name and a face.
Lee Ha-jin.
He’d dug through every single pheromone manager in the industry, scraping the bottom of the barrel. Only six men in the whole country matched the name. Two were women. The other four men? None of them were his Lee Ha-jin.
Something had changed. Had his regression altered the past? Had Ha-jin died in this timeline too?
No. His instincts screamed that wasn’t the case. More than anything, this was his one shot to set everything right. He couldn’t give up that easily.
He began digging through Alpha-exclusive meetups. Then, one day, some asshole with a filthy kink proudly showed off a video—and there he was. Ha-jin.
The video had been secretly recorded using cameras hidden throughout an office. In it, Ha-jin appeared clearly, having arrived to perform pheromone management.
Tae-seong had snatched the man’s phone without hesitation. That’s how he found him again. Of course, the bastard who filmed it ended up dying in a convenient accident.
“Kim Nalgae… fuck. No wonder I couldn’t find him.”
Tae-seong suddenly swore, and Kim Dae-hong blinked in surprise.
Cheon Tae-seong usually hated vulgar language, even from his subordinates. The fact that he was doing it himself? That shift had coincided with the point when he’d started taking heavy meds. Maybe it was a side effect.
“Want me to call the agency CEO and ask what that alias means?”
“Dae-hong, why are you being so rude?”
Dae-hong had been secretly curious, but at the unexpected scolding, he clamped his mouth shut.
“Ha-jin said it’s a secret.”
A secret. Well, he had his own secrets, too.
On New Year’s at midnight, Cheon Tae-seong had opened his eyes in his grandfather’s house. He’d been pouring drinks during dinner and had nodded off shortly before the bell that marked the new year.
How do you explain that strange feeling when he woke up?
He knew less than an hour had passed. But in his still-conscious mind, he’d experienced two entire years.
He was too arrogant to question his own sanity. So, with a perfectly composed mask, he began observing those around him.
Once he confirmed that time had indeed rewound, his focus zeroed in on a single point:
Lee Ha-jin.
Meeting him. Watching him die. That entire two-year timeline had been erased—but Tae-seong’s body hadn’t forgotten. It still needed Ha-jin.
Instead of wasting time trying to prove the impossible, he decided to focus on what he needed now.
If time had turned back, it meant that Ha-jin was still alive, somewhere under the same sky.
The more he investigated, the more his stomach twisted.
A sick younger brother. A fucked-up family situation. A man who was stupidly self-sacrificing.
No wonder he’d taken the money and stabbed him in the back. But even after all that time working together, he never once reached out to ask him for help.
“……”
Cheon Tae-seong stared down at the pill case in his hand.
The meds were meant to keep his heart from failing due to the absence of his imprinted partner. The label, written in tiny print, was full of warnings.
He’d been getting a week’s supply from Song Jae-hyun after reporting his symptoms. But of the latest batch—received on Monday—only two pills had been used.
Ever since Ha-jin showed up again, the symptoms had clearly improved. You didn’t need a blood test or a pheromone scan to know he was imprinted. Even a passing dog could smell it.
Maybe time turning back was a gift from the gods.
A chance to fix the one flaw in his otherwise flawless life.
“Where’s Ha-jin?”
He tossed the question out. Kim Dae-hong pulled out his phone.
“Nothing out of the ordinary. The staff assigned to him just reported that he got off the subway a little while ago. Then, like always, he stopped by a public bathhouse before heading home.”
“Bathhouse, huh…”
As Dae-hong gave his usual low-key report, he glanced over at Tae-seong—whose face had now twisted into an ugly scowl.
“The manager really seems to love bathhouses, huh?”
“He’s just being considerate.”
No doubt it was because of his sick brother. Ha-jin was probably washing off every trace of pheromone before stepping foot into the house—including his own.
Tae-seong sneered to himself, but the amusement quickly drained from his face.
It wasn’t something to laugh about. The biggest idiot in the world was him.
He hadn’t even kissed the man—never even touched him—and yet he was imprinted. Clearly, it wasn’t Ha-jin who’d lost his mind. It was his own goddamn body.
Lee Ha-jin had done nothing wrong. He couldn’t be punished for a betrayal he’d never committed—not when things had already been reset.
If anyone was in need of help, it was Cheon Tae-seong.
He was the one who’d have to climb onto the operating table, have his brain fried, and ask for help breaking the imprint.
Ha-jin needed money—badly. If Tae-seong offered the same 500 million from the previous life, he’d probably agree without hesitation.
All he had to do was swallow his pride. Everything else was easy.
Suddenly, Cheon Tae-seong stood up from his seat. He looked down at the mess of papers scattered across his desk.
They were documents related to a greenbelt zone in the South Sea region—something his grandfather had been obsessing over recently.
In his last life, this had been his top priority around this time.
But now? He couldn’t focus. His thoughts refused to stay on track.
It was supposed to be his second time through. He knew how everything unfolded—should’ve had the upper hand in every scenario.
But far from familiar, everything just felt harder.
Maybe because his entire condition was still completely, utterly fucked.
