Part One: The Evening the World Changed

The blood testing facility smelled of antiseptic and quiet anxiety.

Haebeom sat in the white plastic chair with his knees pressed together, the sleeves of his oversized cream-colored sweater pulled down to his knuckles. Around him, other newly-turned eighteen-year-olds fidgeted with their phones, scrolled through nothing, pretended not to care. Some of them were alphas who came in with their chests slightly forward, performing nonchalance. Most were betas who filled out their forms with the practiced indifference of people who already knew they wouldn't match with anyone today.

Haebeom was omega.

He knew it the way you know the color of your own eyes — not from looking in mirrors, but from the way the world had always looked back at him. Softer. With more attention than he ever asked for.

He had spent his entire adolescence learning to make himself smaller. Wearing scent-suppressants religiously, keeping his eyes down on public transit, choosing art over parties because a paintbrush never looked at him the way strange alphas sometimes did — with that particular hunger that had nothing to do with him as a person, only with what he was.

Last time, he was three days shy of turning eighteen and could not take part.But today time he was required to. Today was the day the system would either give him someone, or tell him to wait

Please let me wait, he thought, not entirely sure he meant it.

The nurse called his number. He rolled up his sleeve with careful fingers.

The needle went in clean.

A week after, Haebeom was home, sitting at the kitchen table helping his mother shell edamame while his younger sister watched a drama on the living room television. The apartment was the kind of small that had always been filled with warmth anyway — his mother's persimmon-colored curtains, his father's collection of ceramic dogs on the windowsill, the permanent smell of doenjang and fabric softener that Haebeom had decided, somewhere around age twelve, was what the word home actually meant.

His phone rang.

An unknown number. Official prefix.

He answered.

"Is this Im Haebeom-ssi?" A woman's voice. Careful. The kind of careful that meant something.

"Yes."

"This is We need you and your family to come to a location we will send you now. Tonight, if possible." A pause. "Your match has been found."

Haebeom's mother dropped an edamame pod.

They did not go to the standard matching consultation office.

The car that came for them — a black one, with tinted windows and a driver in white gloves — took them to a building in the center of the city that Haebeom had only ever seen in photographs. The Haewon Grand, seven stars, the kind of hotel that existed in a different atmosphere than ordinary life. The kind where the lobby flowers were changed every four hours and the staff bowed at an exact fifteen-degree angle.

In a private suite, a doctor in a pressed white coat took Haebeom's blood again. Asked him to wait.

His mother sat with her back very straight, hands folded in her lap in the way she always did when she was frightened but refusing to show it. His father had gone quiet in the way that meant he was thinking very hard. His sister kept looking at Haebeom with enormous eyes.

When the doctor returned, he was accompanied by a woman in a grey suit and a man who introduced himself as Chief of Protocol.

"The match has been confirmed," the doctor said. "Twice now. The markers are..." He paused, and for a moment something human crossed his professional face — something close to awe. "They are an exact resonance. The rarest category."

"Who," Haebeom's father said. Not a question. A demand, quiet and firm.

The Chief of Protocol cleared his throat. "The Im family will be escorted to meet the matched party's family now. We ask for your patience and discretion." He looked at Haebeom's father with the careful eyes of a man about to say something that would change the shape of an entire life. "His Royal Highness Crown Prince Jae Kyung has been waiting five years for his match."

The room went very still.

Haebeom looked down at his own hands — the paint that was still faintly stained into the lines of his knuckles from this morning's studio session, the hangnail on his left thumb he kept forgetting to trim, the small scar on his wrist from a childhood fall.

These hands, he thought, half-delirious. A crown prince has been waiting for these hands.