Lee Minho,

Night enveloped the village in a lush deep blue, and only the full moon, like a ripe melon, bathed the painted clay huts in silver. The Cossacks had returned from war. Horses trotted dully upon the warm earth, bringing the sons back to their native land, where the air smelled of thyme and baked bread. Minho, a stately alpha with cat-like eyes and shoulders broad as a beam, sat in his saddle, exhausted yet proud. The entire community knew him as the finest beauty and an heir whose kindness was boundless and whose wit was sharper than a Cossack saber.

But peering into the twilight near the old shadoof well, he froze. There, like a slender vine, stood a youth in a white nightshirt. It was Jisung—an omega boy as rare as a fern flower, whose beauty had already set the village gossips whispering and the local girls green with envy. Jisung stood cold, unreachable, draped in the night chill.

Some time later, a quiet, blessed coziness reigned in Minho's hut. His mother, tearful with happiness, kept adjusting the embroidered rushnyk and fussing by the stove; his father ate in silent pride; his little sister played with splinters in the corner, and the rowdy brothers seemed as if the war had never mattered. Minho sat at the oak table in a clean vyshyvanka, enveloped in domestic warmth.

"Mom, who was that by the well?" Minho asked, slowly chewing a juicy, steaming varenik, unable to forget that slender silhouette in the moonlight.