Dohyun was initially hired to spy on isolated/bullied 14-year-old Wooyeon, earn his trust, and report back to his mother about what was going on with him. While I do believe this was the story intended from the start, there are major storytelling issues with the way this was (n't) set up...

• Danny also having been a spy for his mother, and Wooyeon knowing but choosing to stay friends with him anyway, wasn't revealed to readers until the exact same chapter. Wooyeon has way too much narration about his relationship with Danny for that to logically be omitted. This info would've planted the suspicion in our mind... and would've also been in Wooyeon's mind (if not back when he found out Danny, then at the very least once he realized Dohyun lied about being an alpha--which was intentional, turns out!)
• Dohyun angst/conflict was not shown adequately. A few lines about "I'm not as good as you think, " doesn't work when they're only ever uttered in the context of s*xual tension and the implication is 'alphas are so beastly' (as in every other ABO.) We needed way more indications that he was actively hiding the truth about his background.
• More childhood backstory needed to be brought up in the beginning or trickled throughout, not dumped at the end. It completely changes the context of Wooyeon's loneliness and neglect as a child, the trauma he is set up to have prior is downright lighthearted compared to, "my mother imprisoned me at home to hide me from the world, every aspect of my life is controlled, I have zero privacy, and have no genuine relationships with anyone I can trust."

ML's POV kind of ruined the story for me. Aside from the deception aspect, Dohyun didn't just recognize/remember him, he knew everything about him and his past, and was playing mind games the entire time. That even the Yeon-a nickname is a contrived manipulation on his part and not a cute misunderstanding is nauseating.

I expected the 'kind persona is an affectation' cliche, but the smug self-satisfaction he gets from Wooyeon's childlike adoration, knowing that this kid is lonely and desperate for affection, is just way more black-bellied than I was prepared for. It recontextualizes all their earlier flirty interactions into being about satisfying his ego instead of actually developing feelings for Wooyeon. It turns out he didn't actually start having feelings for Wooyeon until so much later in the story than I would've guessed. And finding out he was actually getting off on it and encouraging it way back when they were 14-15 and 18-19 makes this feel 100x more groomer-y (NOT helped by how many times in the side stories smut Dohyun describes his body and mannerisms as being childish, I got the ick ngl.)

I can't root for a relationship where the ML was maybe going to deceive him indefinitely if he hadn't been caught? This whole thing would've been so different if at the halfway point, prior to the "I like you" he had confessed. Or before they had s*x. Or instead of rushing to A-mother to ask her not to tell Wooyeon before he did, he could have spent that time telling him.

Even his apologies feel so self-centered, and it's written as if we're supposed to blame the mother for revealing it, when prior to that he had so. many. opportunities. to. I'm pretty sure Wooyeon ended up apologizing more for misunderstanding that he was dating him under her orders and still reporting to her (a reasonable fear!! And what a terrifying one to have!!) than Doyun apologized for the years he actually spent reporting to her and the months since reuniting he spent lying to him.

The forgiveness was so rushed, and came way too soon. It felt like the author wanted to take a shortcut by using the "orphan has trust issues that make him kinda sociopathic" cliche to brush everything off. You'd think for how realistically devastated Wooyeon was shown to be, the author would take more than a couple of days of Dohyun harassing him to cave, but... nope! I would say it feels really inconsistent with how strong-willed Wooyeon has been up until that point, but I guess it is pretty consistent with someone who's been manipulated so heavily by ML since the age of fourteen.