Chapter 62

The instant Blake heard Dante’s startled shout, he quietly glared down at Rhys again. After a long, painful silence, he asked in an even more exhausted voice, “He didn’t tell you I’m his cousin? On his mother’s side. We grew up together, so we’re practically siblings. In reality, I’m more or less acting as his older brother….”

Dante had thought their hair color and general aristocratic atmosphere seemed somewhat similar, but they were actually blood relatives?

Dante, who had been unable to rule out the distinct possibility that Blake was Rhys’s new lover until the exact moment Blake had been taking a horrific beating, closed his mouth in absolute shock. Perhaps his entire internal monologue showed plainly on his face, because Blake also said nothing for a long while. After letting out another hollow laugh and pacing in a small circle, Blake suddenly turned and headed back toward the sculptures covered with heavy cloth. The faint sound of his palm brushing over the canvas of one sculpture echoed through the silent room.

“I knew Rhys had kept everything a secret, but judging by your face, you really know absolutely nothing,” Blake said, his back turned. “At least after you saw me in Rome, he could’ve told you I was his cousin. Honestly, I don’t even know where to begin explaining this. Ha, what a shitty night, isn’t it?”

Blake continued muttering in a deeply troubled voice.

“I was supposed to take a cute Omega home later, damn it. Do you know how hard it was to find him? Even in New York, tall Omegas with big chests are incredibly rare. And now my beautiful face, which was supposed to go on a hot date, has been smashed to pieces. Iris, when you wake up, you are in so much fucking trouble.”

Still talking to himself, Blake walked slowly among the shrouded sculptures and finally came to a stop before the statue raised on the highest central pedestal. He lifted his head, clasping his hands firmly behind his back as if admiring a masterpiece. His side profile looked incredibly complicated as he gazed up at the statue, though nothing could be seen beneath the heavy white cloth. It wasn’t an emotion Dante inferred from his expression; he simply felt it radiating into the room. Swept along by the heavy atmosphere, Dante found himself focusing entirely on Blake’s back.

“You broke up with Rhys, didn’t you?”

After a long silence, the words Blake finally spoke dragged them right back to what had transpired three months ago. The remark, aimed straight at their reality, instantly cooled the remaining heat in Dante’s head. Looking down at Rhys, who slept peacefully against his chest, Dante answered quietly.

“…Yes. In Rome.”

So in truth, he shouldn’t even be holding Rhys like this. He had promised himself he would never see the man again. Even when missing him hurt to the point of physical pain, he had endured it with immense difficulty—and then Rhys had suddenly materialized in a situation Dante never could have predicted. And with his eyes gone completely wild, no less.

“It’s unfortunate,” Blake said softly. “He really does go entirely insane when it comes to you. So, on that note… if I told you that Rhys broke up with you because he loved you too much, would you consider seeing him again?”

Blake had just uttered something entirely unbelievable. The moment Dante heard the claim that Rhys had broken up with him because he loved him too much, something inside his chest tightened with a violent surge of frustration. If Rhys loved him so much, he should have trusted him enough to tell him what was happening to his body. He shouldn’t have left him to hear about “episodes” or whatever this trait crisis was from a third party.

After a long, tense silence, Dante’s lips parted slightly, but he ultimately shook his head. To be absolutely honest, he was desperately, agonizingly curious about what lay behind those cryptic words, but he fully intended to do exactly what Rhys had demanded of him: sort his life out and move on. He had already decided to move, and he would take Lily with him.

Did that mean he no longer loved Rhys? Of course not. But Dante couldn’t easily forget the traumatic sight of Rhys turning sharp and cruel against him in Rome. Rhys had wanted to break up sincerely, pushing Dante away by any means necessary. In the end, he had even hurled vile insults entirely unlike his usual self in order to drive him off, and Dante didn’t want to make that agonizing effort meaningless.

“I don’t know about anything else, but Rhys sincerely wanted to break up with me, and I accepted that decision,” Dante said, his voice steadying. “Rhys himself wanted that, so I don’t know why you, a third party, are making this offer now. To be perfectly honest with you, it was fucking hard all this time. I finally managed to pull myself back together, and I don’t want to be shaken anymore.”

Dante’s voice sounded as if everything had already been permanently settled. Blake turned his head to look back at him. Seeing that Dante was firm, he didn’t seem particularly intent on forcing the issue, giving a short, acknowledging nod.

“Originally, the two of you breaking up was the logical thing,” Blake murmured. “To begin with… knowing he was in that medical condition, he shouldn’t have coveted you. He knew staying with a Beta would only make his instability worse.”

Was Blake also an artist? Artists always seemed to say cryptic things only they could understand, and Blake, too, was muttering concepts Dante couldn’t grasp at all. Dante waited for him to continue with forced patience, then finally answered, “I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.”

But Blake seemed to have sunk entirely into his own private world. He continued pacing, words that might have been an explanation or a simple soliloquy spilling out one after another.

“Still, you’re the man our Rhys loved for so long, so shouldn’t we have found some way somehow…? No. There was no way. If he’d stayed with you even a little longer, he really would’ve lost his mind permanently. Then no one knows what horrific thing might have happened… That’s why Rhys tried to break up with you.”

“Excuse me,” Dante interrupted, tightening his grip on the sleeping Alpha. “Are you talking to me, or are you just talking to yourself?”

And how long were they supposed to stay like this on the floor? Holding Rhys made him feel steady—almost like he could finally breathe again—but he was deeply worried about Rhys lying half-exposed on the cold marble. What if he caught a cold on top of everything else? If Blake claimed he was already ill, Dante wanted to lay him down somewhere proper as soon as possible.

Besides, Dante’s own physical situation was rapidly deteriorating. His body didn’t ache the way it had while he was sick in bed for an entire day, but an intense heat kept pooling in his lower stomach, and strange, vivid flashes of sexual desire kept surfacing in ways completely inappropriate for the grim atmosphere. Every time they did, he became acutely aware that the place behind him—that wet, slick place—was continuing to self-lubricate. It felt deeply unpleasant and alien, and he wanted to wash and change his clothes immediately. He wanted to flee the building, but because of the heavy weight of Rhys in his lap, he couldn’t move a muscle.

“Ah, sorry. You suddenly presenting as a full Omega gives me a lot of variables to think about,” Blake said, shaking his head.

Dante stared blankly at him for a long moment. He was thoroughly exhausted. After being violently ill through the entire night, he had come out merely to look for his pet guinea pig, briefly lost his mind to a strange scent, stopped two madly fighting cousins, and was now being told he had magically transformed into an Omega.

“I’m not in the mood for jokes,” Dante snapped, his eyes flashing. “I’m a Beta. You said yourself I was a Beta when you saw me earlier, too.”

Blake had been beaten bloody, so he was probably exhausted, but Dante was more or less a medical patient himself right now. Overwhelmed by sheer fatigue, he denied the absurd claim with a fierce, serious expression, having zero desire to argue over nonsense.

Blake’s eyes widened in genuine disbelief. “You’re the one who shouldn’t be joking. You sprayed aggressive pheromones the exact second I came close, and you’re telling me you’re a Beta? From my perspective, I was just walking down my own hallway and got hit in the face with a bucket of heat. I held back because it was me. If I had been an Alpha with even slightly less self-control, I would’ve jumped your bones already.”

Blake, sounding genuinely wronged, pointed emphatically at his own swollen face. “And thanks to your little display, I ended up looking like this!”

“…Ha, this is really driving me insane,” Dante groaned, rubbing his eyes. “You’re saying I released pheromones or whatever? I don’t even know what that feels like. I didn’t do anything then, and I’m not doing anything now.”

“Right now, Rhys has slathered your entire body in his own heavy pheromones, so yours aren’t leaking out anymore.”

It was something that, by every law of common sense, absolutely could not happen. Yet as Dante spoke with Blake, a sudden, heavy intuition slowly told him that Blake was telling the truth. The things Dante had felt with his entire body—the invisible things that might have been air or scent—were biological sensations he had never experienced in his thirty-three years of life, and he was still actively feeling them vibrate against his skin right now.

But recognizing a physical possibility in his head and accepting it in his heart were two entirely different matters. Dante had lived over three decades as a standard Beta. He had been confirmed as one not only on his official birth certificate, but also through the rigorous, detailed military medical examinations he had undergone before joining the Coast Guard. Therefore, by every medical standard, Dante Bellini was a Beta. He was a Beta, and yet….

With a grim, tormented expression, he looked down between his legs. The undeniable sight of his damp, wet jeans brought reality rushing in like a tidal wave. Mateo’s cryptic warnings in Rome also came flashing back to him, and with them came an unwelcome, horrifying realization: what had been happening to his body over the past few weeks was the exact phenomenon an Omega would experience during a cycle.

“Do I really look like an Omega to you right now?” Dante whispered.

“Looking at you right now, even a blind Beta would probably think so,” Blake said smoothly. “Ah, though someone like you, who has zero interest in other traits, might not know the signs. Anyway, yes. You feel like an Omega, you smell like an Omega, and you are an Omega.”