Chapter 45

Leaving the not-quite-compliment behind, Yuri closed the bathroom door. Had Yuri ever awakened to a day that felt this light? Marvelling at something he had never experienced, Yuri briefly removed the shirt.

Before stepping into the shower, he happened to see his body. Instead of focusing on the scars as he normally would, his eyes went only to the marks Cherriot had created. They were impossible not to notice.

Starting with the teeth marks on his shoulders, traces of having been bitten and nibbled covered his entire body. Wondering how far Cherriot had gone, Yuri looked away from the mirror and examined himself directly. The marks were especially red around his ankles and inner thighs. The love bites were so blatant and densely scattered that anyone older who saw them would likely become embarrassed on both their behalf.

Yuri did not dislike them.

It was practically the same as being marked by another Alpha. Perhaps it felt different because Cherriot had not done it to dominate him. The marks seemed like evidence of how fiercely Cherriot had wanted him.

Even as Yuri lightly washed beneath the running water, his gaze repeatedly returned to them, as though they might vanish if he did not keep watching. Time would make them disappear naturally. Yuri knew that. Yet, like a man already mourning their loss, he could not stop checking.

The scar Cherriot had kissed first bore only one dark mark rather than several. Apparently, Cherriot had repeatedly returned to the same place, leaving it looking almost bruised. Yuri had not known that such color could remain beside skin that had always been lifelessly white. He stood touching the scar for so long that Cherriot’s voice calling from outside finally brought him back to himself.

He had finished washing some time ago and simply lost track of his surroundings. After showering, Yuri emerged to find Cherriot waiting with food packed across the kitchen island. As he had before, Cherriot watched with faint concern until Yuri appeared unharmed. Relief then softened his face.

“Hurry over, Wolfie. Cold pancakes are a sin.”

The cheerful tapping of his fingers against a plate rang through the room. Yuri passed him, entered his own bedroom, and put on drawers and trousers. Listening to Cherriot whine and call his name again, Yuri returned to the kitchen.

He liked the layout of the cottage. Rather than being divided into two floors, it was a long rectangle with the kitchen and living room in the center and bedrooms on either side, making it easy to tell where the other person was. Only after Yuri sat beside Cherriot, who had been waiting for him, were they ready to eat their late lunch—or perhaps early dinner.

“Did we buy the ingredients to make all this?”

Four pancakes were stacked on each plate. Beside the pancakes topped with butter sat a salad of pomegranate seeds, almonds, kale, and lettuce. The main dishes were steak and macaroni and cheese. Yuri remembered buying meat, but the rest was unfamiliar.

“The pancake mix was already here.”

Apparently extremely hungry, Cherriot cut off a large piece of steak the moment Yuri arrived and lifted it on his fork. After watching Yuri cautiously, he confessed a secret. “The expiration date had passed a little, actually… but it should be fine, right?”

There was only one way to find out. Yuri reached for the pancakes he had wanted since waking, cut off a large piece, looked at Cherriot, and put it into his mouth.

Cherriot forgot to eat his steak and simply watched Yuri chew. Meeting the slightly anxious eyes waiting for judgment, Yuri smiled and lowered his fork. “Who told you that? It tastes as if the flour was milled this morning.”

A radiant smile finally blossomed at Cherriot’s mouth. It opened with the brilliance of a peony, and seeing it filled Yuri with the greedy desire to watch Cherriot smile more—far more. He wanted to make that man happy. Whatever it took.

“Thank goodness. Is it good?”

“Very.”

“Want syrup?”

The Yuri of the past would have refused. Now he wanted the version drowned in syrup. “Yes.”

Cherriot’s smile deepened. He picked up the bottle himself and poured syrup over Yuri’s pancakes. He made two round dots, then drew a curve beneath them, creating a smiling face.

Watching him, Yuri finally laughed aloud. “What is that? Like a child,” he added quietly, his eyes narrowing with laughter.

Cherriot burst into a bright, ringing laugh of his own. He squeezed out syrup until Yuri repeatedly told him, “Enough, enough,” then handed Yuri the bottle. Following the gesture asking Yuri to do the same for him, Yuri poured syrup evenly over Cherriot’s pancakes in neat, closely spaced lines.

For the next few minutes, neither spoke as they hurried through the food. Even without conversation, they frequently exchanged glances and smiled. Yuri quickly finished all four pancakes. After eating half his steak and alternating bites with the salad, he finally had room to relax. As his stomach filled, a pleasant satisfaction rose through him.

“Wow. I feel alive again. I’ve never spent that long in a bedroom without eating anything. ” Cherriot set down his knife around the same time. Perhaps because he was young and large, he had already finished his entire steak and half of the macaroni and cheese.

“We were fortunate nothing happened.”

Yuri reflected on his negligence. He did not want to recall the conversation he had shared with Alexei during a moment like this, but he needed to keep reminding himself that Cherriot remained in danger.

“We’ve been here nearly six days without anything happening. Maybe we’re safe now.”

No, Cherriot. It isn’t that optimistic. Samuel is dead, and many people are searching for you.

Ordinarily, Yuri would have reminded him of at least half the truth. Instead, he said something else: “It doesn’t appear that this location has been discovered.”

“Right?”

Cherriot’s face brightened as he reached his fork toward Yuri’s salad. Yuri willingly allowed him to take whatever he wanted and sank into thought. He wanted to continue talking with the man beside him.

Instead of discussing the danger that might immediately distress Cherriot, Yuri wanted to ask something more personal. After hesitating repeatedly, Yuri summoned his courage. Asking such a question felt like violating the rules he had established for himself, but his desire to know Cherriot was stronger.

“Is that a family photograph in your room?”

Cherriot, who had been picking out only the pomegranate seeds, paused at the question.

Was that a mistake? Should I not have asked?

Just as regret began rising within Yuri’s mind, Cherriot turned and met his eyes. “Are you finally becoming a little curious about me?”

Fortunately, the question had not upset him. He looked pleased instead.

“They were obviously your parents.”

“Well, I did inherit only my mother’s and father’s finest qualities. I may be the most successful genetic combination in history.”

After praising himself, Cherriot began telling Yuri about his past, just as Yuri had hoped.

“You’re right, Wolfie. That was when my parents took me to Lake Louise. We asked someone passing by to take it, and it came out so well that my parents printed several copies. While my father was alive, our whole family used to travel from Boston to Calgary every summer, spend time around Banff, and then come here. ”

Yuri saw longing settle into the green eyes gazing back across distant years. It was the deep shadow of loss that only someone who had lost another person could recognize.

“We did that until I was thirteen.”

After slowly swallowing a pomegranate seed, Cherriot fell quiet. He was looking at Yuri, yet his gaze seemed fixed somewhere far beyond him. Yuri slowly extended a hand and laid it over Cherriot’s where it rested on his thigh.

Cherriot, whose awareness had drifted far away, flinched and lowered his head to look at their hands. Yuri hesitated, then spoke quietly. “You don’t have to continue if you don’t want to.”

There was no need to force himself to speak. Yuri stroked the back of Cherriot’s hand briefly and began to withdraw.

“No.”

Cherriot caught him before he could pull away.

Instead of gripping Yuri’s wrist as usual, he did something different. He turned Yuri’s palm upward, clasped their hands, and threaded their fingers together. The fingers slipping between his own held him tightly.

The moment their palms touched, Yuri’s heart began pounding. His pulse raced so quickly that heat seemed to rise from it, and Yuri pressed his lips together. He felt painfully inexperienced again.

“I… want you to know about me,” Cherriot spoke while looking down at their joined hands.

Merely holding hands this way made Yuri tremble unbelievably. Hearing such words only complicated his thoughts further. Without realizing it, Yuri began searching for a clue. Some indication that what existed between them might not end as an ordinary relationship between two people merely passing through one another’s lives.

Had Cherriot told others these things before? Perhaps this was a story everyone knew, and Cherriot was only sharing it with Yuri as well. Yuri hoped that was not the case.

Everything that has happened to me these past few days has been special enough to make my heart ache. I don’t want it to have been ordinary for you.

Longing boiled up from deep within Yuri’s chest. Blood still flowed inside the heart he had believed frozen and hardened into stone. With difficulty, Yuri calmed the heat within himself and held his breath so he could listen. He did not want to miss a single word Cherriot said.

“My father died just before I entered boarding school. He went on vacation with my mother, but there was an accident. My father died, and my mother had to remain in the hospital for a long time.”

The story was heavier than Yuri had expected, and he remained silent. Thirteen was around the age Alexei had lost both his parents. Losing a father so young must have been a despair Yuri could hardly imagine. Yuri had lost his mother as well, but he had been nearly an adult by then.

“The trust originally belonged to my father. My grandparents transferred it to me, and it included assets that were nothing like the portion originally intended for me as their grandson. So the trust is my father’s inheritance. I have to protect it. The money matters, of course, but more than that, things like my father’s house in Boston and his share of the family cottages are fragments of my memories. ”

Yuri finally understood why Cherriot had become angry when Alexei and Yuri initially treated the trust lightly. Traces left by someone no longer in this world… One would want to protect them by any means necessary. No matter how desperately one tried, memory had limits, and sensation faded with the passing years.

Some people needed objects to remember the dead. Others needed recordings and photographs. Still others lived according to the will of the person who had died.

“I worked extremely hard to satisfy the conditions of the trust. I always kept in mind that someone might use my fame to threaten me. I never met anyone while drunk, and I never attended private parties. When my rut came, I usually chose Alphas. Even when I chose an Omega, I was meticulous about contraception. I was afraid that if I dated someone, they might exaggerate my flaws and sell a scandal to the press, so I avoided serious relationships as much as possible.” Cherriot swept aside the hair that had fallen slightly over his forehead, wearing an embarrassed expression. “And somehow I still ended up in this situation.”

Recognizing that Cherriot wanted to lighten the atmosphere, Yuri added in his usual flat tone, “For someone so meticulous, you didn’t even consider using a condom this time.”

“That was—!” Flustered, Cherriot quickly raised his head and examined Yuri. When he realized that Yuri’s eyes were faintly smiling, his brows furrowed and he laughed. “That was your fault.”

“How?”

“You destroyed my reason the moment I saw you,” Cherriot whispered while gently rubbing the back of Yuri’s hand. “Ha. I know. It was really entirely my fault. I’m sorry. Rut or not, I shouldn’t have done that… I’ll buy you a neutralizer before the pharmacy closes later. Apparently, it’s used when accidents like this happen. Dolly told me about it after I started sleeping with Alphas too.”

So such medication existed. Yuri considered the unfamiliar term, then tilted his head at the name Dolly.

“Dolly?”

“Dolly is one of my bodyguards. Her name is Dorothy. She’s one of the people you’ll meet soon. After my father died, Dolly stayed beside my mother and me. We’ve lived together almost like family ever since.”

“Almost? So she isn’t family?”

“No. Dolly came to us through a rather unusual path.” Remembering something pleasant, Cherriot smiled softly and continued. “To explain how we met Dolly, you need to know more about my father. The truth is, he was extremely good at hockey. Most popular boys played football, but he chose hockey. Before college, he was good enough to receive recruitment offers from several schools. He wanted to become a professional player, but my grandparents opposed him fiercely. My grandmother stopped eating and drinking and protested for an entire week.”

When he spoke of his grandparents, Cherriot’s brow tightened slightly.

“In the end, my father had to study law, just like everyone else in the family. The Goodnights were all involved in politics or the legal profession. He did become a lawyer, but…” The furrow vanished, and his face opened into a grin. “Ha. Instead of joining a law firm as my grandparents wanted, he became a public defender. They tried to persuade him that if he insisted on that kind of work, he should at least take private court appointments. He went straight to the Boston public defender’s office instead.”

Yuri did not understand the exact distinction between the two. Still, he could easily sense that the man in the photograph had passed more than his appearance on to his son. Cherriot had inherited the same quiet stubbornness and tendency to do whatever he pleased.

“After going through all of that to become a public defender, he met Dolly through his work. He never told me exactly what sort of case brought them together, but I think my father changed her life. Afterward, she volunteered to remain beside our family because she wanted to repay him.”

It sounded like something from a film. The idea that complete strangers could become family made it so.

“He sounds like he was a good man.”

Destroying another person’s life was terribly easy. Doing the opposite was extraordinary. Yuri spoke sincerely, and Cherriot received the words with clear happiness.

“Thank you for saying that.”

“I mean it.”

“For some reason, that makes me happy. One more person knows my father now, and that person is Wolfie.”