Chapter 2

Dante Bellini was a Beta male who had turned thirty-three this year.

With tawny eyes that shone like the sun beneath daylight and hair as black as ebony, he possessed a tall frame of over six feet and a solidly built, athletic physique. This year marked his tenth as a rescue swimmer, and within his organization, he was the resident poster boy, always summoned whenever an outside interview or promotional photo shoot came in.

This Italian man, who knew exactly how to flash a refreshing, model-perfect smile, looked from every conceivable angle like excellent boyfriend material.

In truth, however, Dante had one tiny, almost catastrophic problem.

He had a chronic habit of announcing breakups.

Dante had not always possessed this terrible trait. It had developed entirely during his time dating Rhys Elliott. Before meeting Rhys, Dante had never been the one to issue breakup notices; he had always been the one betrayed, blindsided, and dumped.

The reason Dante changed was, paradoxically, because Rhys was far too perfect a boyfriend. He was so perfect, in fact, that Dante could hardly believe a man like that had chosen him.

If asked why he could not trust his own good fortune, the answer was simple: Dante had been famous since high school for having absolutely no eye for people.

Before meeting Rhys, Dante had dated five women. Apparently, Alphas and Omegas could date men without much fuss, but as a Beta, Dante’s world was not quite that fluid. Most of the Betas around him paired off with the opposite sex. As for designation, they usually dated other Betas whenever possible. Alphas and Omegas, with their peculiar, volatile cycles of heat, were notoriously difficult to understand, and Betas could not relieve the heat of people with other designations anyway.

For that reason, Dante had never even considered dating outside his designation. A man like me, unable to satisfy his lover’s core needs? Unacceptable. On top of that, Dante possessed a powerful, desperate need to be needed. The very idea of being of no use to the lover he cherished was intolerable. Following what he believed to be perfectly rational judgment, Dante dated female Betas without giving his own identity much deeper thought.

The problem was that among the many women who made advances toward him, Dante suffered from a fascinatingly consistent affliction: he was drawn exclusively to toxic people. They were the sort who looked beautiful and angelic through the eyes of someone blinded by love, but who gave off a faintly ominous, red-flag impression to anyone with an objective viewpoint. If nine out of ten women who liked him were perfectly normal, Dante would invariably pick the one bad apple. His father had raised him on the chivalrous teaching that all women in the world were incarnations of angels, but the five women Dante dated were slight exceptions to that doctrine.

Each of those five relationships left Dante with deep trauma.

The two girls he dated in middle and high school both two-timed him, and the girlfriend he dated after graduating and going straight to work as an emergency medical technician did much the same. Dante’s “Nightingale”—a nurse at the same hospital—turned out to have fallen for a successful businessman while still dating him.

Even after Dante caught her having sex with the other man in plain sight, she had the sheer nerve to sue him for trespassing. He had almost gone to prison simply because he had returned to her apartment after waiting two hours in line to buy the expensive dessert she had explicitly asked for.

Shocked and deeply reeled by the incident, Dante impulsively enlisted. He didn’t want to deploy overseas, and since he wanted to continue work that involved saving lives, he decided to become a rescue swimmer with the United States Coast Guard. The job allowed him to return to ordinary society after his shifts, and the fact that he mostly had to work his body hard rather than his brain suited his state of mind perfectly. The agonizing pain of heartbreak gradually faded from memory under the sheer exhaustion of brutal training.

After two long years of training gave him a killer physique and formidable stamina, his confidence began to resurface. As soon as he was stationed with the Coast Guard, he threw himself back into the dating market. Perhaps human beings truly could not live without love; the two-year gap in his romantic life had left Dante shuddering with profound loneliness. Still, by that point, he had learned something resembling a lesson. Unable to trust his own catastrophic judgment, he asked his friends to set him up.

Dante was introduced to three women. One was a cheerful reporter with a deep interest in human rights and animal welfare. Another was an aspiring director making documentaries about environmental pollution. The last was an introverted woman working as a librarian.

Within those 33.3 percent odds, Dante was immediately drawn to the librarian. Her medium-length haircut, glasses, and intelligent appearance somehow comforted his bruised ego. Perhaps, after having dated too many glamorous, volatile beauties, he had unconsciously hoped that someone plain and unassuming would be safe. Of course, that did not mean she wasn’t beautiful; she was elegant and lovely. Since they had met through mutual connections, Dante felt a rare sense of security.

In fact, the two of them spent six beautiful months together. About once a month, she lovingly packed lunch for Dante, and whenever he gave her gifts, she returned the gesture with a smile as pretty as a flower. Dante even received a pair of pants from H&M as a birthday gift from her. For a man who had always given everything to his lovers and could not remember ever receiving a single token of affection in return, it was a deeply meaningful present.

Thinking he had finally found the right person, Dante suggested they live together, and she readily accepted.

The result?

She took the full year’s rent Dante had given her for the deposit, supposedly to go sign the lease on the condo they would share, and vanished into thin air.

He later found out that she had a long-term boyfriend well before she ever met Dante—a man addicted to gambling who desperately needed the cash. For reference, the other two women Dante had turned down were now both well-settled in successful careers and happily raising families with their childhood sweethearts.

At this point, any reasonable person might have given up on romance entirely. But Italian blood ran thick in Dante’s veins. Following the proud lineage of ancestors who lived and died for love, he resurrected from the ashes like a phoenix and found yet another hope. This, as it turned out, was tremendously unfortunate for him.

He met his fifth romantic connection at his new posting in New Jersey. A resident had set off the fire alarm while smoking marijuana, forcing most of the condo’s residents outside into the cold. Dante, who had been resting after work, also evacuated. Thinking he might smoke a cigarette, he entered a nearby alley and ended up talking to an older woman who lived in the same complex.

She looked over Dante—dressed in a short-sleeved shirt that completely revealed his muscular build—with a lingering, hungry gaze, and handed him her number before they parted. Recognizing the look of interest instantly, Dante called her the very next day. Having only ever dated women his own age, Dante was utterly helpless against the practiced, sophisticated lead of an older woman, and the two soon developed a serious relationship.

The fifth lover he dated that way was, objectively, the most reasonable person Dante had ever been with, yet she wound up wounding him the deepest.

A highly successful lawyer in New York, she treated Dante as little more than a living sex toy. Dante was always the one starved for affection, running to her whenever she called, whether it was morning or night. The woman, who summoned Dante strictly according to her own packed schedule, never asked how he had been or checked on his day. She simply started by taking off his pants. The only expression of affection he ever heard from her mouth was the ambiguous, clinical, “That was good today,” offered post-coitus.

Even as he withered from a desperate thirst for love, Dante could not bring himself to leave. At least this time, there wasn’t someone else. So if I just try a little harder and somehow endure, maybe she will eventually see me properly. Clinging foolishly to a hope he had forcibly manufactured, he continued the relationship.

That romance, held together by sheer force of will despite its inevitable expiration date, finally imploded the day Dante suggested they live together. She told him bluntly that she could not stand clingy people.

He had known for a long time that she did not love him. He felt it every time he confirmed that someone so brilliant couldn’t remember a single detail Dante had shared about his life, and he realized it every moment she failed to ask, even by accident, about his tastes or his friends. Even though he knew she only wanted him for his body, he had stayed because even that superficial desire meant she needed him. Yet the red thread connecting them slipped out of his hand the harder he grasped it.

Am I completely incapable of proper love? For my whole life?

After repeated, devastating failures, his confidence shattered entirely. At this point, he genuinely wondered if he had been cursed never to be loved. He had thought they dated because their hearts had connected, but it was too miserable to accept that not a single person he had ever been with had truly loved him. Come to think of it, Dante had never even heard the words “I love you” spoken as a lie. He was always the only one saying them.

On the exact day a bleak, overwhelming anguish settled over him, whispering that he might never be able to date anyone again, he happened, by pure coincidence, to meet Rhys.

When they first started spending time together, Dante never imagined he would end up dating a man four years younger than himself. Not only had he never dated anyone younger, but Dante was, at his core, a human being who generally disliked the species known as men. After he entered the Coast Guard, he became even more thoroughly sick of the XY chromosome.

The vast majority of men were filthy creatures who didn’t even wash their hands after using the restroom. Dante had wondered if only his specific Beta team was like that, but asking around revealed that Alphas were even worse and Omegas were not particularly different. For Dante, who managed his personal cleanliness with utmost dedication in order to seduce women, this behavior was entirely unacceptable.

But Rhys was entirely different.

Unlike other men, this young man smelled lovely, had no unpleasant hair to speak of, and washed his hands with soap every single time. Not only that, Rhys was staggeringly beautiful. If Dante, who was notoriously harsh when evaluating male aesthetics, deemed him beautiful, it meant the man was truly flawless.

Even so, Dante had never thought they would date.