Chapter 72

Dante was a genuinely good man, the sort who smiled easily at anyone he crossed paths with. If he spotted someone in distress on the street, he would intervene without a second thought. He frequently bought food and water for the unhoused and regularly spent his weekends volunteering alongside his coworkers. At his core, Dante simply lacked malice or a temper. Even on days when Rhys let his underlying tension slip and reacted too sensitively, Dante would gently scan his face to gauge his mood, offering a soft apology: “Pretty one, I’m sorry.”

The more time they spent wrapped up in each other’s lives, the deeper Rhys’s understanding grew of how profoundly devoted Dante was to the people around him—and the more helplessly he fell in love with that innate goodness. Yet, because their upbringings and backgrounds were worlds apart, they shared virtually no overlapping tastes. It would have been entirely natural for Dante to grow bored of him given how little common ground they shared, yet Dante never uttered a single complaint about their mismatched interests. Instead, even when he was visibly out of his element, he tagged along with Rhys every single time. Once, out of sheer guilt, Rhys had tried to dissuade him, insisting he didn’t need to force himself, only for Dante to look back at him with utterly bewildered eyes.

“If you don’t mind the company, let’s go together,” Dante had said softly. “I want to know everything about you. You can’t always articulate in words exactly what you love or hate, right? So let me learn it firsthand by experiencing it with you. Rhys, you don’t have to force yourself to like the exact same things I do. I fell for you, not your hobbies. I assumed it was the same for you too, beautiful.”

Whenever Dante bared his heart like that, Rhys felt an overwhelming certainty that his survival at sea years ago had been orchestrated solely for this purpose. The deeper he parsed the depths of the man named Dante, the more vividly Rhys began to construct a shared future in his mind. If they moved in together, Rhys decided he would gladly take charge of all the housework; Dante was laughably terrible at maintaining order. Still, he was wonderfully compliant when given direct instructions—simple and thoroughly endearing. Even his habit of clumsily shedding his clothes in his sleep drove Rhys half-mad with desire, an uninhibited, unconscious quirk that was simultaneously maddening and utterly precious.

Flaws that might have irritated anyone else were transformed into nothing short of adorable in Rhys’s eyes. As the days bled into months, his affection for Dante only snowballed. There wasn’t a single facet of the man he disliked; every waking moment spent in his presence was a masterclass in pure, unadulterated happiness.

…Except for those moments. Those very rare, agonizing moments.

Because they were human, friction was inevitable, and both of them were bound to inflict or suffer hurt from time to time. The core, devastating issue was that the specific wounds Dante suffered because of Rhys were things Rhys was fundamentally powerless to amend.

Intermittently, the very things Rhys had been forced to conceal by burying his Alpha status became the exact triggers that bred Dante’s deep unhappiness. Those moments tore at Rhys just as brutally. A manic wave of regret would crash over him, screaming that he never should have fabricated the lie in the first place. He desperately wanted to confess, but the terrifying certainty that Dante would walk out the moment he discovered he was dating an Alpha paralyzed him. He knew with absolute clarity that no matter how pitifully he begged or clung to him, Dante would never look back. Thus, trapped by fear, the only recourse Rhys had left was a suffocating silence.

Yet it was that very silence that ultimately coaxed out the words he dreaded most: “Let’s break up.” On the terrifying day Dante first uttered that sentence, the full, crushing weight of Blake’s long-ago warnings finally clicked into place.

The fraction of a second Rhys realized Dante might no longer want him, the monstrous beast crouched deep within his Alpha instincts broke its chains. The absolute instant the man he had considered his for so long turned to walk away, Rhys’s body moved purely on primal impulse. He reached out, roughly snatching Dante by the arm, and violently yanked him back. It was only when he caught sight of Dante’s wide, startled eyes staring up at him in sheer shock that a fractured piece of his sanity returned. But his mind was already a shattered, chaotic wreck.

“Where are you going?” Rhys choked out, his voice fracturing. “Don’t go. Please, come back here and look at me. Talk to me again.”

As if he had been instantly reduced back to the helpless, drowning twenty-three-year-old Iris Elliott, hot tears spilled over before he could stop them. I love you so unbearably much, so how can you turn your back on me without a shred of regret? Have you already grown tired of me? Do you truly not want to be with me anymore? I waited for you for so long.

The primeval terror of rejection and the agonizing fear of abandonment fused into a singular, suffocating panic. For the very first time, a horrific epiphany dawned on him: the man he believed would never be the one to abandon him could, in fact, walk away for completely ordinary reasons. Because he’s tired of me. Because he’s furious at what I’ve done. I see. Dante really can leave me over things like this…

But I can’t live without him.

Even when this man, entirely oblivious to the fragile state of Rhys’s heart, handed out casual greetings that others could easily misinterpret; even when he carelessly broke his promises to stay safe and returned home sporting fresh injuries; even when a violent, boiling jealousy threatened to shatter Rhys’s sanity every single time Dante met up with that childhood Alpha friend—through all of it, Dante had only ever complained about how unfair Rhys was being. Yet Rhys had never once dared to even conceptualize the idea of breaking up.

Yet this man could turn his back so effortlessly, as though someone like Rhys Elliott were a disposable commodity that could be swapped out at any moment. The profound shock that rattled his soul the second the words break up left Dante’s lips did far more than throw his mind into anarchy; it struck a match against a dark, twisted desire buried so deep within him that he hadn’t even known it existed.

He’s mine. Yes. Tay belongs to me, so I need to leave an indelible mark on him. I need to claim him so thoroughly that no one else will ever dare touch him.

Their very first kiss was born from that dark impulse. Driven by a desperate, frantic urge to cage Dante securely within his embrace, Rhys forced a kiss he had never previously possessed the audacity to attempt. As he smashed their lips together, trapping Dante against his frame, the Beta froze in pure shock—before, unbelievably, sliding his own arms around Rhys’s waist. What followed was a bruising, reciprocal kiss that thoroughly drove Rhys out of his mind. To a man who had sheltered the naive belief that kissing was merely the static pressing together of lips, the sudden, slick intrusion of tongue meeting tongue was a seismic shock to his system.

Dante’s mouth tasted impossibly sweet. Rhys could scarcely comprehend that a human being could possess such an intoxicating taste. Consumed by a daze as he drank him in, an insatiable greed took root. Dante’s practiced, fluid movements as he tangled their tongues together sparked a sharp prickle of resentment—a stark reminder of the invisible traces left by past lovers—and yet the sheer reality of what they were doing eclipsed everything else.

We really are lovers. We are sharing something sacred, something reserved only for people who belong to one another…

He had wanted nothing more than to strip Dante bare on the floor right then and execute every dark fantasy he had ever engineered in isolation. But because he lacked any confidence in his ability to restrain the thick, suffocating pheromones that would inevitably hemorrhage from his body the moment his arousal peaked, Rhys subsequently began to avoid deep, tongue-heavy kisses as much as possible. Dante, entirely blind to the agonizing restraint tearing Rhys apart, would mindlessly slide his tongue past Rhys’s lips out of sheer habit, driving the Alpha to the brink of insanity. It was a beautiful, excruciating torture—a truly terrible habit.

In tandem with those maddening kisses, Dante developed an even more destructive habit. Following that first explosive argument, Dante weaponized those exact words, dangling the threat of a breakup every single time they clashed over a recurring issue. His lovely, oblivious Beta knew with terrifying precision exactly how to snap the threads of Rhys’s sanity.

Every single time, Rhys’s eyes would glaze over with a feral, wild light. In the beginning, he would simply silence Dante with a desperate kiss. As time wore on, those kisses seamlessly escalated into frantic hands unbuttoning clothes, until finally, he claimed Dante entirely, making the man his in the most primal sense. The reality of Dante’s naked form, which Rhys had spent years meticulously conjuring in the dark, far outstripped the pale limitations of his own imagination.

The searing heat of bare skin against bare skin; the velvety, smooth texture of his flesh; the shifting contours of firm, solid muscle beneath his hands; the helpless, erotic expressions flitting across Dante’s face with every stroke of Rhys’s palms—experiencing Dante Bellini through the raw lens of all five senses was a drug more addictive than anything on earth. The exact millisecond Rhys finally buried himself deep inside him, his soul screamed with the urge to imprint all over again.

He was so achingly beautiful it induced a physical ache in Rhys’s chest. Every inch of his frame was profoundly lovable, and the sheen of clear sweat gilding his skin at the height of arousal tasted entirely sweet. The tight, slick heat that enveloped Rhys was incredibly soft; the way it rhythmically twitched and clenched around his length at the slightest movement made it feel like a sanctuary designed solely to ensnare his senses. Just as he had once marveled at the discovery that this robust, resilient man was capable of weeping, uncovering the tender, uninhibitedly lewd depths hidden inside him only caused Rhys’s toxic greed to balloon. Those eyes, beautifully distorted by pleasure; those breathless, heated moans; the way his entire body desperately clung to him as they crested the climax together—Rhys wanted to lock those sights away, ensuring he was the sole witness to them for the rest of his natural life.

Had he remained ignorant of such bliss, perhaps he never would have harbored such a dangerous, covetous hunger. But Iris Elliott had willfully swallowed the forbidden fruit, and the rot of change had begun to settle into his bones. Every single time Dante flippantly suggested a breakup, the pitch-black desire festering within Rhys expanded. His love for Dante evolved into a bottomless, volatile vortex, while Dante’s heart consistently appeared to stall, circling the exact same safe perimeter. The devastating ultimatum that Rhys Elliott could never bring himself to even whisper was the very phrase Dante casually tossed into the air time and time again.

Even so, Rhys stubbornly convinced himself that he was managing the burden well enough. Eventually, bouts of sudden nausea and splitting, agonizing headaches began to plague him, but a brief day or two of physical distance was usually enough to alleviate the worst of the symptoms. By the time their relationship hit the two-year mark, Rhys had also rationalized the patterns intellectually; he understood that Dante didn’t weaponize the threat of breaking up out of a genuine desire to end things.

“Dante will never have any idea of the lengths you’re going to just to keep dating him,” Blake murmured.

Even as the physical side effects of the unmatched imprint steadily deteriorated his health, forcing Rhys to check into clinics for heavy stabilizer injections, he maintained that he was perfectly fine. He actually considered it a stroke of luck that the biological toll was contained strictly within his own body. As long as it remained internal, he would never lose control and do anything to sadden or jeopardize the man he cherished. Blake, sitting by his hospital bedside, muttered a string of curses under his breath, his expression twisting in sheer incomprehension before he voiced a question he hadn’t asked in two years.

“Are you actually happy, Rhys?”

The moment the words left his cousin’s mouth, a soft, serene smile bloomed across Rhys’s pale face.

“Yeah,” he replied quietly. “I’m incredibly happy.”