Chapter 57

Lazzaro immediately opened his eyes wide and called her out. “Choi, didn’t we agree not to bring up topics related to that person?”

As if taking revenge for earlier, Lucy glared back at him and took a sip of beer. “I’m bringing it up because I think I need to tell him. No matter how I look at it, that guinea pig seemed like Dante’s Lily. The spotless white fur, the cute black eyes. It was Lily.”

The moment he heard Lily’s name, Dante’s heart began to pound. Thud, thud. Trying to calm the heart hammering wildly in his chest, he took a long draft of his beer.

So did you see Rhys, Lucy? How did he seem? Did Rhys come alone, or was he with someone else? He barely held back the questions that almost burst out of him, and in the meantime, Lazzaro and Lucy began arguing.

“You think Lily is the only white guinea pig named Lily in all of New York?” Lazzaro countered. “You told me not to say a word, and now you’re the one dropping a bomb? Look at him. The bastard’s gone hollow-eyed.”

“Do you think I’m doing this for fun?” Lucy snapped. “It was a two-year-old male guinea pig. Not many people have the kind of greasy naming sense Dante does. The age matches too. If it really was Lily, Dante has a right to know. The name of the person who brought Lily in was different from the one I remember. Their face was different from the pictures too. What if his ex-boyfriend abandoned Lily?”

As Dante listened blankly to their conversation, his heart sank at the words that someone else had brought Lily in. Either Rhys had given Lily to someone else, or perhaps Rhys had met someone new, and that person had come in his place. Either way, Dante felt as though both possibilities would devastate him.

… No. Actually, maybe that was for the best.

When he remembered the way Rhys had pushed him away, Dante found himself hoping Rhys had met someone else and become happy quickly. Rhys had been tormented enough by him, so he deserved that much. Unlike Dante, who had not shared a single overlapping taste with him, it would be better if Rhys met someone kind and gentle, someone who saw and felt the same world he did. Someone who could enjoy art elegantly and go to expensive restaurants every week without feeling the slightest burden—someone from a similar class.

Would it be a woman? Or a man? Dante could not even guess what kind of people Rhys had dated before him. Rhys had never really talked about it. Because Dante had met Rhys on the day he had been dumped, he had drunkenly babbled about his dating history, but Rhys had only mentioned, briefly, that there had been someone he had dated for about two or three years.

Then had he originally dated Omegas? Since he had mentioned Omegas that day when he pushed Dante away, it seemed likely, though Dante had not heard whether that person had been a man or a woman. If it was a woman… well, good for him. If it was a man… Dante hoped the guy was uglier than him.

Lucy shook Dante, cutting through the silence where he was currently drowning in lingering attachment. “Dante, did you hear me?”

He did not want to say Rhys’s name out loud, but when he saw the heavy sense of responsibility in Lucy’s eyes over Lily, he could not avoid addressing it. After a moment’s hesitation, he shook his head.

“I heard you, but Rhys isn’t the kind of person who would abandon Lily. If he meant to do that, he would’ve said so long ago.”

God, he had not wanted to say that with his own mouth.

“Maybe… he just has a new lover. They might’ve taken Lily to the hospital for Rhys. If that really was Lily, I mean.”

Contrary to his worries, his voice came out calmer than he had expected. At the phrase new lover, the air over the table briefly stiffened. Dante reached for his beer bottle and caught sight of his reflection in the curved glass. In the strange, distorted figure pooled in the brown surface, his expression looked surprisingly composed.

Until he heard Lucy’s next words.

“The person’s name was Blake Lindner… Have you heard of him?”

What? Blake?

The moment his previously calm face crumpled, Lucy asked urgently, “Is that a name you know? He seemed famous.”

Ah, yes. Famous, all right.

In the world of Dante Bellini, that name had a sterling reputation as Rhys’s adulterer. He had never heard the surname before, but Blake was not exactly a common name, was it? And for that name to be connected to a guinea pig named Lily? His gut told him hard that this was the Blake he knew.

“… He’s someone Rhys knows,” Dante managed to say.

Lazzaro, who had been cowed into silence by Lucy’s intensity, cut in. “There was an ‘acquaintance’ of Iris Elliott you knew about? I thought the only person around him you ever met was that woman who may or may not have been his mother, or an actress playing his mother.”

That was a remark they would need to discuss privately later. While Dante seethed over Lazzaro pointing out a painful truth, Lucy seemed to latch onto a different part.

“You’re saying your ex-boyfriend gave a precious pet he’d raised for two years to someone he just knows?” Lucy’s black eyes grew even icier. She was already treating Rhys like a cold-blooded bastard with no human heart.

Their relationship was over, and Dante had not exactly been rejected in a pleasant way either, so he did not particularly want to defend Rhys. Still, Rhys was not someone who would abandon Lily.

How tenderly had he looked at Lily the day Dante brought him home? He’s a pretty little thing who looks like you, so I gave him a flower name too. Iris and Lily sound so nice together, don’t they? Dante had said it with excitement, and Rhys had agreed with everything. He had always prepared Lily’s meals with the finest vegetables too. Organic produce more expensive than what Dante, a human being, usually bought for himself…

He could not allow even Rhys’s feelings for Lily to be misunderstood. With no other choice, Dante offered the information he knew.

“They’re not just acquaintances. They’ve known each other a long time. I don’t know if he’s a business contact or if they were… involved, but I met him once in Rome too.”

The instant Dante finished explaining, Lazzaro smacked the table with his beer bottle and groaned. “Damn it. I told you that bastard was living a double life!”

“You ran into him in Rome?” Lucy asked, her voice dropping an octave. “Then did Dante end up tagging along on a trip those two were supposed to take together?”

Dante had only added that because he did not want Rhys to become a cold-blooded monster in Lucy’s mind, yet somehow it had backfired. Fatigue suddenly surged over him, and he let his body slump, leaning back against the booth and closing his eyes for a moment. When he had met Blake in Rome, Dante had thought exactly the same thing, so the two of them were not overreacting in the least. Still, he felt uneasy because Rhys’s words came back to haunt him:

Listening to you talk, it seems like you’ve always thought I might betray you.

When he heard that, it was true that he could not deny it completely. He had suspected the parts of Rhys’s life that Rhys never explained, and when his friends’ words piled on top of that, suspicion had turned into conviction. At the same time, though, he had felt both guilt and shame for failing to trust the person he loved.

Stop thinking about it. It’s over.

Dante hardened his expression and erased Rome from his mind. Even if Rhys dated another man now, it had nothing to do with him anymore. It was for the best. Just from his appearance, Blake seemed to have an atmosphere similar to Rhys’s, and if they knew each other through work, that meant they were at least in the same field. Dante had hoped Blake would be uglier than him, so that part was unfortunate.

He tried to think that way and wipe it from his mind, but the intimate image of the two of them together at the fountain filled his head. The harder he tried to push it away, the more vivid the imagined scene became: Rhys holding Blake’s hand instead of his, embracing him, drinking Bellinis with him, kissing him…

The moment that thought crossed his mind, a headache swept in. Nausea and heat followed. The symptoms he had first felt in Rome had not improved after his return, and they came back periodically whenever Dante thought about Rhys. Some days, they passed lightly, but right now they were fairly severe.

“Dante, you don’t look good,” Lazzaro noticed, his enthusiasm for trashing Rhys draining away as he looked his friend over. “Is it that symptom again?”

“Yeah. The hospital says there’s nothing wrong, so I have no idea why.”

This had been happening often lately, which was why Dante was already on sick leave. After hearing his symptoms, the doctor had run bloodwork and immune tests, then referred him to an ENT specialist and even ordered an endoscopy. But Dante’s body was fine. The symptoms were apparently untreatable, and because there was no way to predict when his condition would worsen, he had taken sick leave on Kirk’s advice. Dante’s work could lead to loss of life if his physical condition failed him, so it had been a necessary decision. Fortunately, the military was fairly generous with paid sick leave.

“Don’t drink any more. Just go home,” Lucy said, promptly confiscating the beer bottle in front of him.

Dante nodded and reached for his wallet, but Lazzaro waved him off. “Forget it. I’ll pay, so go home and rest. Weak as hell. What a waste of those chest muscles.”

“My core’s better than yours too,” Dante muttered weakly.

“My thighs are more incredible.”

While that pathetic conversation was taking place, Lucy took a notebook out of her bag, tore out a sheet, and held it out to Dante. He stared at the paper in confusion, and Lucy lowered her body, whispering quietly.

“Contact that adulterer and get Lily back. Poor Lily. His dads got divorced, and now he’s suddenly been handed over to some other person…”

Dante accepted the paper with an incredulous expression and found a phone number written on it. “Did you steal client information from the hospital?”

Lucy looked up at him as if he had lost his mind. “That would be a data breach. Do I look like someone who’d do that?”

“Right. Sorry.”

“I googled the man’s name and found it. Looks like he owns a gallery.”

Of course.

He had looked like some rich-house bastard at first glance. Dante’s sense of defeat deepened. Someone like that probably did suit Rhys better. His vision was blurring from feeling so unwell, so for now, Dante took the note and stood up to leave. Lazzaro also rose for a moment, saying he would help him catch a cab.

As they walked out, Lazzaro muttered, “Lucy gets kind of scary when animals are involved. And it’s not limited to dogs or cats either. She’s serious about every animal on Earth.”

“Well… humans have made animals’ lives worse,” Dante replied, rubbing his temples, “so I guess there need to be people like Lucy to balance things out.”

“You’ve got a point.”

Lazzaro spotted a passing yellow cab and raised his hand. Dante pressed his palms firmly against his eyes to cool the heat rising all the way into his head when Lazzaro, who had been watching him closely, asked, “Come to think of it… I wanted to ask one thing before you go. Are you seeing an Omega these days?”

Me? An Omega?

The person seeing an Omega right now was someone else entirely. Dante frowned as he thought of Rhys and Blake.

“No way. You know I don’t date Omegas or Alphas.”

“I know that. And I also know it’ll take you ages to date anyone again.”

“No, it won’t,” Dante countered, though he could not quite bring himself to joke that he would return to the dating market and threaten Lazzaro’s place there, so he closed his mouth.

The taxi pulled up in front of them. Lazzaro opened the door for him and added, watching as Dante got in, “Anyway, it’s weird. You’re the kind of guy who’d never have a reason to meet an Omega, but for some reason, lately, you’ve smelled like one… It’s a really nice scent.”

The expression on Lazzaro’s face as he said the scent was nice was gentle, almost like when he was flirting with an Omega. Dante’s entire body crawled at the sight. Did this bastard just say I smell like an Omega?

Seeing Dante’s look of pure revulsion, Lazzaro seemed to agree that it had sounded strange, and he awkwardly shut the door for him. “Hey! I didn’t mean it like that. I was about to ask you to introduce me if you were seeing an Omega often… Never mind. There’s no way you’d be meeting an Omega anyway. Go home and rest.”

“Thanks. Go back inside.”

As soon as the car started moving, Dante collapsed across the back seat as if his body had completely given out. Strength drained out of him in waves, and the heat began to boil through him in a way that felt deeply ominous. Somehow, he had the feeling he was about to get seriously sick.

***