Chapter 63

This is really fucking insane….

For Dante, the reality was maddening. He didn’t even have the faintest clue as to why something this massive had suddenly rewritten his biology midway through his life. He had worked around military hospitals, and as part of a high-stakes rescue team, he had picked up all kinds of advanced medical knowledge, but he had never once heard of a case where a person’s trait changed completely in adulthood.

As Dante sat there in sheer, paralyzed shock, Blake offered one quiet piece of advice.

“I’ve never seen a case like this either,” Blake said, his tone softening slightly. “But usually, when a major biological life event like this happens, parents can be helpful. They’ve got more life experience, and sometimes it turns out there are hidden family secrets involved. Also, go to a proper trait clinic and get tested. A specialist will know exactly what’s happening to you.”

Right… Right, he should.

Now that Blake had explicitly advised him to visit a specialized trait clinic, Dante finally understood why no medical issue had been found when he had gone to ordinary city hospitals all this time.

He had simply gone to the wrong type of hospital. He had been tested at facilities Betas routinely visited, tested for standard human illnesses entirely unrelated to secondary traits. Of course they had said everything was perfectly normal.

After being told that his entire life and identity had changed completely in a single instant, a profound exhaustion suddenly swept over him, and he wanted nothing more than to go home and hide. Still, it bothered him terribly to leave Rhys behind like this. They had met entirely by accident, but once Dante had touched his skin, a lingering, sickening attachment surged up with terrifying force. He thought, I should leave him to Blake and go right now, yet his arms refused to loosen. He kept adjusting Rhys in his embrace, breathing in the comforting scent.

So this is Rhys’s pheromone.

The gentle flower scent Dante had always smelled on him over the years. The scent he had faintly detected even on the day they first met. The fragrance that had always made him feel safe and grounded wasn’t a commercial cologne at all… it was his Alpha’s pheromones.

Then when exactly did I become an Omega?

“Why do you look so ominous all of a sudden?” Blake asked, disrupting his thoughts.

“Rhys’s pheromones smell like flowers, right?” Dante asked quietly, looking up. “Not a harsh, chemically scent like yours, but something genuinely beautiful and elegant.”

At Dante’s blunt description, Blake made a deeply displeased face. He leaned crookedly against the raised pedestal of the central statue and corrected him sharply. “Mine is an alluring, high-tier rose scent, thank you very much. And Rhys’s pheromones are fairly intense and violent, too. You probably only feel them that way because your bodies are biologically compatible.”

Anyway, that meant his theory was correct. Dante had smelled that exact scent for a long, long time. What the hell? Since when?

Ah… his head was rapidly starting to overload. Too much life-altering information had entered his brain at once, and every single piece of it was monumental. To truly accept it, he needed to go home, wash his body, sleep for twelve hours, and only then wake up and process the reality.

“I don’t know what’s going on, but… I want to go home for now,” Dante sighed, his voice thick with fatigue. “I don’t know what’s happened to me, and this damn…”

He quickly swallowed the words that he wanted to wash his soaked lower body. That wasn’t something to say aloud in front of Blake. But Blake seemed to understand the unsaid words perfectly, because a sly, knowing smile appeared on his bloody face. Was that what harassment looked like? If Blake hadn’t just been revealed as Rhys’s blood cousin, Dante would have punched him in his other cheekbone.

“Well, I won’t stop you from leaving,” Blake said, gesturing toward the exit. “But are you really going to leave Rhys lying on the floor?”

Dante hardened his heart and deliberately loosened the arms wrapped around Rhys. The moment the support vanished, Rhys’s limp body started to slump backward toward the hard stone. Dante hissed and hastily caught him again, pulling him back against his chest.

He glared up at Blake. “Take Rhys somewhere proper and lay him down on a bed. You said he’s sick.”

“If you’re that worried about him, stay with him until he wakes up,” Blake countered easily, pointing toward the lit doorway. “There’s a private room in there where the two of you can be together without any interruptions.”

“I said this earlier, but we broke up,” Dante stated flatly. “Rhys doesn’t want to see my face.”

The raw voice that had been calling his old nickname in a daze and the desperate arms that had held him fiercely just moments ago came back to his memory, but Dante deliberately crushed them down.

“That rule only applied when you were a Beta,” Blake said simply.

Blake clearly had zero intention of lifting a finger to move Rhys immediately. To keep the firm promise he had made to himself that he would no longer get involved in Rhys’s life, Dante carefully, slowly laid the Alpha’s head down onto the marble floor. Now, all he had to do was stand up and disappear quickly into the night.

Yet, he found he couldn’t take his eyes off Rhys, who looked so small collapsed on the floor—which was cold enough to be chilling.

He had lost an alarming amount of weight since Dante last saw him in Rome. Look at how hollow his cheeks were. His jawline was so sharp now it looked fragile. Perhaps because he had slimmed down so drastically, his elegant features looked even more distinct, giving him a much more sensitive, haunted impression. As Dante looked closely at Rhys’s pale, sleeping face, it became painfully obvious that the man was severely ill. Dante had been acting as if he would leave, but in the end, his legs refused to rise.

Blake watched him for a moment before asking a quiet question. “Have you ever heard of imprinting, Mr. Devil Hunter?”

I am really not in the mood for a lecture on trait biology right now.

When Dante shot him a glare that said exactly that, Blake quickly added, “Everything I’m saying has to do with the two of you. It won’t hurt you to listen. Rhys will sure as hell never tell you himself.”

That last sentence successfully tempted him. If that was truly the case… he should listen. They had broken up, yes, but Blake claimed it involved Dante’s past too, didn’t he?

Dante answered formally, trying to sound indifferent. “…Well, roughly. It’s something only Alphas and Omegas can do, right? I heard both people have to intensely like each other for it to take.”

“Correct,” Blake said, stepping closer. “Then what do you think happens when it occurs between an Alpha and a Beta?”

Dante had never been a student with an excellent attitude in the past. When a teacher asked questions with enthusiasm, he had usually stared back indifferently while thinking about going outside to play soccer. Now, at thirty-three, his core personality hadn’t changed much.

“More precisely,” Blake continued, ignoring his blank stare, “what happens when an Alpha unilaterally imprints on a Beta?”

But Blake proved to be an instructor who refused to back down even when his student’s attitude was completely poor. He pushed himself away from the sculpture he had been leaning on and slowly grabbed the edge of the enormous cloth covering the central statue.

Then, he began to tell a story, his voice dropping into a narrative cadence, as if reciting a dark fairy tale.

“If you want to know the answer to that, you can look directly at what the idiot in your lap went through. My prickly cousin fell completely in love with Mr. Devil Hunter the very first moment he saw you. Then, he couldn’t control his own heart and unilaterally imprinted on a biological Beta. That was already six years ago.”

What Blake was telling him was clearly meant to be the origin story of him and Rhys. But Dante was entirely unsure about the part where Rhys had supposedly fallen for him at first sight, and the timeline that followed made even less sense. Especially the part about six years ago. Blake had to be entirely mistaken on the math.

“Rhys and I met four years ago,” Dante corrected firmly.

“Well, in my memory, it was definitely six years ago,” Blake replied.

“I think the memory of the actual person involved would be slightly more accurate…. Rhys and I met exactly four years ago on a wooden bench in front of The Lake in Central Park.”

As Dante recalled the beautiful, pristine memory of that day—a day he would never forget even if he lived to be a hundred—Blake’s sharp scoff reached his ears. At the sudden derisive sound, Dante snapped his gaze back to him.

Blake simply shook his head with a heavy sigh. “Ha ha. I think a man like you must have made quite a few people cry in your life, Mr. Dante. What are people supposed to do if you don’t even remember the monumental things you did for them?”

This would not do. Blake had been muttering cryptic things that were practically soliloquies for an hour now, and Dante needed to set him straight.

“What did I do?” Dante demanded. “If you’re going to tell me a story, stop mumbling to yourself and say it properly. Only then can I actually listen and judge.”

Seeing the sharp, challenging look in Dante’s eyes, Blake lifted the corner of his mouth into a sharp smile. Perhaps he had completely forgotten he was injured badly enough for a dark purple bruise to bloom across his cheekbone, because his eyes were finally stained with the pure joy of a man about to reveal a long-buried secret.

“Six years ago, San Diego,” Blake whispered, his hand tightening on the cloth. “Do you really remember absolutely nothing? Even if you’ve rescued a mountain of people in your career, I thought you’d at least remember that day. The day the typhoon hit, Dante. The typhoon was terrible that day.”

With a sudden, dramatic sweep of his arm, Blake yanked the white cloth away.

Just as Dante was trying to dig through his old military memories, the sudden motion stole his gaze, and he looked over. The revealed sculpture seemed to depict a tragic angel from ancient myth, with its grand wings half-broken on its back.

From the ivory wings, carved so incredibly finely they looked as though they had been constructed from real, soft feathers, extended a powerful body draped in a thin cloth that looked wet with sea water. It was undeniably a man’s body. The angel, looking as if he had just walked straight out of the ocean, gazed down toward some point on the floor with a deeply peaceful, serene expression.

The soft smile at the corners of the statue’s eyes made it seem as if he had come to save someone resting beneath him, while the expressionless lips and the wet hair clinging lightly to his forehead were carved so delicately that it felt modeled after a breathing person. Even the physical size matched that of an actual human being.

Then, the high-intensity gallery lights suddenly snapped on. As bright illumination flooded the exhibition hall that had been kept intentionally dim until now, Dante could see the statue’s face much more clearly.

The man’s face, dressed like an angel from an ancient myth, felt somehow deeply, chillingly familiar. Dante frowned, his breath catching, entirely unable to tear his eyes from the sculpture. It was partly because the raw emotion emanating from the marble was so intense that it seized the viewer’s gaze, but more than that, it was because a violent sense of déjà vu was suddenly overwhelming his mind.

Then Blake, who had somehow silently come to his side, bent low at the waist and whispered directly into his ear.

“That’s right,” Blake murmured. “It’s you.”

The moment Dante heard that voice, edged with a sharp accusation as if commanding him to finally remember, a vivid scene flashed through his mind.

There had been a day when a massive typhoon struck the coast without warning. It was exactly six years ago, during the intense period when he had been stationed at the San Diego base. That afternoon, when the calm sea turned savage enough to swallow the shoreline whole, while everyone else was frantically evacuating inland, Dante had been patrolling the beach.

He had spotted someone entering the raging sea—a place where all manner of sharp debris had washed up, making the churning water lethal.

To save the man sinking beneath the massive incoming waves, Dante had entered the jaws of death without a second thought. With a snorkel clamped in his mouth, he had dove into the black sea and spotted dark blond hair sinking rapidly below. The moment frightened, drowning blue-gray eyes had looked at Dante as if deeply regretting the choice they had made, Dante had swum toward him without the slightest hesitation.

Blue-gray eyes.

Just before the endless, crushing waves could snatch the man away like messengers from hell, Dante had caught his hand. His arms, especially powerful in the water, had held the stranger tight so he wouldn’t drift away into the abyss. Drowning people often clung violently in their desperation to live, sometimes almost pushing away the person who had come to save them, but this man hadn’t done that.

The young man with the youthful face had accepted Dante’s rescue as if he had been waiting for that exact moment his entire life. The calm face that obediently allowed itself to be carried outside onto the sand had felt strangely familiar back then. As if Dante had seen it only moments ago. No—as if he had known it for a very long time.

Dante slowly lowered his head. The instant his eyes took in the pale, sharp face lying collapsed on the floor in his lap, that youthful face lying on the stormy San Diego beach overlapped with it perfectly.

Blake had been right.

The first time Dante had seen Rhys hadn’t been in front of the quiet, sunlit lake in Central Park. It had been a day Dante remembered only as a chaotic blur that had happened six years ago—a day when a violent typhoon had struck the coast.

The two of them had met there first.

***