Chapter 69

After that first shameful act, thinking of Dante and constructing elaborate scenarios had become too natural. During his second rut, a highly specific, vivid fantasy took hold: Dante, bent over, deliberately spreading his thighs.

In that recurring vision, Dante lay prone, his firm, athletic thighs parted wide. Between the round, muscular swell of his buttocks, a pink, wrinkled opening fluttered, silently tempting Rhys forward. Dante, his hips hoisted high as he lay there, would look back over his shoulder at Rhys—who had not yet entered him—wearing a deeply embarrassed, flushed expression.

As Rhys imagined the sheer heat of it, he had no choice but to thrust. That day, he had shoved a pillow beneath his hips, driving himself against it in a frantic rhythm, ultimately coming hard with the blue handkerchief clutched tightly in his fist.

He knew, with agonizing clarity, that it was something he absolutely should not do. To objectify his savior—the man who had been like an angel rising from the sea—in such a depraved manner felt like a sin. Feeling as though he were tarnishing the pure kindness of what Dante had done for him, Rhys was constantly tormented by a crushing weight of guilt.

Yet, whenever the rut claimed him, Dante inevitably rose in his mind like a specter. The frequency and intensity of the fantasies grew increasingly obscene, leaving Rhys shocked and horrified to discover that he possessed such a lewd, insatiable nature.

I don’t know why I turned out like this either, he thought miserably, hiding his face. But Dante just keeps coming to mind…

Was it simply because he had never seen a man that handsome before? Or was it because Dante had saved his life? Both explanations felt true, yet neither seemed entirely sufficient. When Dante had grasped his hand in the freezing, lonely depths of the sea, Rhys couldn’t find a single word to encapsulate what had shifted inside him. When he recalled the warmth that held him tight on the beach, the security of being wrapped in Dante’s arms, and that low voice whispering reassurance, Rhys felt a violent urge to embrace Dante back—hard enough to crush them both together.

He simply liked him.

Too much.

It had already been half a year, yet Dante’s image had only grown sharper instead of fading into a distant memory. Rhys had tried searching for any trace of him online, but nothing useful ever appeared. His own mind was the only archive he possessed. Terrified that the memory would eventually degrade, Rhys had begun sculpting him. But as the clay and marble took shape, his longing only deepened into an ache.

As Rhys sat lost in his thoughts in the clinic hallway, a shadow fell across the floor before him.

The first person to emerge from the private examination room was not Blake, but his mother. Deborah Lindner stood before Rhys, her expression heavy with the look of a woman who had finally pieced together a troubling puzzle. Walking forward, she quietly whispered to her son.

“Rhys,” she said softly. “You’ve imprinted.”

Young Rhys—who was still only twenty-three because his birthday had not yet passed—blinked his long lashes, looking up at her as though he couldn’t quite comprehend the weight of the words. Deborah offered a sad, gentle smile to her son, who looked back at her with such agonizingly innocent eyes. After several seconds of heavy silence, she slowly placed a comfortingly warm hand on Rhys’s shoulder.

She already knew. She had noticed the unfamiliar blue handkerchief that had mysteriously appeared in her son’s bedroom half a year ago. She remembered the fierce blush that had colored Rhys’s pale cheeks when he spoke Dante’s name in the hospital immediately following his rescue. She had seen the way his gaze remained fixed endlessly on Dante the day they crossed paths in front of the café, and she remembered how many times he had quietly asked, after returning home, whether he might be allowed to go back and see him.

“You like Mr. Bellini, don’t you, Rhys?”

The young man, entirely unable to guess the tragic biological reality that awaited him, shyly curled his lips at his mother’s words. A beautiful, radiant blush spread over his pale face, and he quickly lowered his head to hide it. His long lashes trembled with a sudden, breathless excitement.

“… Yes,” he whispered.

Only then fully realizing the truth he had been blind to himself, twenty-three-year-old Iris Elliott lifted his head once more. Meeting his mother’s eyes, he smiled with a raw, happy vulnerability.

“I think of him every single day, and missing him makes my heart hurt so much. When I think of him, it hurts so badly I feel like I might die… but then, it makes me so happy, too. Is this what liking someone feels like?”

Deborah’s lips parted several times as if to speak, but the words failed her. Finally, she simply nodded. Offering Rhys an incomprehensible, bittersweet kind of comfort—murmuring that everything would be all right—she pulled her son tightly into her arms.

From that day forward, for two agonizing years, Rhys began the medical treatment required to forcibly break the imprint.

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