Chapter 38

Watching the man literally run away from his own establishment, Dante snatched a paper napkin from the table and began scrubbing hard at his neck. From the moment that man had violated his space, a seasick wave of nausea had rolled in. Even now that he had shaken him off, the room continued to tilt, and an unnatural heat raged through his body.

At the sensation of his vision blurring slightly, Dante grabbed the water glass on the table and downed it. As he drank, the whispers and stares pouring in from every direction lodged uncomfortably across his body. He needed to leave this place immediately. After wetting his parched throat, he pulled out his wallet and dropped every loose bill he happened to grab onto the table, not caring about the currency exchange. He didn’t want to give anyone even a pointless excuse to call the police or make trouble.

Exchange it yourself, you stupid bastard.

He burst out of the bar into the cool night air and walked as fast and as far away from it as his legs could carry him. After escaping the labyrinth of narrow alleys, he emerged into a sprawling, crowded square. In the center sat a grand fountain pouring into a wide stone pool. Dante slumped onto the nearest stone ledge, grimacing as he continued to violently rub the skin where Santino had touched him. Nausea welling up so fiercely he felt as if he might vomit into the street.

I’m really going to lose my mind. If I’d been with Rhys, I wouldn’t have had to deal with any of this shit.

Perhaps in an attempt to purge the unpleasant memory, Rhys rose naturally, vividly, in his mind. It felt as though that strange, toxic Alpha smell from the bar was still lingering at the tip of his nose, and he desperately wanted to breathe in Rhys’s elegant, comforting floral scent. The thought that everything would be fine if he could just smell Rhys pushed at him with a terrifying, addictive strength. As it had that morning, a primal, instinctive urge drove him forward.

Enduring the severe dizziness, Dante stood up. He rubbed at the nape of his neck irritably before he began outright scratching it. Was this severe physiological reaction just because a man had come on to him? But when Rhys touched him, Dante had never felt an ounce of sickness. Even when they were newly dating, an accidental brush of their shoulders had only ever made his heart race. Not once had it disgusted him.

“Damn it…” Dante muttered to the empty air. “I want to see Rhys.”

Feeling wretchedly sorry for himself, Dante navigated the stone alleys alone. At some point, he had begun scratching his neck compulsively. A stinging, sharp pain rose as the skin scraped raw under his nails. Yet, even physical pain couldn’t drown out the revolting sensation another man had left behind. The stronger that disgust became, the deeper his bone-deep longing for Rhys grew. If he could at least hold a piece of Rhys’s clothing, he felt he would be able to breathe. He needed to get back to the hotel. Now.

Retracing his steps by relying entirely on a hazy, alcohol-soaked memory, Dante eventually found a familiar alleyway. It was the cobblestone road leading to the Trevi Fountain—the exact path he had walked before dawn. Along with a wave of relief that the hotel was nearby, a heavy longing surged in his chest. By the calendar, everything had transpired within the span of a single day, but meeting Rhys here at dawn already felt as distant as a memory from a past life.

Dante slowed his frantic pace and walked toward the massive fountain. It was likely well past ten at night, yet there were still massive throngs of people gathered around the water. Illuminated by spotlights, the Trevi Fountain at night possessed a completely different, theatrical atmosphere compared to the daytime. As Dante moved closer to the towering marble statues, tinted with moonlight and the soft glow of white lamps, he realized that the tourists in the immediate vicinity kept glancing toward a specific spot on the edge.

Following a strangely familiar pull, Dante turned his head toward the focal point of the crowd.

Two men sat there. They looked intimate, their postures leaning into one another almost like a pair of long-term lovers. Both were blond. One of them possessed a vivid, elegant, spun-gold hair color that could not easily be found anywhere else on earth. He looked exactly like Rhys.

…Wait. Is that actually Rhys?

Dante stared hard at that uncommon, shimmering gold. Then, his eyes flew wide. It was dark, and he was undeniably drunk, but Dante’s excellent, military-trained eyesight caught the profile of the man sitting by the fountain with perfect, undeniable clarity. The person perched there, deeply engaged with a man Dante had never seen before in his life, was undoubtedly Rhys.

That straight, aristocratic forehead. That perfect nose. Those beautiful lips. No matter how closely he scrutinized the figure, it could be no one else.

The moment suspicion hardened into absolute certainty, Dante’s heart began to pound ominously against his ribs. He felt as though he would go violently insane if he didn’t find out who the stranger sitting beside his ex was. Curling his chilled, trembling fingertips into his palm, Dante managed to shift his gaze to the companion.

The stranger was smiling warmly as he spoke to Rhys. Even with Rhys right beside him as a golden standard, Dante could not bring himself to think the man was ugly. He was highly handsome—handsome enough that when he occasionally swept back his medium-length hair, there was a certain innate wealth and ease in the gesture. Because he wore a tailored suit beneath a thin, light-brown overcoat, he looked exceptionally elegant. For that exact reason, he looked like he belonged next to Rhys. Something about his entire aura screamed old money and high society.

When Dante finally came to his senses, he realized he had already drifted dangerously close to them. Mixing among the tourists who were lining up to take photos, he used his size to slide forward until he was near enough to catch fragments of their conversation over the rushing water.

“You have no idea how… I was when you came,” the stranger was saying, his expression earnest. “You know I love… right? It’s been painful not being able to see your… for so long.”

The man was smiling, while the shadows cast by the spotlights hid Rhys’s exact expression. Still, the ambient atmosphere between them looked devastatingly good.

A moment later, Rhys moved his lips, murmuring something in return, but his voice was far too quiet to carry over the crowd. Watching the handsome stranger let out a low, familiar laugh in response, Dante could only assume whatever Rhys had whispered had been pleasant.

“As for me, I’m always happy to see your… so I can wait as long as I have to,” the man continued smoothly. “Let’s talk properly once we’re back in New York. Should we set a date now? I’ll make a reservation at that restaurant you went to often. Le Coucou? Or Bucadan? Ah, should we call the others too, since it’s been a while? Everyone’s been making a fuss about how long it’s been since they saw your face.”

At the man’s next words, Dante’s mind went entirely white. The stranger acted as if he had known Rhys for a lifetime. No—they clearly shared a history. The places he mentioned were high-end New York restaurants Dante had gone to with Rhys several times. But what shocked Dante most wasn’t the shared culinary history. It was the phrase: the others.

That meant there was a mutual circle. People they both knew.

Rhys had told him, explicitly and repeatedly, that he had no friends. That he was not sociable, hated networking, and did not have a soul he met with regularly. Dante was certain he had said it with his own mouth.

A deep, jagged sense of betrayal raked violently across his chest. During their four years together, they had fought over this exact topic again and again. Every single time, Rhys had clung to him, weeping, repeating that he had no one but Dante. To think that all of it had been a calculated lie. Dante couldn’t breathe. The sincere, warning words Lazzaro and Lucy had laid out for him right before he boarded his flight to Rome flashed through his mind with blinding clarity.

“I think you’re the side piece, and there’s a high chance your ex already has someone he was seeing. He’s dating someone from the same Upper East Side background and keeping you around as a change of pace.”

“You were close enough to live together, but you don’t even know his studio address. It’s way too suspicious. Anyone can see he wanted to hide you.”

The past version of himself who had stubbornly, angrily defended Rhys now felt like a pathetic idiot. Dante had believed that anyone else in the world might be capable of such cruelty, but not Rhys. Someone who had loved him with that level of intensity could not possibly have deceived him.

It would be a lie to say he had never been anxious or suspicious during their relationship, but even so, he had never truly believed there was another flesh-and-blood person.

But there was.

The evidence sat ten feet in front of him.

My pretty one, how could you do this to me? You looked so terrifyingly cold this morning when you told me I didn’t trust you, and yet you were here enjoying a cozy little date the entire time?

His chest tightened, and a flood of toxic thoughts overwhelmed him. He had spent the entire afternoon blaming himself for failing to trust Rhys, watching his ex’s retreating back as he claimed their relationship was over. But there had been no need for guilt. Now he finally understood why their foundation of trust was such a fractured mess. Rhys himself had been actively deceiving him from the start.

After being burned so many times in his past, believing this time would be different had made Dante the ultimate fool. Of course. Everyone always left him for someone better. Why would Rhys be any different? When had it even started? When Dante first mentioned breaking up? After that?

Or had this man been there from the very beginning?

The unnatural heat surged once more through the body the cool night wind had gradually begun to calm. It rose so fiercely that Dante’s vision blurred for a terrifying instant, and his knees nearly buckled. Whether the physical reaction was due to the psychological shock or because he was genuinely furious enough to faint, he couldn’t tell. His fingertips trembled finely, and his heart ached as though it were being physically wrung out like a wet cloth.

“Right. So why did you come to this fountain? Don’t tell me it was because of some cute legend about throwing coins,” the man continued speaking. This time, his voice carried unusually clear over the sound of splashing water.

The words coin and fountain drove like physical nails into Dante’s ears. No sooner had the man finished his sentence than a loud, high-pitched tinnitus rang through Dante’s skull. Eeeee. His eardrums muffled, the ambient noise of Rome vanished, and his vision wavered dangerously.

No way… Is this person the exact reason you came to Rome even after breaking up with me?

A blinding headache attacked him, mirroring the one that had struck when he was left abandoned in the hotel room. Rhys’s beautiful face flashed through his mind—the memory of him saying he wanted to throw two coins. The days Dante had spent vowing to make Rhys happy when he saw that shy, rare smile followed in rapid succession. Once he remembered his own utter foolishness—stubbornly carrying four literal American one-cent coins all the way across the Atlantic—he could no longer endure the humiliation.

I thought you wanted to throw those coins for us. That’s what I believed. If I’d known this would happen, I never would’ve thrown a single cent.

Just then, a group of tourists directly in front of him dispersed. With the crowd that had been shielding Dante from view gone, the stranger’s casual gaze naturally drifted across the open space and landed squarely on Dante.

Dante, tracking the sudden focus, turned his head to lock eyes with him. When their gazes met, the stranger’s wide hazel eyes flared with shock, as if he had just seen a ghost. It was an expression of immediate recognition. In sudden panic, the man reached out and shook Rhys’s shoulder.

Rhys turned his head automatically, following the frantic hand shaking him. His striking blue-gray eyes, which had been staring blankly into the middle distance, slowly tracked across the square until they landed on Dante.

Dante stood rooted to the spot, facing Rhys entirely exposed, making no effort to hide the raw, bleeding betrayal written across his features.

Under the moonlight, Rhys was still agonizingly beautiful. Even though he sat at a romantic fountain with someone who wasn’t Dante, the very first thought that entered Dante’s traitorous mind was that the eyes looking up at him were as elegant as wild blue irises. He wanted to reach out and touch the blond hair shining like spun silk under the white lamps. The desperate, pathetic urge to pull Rhys into his arms rose inside him.

His Rhys was lovely, even in a situation as devastating as this. Lovely enough that Dante could not even muster the strength to be angry at him. Feeling entirely pathetic for his own weakness, Dante let out a sharp, mocking laugh.

“…Dante?” Rhys called out, his voice quiet, almost breathless.