Chapter 41

His brewing anger, deep hurt, and total inability to understand Rhys’s attitude by any standard of his own made the rims of Dante’s eyes flush a painful red. The sheer frustration was so intense it felt as if it might drive him mad, prompting him to rake a hand roughly through his damp hair. The sudden motion loosened the robe he had carefully closed, leaving his chest completely exposed. Rhys flinched and sharply turned his head away, but to Dante, it only looked as if Rhys was disgusted by the sight of him.

“I misjudged things then, too,” Rhys murmured, his face still turned completely away from Dante.

At those unexpected words, Dante’s eyes widened in disbelief. He had never imagined that someone who had moved his belongings over so diligently and prepared to build a life together would say something so dismissive.

“Are you saying… that asking me to live with you was a mistake?”

“We’re already over, so I’m not obligated to answer you,” Rhys replied cuttingly. “Leave.”

Rhys turned his body completely away from Dante and pointed directly toward the door. But Dante could not bring himself to retreat.

“You’re a bastard.”

Rhys chose absolute silence. The sight only fanned Dante’s erratic emotions higher. It felt as if he was the only one in this room suffering over the devastation of the breakup and yearning for the other, and it was enough to drive him completely insane. Rhys seemed like someone who did not waver at all.

“You… How is all of this so incredibly easy for you?” Dante’s voice cracked, thick with emotion. “Please teach me too, Rhys. Tell me how to say it’s over as effortlessly as you do, how to make up my mind to never see you again. Teach me how…”

The profound hurt rose first, closely followed by a bitter resentment. It was utterly unbearable that their precious years together had been, to Rhys, mere feelings he could effortlessly sort through in a span of only two months. What made it even more maddening was that the cruel face watching him without a word still looked devastatingly beautiful and lovable to him, even now. What would it take to finally sever his own heart? What harsh words did he need to hear before this tenacious, lingering attachment would loosen even a fraction?

“…Forget it. You won’t say anything anyway,” Dante muttered defeatedly. “I don’t know anymore. Maybe I should just do what you said and find another love.”

Rhys, his back still turned to Dante as he stared toward the bed, let out a sharp, hollow laugh. “Meet whoever you want. I don’t care.”

Apparently, Rhys intended to die before giving Dante the one answer he truly wanted. If Dante stayed like this, emotions he could not handle would inevitably well up, so he turned away and headed for the door, flinging words into the air like a desperate challenge.

“Fine. I will. Since it’s come to this, I’ll meet everyone—Omega or Alpha—without discrimination. I learned today that I’m apparently the type who works for both sides. I already ended up dating a man, so why wouldn’t I be able to date a different designation?”

Spouting reckless words he did not mean in the slightest, Dante reached the door and gripped the handle to turn it.

Without warning, Rhys moved. He surged up behind him and violently seized his shoulder. Holding Dante with enough raw force to crush bone, he shoved him straight into the wall.

Bang!

With a violent crash, the television mounted on the bedroom wall rattled precariously. A sharp, blinding pain shot through Dante’s back and the back of his head.

Dante’s eyes flew wide in absolute shock at being attacked by Rhys as if he had been ambushed by an enemy. The parts of his body that had been slammed against the wall throbbed painfully, but the thing that bothered him far more was Rhys’s expression as he pinned him there.

Rhys looked as if he had been profoundly betrayed.

Beneath his terrifyingly distorted, golden-brown brows, fierce emotion churned violently in his blue eyes. The veins in his pale neck stood out so thickly they were vividly visible. Wearing an expression Dante had never once seen throughout their entire relationship, Rhys growled in a voice so low, rough, and ragged it sounded nearly cracked apart.

“So that was why you came back reeking of an Alpha bastard?”

The eyes glaring down at Dante flashed like a wild animal’s. When that alien, unfamiliar voice flowed into his ears, literal chills crawled over his skin. Goosebumps swept down his spine, and a strange, deep vibration spread through his entire body.

“…What are you talking about?” Dante stammered. “What Alpha smell?”

Rhys’s sudden, terrifying transformation was bewildering enough, but what confused Dante even more was the content of what he had said. It was bizarre that the exact moment Dante claimed he would meet Omegas and Alphas alike, Rhys had immediately brought up Alphas. Even seeing Dante’s genuine confusion, Rhys did not loosen his grip. Instead, he whispered with even more savage eyes, looking as if his grip on reason had slipped one step further into the abyss.

“You said you couldn’t.” Rhys shoved Dante against the wall yet again, the sheer force making Dante wonder if the partition might collapse under his weight. “You said you couldn’t meet them.”

Rhys was agitated enough that he felt genuinely threatening. He had pounced without a single word of explanation, so Dante did not know what exactly had set him off, but if this volatile behavior continued, something was going to break—the room partition, the television, or Dante’s back. He needed to calm him down.

“I understand, so Rhys—let go first and let’s just talk. Calm down, okay?”

Dante spoke as calmly as possible to soothe him, catching Rhys’s arm. He slowly tried to pry him off, but Rhys did not budge an inch. This was definitely not the usual Rhys. The man before him now looked like a ferocious beast capable of doing anything at any given moment.

“You said Alphas were impossible,” Rhys whispered in a cutting, hoarse voice, bringing his lips dangerously close to Dante’s ear. “You weren’t sure about Omegas, but you definitely hated Alphas. Remember?”

Amid all the chaos, words finally came that Dante could actually comprehend. Dante frowned at the vaguely familiar concept, and Rhys pressed closer, his breath hot against his skin.

“‘I have quite a few Alpha friends around me, and they say that when they get too excited or like someone too much, they start wanting to do things like knotting and bonding. I heard it’s similar even with women. But I’m not an Omega, so wouldn’t I feel absolutely nothing? If the other person is doing it because they like me, then only one side would be pitiful.’”

The longer Rhys spoke, the more a specific scene dimly surfaced in Dante’s mind. It had been a conversation from so long ago that Dante had completely forgotten it, but he had certainly muttered something along those lines on the very second day he met Rhys. It sounded exactly like something he would say, and even now, after all this time had passed, Dante’s core thoughts on the matter hadn’t changed very much.

“Sounds familiar, doesn’t it, Dante? You remember, right? You’re the one who said it, so you should remember.”

When Dante fell silent for a moment, actively searching backward through his memories, Rhys pressed him with a dangerous sharpness. At that intensity, which made Dante feel as if he might be sliced open if he made one wrong move, he quickly nodded.

“I remember. I do, but… what are you trying to say? Is that a problem?”

Somehow, those words seemed to have deeply offended Rhys, but Dante honestly did not comprehend why. Rhys had explicitly told him to meet someone else, then suddenly exploded out of nowhere, bringing up an old conversation from before they had even started dating. All of it left Dante entirely disoriented.

“Is that a problem?” Rhys repeated Dante’s words under his breath, and then let out a low, unsettling laugh. Haha, ahaha. With his eyes distorted and his voice sunk incredibly low, he looked almost deranged. Letting go of Dante’s shoulder and stepping back a pace, he continued to laugh quietly for a moment before exhaling a lengthy breath and looking down at Dante.

The pupils staring down at him had dilated much darker than usual, and the pale violet coloring the centers of his irises had grown significantly deeper. Intense, volatile emotions seemed condensed in those eyes—emotions that might violently burst if touched the wrong way. They were so intricately tangled that Dante could not even begin to guess what they were.

“You really are… unbelievable.”

Rhys’s half-lowered eyes swept Dante from bottom to top before halting abruptly at his nape. The moment Rhys’s gaze stopped there, his focus went briefly hazy, as if he had momentarily lost his mind. His chest heaved heavily as he let out another hollow laugh. Putting aside the fact that Dante had never seen Rhys like this before, the man now looked as though some kind of immediate intervention was needed. Dante was about to step toward him with a grave expression when Rhys spoke again.

“You were so good at going on and on about how you couldn’t forget me…” Rhys’s voice dropped to a venomous whisper. “…but you couldn’t even hold out that long before spreading your legs outside?”

Those strange, cutting words rang sharply in Dante’s ears.

For a moment, Dante genuinely doubted his own hearing and stared at him wide-eyed. He must have misheard. Those were absolutely not words that should have ever come from Rhys’s mouth.

“Then again, I suppose as long as someone is pretty, it doesn’t matter to you,” Rhys continued, his tone dripping with bitter mockery. “What kind of guy was he? Did you tell that bastard he was pretty too, the way you did the night you drank with me?”

Unbelievably, it really was Rhys saying these things. Dante looked at him with a stunned, breathless expression, feeling as though he had been violently slapped across the face. Rhys, however, seemed to have no intention of stopping and delivered another line that drove Dante to the brink of madness.

“Tell me. For you to personally roll around with an Alpha when you explicitly said Alphas were impossible… was he prettier than me?”

What the hell is this bastard saying?

Dante knew Rhys was not in his right mind, but now he had officially crossed the line. Dante’s expression hardened completely at the obscene words he could not believe had been uttered by Rhys’s pretty mouth. Santino licking his neck on his own had already felt incredibly filthy; hearing Rhys lash him with such sharp, accusatory words without even knowing what had actually transpired made heat rise violently in Dante’s head.

Even touching hands with someone who was not Rhys felt inherently disgusting to him. How could Rhys say he had spread his legs? How could he reduce something Dante had allowed only because it was Rhys to something so cheap, dirty, and easy? He felt not only furious, but deeply miserable.

It was because it was you, Rhys. If it had not been you, letting someone use the back of my body—a part of me that cannot even feel properly—would never have happened in my entire life.

His anger burned so fiercely that a prominent vein stood out on his forehead, but Dante drew in a harsh, stabilizing breath and kept his mouth firmly shut. Rhys was clearly not in a state where logic could reach him, and even if he could understand, continuing like this would only worsen their volatile emotions. The mistake had been holding on to someone who showed no sign of explaining what had made him angry in the first place. Dante should have shoved him off and left much earlier.

“You… are not sane right now,” Dante said, his own words coming out harsh and ungentle. “We’ll talk tomorrow. No, we don’t need to talk at all. We’re already over, and who I choose to meet or don’t meet isn’t any of your business. Open a window and cool your head. I’m leaving.”

Holding back his temper as best he could, Dante shot Rhys a rigid look and turned on his heel. He was about to open the door and exit when Rhys fiercely grabbed him by the arm from behind and yanked him back. The sheer momentum nearly pulled Dante’s shoulder out of its socket, bending his body backward as he was dragged violently onto the bed.

“I asked what kind of guy he was,” Rhys demanded. He climbed over Dante, who had been thrown flat onto his back, pinning him down with relentless fixation.

This bastard, seriously. Lying on the bed in an instant, Dante stared up at Rhys in utter disbelief. He had secretly wanted to lie in the same bed with him again, but he had absolutely never wanted to do it under these circumstances.

“What are you going to do if you know?” Dante snapped.

“Did you do it? With that bastard?”

Rhys tightened his grip around Dante’s wrists as Dante tried to rise, pressing his entire body weight down to anchor him. At this point, the only way to escape was to physically strike Rhys’s body, but no matter how filthy he felt, Dante truly did not want to lay hands on him. After a moment of wavering, Dante looked straight into Rhys’s face. Annoyingly, when he faced that beautiful countenance looking down at him, he realized he didn’t have it in him to actually hit him. Thinking himself a complete lunatic for still finding Rhys pretty in a situation like this, Dante opened his mouth.

“Do you actually think I did?”

“Then what is this fucking thing?” Rhys snarled.