Chapter 55

When Dante blinked, Rhys had already pulled back. Bending his slender upper body, he wrapped the fallen gelato in the napkins he had taken from the shop. Rhys threw the gelato, now dirty and impossible to eat, into a nearby trash can. Then, he put the gelato he himself had been eating into the same trash can.

Thump.

A heavy sound settled inside the bin.

Dante, who had stopped blankly as if he had lost his soul, belatedly let out a low, “Ah.” Slowly, he came back to himself and recognized the harsh reality that nothing had happened between them. Along with the floral scent that had vanished before he knew it, the scent of Bellini from his memories scattered too.

…I thought we were going to kiss.

Naturally, he had waited as if such a thing was about to happen. Rhys’s face had definitely come closer, hadn’t it? Was that just his imagination? Probably… yes. They were not in the kind of relationship where they kissed right now—even if they had been like that in bed until yesterday.

His mind tangled into knots. Disappointment and confusion mixed, and the thought that he must have looked quite ridiculous just now crossed his mind. Then, frustration followed. Rhys would surely remember what had happened on days when he drank Bellinis too, so the fact that he had simply pulled away gave Dante a bad feeling.

No. The atmosphere was good. If Rhys still intended to end things with me, all he had to do was wait for the four hours to pass and break it off right away. He didn’t need to suggest eating gelato first. And is that all? Even if I asked him to act like when we were lovers, he had no reason to worry that much over a slight fever.

He must have changed his mind. He did it because he still likes me.

“Dante.”

Dante snapped back to reality. Unlike earlier, when Rhys had been close enough to touch, he was now calling him from a little distance away. When Dante looked toward him, Rhys briefly lowered his gaze and checked the watch on his left wrist. Dante could see, too, that the hour hand sat at five and the minute hand at seven.

The time they had been given was over. To be precise, it had already passed.

“Time’s up,” Rhys said, sweeping back his blond hair that had been lightly disheveled by the wind. He calmly brought up the matter at hand. “I think I’ve gone along with you as much as you wanted.”

For a moment, Dante did not know how to react and studied Rhys’s face. No particular emotion was drawn on that elegant, pale face. It did not carry the sensitive air of pushing Dante away as it had four hours ago, but it did not feel affectionate or gentle either.

Dante moved his lips, which had gone dry before he knew it, and barely managed one word. “Already?”

It was a foolish question, but Rhys did not get irritated or become severe. “Yes. It passed a little while ago.” Instead, he pointed out the end one more time. The promised time was over—the four hours Dante had staked on the condition that he would give Rhys up.

What he had to say next was already decided. Dante opened his mouth, but only a dry, metallic sound came from his parched throat, so he swallowed. An alien sensation settled there, as if something were caught in his windpipe. After swallowing once more, he clenched his now-cold hand into a fist. He did not want to ask, but he had to.

“So… how was it? Did your mind change?”

No sooner had the question ended than Rhys parted his lips. The instant Dante saw it, he hurriedly interrupted, adding, “Come to think of it, I forgot to ask about Lily. How is Lily doing?”

Even though his words had been cut off, Rhys’s expression did not change. He closed his mouth for a moment, then answered Dante’s question exactly as asked.

“He eats well and is doing fine. He isn’t sick anywhere… He cries annoyingly at dawn like always, and if I let him out sometimes, he wanders around.”

“Doesn’t he miss me?” Dante pressed. “Lily could tell us apart, couldn’t he?”

“Well….” Rhys let out a light sigh and shrugged. “He doesn’t tell me things like that.”

“That’s too bad. It would be nice if Lily could talk.”

Then… he could tell him how Rhys had been doing while they were apart, and at least give him a hint as to whether Rhys had missed him.

Rhys quietly listened to Dante’s meaningless words. Honestly, that calm attitude, with no change in expression, made Dante even more anxious. If Rhys had acted prickly as he had until now, even those negative emotions would have shown an interest in him, and he would have felt reassured.

The Rhys before him now was too calm. He was like someone who had entirely finished sorting things out.

Startled by his own thought, Dante narrowed his eyes. Thinking this way was not like him. If he thought badly for no reason, things really would flow that way. Cancel the thought he had just had. Cancel it. Wiping away the ominous assumption, Dante deliberately mentioned something occurring afterward. In other words, not something happening right now, but something that would happen after they returned home.

“When we get back to New York, I should go see him,” Dante said. “If he sees me for the first time in almost three months, he’ll go crazy with happiness, right?”

It was something he desperately wished would happen.

“You’re going to take him?” Rhys asked instead. “I remember you gave him to me because you couldn’t keep animals. If you moved in the meantime, or if your apartment rules changed, take him. It would be better for both of you if he went to his original owner.”

He had not moved, and the rules had not changed. Only one thing had changed.

“I meant… I’d stop by your place to say hello,” Dante answered, not knowing what expression he should make. A smile would not come, but it also did not feel right to frown or press his lips together like someone in despair.

Rhys, who had been silently listening, let out a distinctly deeper sigh and closed his eyes when Dante mentioned going to his home. Then, he spoke in a tired voice. “Dante… we are…”

As if choosing his words carefully, Rhys parted and closed his lips. After a brief silence, he began explaining gently.

“We broke up too many times. A relationship that’s shaken this much is hard to turn back. I… don’t have the confidence to continue it. Let’s stop. I’m saying this for your sake.”

When Rhys opened his eyes again, they had grown a little darker. It seemed to be because the sky was quickly losing its light. The sun was disappearing bit by bit.

The moment Rhys finished speaking, Dante hurriedly tacked on an excuse that was not quite an excuse. Even though he had realized from Rhys’s words that his decision had not changed—even though he had promised he would give up cleanly—in the end, he wanted to cling pathetically.

“I know. I’m really sorry,” Dante pleaded. “I know the choices I made were the worst. But it wasn’t because I didn’t love you. It was because I loved you that I did those stupid things, like I confessed earlier. It will never happen again. I’ll make sure it doesn’t.”

Now, he could no longer see Rhys’s expression clearly. Like the day they had first met in Central Park, the darkening weather allowed him to feel only Rhys’s beautiful silhouette and presence.

“It’s because I don’t think I can endure anymore,” Rhys said softly.

Dante had been about to cling again as soon as Rhys’s words ended, but he flinched at what followed. His stomach churned, and a strange headache came over him.

“I don’t have the confidence,” Rhys continued. “I don’t know what might happen if this continues… and there’s a limit to what I can hold back.”

“…You don’t have to hold back! You can be as angry as you want. Just like the last few days, just…!”

“That isn’t what I mean.” This time, Rhys cut Dante off cleanly. All emotion vanished from his gentle voice. “Because of the time we spent together… I didn’t want to end it by saying this much. But Dante broke the promise to give up cleanly, so I suppose I have no choice.”

Rhys brought up the very subject Dante had deliberately kept silent about.

“You noticed I’m an Alpha, didn’t you? Even if you have no interest in Omegas or Alphas, I thought you’d know after being knotted.”

Dante wondered why Rhys was suddenly bringing this up, but it was better this way. The instant he heard the word knotting, Dante shot back. “Yeah. We can talk later about how you deceived me all this time. But I don’t understand how you can say we should stop when you went as far as knotting me. Knotting is something you only do to someone you like, isn’t it?”

Rhys suddenly let out a low laugh. It was a sound as dark as the night settling around them. “Dante really is cruelly indifferent to things he has no interest in.”

There was something like self-mockery or deep pain in that murmuring voice, but before Dante had time to dwell on it, Rhys spoke again.

“Alphas, as a species, aren’t beings moved only by love the way you think. We act based on obsession and desire toward what belongs to us. Betas may not know, but in this world, people do things beasts would do. I’m not much different.”

Rhys, speaking as an Alpha, gave off an unfamiliar air, as if he were a completely different person.

“The sex we had meant nothing,” Rhys said coldly. “Do you want to know why?”

The moment Dante heard it had meant nothing, his headache worsened. Nausea surged up as if his organs were being violently scrambled. Raising a trembling hand, Dante covered his mouth. At the words denying the time when they had forgotten everything surrounding them and tangled together as if becoming one, he felt as if even his soul were being rejected.

“Because someone who was mine, whatever else he was, came back reeking of some fucking Alpha bastard’s pheromones, and I briefly lost my mind,” Rhys laughed darkly. “Ha ha, doesn’t that piss you off? I spent years having sex like children’s games to match you, a Beta… then you suddenly said you’d enjoyed yourself with an Alpha, and I snapped.”

The phrase “mine” no longer sounded the way it had before.

“But you somehow took it,” Rhys whispered. “They say Betas, because they aren’t Omegas, collapse after taking an Alpha once or twice, but Dante….”

Rhys, who had continued making vicious remarks in a calm tone, suddenly shut his mouth. The nausea that had been rising throughout his words surged at that exact moment, and Dante bent over and retched. He barely held back from vomiting up everything inside him.

“Urk…!”

As he endured the waves of nausea with his body bent, he felt Rhys’s cold gaze over his head. Wiping the saliva from his mouth with the back of his hand, he slowly lifted his head. Dante met Rhys’s eyes, which were shining vividly in the gloom. At some point, the streetlights seemed to have turned on, and light settled behind Rhys. With the light at his back, Rhys whispered in a quiet but painfully clear voice.

“Dante was right. Our sexual compatibility was good. The more we did it, the more turned on I got, and I couldn’t stop. I told you, Alphas prioritize desire. But because I hadn’t properly released that for years, I lost reason completely. Should I be more honest? If you’d collapsed early on, I would have found an Omega and finished. If that had happened, I would have knotted not you, but some other Omega—”

Rhys’s words could not continue to the end. Dante lunged, grabbing the collar of the shirt from which those endlessly cruel words were spilling. Under that rough, snatching hand, the buttons near the collar ripped off and fell to the pavement.

Tick, tick.

Along with the sound of the buttons rolling away, a heavy silence fell.

“Stop. This isn’t like you,” Dante choked out.

Dante slowly pushed against his own thighs and straightened his upper body. Rhys’s body swayed for a moment with the movement. Dante stood without releasing the collar in his grip and looked at Rhys sadly, his face entirely pale.

“…Not like me?” Rhys challenged, his voice rising. “Do you know anything about me? You didn’t even know I’d hidden being an Alpha from the moment we first met. Isn’t that why you were anxious the whole time? Why did I disappear every two months, why didn’t I introduce you to the people around me—you were tormented because you didn’t know anything about me!”

At the words “not like you,” Rhys finally cracked. His pale brow twisted, and for an instant, the veins stood out in his neck as he raised his voice to refute Dante. Every single thing was true. Rhys always said only true things.

“That’s right,” Dante said, looking down at his own hand gripping Rhys’s collar. “Even though we dated that long, starting with your designation, there’s still nothing I properly knew about you. It’s really fucking awful. Ha, how did you even think to hide being an Alpha? You’re impressive too.”

His hand, gone white with blue veins standing out, was full of force. Following that strength, the shirt collar tightened around Rhys’s pale neck, leaving a red mark. Unlike Dante, Rhys had fragile skin and marked easily.

“I can’t understand what you’re thinking at all,” Dante murmured. “You could have just left me alone no matter what kind of shitty thing I went through by myself, but you still came all the way to the fountain. I don’t understand you ordering dessert you won’t even eat purely because of me, either. Are pretty people all… this complicated inside?”

Slowly, he released the force in his hand. Letting his arm fall weakly, Dante closed his mouth and stared endlessly at Rhys’s terribly distorted face.

The venom those pretty lips had spat out was truly horrific. As he listened to those cruel words, enough to drive him mad, the terrible headache that had suddenly struck him joined in, and a pain as if his skull were splitting churned inside his head. Even now, the headache remained, and the nausea turning his stomach did not subside. It only worsened.

Because the words were just that painful…

“I made you suffer, didn’t I?” Dante whispered.

They did not sound at all like words someone who had merely expressed hurt by drinking a Bellini would say.

“You want me to lose affection for you badly enough to say things like this,” Dante realized, a bitter truth settling over him. “That’s how much you wanted to end it. You’d already done all you could in New York, but because I clung to you like a leech and wouldn’t fall off…”

Ha. He was so upset he felt like tears might prick at his eyes. More than when Rhys had told him at the hotel to find another love, more than when his parents had ignored him countless times, this moment hurt so much more that he felt like he might go truly insane.

“Because of one crazy ex-boyfriend, you ended up saying things like this.”

A red mark had already formed on Rhys’s neck. On that midsummer afternoon when all the sunlight in New York seemed to shine down on Rhys—when Dante had looked at that beautiful man smiling shyly at him—he had thought Rhys resembled a flower, just like his name. A fragile flower whose petals would be hurt by even the slightest wind.

Now he knew that flower-like man was stronger than he looked, and rougher-spoken, too.

“I’m sorry,” Dante said.

Even so, in Dante’s eyes, he still looked as beautiful as a flower.

“I’ll do as you said.”

No, since Dante had been the one to bring it up first, should he say they would do as Dante said? A self-mocking thought rose, and a bitter laugh followed. Looking tenderly at Rhys with tawny eyes beneath dark brows, Dante decided to finally accept the reality he should have accepted two months ago.

“Let’s break up.”

He should have accepted it earlier. Like a terrible lover from a movie, he had clung and clung until he finally made Rhys say things like that—to no one else but his Iris.

Iris Elliott.

A bundle of contradictions and a liar. A person Dante’s simple mind could not understand. A man he had thought was a Beta but who turned out to be an Alpha. Twenty-nine-year-old Rhys Elliott, impossible to know which version of him was real, hiding a goddamn lot of things.

The first love of Dante Bellini’s life, whom he loved so, so much.

“I won’t come find you anymore,” Dante promised.

Only after meeting Rhys did Dante realize he had never truly loved his past lovers. He had believed it was love, but it had been an illusion to soothe loneliness. Perhaps because they knew that, Dante’s lovers had never truly loved him either. He had loved because he wanted to be loved, not because he had seen the person themselves.

But Rhys had been different from the very beginning.

Dante had never even thought he would like him. Rhys was from the Upper East Side, clearly someone who had lived in a world far too different from Dante’s, and he was a gender Dante had never given attention to. His eyes kept going to Rhys’s face, but even so, Rhys was still a man.

After Dante realized that the eyes calling him, Dante, sparkled as they followed him, he became a little conscious of Rhys, but even then, he had not thought of dating him. The interests Rhys told him about did not match Dante’s at all, and when they were together, there were almost no things they could do in common. Dante came out when Rhys asked to meet, but truthfully, not many words passed between them. Even so, the reason he continued agreeing to meet was…

Because the moment he turned his head and inevitably met eyes looking at him, his chest swelled so much it trembled.

When he awkwardly turned his gaze away and then looked beside him once more, he saw blue-gray eyes curved while Rhys bit his lip. Even though they were continuing a terribly boring date, looking at that face smiling so happily, Dante had thought he wanted to keep walking beside this man forever.

It was not because Rhys was prettier than a woman, nor because he did not feel like a man. He had simply liked the face that smiled whenever it saw him. The smile that lit even the shaded places in Dante’s heart, which had always been a little dark, was truly beautiful.

That was all that had been beautiful.

As Dante continued speaking, Rhys’s expression gradually disappeared. The pale face, tinged with the violet of the night sky, hardened like a sculpture carved from marble. The temperature that had been endlessly warm while they walked through Rome holding hands became terribly cold as night fell. A desolate wind swept between the two of them, now farther apart, and the scent of Rhys that Dante loved briefly rose very strongly before scattering at once.

Before lingering attachment could stubbornly raise its head, Dante chose to leave. This time, it was his turn to move first. He forcibly held back the gaze that wanted to touch Rhys and barely managed to turn away. The steps that began extending at regular intervals soon started growing faster.

As he walked, he reached a square with a small fountain, and a staircase prettily decorated with flowers appeared. He had wondered why it felt somewhat familiar, and then he remembered having glimpsed it when Mateo pointed it out as they passed nearby. What had he called this place again? Some kind of steps. And he had said something else too—that it had become famous because it appeared in a movie, that it was a good place for lovers to visit together…

At that moment, Dante stopped. Then, like someone remembering something he had left behind, he hurriedly turned around. There was some distance between them, but the alley where he and Rhys had been standing came back into his view.

Rhys was no longer there.

Even while knowing his own eyesight was good, Dante searched that spot again, wondering if he might have seen wrong.

But no matter how he looked and looked, Rhys was not there. Not even a blond head resembling him appeared.

Rhys had left.

“…Addio,” Dante whispered.

Addio, Rhys.

The farewell that would never reach him flew into the wind and scattered into the Roman night.

[END of VOLUME 2]