Chapter 60

None of the words reached Dante’s processing centers. Only one single thought circled round and round inside his skull: Please, just do something. Please, do something to me. Right now… take me, do anything, just do something.

For a moment, his consciousness cut out entirely. There was a very brief, dark blank, and when Dante blinked his eyes open again, his arms were wrapped tightly around Blake’s neck. Completely independent of his own will, his body was trying to embrace Blake and press itself flush against him.

Even though a strange man he had met only once before was suddenly clinging to him, Blake didn’t push him away. Instead, Dante could feel the arms around his own torso tighten sharply. He understood it instinctively: the person before him was completely affected by him.

Just a little more. If he touched Blake just a tiny bit more… he could get what he wanted. Something deep inside him whispered the command. His body wanted what Dante’s reason—now so faint it was close to vanishing—refused to permit.

“I told you to get your pheromones under control, okay?” Blake snarled, his grip tightening to the point of pain. “You’re acting like an Omega seeing an Alpha for the first time…! The person you were with all this time was an Alpha, wasn’t he? Didn’t Rhys teach you how to handle Alphas? Wait, that doesn’t make sense. If you were an Omega, there’s no way Iris would’ve gone through that much hell all this time….”

Then, just before his reason was wiped entirely white, Dante caught the name Rhys.

A faint focus snapped back into his completely dazed eyes. With a low groan, Dante threw his head back and whispered in a voice thickly choked with heat, “You… what did you do… to my body…?”

At Dante’s strained whisper, Blake’s eyes darkened at once. “Ha!” With a sharp scoff, Blake muttered in a voice that hovered somewhere between incredulity and madness, “You’re the one doing something to me. I called you here to talk for a moment, and you suddenly started releasing pheromones…. Haah…. Seriously… what the hell is going on?”

Dante was the one who wanted to know what the fuck was going on. He wanted to tell him: First, let go of me so we can talk. Push me to the floor if you have to. But the primal thing inside him utterly crushed the reason that had briefly returned. It was as if all his physical desires had been condensed into one tight, throbbing knot, and that knot demanded only one outcome:

Accept this Alpha.

Hurry. It doesn’t matter who it is. Open up and cling to the person who can fill that soaked hole. He’s right in front of you. Ask him to do it.

“Ha, fuck,” Blake groaned, his head dropping. “Rhys, I… I really held out as long as I could.”

Dante slowly lowered the head he had forced back and stared blankly at Blake’s face. Blake was looking at a man the same size as him—no, a man who was certainly far better built than he was—and yet Blake showed neither refusal nor discomfort. Instead, he looked at Dante with eyes heavy with raw desire, wearing an expression that suggested he had already stripped him naked in his mind.

Dante could feel the hand at his waist gradually sliding lower. As the heat of Blake’s palm moved down along his lower back, Dante’s body rocked its hips, as if it had been waiting for exactly that point of contact.

The moment Blake saw the movement, his eyes went wild. There was only one inevitable thing that could happen next.

The two of them would fuck right here on the marble floor.

A hand slipped under Dante’s T-shirt. His body, following the heat of the hand that quickly pushed the fabric up, panted with eager pleasure. But Dante’s suppressed heart violently rejected it.

No. I said no. I don’t want to sleep with someone I barely know. Why am I acting like some animal in heat, you crazy body? I don’t want anyone but Rhys.

Even if we broke up, I will never sleep with another man who isn’t Rhys.

Not even if it kills me.

The moment that fierce thought surfaced, strength briefly flooded back into his limbs. Following the sensation that he had regained control for a mere fraction of a second, Dante loosened the arms he had wrapped around Blake’s shoulders. As Dante moved to back away, the fragrant, poisonous liquor scent he had been sensing all along deepened. Just before his mind could slip away again, Dante channeled every last bit of strength he possessed and shoved Blake hard. He had no idea how much force went into the impact, but—

Thud!

Blake, who had been holding him securely, flew backward and crashed hard onto the floor.

Once the suffocating scent and sensation that had been burrowing fiercely into Dante retreated a little, other inputs began to register. Thump, thud—the muffled sound of bone and flesh striking hard against each other echoed through the room… and then another scent reached his nose.

He knew this scent.

More than knew it, he was intimately familiar with it. It was the scent Dante loved most in the entire world. Flowers. Not the hard, liquor-steeped rose scent he had been smelling until now, but something inherently elegant and gentle. It was a fragrance that wrapped around his entire body so pleasantly it felt as though he had been dressed in soft petals, making him want to stay held within it forever.

Iris’s scent….

“Urgh…! Stop! Wait, Rhys…! Calm down! I’m back to my senses now, I said I’m back, you bastard!”

Rhys’s body scent, violently filling the wide space around them, brought Dante fully back to reality. His rolled-back eyes returned to their proper focus, and beneath the dim lighting, he saw two men tangled together in a brutal scuffle. What entered his vision was blond hair that looked similar to Blake’s, but deeper in color, like thread spun directly from the sun.

Dante lay limp on the floor, but he forced his powerless arms to move. He barely managed to plant a hand on the marble before it slipped with a dull thud, leaving him with no choice but to brace himself on his elbows to lift his upper body. When his gaze rose, he could finally see exactly what was happening.

Blake, who had been pinning Dante moments ago, was now rolling across the floor. He must have taken a solid, heavy hit directly to the face; dark red blood streamed from his nose, soaking the collar of his green shirt in a frightening stain. The glasses that had been tucked into his collar had flown off somewhere and were nowhere to be seen. Wearing a vicious, defensive expression, Blake hastily caught the forearm of the man trying to swing another heavy punch down at him.

“I said stop!” Blake screamed.

But the man didn’t seem to hear a single word. Instead of freeing the arm Blake had grabbed, he used his other hand to crush Blake’s face down into the floor. The large white hand pressed so hard it looked as though he genuinely meant to smash Blake’s skull open. In that instant, Blake let out a bizarre yell and shoved the man back with the full weight of his body.

“You fucking lunatic! Nothing happened yet!”

Frozen, watching a violent fight he felt he absolutely should not get between, Dante finally caught sight of the attacker’s face when the man toppled backward from the shove. The man, his blond hair in complete disarray, was a striking beauty with elegant features and beautiful blue-gray eyes. The moment Dante saw those blue eyes, where the violet at the center of the irises had darkened strangely, his own eyes widened in shock.

“Rhys?” Dante breathed.

He thought he had smelled Rhys, but it was actually him?

The instant Rhys heard Dante’s voice, he jerked his upper body upright. Then, with murderous eyes whose pupils had narrowed almost to the point of disappearing entirely, he lunged at Blake again. Blake arched backward to avoid the strike and shouted urgently toward Dante.

“Don’t just sit there gaping! What are you doing? Mr. Devil Hunter is the one who seduced me, dripping pheromones all over the place! Take responsibility!”

The infuriating nickname Devil Hunter, along with the sight of the man who truly seemed to be Rhys from behind, slowly got Dante’s brain moving again. He couldn’t understand a single thing that had transpired since he entered this building, and he had no earthly idea why Rhys was here, but if he left them alone, someone was going to end up dead.

Meanwhile, the confrontation between the two men grew increasingly savage. The moment Blake retreated, Rhys attacked like a feral beast. When Blake dodged in a hurry, Rhys pursued him instantly. Dante needed to intervene, but his mouth hung open because he simply couldn’t believe the man rampaging so ferociously was the gentle Rhys. Wait…. Now that he thought about it, this frantic energy did feel somewhat similar to when Rhys had pounced on him in Rome.

“Can’t you hear me? Dante! Dante! At this rate, one of us is going to be hauling out a corpse. You need to save me!”

Blake was now reduced to throwing anything he could get his hands on to keep his distance. Dante wondered briefly if it would be easier for Blake to just fight back and subdue him, but then he remembered the way Rhys kept attacking without end, completely ignoring being shoved, and he figured it wouldn’t be that simple. When Rhys had pressed down on Blake’s face just now, he had looked entirely lethal.

“No, I hear you, but…!”

Since stopping Rhys was the immediate priority, Dante tried to push himself up. But strength still hadn’t returned to his legs. And there was another, far more humiliating reason he couldn’t get up: he had no idea how it had happened, but the slick liquid leaking from his heat had soaked entirely down to his thighs, and he could feel the dampness wetting his jeans. Was he supposed to stand up looking like this? He was meeting Rhys after what felt like a hundred years, and he was supposed to show him this fucking state?

“My legs won’t work, so what do you want me to do?” Dante shouted with full fury, his frustration boiling over.

At that exact moment, Blake was caught by Rhys again. Blake was tall and well-built, but apparently, Rhys possessed an entirely different level of strength. Like a carnivore with its prey firmly in its jaws, Rhys slammed Blake against the wall and pinned him there. The second Dante saw Rhys grip Blake’s collar and raise a clenched fist again, he shouted.

“Rhys!”

The fist stopped dead in midair.

Following the sound of Dante’s voice, Rhys slowly turned his head. The blond hair he usually wore prettily swept halfway back was a complete mess, falling wildly over his forehead. When Dante saw the blue eyes flashing like an animal’s between the strands covering his brows, goosebumps prickled instinctively over his skin. Rhys’s thick, suffocating scent filled every single corner of the space, and his panting breaths made it obvious he had completely lost his reason. From his posture flowed the overwhelming, terrifying presence of an apex predator.

Dante had called his name, but the moment their eyes locked, his confidence faltered. He remembered the Rhys who had turned sharp and cruel in order to push him away in Rome—the man who had even mentioned Omegas in an insulting way when Dante couldn’t easily keep his promise to give up. Then there was what had happened after Rhys disappeared without hesitation. Dante had fully believed Rhys would never be happy to see his face again.

It was astonishing that Rhys had arrived before something terrible happened with a total stranger, but Dante wasn’t even sure if the rescue was for his sake. Maybe that adulterer—

At that moment, his eyes met Blake’s.

“Try seducing him or something, please! Use your pretty face if you have to!” Blake shouted, his eyes bulging as Rhys’s hand remained wrapped in his collar. “That bastard’s eyes go stupid happy even if all you do is say ‘hey’ to him, so just do something!”

Pale-faced and trapped, Blake’s pretty features were ruined and soaked in blood, which made Dante feel slightly bad for internally calling him an adulterer.

At any rate, Dante used a sharp shake of his head to inform Blake that his plan was impossible. He understood the urgency, but asking that of none other than Dante Bellini was a joke. How was a man who had clung to Rhys over and over, only to be pushed away with cruel finality, supposed to suddenly use his looks to calm a raging Alpha?

Maybe it would have worked in the past, but in Rome, even seduction had failed miserably. Dante had spoken hundreds, thousands of words, and Rhys had still pushed him away to the very end. Even now, he was terrified that the eyes glaring at him were asking why someone who should have stayed gone had suddenly shown up here.

“I know Iris Elliott far, far better than you do, so listen to me!” Blake screamed.

Wait. That one seriously stung.

They had dated for four whole years, and Blake was saying that to him? What did this guy know? Talking like that when he didn’t know anything about their relationship. But the situation was dire, and there was absolutely nothing to lose by trying.

After a moment’s hesitation, Dante opened his arms wide. Then, softening his thick brows, he spoke as gently as his racing heart allowed.

“Rhys, come here.”