HOYSE CHAPTER 36

Chapter 36 — All Alphas Are Jerks, Me Included

The shower floor was black-gold. Against all that white foam, the splash of red looked viciously bright.
It was not that much blood, really, but streaked through the suds it seemed terrifying.

Only one thought pounded through Rong Jing’s head: murder.

He had already run into a few moments where the plot snapped back into the book’s storyline for no reason, so it was not strange his brain leapt there first. Hands shaking, he fumbled out his phone to dial 120. While the ring tone droned in his ear, he moved closer to check Gu Xi’s condition.

Foam veiled Gu Xi from view, every inch too beautiful to seem real, like a mermaid dissolving into bubbles.

Half-hidden, half-revealed, and carrying a pull that felt like it could strip a soul right out of a body, as if he were born a human lodestone.

A faint, tempting scent threaded the air. Rong Jing’s eyes began to redden as the pheromones in his body stirred awake.

He had no idea about any of this. He did not know that during an Omega’s heat even blood could be a lure. It would not scramble your mind, but in a small space like this it filled every corner with stray sparks.

A touch of fuel and everything goes up.

The moment Rong Jing’s fingers brushed Gu Xi’s back, the beauty who had been wincing and light-headed from the pain suddenly moved like a trap had sprung. One hand braced, he pounced like a young leopard and knocked Rong Jing flat.

Rong Jing’s mind had not caught up, but his arms did, wrapping Gu Xi on instinct so that fragile body would not hit anything hard.

Gu Xi looked nothing like usual. His gaze went cool, almost feelingless, and there was a thread of wildness in it.

The wild air of someone who conquers. He stared down from above as if he had found prey that finally met his standards.

From the phone now abandoned on the tiles came a tinny voice: “Hello, hello? Is someone injured? Please respond.”

Pinning Rong Jing with effortless lightness, Gu Xi traced circles over his shirt with a fingertip. The pressure was feather-soft, a silken loop around his finger that snuffed out Rong Jing’s resistance. Then Gu Xi spoke toward the phone, voice clear and cool. “Wrong number.” He hung up.

Something was off about Gu Xi, but Rong Jing could not nail down what.

He wanted to flip him off, get him away, but the sense that a careless move would snap this fragile person held him still.

There was another patient at the hospital right now, and this Gu Xi was the one who had told him after a couple meetings that he admired him. There was no way he could treat Gu Xi like anyone else and just rough him up. His feelings toward Gu Xi were a tangle: the pity he had felt reading the book, the admiration and fondness after meeting him, a sense of like calls to like, even a little fan’s heart from watching the drama unfold. All of it had settled in without him noticing.

Rong Jing himself had not realized he had stopped seeing Gu Xi simply as a man and had started seeing him as an Omega.

Rong Jing was not doing great either. That sweet scent had gotten to him and his body temperature was rising.

He looked at the body straddling him, white skin crossed by plum-colored red, slender yet not weak.

Every line hit a perfect point. Those few hundred words the original text used to describe Gu Xi rose in his mind one by one.

Too accurate.

He dared not look.

He turned his face away at once, deliberately avoiding Gu Xi. His fingers curled hard into a fist, reminding himself of Gu Xi’s condition. He absolutely could not use force.

Gu Xi sensed the contradiction. Rong Jing’s mind was saying no while his body was honest. A little pleased with his prank, Gu Xi smiled, leaned down, and aimed for Rong Jing’s Adam’s apple.

Rong Jing nearly sprang off the floor. Did Gu Xi have any idea that this spot looked unremarkable but was a lot of men’s weak point?

You do not just bite there!

Rong Jing’s vision rimmed red. He wanted to swat the man on top of him, yet he remembered it was Gu Xi, the Gu Xi who would gag if an Alpha touched him. How could he use violence on someone who tried so hard to keep living and smiling? “Calm down… calm down. Look at my gender…” Look clearly. I am an Alpha!

He tried to shake Gu Xi awake, but it was useless.

He reached up to grab Gu Xi’s arm and push him away, and that was when he saw the blood. So that was where the red in the foam came from.

The skin had been rubbed raw by who knew what. On that pale, delicate flesh the wide smear of red looked horrific.
Rong Jing tried to talk an Omega down during heat, but if a person could control it by reason, it would not be called heat.

Gu Xi did not stop. He went for Rong Jing’s mouth, the lips that usually meant restraint and propriety.

If this had been Wu Fuyu from before, he would have been on the ground in two moves.

Right now Rong Jing was dodging, harried, his clothes rumpled to a mess.

Protecting his virtue took effort. At the same time he tried to ease off the person who looked weak yet was in fact impossible to shake.

In that pushing and pulling, he caught sight of the inside of Gu Xi’s forearm.

Punctures.

So many they made his scalp prickle.

Inhibitors. How many shots had he taken?

He had been sitting by the lake earlier, clearly not okay. Something must have happened.

“It hurt, didn’t it?”

Rong Jing stopped resisting. With Gu Xi’s skin bare he could see where the foam had reddened it, and where tiny beads of blood dotted like coral. Around a cluster of needle marks the skin was mottled green and purple.

He did not want to ask what Gu Xi had been through. Dragging someone back through pain by making them talk about it was like making them endure it again. That was its own kind of torture.

At his three words, Gu Xi suddenly went still.

A drop hit Rong Jing’s cheek. He could not tell if it was water from Gu Xi’s wet hair or…

He touched it, then forgot the disaster he looked like and wanted to ask what was going on, but Gu Xi had already let go, slid to the side, pulled his knees up and tucked his head into his arms.

A posture that said: do not talk to me.

Rong Jing did not notice that when he said those three words, the wildness in Gu Xi’s eyes had faded. Clarity crept back in. He even glanced around in confusion and, seeing Rong Jing beneath him, light clothes tugged askew by his own hands, felt the world crack.

Would Rong Jing hate him, think he was shameless?

Gu Xi did not want to speak. Rong Jing could not find words either.

The air felt awkward and weirdly charged at once.

He could guess the plot had pulled another switch. Damn the original story.

He practically fled that scene that could so easily become something else, shut the wobbly bathroom door, and headed straight for a room farther away. He slammed that door too.

He sucked in a rough breath. His shirt tails had been yanked from his waistband, several buttons undone.
He did not need a mirror to know what he looked like. It was like he was in heat himself.

What he could not accept was that images had flashed through his mind, white skin and soft heat, a seduction that hollowed him out. For a second he forgot the other person was male. He had always thought “so beautiful you forget the gender” was a lie from pretty prose, but now he knew exactly how real it could be.

He looked down and realized a certain part of him had opinions.

No. That is not me. It is pheromones messing around.

He had never dated in two lifetimes, but he still had desire.

He was not a monk. A man who had been dried out for twenty-plus years not reacting would be the strange part.

But that was a man.

No, that was an Omega.

An Omega who was still a man.

This line of thinking was a mess. He could not afford to chase it further.

He pressed a palm over his excited brother. What, planning to take advantage while he is weak? Dream on.

With a blank face he thought, all Alphas are beasts. That includes me.

Restlessness crawled under his skin, the breath he released still too hot. The aftereffects had not burned off.

He paced the room for twenty odd minutes and now and then put his ear to the door to listen.

Nothing. Quiet. It sounded like Gu Xi had not come out.

What now?

He had hoped that after what just happened Gu Xi would be scared enough to run. Coming here to him would be jumping from the wolf’s den into the tiger’s jaws.

But then Rong Jing remembered Gu Xi standing in the rain, remembered that hand catching his wrist as if asking for help.

He let out a heavy sigh and looked down at his troublesome brother. Please be a decent person, alright.

He picked up his phone. Even in the panic, he had not forgotten it.

He texted Zhou Xiang: When an O takes inhibitors during heat, does it hurt?

Zhou Xiang, a walking little encyclopedia, replied: Hurts like hell. Think about it. Heat is your body’s normal state. Inhibitors press it down hard in the opposite direction. How would that not hurt? And too many shots leave side effects. Periods go irregular, pain spikes, that sort of thing.

Rong Jing: How many shots count as too many?
Zhou Xiang: Trying to die or what? You can trigger a stress response. Serious cases need the hospital.

So Gu Xi’s state was pretty dangerous right now. Rong Jing raked a hand through his hair.

To cool himself down faster, he called his big brother, Xie Ling, the walking air conditioner. “Ge, who designed this place? The décor is amazing.”

Xie Ling was at the sanatorium where their grandfather lived. The old man still had a ventilator, eyes closed in a long sleep, waking only in scattered moments.

Frozen over by Xie Jisheng’s behavior, Xie Ling missed the old man terribly. He had set a pile of work aside to keep watch. He sat silently at the bedside, saying nothing.

The phone rang. He kept his phone on airplane mode at the sanatorium. Only whitelisted numbers could get through.

His little brother had a special ringtone. One chime and he knew.

Hearing Rong Jing’s voice softened his gaze a fraction.

“Didn’t I tell you not to bug me for three days?” he said, though his mouth lifted a little. “Who else but me designed it.”

This younger brother was a sugar drop.

Rong Jing was genuinely impressed. “Ge, your art sense is insane.”

Xie Ling actually smiled. “If I had not gone into business, I would be at the Academy of Fine Arts.” Being affirmed by his brother did make him happy. He had given this house to his family, so of course it was not some cookie-cutter thing. Every line was his.

He had also designed another place in the same neighborhood for Xie Jisheng, a more American style.

He had always treated both younger brothers the same. It was just that Xie Jisheng used that one as a gilded cage for his rotating songbirds.

They chatted a little longer and hung up.

Xie Ling looked up to find that, at some point, the old man had opened clouded eyes, full of love. “Xiao Ling,” he whispered in broken phrases, “did something… happen?”

After talking with that block of ice, the heat in Rong Jing finally cooled a notch.

Then he remembered there was a text he had not checked earlier. It was from the pheromone matching center.

A user with ID 32908477xxxxxx had a match with him above eighty percent. Would he like to connect?

Only when both sides were above eighty percent would they send this message.

He remembered the original host had been taken by the Xie family to register in case he could not find a wife later. There were far more Alphas than Omegas. Plenty of Alphas might end up single.

In the old days of this world there had been forced matches based on pheromones. The higher the match, the more likely you would be forced to marry.

Just like arranged marriages by parents and matchmakers in their ancient times.

These days pheromones were not the only measure. People encouraged marrying for love.

Especially Omegas, a rarer group, who fought for respect. Many did not want to be housebound or to be paired because of pheromones. Views had opened up.

Of course, many still believed only AO matches made the healthiest babies and made heat and susceptibility easier together. So most people would meet in person at least once to see.

And Omegas with rare, high-grade pheromones often had multiple high matches. They did not need him.
Rong Jing thought for a moment and tapped decline.

His own life was a mess. Where would he find the time to meet a new Omega? Why add trouble?

Another thought hit him. Xie Ling liked stocking his properties with… certain supplies. This place might have that.

He cracked the door, listened toward the bathroom. Gu Xi was still there, and it did not sound like the shower was running anymore.

Drawing a steadying breath, he headed for the utility room.

Gu Xi was still in the bathroom. Since Rong Jing had bolted, he had not moved. He could not bring himself to face him.

After the collision, his thoughts had gone foggy and something else had taken the wheel.

When he came back to himself, the memory of what he had done replayed. He knew how crazy he had been and what he had done to Rong Jing.

You are insane, he snarled at himself. How could you touch him? You do not deserve it. Another voice answered, then who does? You? You think you do not deserve it? That is the truth.

Gu Xi’s eyes went red. If you touch him again, I will kill you. Try me.

The voice was calm. I am you. I am what you want. You know exactly what you truly want. I only did it for you. What are you so afraid of?

Gu Xi had no words. His mouth tasted bitter.

He could not refute it with any righteousness.

After his parents died one after the other, the three siblings were parceled out to different relatives. He had gone to his aunt’s house. At first the days were peaceful. Then her husband’s eyes turned wrong. One day while his aunt was out of town, the man barged into his room… 

He had run like mad and had nowhere to go, so he drifted, scavenging food from trash bins, sleeping curled by them.

He did not know when another voice woke inside him.

Gu Xi knew he was sick…Very sick.

But he could not stop it.

I am sorry, Rong Jing…

He curled on the tile, cold to the bone.

The bathroom door opened again and someone stepped into the frame, fully armed.

Rong Jing wore a gas mask. He looked at the person inside who had not moved for what felt like half an hour.

Gu Xi stared, dazed.

A gas mask?

Poison.

Was that supposed to be... me?

Isn’t that a little over the top?

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