Chapter 212

Siron thought Isaac looked strange, standing there blankly, but he stepped off the landing and headed toward Lewis’s room. He carefully turned the doorknob.

The quiet room, instead of carrying the chill he expected, held a warmth—like the trace of a living person’s body heat and scent. That gentle warmth, so unexpectedly touching compared to the silence he had braced himself for, made Siron’s heart ache.

Stepping inside, Siron calmly began to inspect Lewis’s room with care. On the nightstand beside the bed lay a neatly placed copy of Nicholas Sparks’s novel The Notebook, a bookmark stuck midway through. On the wall opposite the bed, a television easily a hundred inches wide was mounted.

Siron opened the shelf beneath the TV and, rifling through it, suddenly came face to face with his own past. It was the Blu-ray of Body Host, the film that had propelled his acting career forward. And that wasn’t all. With his heart tightening, he opened another shelf and found Blu-rays of the films and dramas he had starred in, stacked in careful order.

“These are all mine. When did he take them?”

They were the things Siron had carried with him when he’d been half-forced into retirement from the Korean entertainment world and returned to America. Now, confronted with the past he had avoided all those years while living in survival mode, a faint, indescribable emotion spread across his face.

Lewis. When you were still crawling, I was already running. Funny how it makes my chest swell up like this.

Even knowing now was not the time, Siron went through each Blu-ray case one by one. His debut film Let’s Meet Sometimes was missing its DVD. It was the movie where he had suddenly been cast as a reckless college student husband who becomes a father without warning. He remembered how thrilled he had been to finally land a significant supporting role, and at the same time, how it had only been possible thanks to Baekgyeong’s support. That thought made his feelings even more tangled.

Closing the drawer, Siron turned his head toward Lewis’s bed. The blankets were still creased in the shape of a body having just risen from them. On the day Siron had been abducted, Lewis too had disappeared without a trace. If Anna hadn’t touched the room since then, this scene was the exact remnant of Lewis getting up in the morning, unaware of what awaited, about to start his day as usual.

Looking back, that day had been strange in every way. The Langford Bridge linking Baggers City and Captiva Island had collapsed. Anna had been urgently summoned to the scene and trapped there. And in Siron’s mind, like black mold spreading its domain, resurfaced the desolate, suffocating atmosphere of the Millander Shelter, and the villainous face of Joseph Miller—approaching him with his obscene pink, sausage-like cock exposed, ready to pounce. Shaking off the foul images in a hurry, Siron kept opening and closing drawers, searching for a suppressant.

He even ransacked the desk drawers in the small study attached to Lewis’s bedroom before stepping into the bathroom. Opening the cabinet, he checked inside, but found only towels and shaving supplies.

Letting out a sigh as he closed it, Siron flinched. Reflected in the mirrored cabinet door was Isaac. He was standing in the doorway without a sound.

“Did you find the suppressant?”

“What? Oh, no.”

The garden shed Isaac had been assigned to search was minuscule compared to the mansion. He must have finished with it quickly and come up to the second floor. Siron’s resentment toward him had not faded, and he avoided meeting Isaac’s gaze in the mirror as he asked:

“There wasn’t any suppressant in the shed?”

“So it seems.”

“Well, yeah. It’s not the kind of thing you’d expect to be stored there.”

About to break the awkwardness by suggesting they search another spot, Siron suddenly realized Isaac had closed the distance between them. Siron trembled as he stared at Isaac’s reflection.

“It seems we’ll need the suppressant immediately... right now.”

The voice was low, suppressed, but the eyes in the mirror were anything but calm. He was breathing quick and shallow, and his hand slid to Siron’s waist.

At that moment, slick fluid spilled abruptly through the gap below.

It was like being punched in the face without warning by someone who had just been smiling and chatting a second ago. A rift opened between what his body registered and what his mind understood. And then Siron realized, with sudden clarity, what it was that had overwhelmed him.

Siron twisted his face in anguish, clutching the sink with all his strength. A scent like blood soaking into rain-drenched soil stung his nostrils and made his skin feverish. It was Isaac’s pheromone—the faint memory of it, now flooding back.

“Haah, hff—”

As the blood-tinged pheromones filled his lungs, every cell in his body awakened with hunger, even the sensation of objects against his palms turning lurid, erotic.

It was the scent of fresh death, perfectly matched to his vampire-pale face. A scent that made him want to sink his mouth into the cut surface of raw flesh and suck the blood dry—an arousal impossible to imagine in his sane state of mind.

Isaac moved closer. His hand slipped inside Siron’s shirt, trailing over his belly, climbing higher.

“Mmngh—”

When those rough, rust-like fingers seized the nipple, swollen and stiff with rushing blood, and twisted gently, Siron couldn’t help but let out a desperate moan. At that sound, Isaac’s breathing behind him grew harsh. That massive hand, strong enough to lift a basketball with just a few fingers, pulled delicately at the small nub.

It was as though the fibers of muscle connected deep inside his chest were being tugged directly, and Siron’s knees buckled. He grabbed frantically at the sink again, but his enfeebled muscles couldn’t support him, and he collapsed to the floor.

In that frozen-world sensation, the only reality was the thudding, uncomfortable rhythm of his heart. Looking up at Isaac as he helped pull him upright, Siron forced a nervous smile—a frightened animal’s instinctive camouflage, a laugh scraped out of fear.

“Hah, haah, ah, n-no, don’t—”

Even as he shook his head, Siron let his body be lifted helplessly. Isaac drew him tightly into his chest and buried his face between his neck and collarbone. Then he inhaled deeply, as if to consume every drop of Siron’s pheromones and body scent spilling out unguarded.

A tenderness as restless as the heat of sex itself boiled inside Siron, about to overflow like water on the verge of spilling. Unthinking, he cupped Isaac’s head and pulled it closer, pecking light kisses against his cheek like a bird tapping for feed.

The scent poured out violently—dark and rancid, like fresh skin still sticky with clotted blood, tinged with a faint, sickly sweetness. It was not fragrance but terror itself, slicing at his lungs. Siron felt as if his body and mind were being seared scarlet by Isaac’s pheromones.

Isaac lifted his head from Siron’s embrace. In his eyes flickered a last spark of clarity. He grimaced, stepping back a pace—aware, in that moment, that this was not the time to devour him like a beast. But just as he turned to leave the bathroom, he froze, halted by invisible reins like an animal bound.

“Truly... hahah... it’s unbearable.”

Shoving his fallen bangs back with a rough hand, Isaac hunched forward, panting in ragged bursts. The sound that burst from him was half a sob, half a gasp. Siron bit his lower lip and let out a pained moan. His stomach clenched and tingled, aching with the knowledge that Isaac was suffering because he wanted to hold him.

When Isaac turned back again, his gaze was stripped down to nothing but instinct. He closed the distance in a heartbeat, cupped Siron’s face with both hands, and forced his way between his parted lips. Crushing Siron’s tongue between his own lips wasn’t enough; he pried his mouth open wider, ravaging and greedy, devouring even Siron’s moans.

He hoisted Siron’s body into his arms, forcing his legs to hook around his waist, and carried him out of the bathroom. In that fleeting passage, he tugged down his waistband and underwear, baring his ass, then sprawled onto the bed with him.

He ripped away Siron’s pants and underwear, tossing them aside, then fixed his gaze on the slick wetness glistening between his parted thighs. Without hesitation, he freed his swollen cock and pressed the broad head against the drenched opening, grinding crudely around it. The obscene, wet friction filled the room with lurid sounds. Before Siron could brace himself, the thick shaft forced its way in, prying open the clenched hole as though splitting through a sealed wall.

The thick pillar—broad as a grown man’s wrist—drove endlessly inward, battering aside his insides. The suffocating bulk left Siron unable even to scream. The deeper it shoved through his narrow channel, the more his inner walls convulsed violently. And when the head finally struck a ridged bend of intestine, pressing into it like a kiss, Siron broke down, arching his back and trembling his stiffly outstretched legs into the air.

Isaac bit at the tip of his tongue and thrust hard, pulling back then slamming in again. The tight walls sagged and gave way, spreading obscenely around him. Siron sucked in breath after breath, panicked by the dangerous sensation of his body being pried open beyond its limit.

Layer after layer of pheromones built inside his body until his nerves went haywire. At last the cock buried to the root, Isaac’s heavy balls pressing hard against his tailbone. The inner walls rippled, clenching tight as though to swallow him whole.

The unexhaled breath swelled beneath Siron’s ribs, ready to burst. He cried out in a scream-like moan, trembling violently, then, swept away by instinct, threw his arms around Isaac’s neck and dragged him closer.

Each time Isaac withdrew and rammed back in, the sodden inner walls were dragged outward along his veined shaft, only to be shoved deep inside again. Siron clung to him desperately, sucking at his lips, trying to smother the screams bursting free.

The air thickened with pheromones. The enormous cock crammed every inch of his gut, and Siron’s thoughts narrowed to a pinhole, leaving nothing but the primal, fragmentary urge to sate his lust.

It was agony as if he were dying—but he could not resist. No... he didn’t want to resist.