Chapter 268

Gezar returned home half-mad. While speeding down the straight highway and winding back roads, his soul had been trampled, raped, and shattered into pieces together with Yuri. When he opened the door and stepped inside, the sight that met him was of two identical boys, bloodied and locked together in a violent brawl.

One of the twins was naked, his cock fully erect, while the other panted roughly with his clothes in disarray. They looked like beasts consumed by hatred and lust, left with nothing but the instinct to destroy. Beside them lay Yuri, brutally violated, collapsed on the floor with the life drained from his expression.

At that shocking sight, Gezar didn’t even have time to think. He pulled his gun and blew apart the head of the naked twin glaring back at him. He absorbed every detail of the red explosion bursting like fireworks, and the realization that he had just killed one he had raised—perhaps even once cared for—struck him so hard he thought he might lose his mind.

A shrill ringing, like microphone feedback, pierced his ears. Dust floated slowly in the sunlight before his eyes. The world seemed to fade behind frosted glass, light flaring white across his vision.

“Gezar!”

The sudden shout jolted him like cold water dumped over his head.

“No! No!”

Yuri clutched the half-shattered twin and screamed at him. The piercing cry bored into Gezar’s ears, skull, and heart, filling him with searing agony. Yuri’s eyes seethed with boiling hatred as they met his.

“How could you do that!”

Cradling the dead boy, Yuri rocked back and forth like a madman, sobbing with despair.

“We took him in! He was ours! You shouldn’t have killed him!”

Consumed by despair and furious resentment, Yuri glared at Gezar with murder in his eyes. A hollow laugh escaped Gezar’s lips. They—no, he—had taken the twins in, but he had never cherished them. The children had raised themselves, growing alone like poisonous weeds. They had always been a hazard that should have been pulled out. A moment of pity had merely festered into this disaster.

Gezar turned his gaze from Yuri’s weeping form and the corpse of the dead twin to the other boy staring at his brother’s body. The one with disheveled clothes had no expression left on his face. Everything had been swept away along with his brother’s death, leaving only a vacant shell.

And yet, chillingly, his body still bore signs of raw arousal. Isaac—or perhaps Ezra—was still caught in rut. The hard outline bulging through his trousers, his flushed face, the ripped-open waistband—Gezar’s mind, instead of raging further, suddenly went still.

The fury inside him demanded a second execution. He leveled his gun at the surviving twin, who sat numbly collapsed as if his soul had fled, and pulled the trigger without hesitation.

But the second shot took an unexpected turn. The bullet didn’t pierce the twin—it pierced Yuri. At the very instant Gezar fired, Yuri had thrown himself forward, shielding the boy with his body. The scream that tore from him as he hit the floor was filled with raw pain.

The bullet had ripped through his thigh where the femoral artery ran. Blood sprayed in a fountain across his pale flesh. It wasn’t instantly fatal, but left unattended, he would bleed out within an hour—perhaps in thirty minutes. Gezar forgot all about killing the twin, shock crashing over him as he shouted in desperation.

“Call 911! Now!”

Shaken from paralysis, the twin bolted upright and ran for the phone. Panic swelled inside Gezar as Yuri’s agony flooded into his mind, threatening to crush him. Yet another channel inside his head screamed orders—treat him, stop the bleeding, save him now.

Clinging to the last of his reason, Gezar barked an order at the boy—Isaac, or maybe Ezra—who had just finished the call.

“Stop the bleeding! It’s a through-shot, there’s too much blood. Press hard, front and back, hold it down!”

Dragging out the emergency kit, Gezar forced his trembling hands steady, disinfected the wound, and shoved gauze deep into the torn flesh. But the hole the bullet had punched through was so large he couldn’t begin to close it.

“Don’t pass out, don’t you dare! Yuri, don’t close your eyes!”

As he shouted desperately, his vision warped as if through a magnifying glass. Yuri’s thighs and ass, stripped bare, were bruised and battered, marked with the violence of sex. Gezar’s eyes darted from the corpse of the boy he had blown apart without hearing a word of defense, to the surviving twin frantically pressing on Yuri’s wound.

Yuri’s life flickered like a candle in the wind, while the boy beside him still reeled in the haze of lust. Feeling Gezar’s gaze, the surviving twin squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them again, muttering something unintelligible.

Overwhelmed by the fire raging inside him, Gezar spat a curse. The magnified vision dissolved into a sea of tangled emotions—hatred, rage, contempt. Sparks crackled across the inner channel he shared with Yuri, static buzzing as if a screen shorted out, smoke and fire bursting in cartoonish chaos.

Yuri screamed into Gezar’s mind—terror, grief, regret, pain all woven into a desperate plea. I don’t want to die. Gezar, please, save me! Staring into his clouding eyes, Gezar whispered back that he would not die, that he could not die.

Through fading consciousness, Yuri forced his eyes to lock with Gezar’s. The man clung to him with every shred of urgency, listening to his pain as if nothing else existed. Staring into him, Yuri suddenly felt immortal. He would not die. He couldn’t. The wound wasn’t even fatal, not with the first aid already done. And seeing the tears streaking Gezar’s face, absurd and unreal, made Yuri want to laugh despite everything—laugh foolishly, forget his condition. Yet the [N O V E L I G H T] pain was unbearable, and part of him only wished for release.

Gezar felt it—Yuri’s wish to let go.

“No! Don’t you close your eyes now!”

He slapped Yuri’s cheek hard, shouting, commanding him endlessly not to lose consciousness, as if Yuri’s will alone decided his life or death.

In the years after, every time Gezar recalled that night, the memory strangled his breath. As Yuri’s life waned, perhaps he hadn’t understood why Gezar hurt him so, why he inflicted so much pain.

If only Gezar had showered his dying face with kisses, whispered that he loved him—would that have lessened the agony of Yuri’s last moment? Drowning in regrets that clung like a hangover, he often bashed his head against the wall, unable to bear the torment.

Time crawled in hell. At last, after what felt like an eternity, paramedics burst in and took Yuri away. But by then the shadow of death already lay heavy on his unconscious face. Gezar felt the channel of their shared mind collapse, leaving only the echo of pain screaming across a ruined wasteland.

Yuri suffered an acute transfusion reaction. As they always did, the medical team matched his blood according to ABO type and gave him type B—but ordinary human blood was microscopically different in antigen structure from Yuri’s. His immune system recognized it as foreign. The result was a catastrophic, irreversible reaction.

Yet it was impossible to say whether that alone killed him. The gunshot had already caused severe hemorrhaging, and by the time he was transferred he was beyond saving.

The deaths of Yuri and Ezra appeared only as a small article in the corner of the local paper. Speculative reporting claimed that a gay couple, raising an unregistered orphan, had been entangled in a love affair that ended in murder.

But the story vanished almost at once, drowned out by a disaster. An F5 tornado, with wind speeds near 500 kilometers an hour, tore through towns and cities, bringing a state of emergency. With their homes destroyed, no one had the attention to spare for a homosexual lovers’ quarrel turned bloody.

Unfortunately, the case did catch someone’s notice. During autopsy, examiners discovered that the two men’s bodies were species-different from ordinary human males.