Chapter 271

Lewis supported the limp, unconscious man by cradling his back and hips. Hooking the spread legs over his own forearms, he hoisted the man up again and again, gripping him tight against his chest as gravity tried to drag the body down.

“Mmh, nice look. Gets me hard just watching. Now turn around and go up the ramp.”

Lewis gave Ted, whose crude words scraped at his nerves, a flat glance, then started up the incline leading from the dock. Even with Ted’s gun trained on him—ready for anything—he didn’t try to escape. He wanted to see just how far this idiot would go.

A faint dizziness washed over him from the man’s heavy scent. Yoon Siron—his Bebe—had changed during their time apart, ripening into a far more mature omega. And right now he was practically marinated in two other alphas’ pheromones. Ted, too, had to be catching Baekgyeong’s and Isaac’s foul scent clinging to Siron.

Lewis felt nothing. The old him would’ve been scorched black with jealousy, but that man was gone. Of course he still loved Yoon Siron. But that was all.

Through endless training, violence, and indoctrination, he’d learned to watch his feelings for Siron as if they belonged to someone else. Between what he actually felt and the self now observing it ran a river that could never be crossed. The emotion reached him like someone else’s tragedy on a TV screen.

But once in a while, a shard broke through the screen and pierced his safe zone.

My heart stings.

Lewis savored the bothersome ache fluttering in his chest like a small bird with broken wings. Siron, slack in his arms, trusting his full weight to him like a child asleep in a parent’s embrace, felt so small, so fragile.

After a long climb up the approach, a bronze nameplate swayed in the wind beside a giant tin gate. Beyond it loomed a mansion overlooking the sea. In the shade of palm trees, the three entered the resort-style estate, passed through the foyer, and stopped in the main hall.

“Wake him up.”

Ted aimed the gun at Lewis as he ordered. With the air of a man who didn’t want to but had no choice under a weapon, Lewis complied.

“Bebe, wake up.”

Siron didn’t stir. Lewis hesitated, then leaned close to Siron’s ear and whispered:

“Got a curry order. We need to deliver.”

Amazingly, Siron’s eyes flew open.

“What... what?”

He tried to sit up in panic, only to realize he was still suspended in Lewis’s arms. The relief on his face vanished as memories of the boat snapped back.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“Cooperating under duress.”

“What?”

Lewis lowered the still-bewildered Siron to the floor. The instant his feet touched ground, a pair of handcuffs clattered at their feet. Siron turned his head toward the sound.

“Twist his arms behind his back. Cuff him with that.”

Siron stared at Ted with a look halfway between recognition and confusion. Realization dawned, and anger rose in his eyes.

“...You!”

Ted only shrugged and grinned at Siron’s pointing finger.

The clean-shaven face was strange, but the voice, the missing ears, and the nauseating pheromone left no doubt. He was the same man Siron had called “Beardface” on the island—the one he’d loathed to the point of trembling.

“See a ghost? Why so shocked? Ha, getting turned on?”

Ted’s vulgar tone brought the island flooding back in Siron’s mind like a panorama.

“What are you waiting for? Cuff him.”

Ted pointed at the cuffs with the gun barrel. Siron looked helplessly from Lewis to Ted.

“Bebe. Just do it.”

Lewis shrugged and snapped one cuff around his own wrist, then turned his back, hands behind him for Siron to finish. Siron glanced at the armed lunatic, then hissed at Lewis, who seemed equally insane:

“Are you out of your mind? What’s your plan?”

“I won’t die.”

“What?”

“I don’t die that easily.”

Siron burned inside at Lewis’s offhand, placid voice. It was as if some other personality had tunneled into his shell and devoured the old Lewis whole.

Caught between Lewis’s bland composure and the madman’s threats, Siron finally fastened the cuffs around Lewis’s wrists. And these weren’t the usual chain-linked cuffs but hinge-linked restraints that severely limited movement.

Once Siron had cuffed him, Ted herded them ahead down a staircase. Opening a door to a basement entrance revealed a bright space. White fluorescent lights bleached the interior—a psychopath’s torture chamber.

Siron ground his teeth and glared at Ted.

“What the fuck is this place?”

“What do you think? A place for a little fun.”

Lewis, who’d been playing along with Ted’s rhythm so far, surveyed the soundproofed room, the cells, and the neatly arranged sex toys with a narrowed gaze.

“You. Inside.”

Ted stood back, gun leveled at Lewis. Hands raised in surrender, Lewis flicked a glance at the cell’s lock. Then a deafening shot cracked the air, acrid smoke rising.

“Do I sound like I’m joking? Get inside now!”

The bullet missed Lewis by a hair, passed through the cell, and shattered a dildo on the shelf beyond. Lewis eyed the scene, swallowed the sigh rising to his throat, and spoke.

“Fine. I’ll go in. Just lower the gun.”

He backed into the cell slowly, like soothing a raging beast. Ted pressed a button, and the door locked.

Siron could hardly believe it. This wasn’t a prison, yet the cell opened and closed automatically. Even harder to believe was Lewis himself—walking in without resistance, showing no sense of danger in a situation where no one could predict the next moment.

Has he lost his mind? Why so calm?

Something terrible had happened to him since his disappearance. He wore Lewis’s face, but he was no longer the Lewis Siron had known. And at the heart of that change had to be Hybris. But right now Siron had no time to dwell on it—he had his own neck to save.

Humming a tune as he scooped up several of the disgusting toys, Ted grabbed Siron with one arm and slung him over his shoulder. This wasn’t like before, when a flash of taekwondo might floor his attacker and let him escape. The man’s monstrous strength lifted him easily as Ted strode up to the second floor.

On a bed so huge three or four grown men could roll around on it with space to spare, Ted tossed Siron down. In one motion he stripped off his shirt and flung it aside. His body looked unreal, muscles swollen as if by steroids. Sweat rolled off his armor-thick frame and beaded on his dense chest hair like dew, and Siron gagged at the sight. The man looked like some human–beast hybrid.

He unbuckled his pants and whispered:

“Come on, omega. Let the pheromones out.”

Siron’s mind raced. He asked with shameless innocence, as if he’d never heard the word:

“Pheromones?”

“...You don’t know what pheromones are?”

“What’s that? And what’s an omega?”

“You think I don’t know you turned into an omega through the experiments on Lemon Island?”

Siron’s head spun again. He’d been injected, bled, dragged through weird experiments on that island. They’d been trying to create omegas out of homeless men, but Isaac’s meddling had made the project fail.

Yet somehow Ted—or Hybris—believed the experiments had succeeded. They were hunting the one surviving result of the island program, Subject 3543. The hotel bombing, the surveillance near Somora Prison—all for that. As the pieces clicked, a cold terror drove into his bones.

But he couldn’t let this brute smell his fear. He didn’t want to touch that sweat-beaded, furred chest with even a fingertip. He hurried to correct himself:

“Actually, I do know what an omega is. Isaac explained it. But I thought he was lying. Humans aren’t insects—pheromones? That’s absurd.”

“So you’re saying you don’t emit pheromones?”

“Yeah.”

“Every time I look at you I get hard... Weird.”

“Maybe it’s not me. You’re an alpha. Alphas have strong sex drives, right?”

“Yeah, you know your stuff.”

Ted smirked and yanked his zipper down the rest of the way. Seeing the outline of his erect cock straining against his underwear made Siron suck in a sharp breath.

“Did that bastard Isaac fuck you? Or am I the first?”

Whatever answer he gave, this lunatic would go wild anyway. As despair closed in, a brilliant idea flashed through Siron’s mind.