Chapter 139: A glaring anomaly

When Bunny woke up from Cyrus’s bed, he was already gone.

Sentinels rarely indulged in sleeping in; their internal biological clocks were remarkably disciplined—a trait Bunny often wondered was the direct product of elite genetic screening.

Could it be that these high-energy, genetically optimized specimens were the ultimate evolutionary preference of this fractured world?

Regardless, for someone like her who operated on persistently low energy, waking up early was entirely out of the question.

The blackout curtains were drawn shut, sealing the room in total shadow. The black silk bedding was deeply infused with Cyrus’s signature scent—a cool, austere drift of smoldering timber. Bunny had slept exceptionally well; the higher the resonance index, the more powerful the pheromonal magnetism between partners naturally became.

Her heat cycle was finally drawing to a close, and true to form, Cyrus hadn’t forced her into anything against her will last night.

He understood well enough that forcing a woman served zero purpose.

Especially when that woman was a Guide.

Long before he ever crossed paths with Bunny, his family had run countless algorithmic matches attempting to pair him with theoretically compatible Guides.

Those prospective partners—all of them products of flawless genetic engineering much like himself—were cataloged by compatibility percentages across endless digital dossiers, reading less like living people and more like lines of dry, sterile code.

His mother had always insisted: "Even if you don’t feel a spark, you must choose one. You are the sole heir to the Reed family lineage. You have the leverage to demand that your Guide pledge offspring exclusively to you. What more could you possibly want?"

He had never understood how such an arrangement differed from breeding livestock.

As long as the compatibility metrics aligned, strangers were expected to strip off their clothes, jump straight into bed for the most intimate human acts, and permanently bind their entire existence to someone they had never known.

That was the exact opposite of what Cyrus wanted. In fact, it flew directly in the face of his inherently rebellious, anti-authoritarian nature.

He had zero intention of playing the obedient, leashed hound to anyone’s whims.

Ironically, despite being born into the absolute upper echelon of society and having an endless array of pre-approved options laid at his feet, Cyrus secretly yearned for the ancient, forgotten concept of Platonic romance from centuries past.

Many mistakenly equated "Platonic love" strictly with a complete absence of physical intimacy, but that interpretation missed the mark entirely.

Platonic philosophy didn’t reject physical closeness; rather, it prioritized the profound alignment of two souls—loving not merely a person’s physical shell or surface beauty, but cherishing the absolute essence of who they were.

Loving them as completely independent, free-willed human beings.

Unfortunately, in the current era, such a pure and sacred brand of love was little more than a ridiculous pipe dream—particularly for Sentinels and Guides, most of whom lived out their lives as literal slaves to their pheromones.

Cyrus was a glaring anomaly.

Perhaps he was simply searching for someone capable of actually stirring his pulse.

He might have initially gravitated toward Bunny purely due to chemical attraction, but how long could mere physical fascination realistically sustain itself?

Bunny was unlike any Guide—or any woman, for that matter—he had ever encountered.

He lacked the exact vocabulary to describe the distinction.

The women from his background, who matched his level of perfection, all acted like flawless, synthetic mannequins. Whether judged by appearance, intellect, disposition, or capability, they were entirely devoid of human friction.

They always said precisely what he wanted to hear, meticulously masking their true feelings behind pristine, soulless masks of etiquette.

And Bunny? She was a bit clumsy and possessed a delightfully natural cluelessness.

Yet her temper could be fierce; push her too far, and she’d bare her teeth to bite you. When she couldn’t win a physical argument, she’d resort to tears and tantrums, only to catch you off guard and slap you across the cheek the second you let down your guard.

She looked just like a furious, puffing blowfish.

She was a total disaster at picking up new skills, yet she possessed a stubborn drive to improve.

Particularly hilarious were her mishaps—like the time she hurled a grenade while accidentally clinging to the live pin instead of throwing it, panicking as she fumbled in a chaotic blur;

Her look of profound existential despair when her shooting accuracy hovered below 10 percent after firing a hundred rounds;

The way she attacked her meals with the voracious appetite of a starving ghost;

Or her disastrous attempts to mimic his piano playing, producing sounds so painfully discordant it nearly sent him straight to an early grave...

She was endlessly fascinating.

This novelty and stimulation felt entirely foreign to Cyrus, which explained why he persistently found himself provoking her just to get a reaction.

Right up until the night Bunny came looking for him in the confinement cell, he hadn’t anticipated that she would turn back—especially since, in her eyes, he was nothing short of an unmitigated tyrant and rogue.

"But I don’t want you to die."

No one truly wants to be abandoned. Bunny’s simple declaration forced Cyrus to reevaluate her entirely, even leading him to question whether the rigorous "tests" he engineered for her were overly severe and heartless.

Yet, survival in this wasteland demanded absolute adaptation to its brutal rules, which was why he refused to alter his training methodology.

During the sixty-four hours Bunny went missing within the high-radiation sector, he had scoured the grid like a madman alongside every other Sentinel.

It was the first time Cyrus had ever experienced raw, consuming panic.

His chest felt hollowed out, despite the fact that a formal spiritual bond had not even been forged between them yet.

Yet the moment Bunny returned, she spent her heat cycle with Liam instead.

Jealousy crawled like damp moss across a dark, sealed room—silent, relentless, and suffocatingly thick—until, by the time he noticed it, its roots had already choked his entire consciousness.

Even so, jealousy alone wasn’t enough to strip Cyrus of his rationality.

He hadn’t expected to cross paths with that hazardous, elusive entity down in City A; the severity of his injuries was a calculated mix of accidental ambush and deliberate provocation.

Yet his gamble had paid off in the end, hadn’t it?

Countless rounds of probing and boundary-testing proved only one undeniable truth:

He had ultimately failed to conquer the primal urges encoded deep within his own genetic blueprint. The urge to abandon his pride and willingly become her "hound."