The shattered tablet lay on the floor like glass from a long-sealed window—
a window Li Wei had never dared open.
But tonight, something inside him had cracked.
His composure. His silence. The tight leash on every emotion—
gone.
And in its place came a scream.
Not just pain.
Memory.
Truth too twisted to speak without sounding mad.
He wasn't the quiet teacher now.
Not the untouchable Omega who slipped through hallways like a ghost.
He was curled on his bed, trembling beneath a sheet that couldn't block the cold fear gripping his chest.
The scent of his own biology turned against him—bitter, chaotic, saturated with sorrow.
I've gone too far.
He knows too much.
Chen Lihuan now held the key to everything Li Wei had buried.
And still—
no footsteps.
No scolding.
No dominance pressing against the door.
Only silence.
Not the safe kind.
The kind before a storm.
The kind that makes it hard to breathe.
---
Across the hall, behind a sealed study door, Chen Lihuan sat motionless.
That scream—You let me die alone—looped endlessly in his mind.
He had never heard grief like that.
Not in war rooms.
Not in breakups.
Not even in loss.
This wasn't anger.
It was devastation.
And he hadn't known what to do.
Everything in him had screamed to go in, to assert, to reclaim control.
But for the first time in his life—
he hadn't.
He had stepped back from the battlefield.
---
The tablet he'd given wasn't just a gift.
It had been a trigger.
And he'd handed it over without knowing it mirrored a weapon that had already broken Li Wei once before.
He had failed. Again.
Just in a different language.
With shaking hands, he grabbed his phone.
"Get me a tablet," he told his assistant.
"Same model he had before. Not the upgraded one."
"Yes, sir."
"And send the exact books from his class curriculum. All of them."
"Understood."
A beat of silence.
"Also… every medical file on Li Wei from the past three years. All of it."
---
The next morning, a soft knock.
Li Wei froze.
Braced for shouting.
For commands.
For the heavy scent of dominance.
But it was only a young Beta servant.
He set two boxes at the door. Bowed. Left.
One box held the books Li Wei used for his students.
The other—
a familiar tablet. The same model he'd smashed.
On top of it, a note.
Plain paper. Uneven handwriting.
For your work.
With my sincerest apologies.
No signature.
No demands.
No scent of pride—only the faint trace of a remorseful Alpha. Tentative. Unsure. Human.
Li Wei held the note for a long time, torn between suspicion… and something softer.
This wasn't a power-play.
It wasn't manipulation.
It was—an attempt.
Maybe even the first step.
And for the first time since returning to this strange new version of his old world, Li Wei let a dangerous thought take root:
Maybe Chen Lihuan wasn't the same Alpha from his nightmares.
Maybe they were both just trying—
failing, breaking, and trying again.
Together.