During that time, the apartment felt like a lavish tomb. We lived in separate rooms, sharing the same space while deliberately avoiding each other's presence. Subtle changes began to appear in her—coming home late with faint traces of sweet Omega pheromones that belonged to no one in this home; even if she scrubbed them away, my perfumer's nose could not be deceived. In her eyes, there were flashes of defiance tinged with self-destruction. And her own cedar–whiskey pheromones grew stronger, restless, roaring in silence.
She was testing me. Using the lowest, most childish methods to provoke me, trying to find a crack in the contract she was forced to sign—even if that crack would drag her, and the Ai family, into ruin.
The first time I clearly caught that unfamiliar peach-scented Omega pheromone on her collar, laced with deliberate seduction, my reaction wasn't anger but a cold, condescending mockery. Emma, you're still so childish, so… stagnant. Did you think that by degrading yourself this way, you could hurt me? Break the stalemate? You were wrong.
My heart had already frozen in the deepest abyss the moment you asked to break up—when you lost control in heat and refused to take responsibility. Your futile struggles now are a clown's performance: laughable, and tinged with a sorrow so faint it almost escapes notice. Sorrow for you, and for us, that we have come to torment each other in such disgraceful ways.
Yet beneath the ice of mockery, a fine, sharp thorn pierced deep. The mark. The temporary mark she forced upon me, which I had defined as "a mistake" and "disgusting," still lingered in my glands, in my instincts. The bond between Alpha and Omega is mutual; even if I rejected it rationally, my body still sensed her state.
When she tried to cover me—cover that mark—with another Omega's scent, a primal sting of violated territory surged through me, tangled with the terror of being abandoned and erased once more. It coiled around my heart like poisonous vines. She wasn't only retaliating. She was denying the last remnant of our bond, however tainted. She wanted to erase even the final trace I had left in her world. That feeling was more suffocating than hatred alone.
Beneath the cold and the sting, I could hear something crackling inside me, like embers burning their last. Hatred—for her willingness to destroy everything, including herself, just to defy me.
But strangely, within that hatred was a thread of disappointment I did not wish to admit. I forced her into marriage, used every means—yes, for revenge, to bind her to me in torment. Yet deep within that twisted motive, was there also a faint, unacknowledged desire to pull her back onto the "right track"? To hope that, even for the sake of family, for responsibility, she might at least… act the part?
Her actions now told me otherwise. She would rather choose self-destruction than bow to me—than shoulder even the smallest fraction of the duty that was hers. That realization gave my mockery a bitter edge.
So that night, when she staggered home reeking of alcohol and foreign scents, trying to provoke me with words, I chose the coldest, most pragmatic response. I stood, approached her, and suppressed her with pheromones. Word by word, I reminded her of the contract's terms, of the cost of breach—the cost that would annihilate Ai and her father's life's work.
I watched her face drain of color, the drunken defiance replaced by terror and helplessness. In that moment, I felt no triumph. Only a deeper wasteland of ice.
Look, Emma. Between us, all that remains is this cold contract and the threat of mutual destruction. You don't even have the right to use infidelity as revenge. Because we both know—the price is one neither of us can afford.
I crushed her last childish resistance. Watching her collapse to the floor—like a beast stripped of its final defenses—I turned back to my room and locked the door. "Click." A soft sound, sealing the end of our brief, ugly clash.
Leaning against the cold door, I closed my eyes. The air still carried the nauseating scent of that foreign Omega, mixed with her desperate, restless cedar–whiskey.
A tide of exhaustion drowned me. Where was the pleasure of revenge? All I felt was that we were falling together, deeper and deeper, into this marriage forged of hatred—until ruin became inevitable.
Her attempted infidelity was a cruel mirror, reflecting the truth between us: a bond already riddled with wounds, stripped of everything but hatred and profit—hollow and pathetic.