A slender neck was caught between two hands. Doha raised his head enough for his face to be visible in the moonlight, then closed his eyes.
“Flower Bin!”
The sound of a door being flung open could be heard. Simultaneously, the sound of someone running reached his ears. The footsteps were urgent. As the footsteps approached, Doha began to apply pressure with his hands. It was enough force to leave red marks, but not enough to kill.
“What are you doing! Open the door this instant!”
Hyunseo shouted with an urgent voice. Court Official Park, who had been standing by, quickly inserted the key into the lock, but the rusted lock didn’t open as quickly as expected. Click, click. Growing impatient, Hyunseo hastily released his pheromones.
Hyunseo’s scent spread thickly inside the cell. It was an intense fragrance, almost suffocating. A scent as rich and deep as the King’s prestige, so potent it was difficult to even stay upright.
“Hah!”
As the scent was released, Doha’s breath caught in his throat. The respiratory distress from the pheromones was more severe than the pressure on his neck from his own hands. It was the most intense scent he had ever encountered. Doha breathed roughly. The more he breathed, the more his lower body heated up and his strength drained away.
His body responded to the pheromones and grew wet. Sticky fluid flowed down his thighs from deep inside. Doha shifted his body to hide this, but he couldn’t stop the fluid from coming out. Despite this, Doha stubbornly maintained pressure on his own neck.
“Will you not remove your hands?”
Hyunseo shouted at Doha, who was gasping for breath but still not releasing his grip. His eyes flashed fiercely at Doha as if he wanted to kill him right then and there. Hyunseo reached into the cell to get to Doha.
“Flower Bin…!”
Doha opened his eyes and looked at Hyunseo. His gaze was filled with resentment. The moment their eyes met, Hyunseo felt his breath catch. From the banquet, when Doha danced with the sword, his eyes had been filled with deep resentment.
What went wrong? What? Whenever Hyunseo’s eyes met Doha’s, he looked back on the past, but he couldn’t tell where things had gone wrong. He had only hidden Doha to avoid the Prime Minister’s watchful eyes.
“When I go into heat… do you think I would willingly give myself to Your Majesty?”
Doha’s voice trembled pitifully. It wasn’t just his voice that trembled. His entire body was shaking slightly.
“…Of course not.”
“You must think I would have no choice but to surrender myself to you.”
Doha’s slender neck, which looked as if it might break at any moment, was turning red. As his neck reddened, Hyunseo felt his vision spin. Doha. He drove Hyunseo crazy, now as before. Whether for better or worse.
Hyunseo reached through the iron bars with both hands, veins bulging.
“Do you dare think you can die in front of me?”
“…!”
“Go ahead and try. I will keep you alive no matter what.”
Hyunseo gritted his teeth. Pushing Doha away to avoid falling out of favor with the Prime Minister was difficult for him too. Instead of constantly saying “I love you,” “I cherish you,” and embracing him tenderly, he had confined him to Siyeong Palace and not visited for a long time.
Because I believed it was the best path for us.
Doha retreated deeper into the cell to avoid Hyunseo’s hands. Glaring at Doha who was avoiding his touch, Hyunseo struck the iron bar with his fist. Bang. The iron bar vibrated like Hyunseo’s troubled heart.
“I brought you to the palace because you said you wanted to be by my side, and I gladly made you my Bin.”
“…”
“What exactly…! What is the problem!”
Listening to Hyunseo’s angry voice, Doha realized that not much time remained. The time he could withstand Hyunseo’s scent, the time he could maintain his sanity, was running out.
He needed to push himself to the extreme, to the point where he would be driven completely mad and unable to think. He needed to firmly implant the impression that his love was prepared to transcend death, that if rejected by Hyunseo, his lover would die. He needed an event so intense that Seowoo’s words about there being another man would be forgotten.
However, as Hyunseo’s scent penetrated deeper into his body, a new sentence formed in Doha’s mind.
Since when did we exchange such glances?
That was Doha’s line from the script. In episode 15, with few episodes remaining, Doha whispered softly while looking out the window. Since when did His Majesty and I start exchanging such glances? He muttered to himself in an excessively lonely voice that no one could hear.
As soon as the line came to mind, another ‘Doha’ arose within him. The Doha who truly loved Hyunseo and was devastatingly rejected. The Doha from episode 15 who thought about those glances.
Tears wouldn’t stop flowing from his eyes. His heart became empty as if he had become the Doha from that episode. In an instant, Doha became calm. His lips moved of their own accord for a moment.
“…You said we would always be together if I entered the palace.”
Scenes they had filmed flashed before his eyes. The first scene where Hyunseo and Doha met in the marketplace, the scene where they whispered love under the moonlight, and the scene where they exchanged flower rings promising to be together forever, all flowed by like a kaleidoscope.
“You promised you would protect me!”
An incomprehensible anger erupted. At the same time, his hands were controlled by a force greater than he had intended. Suddenly, Doha was properly, deeply strangling himself. It was a grip strong enough to truly cross the threshold of death. He wanted to release his grip, but his hands wouldn’t move as if they belonged to someone else.
“First, your hands!”
“It was all meaningless…! I shouldn’t have believed your words…”
Tears fell with his bitter cry. Countless teardrops kept falling to the floor. This wasn’t a predetermined line or emotion. Doha was also bewildered by his body that had escaped his control.
“You will end up killing me…”
That was Doha’s problem—becoming too immersed in the character to escape the script. Media praised his method acting, but it was a bigger issue for him than expected. Becoming perfectly immersed in the character might one day lead to his death, just like now.
“Rather than stay by your side… I’d rather die.”
Crack. The sound of iron bars breaking was heard. At last, Hyunseo had broken through the iron bars. Hyunseo, who had torn apart the notoriously sturdy iron bars, rushed toward Doha.
“Flower Bin…!”
Hyunseo quickly embraced Doha’s collapsing body. The body in his arms was smaller and more frail than he remembered. Looking at the body that had grown thinner than before, his chest tightened.
Reflecting that pain, Hyunseo’s scent wavered. Hyunseo grasped Doha’s pale cheek.
“Flower Bin, open your eyes now.”
It was the limit. Doha, with eyes barely open, moved his lips. His body finally obeyed his will. But what good was that? He might die at this rate. Doha resented the Doha from episode 15 who had taken over his body.
“I just… want to die.”
This alone was sincere. He wanted to die now. He couldn’t tell if it was because the Doha from episode 15 remained within him, or if it was a thought he had harbored for a long time.
“That can’t happen.”
Hyunseo buried Doha’s face in his arms. It was to hide the resentful gaze. Hyunseo was also at his limit. Since earlier, no, since the banquet, a pain like someone stabbing his heart with a knife had been controlling Hyunseo’s body.
Clenching his teeth tightly, Hyunseo lowered his face to Doha’s ear.
“Even for death… you need my permission.”
“…”
Doha’s hands, which could no longer endure, fell to the floor. These were the hands he had never let go of when outside the palace. Hyunseo stared blankly at Doha’s hands before intertwining them with his own.
“Even in death, you are mine.”
Hyunseo rose, holding Doha in his arms. As he contained the pheromones he had released, Court Official Park, who had taken refuge outside, rushed into the cell.
“Your Majesty! Is Bin Mama safe?”
Hyunseo’s gaze lingered on Doha’s neck. The handprints were already swelling red. The sound of teeth grinding came from Hyunseo’s mouth.
“He is unharmed.”
The threat to his safety was himself. After all, Doha had said he wanted to die because of him. The hands holding Doha tightened involuntarily. Court Official Park, sensing Hyunseo’s discomfort, bowed his head.
“We go to Yongwa Palace.”
Hyunseo’s shadow stretched long across the floor. It had been a long night.
* * *
An omega abandoned even by parents. That was Doha’s childhood nickname.
“An omega… How shameful. Because of you, I can’t even go outside in the neighborhood because I’m so embarrassed!”
“Who did you take after to become an omega!”
“Oh my, are you blaming me now?”
“If not you, then who? I told you to drink only a little alcohol when I was pregnant!”
Since Doha was determined to be an omega, not a day passed without his parents fighting. The fights intensified day by day, and police began knocking on their front door. The subject of their fights was having given birth to a lowly, useless omega who would just go into heat and drip pheromones everywhere.
Eventually, Doha’s parents chose to eliminate the reason for their fights.
“Stay at grandma’s house for a while. We’ll come get you soon.”
His mother said as she put belongings into Doha’s arms. Though he knew they wouldn’t come back for him, Doha obediently nodded. Whether at home or at grandma’s house, being abandoned was the same.
Somehow the rumors spread, and at school Doha was also called the abandoned omega. An omega accepted nowhere. That was Doha’s position. His ordinary life had collapsed due to being identified as an omega.
Doha wanted to become someone else. Someone who wasn’t abandoned or mistreated, someone surrounded by many people who loved them and guaranteed a happy ending. Whenever he hated himself, Doha clung to acting. Because when acting, he could become someone else.
As time passed, his acting became more elaborate and detailed. As he truly spoke, acted, and walked like the character, articles of high praise poured out from everywhere. That’s when the problem began. At some point, Doha’s body stopped listening to him.
He would blurt out lines that weren’t in the script, and emotions weren’t well contained. Once the floodgates opened, emotions would dominate his entire body until he fell asleep. When he saw actors playing villains, he wanted to hit them, and when he saw actors playing parent roles, he wanted to act cute and cling to them.
“Doha needs to learn to love himself completely.”
At the hospital his manager took him to, the doctor told Doha this. It was a voice filled with warmth. Love himself?
Not the character…?
Doha asked again.
“I’ve never been loved before, so how would I know how?”
The doctor smiled gently at Doha’s crooked answer. It was a mysterious smile, as if knowing everything. The doctor reached out, stroked Doha’s head, and replied.
“You’ll know soon. Because you’ll meet someone who will truly love you.”
* * *
It had been a while since he had dreamed about that doctor. He had forgotten about it for some time. Previously, he would often dream of that day when he lost control of his body. Doha opened his swollen eyes. An unfamiliar ceiling, different from Siyeong Palace, came into view.
“Where am I now?”
He pushed aside the silk blanket and sat up. Every part of his body ached. Doha let out a low groan as he moved his feet and felt a heavy weight on his ankle. What’s this? Doha reached for his ankle.
“…Shackles?”
A long iron chain extended from Doha’s ankle to a pillar in the bedchamber. Each time he moved his ankle, the chain made a clanking sound. A round weight attached to one end of the chain was visible.
“I’ve never filmed a thriller before.”
Should have filmed something like Jeon Woochi instead. Disappointed, Doha buried his face in the silk blanket.
Author: Hyacinthus B
Hyacinthus
