AFLBRR Chapter 5 (Part 1)
by Brie- The Story of the One Left Behind
Alexei Slavatov lost his mother at the age of five, and from then on, he was alone. He had a father, yet he could not escape the fate of an orphan. And to certain people, the child looked like an especially tempting piece of prey.
If Alexei had any fault at all, it was that his father was Dmitry Slavatov, and that man had been so utterly crushed by his wife’s death that he became too powerless to care for his young child. In other words, what happened in Alexei’s childhood was not his fault, nor his responsibility. But that truth did little to help him.
Not long after Alexei Slavatov lost his mother, the Emperor dispatched several scholars and knights to the North. The stated reason was that someone of imperial blood required an education befitting their status. Every one of them was a renowned talent from the Academy, and all were staunchly pro-Emperor.
“From now on, we will be the ones attending to you, Lord Alexei.”
‘I don’t like these people.’
Alexei instinctively sensed that they disliked him. A child’s intuition, where affection is directly tied to survival, is keen. He tried to cling to the person he trusted, relied on, and loved the most, desperate to voice his anxiety and fear.
“Dad, can I come in?”
“……Go. From now on, those who came from the capital will take care of you.”
His effort was betrayed.
Dmitry Slavatov heard the small hands knocking again and again on the door of the room still filled with his wife’s lingering scent, the sobs slipping through the crack, and finally the light footsteps retreating down the hall. A fissure opened in his sunken heart.
But a body drowning in the pain of having lost its mate forever was powerless. A mind in ruins turned away from another’s suffering. On the rare days when he forced himself up with what little strength he could muster and headed for the door, hallucinations whispered at his ears.
‘Your wife died because of you. You couldn’t even see her through to the end. And with that hanging over you, you think you have the luxury to care about a child? Do you really think you deserve that? Do you honestly believe you can be forgiven?’
Evil poured its poison into his ears. He mistook hallucinations for truth. His weakened mind could not doubt the wrong choices it made. The two of them suffered in their own separate hells.
“O, ooh, the mind and greed, to mi, mistaking it for love, th-that’s… w, wrong? Ah? Th-this begins, doesn’t it? Y-yes….”
“Alexei, how many times are you planning to read that passage? As a scholar, I have never seen anyone disgrace a sentence as badly as your recitation. At this rate, do you think you can inherit the territory? If you are dull-witted, you should at least make the effort. Again.”
“O, m-mind… and… greed… hic.”
The literature instructor deeply furrowed his brow and clicked his tongue loudly. The child’s thin arm stiffened. He bit down hard on his lower lip, tensing his jaw to hold back his tears. But tears do not stop simply because one wills them to. The book clenched in his hands crumpled, and a voice more mangled than the paper spilled out.
“Mama… hnn, Mama….”
“Your mother is dead. By now she has been crushed to pieces beneath the earth and become food for vermin, so stop your whining and devote yourself to your studies.”
The teacher barked the order in an irritable voice. The textbook he used was one read by children from the capital who were twice Alexei’s age, but the child had no way of knowing that. His father, who might have stopped such harsh, age-inappropriate education, had long since ceased leaving his room, and the low-ranking nobles working in the castle saw no reason to oppose those sent from the capital.
“Raise your sword higher. More, more! No! If you swing your blade like that, a monster will rip your throat out in an instant! Do you want to be buried beside your mother?”
‘I don’t want to.’
“Knights, mages, and dragons? You actually believe those myths are real? Honestly, they’re all fiction. How long are you going to keep reading childish adventure stories? We need to move on.”
‘I don’t want to.’
“You still don’t know proper table manners? You should be using a knife now. Please, at least learn to distinguish between a fish knife and a meat knife. All this effort to keep you from becoming a laughingstock is going to waste.”
‘I don’t want to!’
Every night, Alexei screamed in silence. The days spent surrounded by adults who mocked, ridiculed, and dismissed him were unbearable, and the knowledge that tomorrow would be the same was agony. He cried out in pain again and again, but the lessons always remained far beyond his comprehension.
They were excessively difficult and complex. Yet what tormented Alexei most was not the difficulty of the lessons or the abysmal teaching methods, but the constantly changing words of his instructors. Yesterday differed from today, the previous lesson differed from the current one, and even instructors attending the same lesson contradicted each other.
“Who am I supposed to listen to?”
At Alexei’s flustered question, they all sighed in unison before answering.
“You should be able to think about that yourself. Why do you think His Majesty the Emperor sent us all the way to this backwater? It’s to cultivate your ability to think for yourself.”
He cried every single day until his eyes were raw. Then, at some point, he stopped crying. Instead of crying, he no longer smiled, no longer asked questions, and stopped thinking altogether, sitting still like a stone. It was the best coping method the child could find. One year had passed since his mother’s death.
‘If I get punished no matter what I do, then I’ll do nothing.’
The instructors swarmed like angry bees to the door behind which Dmitry had shut himself away and lodged their complaints. But Dmitry Slavatov never came out.
“If you don’t leave at once, I’ll make sure you part ways with this world.”
A chilling warning emerged in place of a person. Faced with overwhelming strength, they tucked their tails and fled. Their anger turned toward the child. To torment the boy standing like a petrified statue, the Empire’s greatest scholars and knights threw themselves into it with deadly resolve.
Alexei found comfort in the kick to his back or the fountain pen nib digging into his little finger. Physical pain was clearer than incomprehensible commands or lessons.
‘When will Dad come out of his room?’
Even when a sharply carved wooden sword jabbed into his thigh, he waited for his father. He understood his father’s grief. His mother’s death hurt him too. Still, Alexei believed that someday, his father would hold him again, just as he had when his mother was still alive.
He endured like that for three years.
But Dmitry Slavatov did not come out of his room. Instead, there were times when Alexei, rolling across the dirt during sword training, caught sight of a figure reflected faintly in a window. The blurred silhouette would soon vanish back inside.
‘That’s Father.’
Alexei became nine years old, old enough to be satisfied with just that. He no longer cried over most injuries. He had realized that no one would wipe his tears even if he did.
‘I miss Mom.’
Every night, he fell asleep reciting in his head the northern wolf legends his mother used to tell him. His father was hateful now, but in the past he had sat beside her, gently stroking Alexei’s head. Those rough hands had been kind in their own way.
‘Alek. Your father was a hero. And even now, he is my hero.’
The time when he believed his father would save him from the teachers like a hero had already passed, but…
‘Alek, even without Mom, get along well with Dad. I’ll be watching over you from beside the dragon.’
That was what his mother had told him.
“Mom, I want to get along with Dad, but it doesn’t seem like Dad wants that. Still, I’ll try.”
And so the child turned ten.
Then he began to fight back.
He endured the time when he stood like a statue and bore the violence raining down on him, and became a child who knew how to retaliate. The young hero bravely began driving away his enemies.
“Aaaagh! Alexei! You ill-mannered little brat!”
“Serves you right, idiot! Why don’t you try catching me, huh? Run with that pig-like ass of yours!”
Alexei burst into loud laughter as he watched the literature teacher slip ridiculously on the frost-covered corridor floor. His first act of revenge was a resounding success, exhilarating beyond measure.
“Who should I fight next?”
He licked the blood gathered at the corner of his torn lip and smiled. A slap on the cheek was nothing compared to the thrill of successful revenge.
The scholars and knights had once been among the Empire’s greatest minds, but no longer. Their knowledge had grown obsolete, and their indefinite exile in the North plunged them into deep despair. Alcohol and indulgence eroded the very foundations of their trained bodies. Alphas who had once been promising gradually turned into middle-aged men with bulging bellies and sagging cheeks. The glorious rewards promised by the Emperor when he sent them north, professorships at the Academy, command of the Emperor’s direct knightly order, had long since become empty words.
Their petitions to be allowed to return to the capital were sent back stamped with the Grand Mage’s seal. Only then did they realize they had become kites with their strings cut.
“Chort! That treacherous swindler!”
But no matter how fiercely they hurled their curses, they were no longer a match for the Grand Mage. They could not even catch a nimble child, let alone a mage. Unable to endure sawed chair legs, ink diluted with water, books glued shut, and stones flying at them at all hours, the teachers fled back to the capital one by one. Compared to what they had done, it was revenge far too small, yet they could not bear even that. Truly pathetic adults.
“I never want to see a rotten brat like you ever again!”
“Then get the hell out, you moron!”
Alexei shouted proudly from inside the castle gates. A few clueless knights and scholars were sent north afterward, but none of them managed to defeat Alexei in the end. Alexei fought as if his life were on the line, but they were not nearly as desperate.
“I’ll protect the place where Mom lived.”
He never wanted to let people who mocked his mother’s death or her life enter the castle again. He did not want to hear her cursed as a southern male prostitute, a beast-copulation addict, or a hole meant only for wolves. As for Father… he did not particularly want to restrain whatever insults were hurled at him. They were true, after all.
“An alpha who couldn’t even protect his omega’s honor really is a toothless wolf. A man like the broken hilt of a shattered sword.”
At eleven years old, Alexei muttered words that insulted his father to himself, then flicked his tongue over his lips. Insulting his father felt unpleasant somehow.
He had been sitting alone on a training ground bench, swinging his legs idly, when he suddenly bolted toward the castle gates. It was a rare day he might see his father.
It was the day an omega came to the castle.
Before three years had passed since his mother’s death, young omegas knocked on the castle gates once every season. Just like when Noe Horus first came to this castle, they were eighteen-year-old omegas who had only just reached adulthood. Every single one of them knocked on the gates dressed in clothes absurdly thin for the weather.
“To become Slavatov’s omega, to become your second wife, I have come. Dmitry, please let me in.”
And Father always gave the same answer.
“The only omega I can ever love is one.”
Alexei always watched the same play unfold from hiding. And every time, he trembled. In moments like this, his father looked incredibly admirable.
‘When I grow up, I’ll live loving only one omega too. Someone warm-eyed like Mom. I think I’d like a red-haired omega.’
He approached the omega who had collapsed with blue-tinged lips, sobbing uncontrollably. Her tears turned into ice crystals as they hit the ground.
“Um, would you like to rest in the castle just for today?”
Handling the rejected omegas was Alexei’s job. From the first time he spoke to an omega his father had turned away, Alexei willingly took on the troublesome cleanup. He thought that if there was an alpha who made someone cry, there should also be an alpha who comforted them. A father and son both being cold-hearted would tarnish the family’s reputation.
“You’re… Dmitry’s son, aren’t you? The son born to the previous omega?”
“I’m Noe Horus’s son.”
The omegas recognized him easily. The child who looked exactly like Dmitry in his youth differed from his father only in his eyes.
‘I hope these people go home safely.’
Alexei was still only eleven. He did not grasp the true intent behind their ominously gleaming eyes. He took their hands without suspicion. He was far too young to understand what that unsettling gaze meant.
On nights when omegas came to the castle, Alexei always locked his bedroom door tightly. Yet every time, an uninvited guest would arrive in the middle of the night.
‘Again.’
Strangely enough, the locked door opened easily. As if someone had intended it. It could not have been Father, who never left his room, which meant someone within the castle was cooperating with them. But Alexei could not tell who was an enemy and who was an ally. He was still too young to suspect everyone around him. He hoped that among those who came from outside the castle, there might be someone on his side. And so he gambled by offering himself every time, and the results were never good.
With a creak, a white hand slipped through the crack of the opening door. A ghost cloaked in black fabric entered from the darkness, and every time, that ghost climbed onto Alexei’s bed.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry… I really am sorry. But I can’t help it. I really can’t.”
‘If you’re sorry, then don’t do it. You’re doing everything anyway. What even is this supposed to be?’
The hands thrust out from beneath the cloth shook violently almost every time, like branches swaying in the northern wind. When trembling hands pulled up clothing, bare skin was exposed. Several droplet-sized beads of moisture fell onto his flesh. Alexei listened to the omegas’ muttering as he counted the patterns carved into the ceiling decorations. Most of the omegas touched his body however they pleased, then left the room again before dawn. Left alone, Alexei lay awake, watching the morning sun rise.
“Am I… enjoying this?”
Sometimes Alexei asked himself whether he was causing this to happen every time because he wanted it. No answer came. It was true that he needed something like a savior from outside to rely on, but he had never wanted the hands of ghosts crawling into his bed in the dead of night.
‘It’s my fault for expecting the same thing every time, even though it always fails.’
Alexei traced the scars left on his chest with his fingertips. They were scratches left the night before by the omega who had fled back to her hometown at dawn. Blood welled up along the wound. Sucking on his bloodstained thumb, he made a vow.
“Next time an omega comes, I’ll ask why they do this.”
As usual, when another omega entered his room, Alexei asked his question, carrying familiar disappointment and a small spark of hope. He wanted to know what this was, why this kept happening to him, at least the reason.
“Why do you do this to me? You always act like you hate it while touching me. If you don’t want to, you don’t have to. Why do it and cry at the same time?”
The omega, who had been breathing unevenly just moments before, startled at Alexei’s words and retreated to the edge of the bed. Then she began to scream.
“You think I’m doing this because I want to⁈ Shut up. Just lie there and pretend you’re dead and sleep! If it weren’t for your father, if it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t want to do this either!”
Alexei was suddenly crushed beneath him as he snapped and went berserk. It was a clash between an alpha and an omega, but Alexei was a child, and the omega was an adult.
For the first time in his life, he experienced what an omega’s pheromones were like. And he learned what it felt like to be forcibly taken by someone. It was a level of disgust entirely different from hands that merely groped him and left. Hands invading without consent were nauseating enough to make him want to die, but this was far closer to the terror of death itself.
“Aaaah! No! I don’t want this! Let go!”
“Stay still! If you’re going to blame someone, blame the fact that your father is the Emperor’s brother!”
It had been a long time since Alexei screamed out loud, cried for help, and wailed so loudly it felt like the castle might collapse. But that night, the wind howled violently enough to uproot entire trees.
His screams were swallowed by the wind and never reached Dmitry’s ears as he dozed lightly in a distant room. If even a fragment of that desperate plea for salvation had reached his father, perhaps something might have changed.
Perhaps.
“If my father finds out, if he ever knows, he’ll kill you.”
Alexei Slavatov snarled the warning as the omega was about to leave the room. Both eyes were bloodshot, veins burst until everything was red. His cheeks, his chest, his stomach, even beneath the trousers he had barely managed to pull on. The omega’s pheromones lingering in the room were so foul they made him retch.
“I really hope he finds out soon. I’m the second omega of Count Vladi’s house, so don’t forget that. Make sure you tell him. Make sure.”
The omega’s face twisted grotesquely. All through the night, he had tormented Alexei while screaming words that made no sense.
‘I did it for my family. For my house, for my people… I was wrong, but I wasn’t the only one at fault. Fuck, fuuck…!’
“You did it for your family? All of you omegas? Then why do you have to torment me?”
Alexei pulled the blanket over his aching body and shut his eyes. He didn’t want to think about anything anymore.
Some time later, word reached even the North that the second omega of Count Vladi’s house had gone mad. They said he had set his own body on fire and attempted to assassinate the Grand Mage, only to fail. Having barely survived with severe burns all over his body, he was sentenced to death for attempting to harm the Grand Mage, the symbol of the imperial family, and was executed.
When Alexei heard the news of his death, he went wild with joy. Thanks to that, one of the teachers sent by the Emperor suffered a nervous breakdown and returned to the capital. Driving out the Emperor’s people from this wretched castle was his only form of entertainment.
But the omegas kept coming.
‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. Please, don’t forgive me… I’m sorry. I don’t want to die. I want to protect the people I love…’
There were omegas who cried and apologized. Those usually just groped his body before disappearing.
‘You’re an alpha. You’re going to be with an omega once you grow up anyway, so enjoy it now. It’s not so bad. Your body’s already enjoying it, isn’t it?’
And then there were omegas who played with his body.
The aftermath was far worse in those cases. He wanted to die several times more than usual. He couldn’t understand why something like this made him want to die, why his body reacted even though it disgusted him, or why that omega’s pheromones felt sweet. Self-loathing and loss punched holes through his head and heart.
As time passed, Alexei came to understand what it all meant. At the same time, every omega he met became repulsive to him. At least there were no resident omegas in the castle.
But there was one omega Alexei could never hate.
His first omega, Noe Horus, was far too precious, someone he had no choice but to love, and so his hatred of omegas twisted in a different direction.
“Omegas don’t need to step up and protect families or the weak, things they can’t possibly bear responsibility for. They should just bond with an alpha and live comfortably. Is an alpha who can’t even protect a single omega really human?”
“How old are you, exactly?”
“Thirteen. And I won’t let anyone lay a finger on my omega or put them in danger.”
The itinerant teacher dispatched from the capital shut his mouth with a stunned expression at Alexei’s old-fashioned declaration. Perhaps because he had just graduated top of his class from the Academy, he held rather progressive ideals.
‘But in real life, I’m the one with more experience.’
Whenever the topic of omegas came up, Alexei secretly looked down on teachers who only spouted textbook platitudes. He had overwhelmingly more experience with omegas than they did. Every experience had been unpleasant, but experience was still experience.
The omegas who came to his room said they had no choice but to hurt him to avoid dying, to protect their houses, to protect the people they loved.
If that was the case, then the best solution was to prevent such things from happening in the first place, and that was an alpha’s responsibility. Naturally, he reached the conclusion that an alpha who couldn’t protect his omega wasn’t an alpha at all.
“Dmitry Slavatov is the worst alpha.”
Alexei began to hate his father.
His mother had died young because his useless alpha of a father had failed to properly protect her from others’ threats.
Omegas came to this castle because his mother was dead. Because Father didn’t firmly reject them or demand that the Emperor stop sending omegas, Alexei was the one suffering the consequences.
“You crazy old bastard! If you missed Mother so much, you should’ve died ages ago!”
Alexei vented his rage on the castle furnishings for no reason. He avoided breaking anything fragile. He didn’t want to destroy the items his mother had bought and decorated herself.
Though Alexei stubbornly refused to admit it, his hatred toward his father also contained a trace of resentment toward a guardian who didn’t even know what kind of situation his child had been in all this time. That resentment meant he still harbored expectations toward his father, and for Alexei, those expectations were nothing more than a craving for affection he lacked.
A desire he could not acknowledge.
“There’s no way I’d like someone like that.”
To calm his turbulent mind, Alexei circled the training grounds over and over. It was a place Dmitry could see whenever he wished.
“Are you doing well? You don’t seem to be hurt anywhere.”
Dmitry Slavatov watched his son running across the training grounds through the window, his expression rigid. He was a little thin and pale, but his brown eyes, so like Noe’s, burned with determination. And so Dmitry mistakenly believed the child was doing better than himself.
“No matter how lacking he is, he must be better than I was as a child. He carries that person’s blood. Only half of my blood runs in him. That should be enough…”
One of Dmitry’s many misconceptions, born from growing up as the Emperor’s half-brother, was the belief that as long as a child stayed alive, they would somehow grow into an adult. He never truly realized that a child needs an adult they can rely on. He never even considered that he himself belonged in that category.
Noe Horus had hammered and trained Dmitry Slavatov’s shriveled humanity over many years, shaping him into something resembling a person, but failing to teach him how to act as a father had been a fatal oversight.
Even if Noe had lived, he probably wouldn’t have thought it necessary to explain such things one by one.
Because they were obvious.
That deficiency in the father was passed down to the son.
Time passed. Alexei grew increasingly antagonistic toward the itinerant teachers, while Dmitry remained trapped in the mire of grief over his wife’s death, struggling within depression. The mire was powerful, strong enough to leave even a warrior who had crossed death’s threshold countless times utterly helpless.
And once again, an omega arrived.
“Are you going to keep wearing that grim face when your new mother is coming?”
“You’ve never even held an omega’s hand. How dare you interfere with someone else’s future mother?”
Alexei watched with satisfaction as the quill in the teacher’s hand snapped in two. The once-young teacher had wasted his youth in the North. That became a deep-seated complex, and digging into that wound was Alexei’s only pleasure and happiness.
That day too, a night like hell passed.
The next morning, Alexei trudged along the corridor with bloodshot eyes and ran into the teacher. His smiling face looked especially vile today. Just as Alexei was about to ignore him and pass by, the man said something he couldn’t ignore.
“Judging by last night, you must have had quite an enjoyable time with your mother, didn’t you, Alexei Slavatov?”
“You, you… you…!”
Alexei flinched violently and turned his head. His tongue, stiff as stone, failed to form proper words. The teacher chuckled and rubbed his hands together like a fly, looking delighted beyond measure.
“So that’s how a coward who can’t even step outside the castle met omegas. It seems countless ‘mothers’ personally bestowed their grace upon you.”
“They weren’t mothers!”
“They nearly became the lady of Slavatov, so of course they’d be mothers, wouldn’t they? Or perhaps… you still haven’t escaped that narrow path of your first mother. You should start leaving the place you were born, Alexei. Even if she was a legendary temptress who melted northern wolves.”
“Say that again.”
The teacher failed to notice the anger weighing down Alexei’s low voice and kept babbling on. Drunk on the thrill of having found the young lord’s weakness, someone he had always looked down on, the foolish adult had lost his senses. He only shut his mouth after Alexei grabbed him by the collar and slammed him into the ground.
“Insult my father, threaten me, mock Slavatov, I don’t care. But you’ll pay a proper price for mocking Horus’s omega.”
Alexei seized the teacher’s ankle as he groaned on the stone floor and dragged him to the nearest room. He paid no heed even when the man screamed about cutting himself on broken tiles. For the first time in his life, Alexei felt rage spilling past its limits. A reason devoured by fury told him exactly what to do.
“Idle words are paid for with death.”
He threw the teacher into the room, locked the door, and set it ablaze. The sequence of actions was clean and efficient. Faced with the sudden prospect of burning alive, the teacher thrashed wildly in a panic befitting his share.
“Open the door right now! Do you think you’ll be fine after doing something like this?”
“No. You’re going to die here.”
“You lunatic! Are you out of your mind? If this continues, you’ll be a murderer! You’ll die too!”
A bright smile bloomed across the child’s youthful face.
“That doesn’t sound so bad.”
There was no trace of regret for life or fear of death.
And that was only natural. Alexei was not afraid of death at all.
“My life’s already as good as dead. I don’t care if I’m called a murderer.”
As the flames crept closer, the teacher struggled desperately. He slammed his arms against the wall to extinguish the fire spreading along his sleeves. Alexei watched the mad flailing with enjoyment, a clear smile on his lips.
‘Death isn’t frightening at all.’
A soul freed from the body either gains a new body at the dragon’s discretion or disappears altogether. A soul granted a new body forgets all memories of its previous life and is born close to a blank slate, living anew. One never knows what form they will take, but that is the law and cycle of nature. Alexei wanted to escape this loathsome life, this wounded body.
The body an omega had used at will the night before still throbbed painfully. Rather than live on endlessly enduring such things, he wanted to die, forget everything. If he was lucky, he might even be reincarnated and reunited with his mother.
Dying was easier and more comfortable than living.
“I won’t tell anyone! I’ll keep my mouth shut forever and live quietly, please, spare me!”
The teacher flattened himself against the floor and begged. Alexei quietly shook his head.
How could he trust such words? He trusted no one anymore. He couldn’t. Rather than save someone and suffer while praying their secret wouldn’t leak, it was better to bury both the person and the secret together in the fire.
The flames climbed to the ceiling. Wooden beams crashed down from above. A deafening roar tore through the air.
‘I wish the castle would just collapse like this.’
Alexei thought dully as he stared at the upper floor visible through the fallen ceiling. He had never been outside the castle. He had lived his entire life within this single space. No one outright forbade him from leaving, but whenever he tried, countless people found faults to stop him.
‘Your clothes are far too thin. You need to wear at least three more layers before going out.’
‘Have you memorized all the etiquette required outside the castle? Be careful not to break any rules. Do not bring shame upon the imperial family.’
The castle was the only world Alexei knew, and a suffocating prison. If his weakness, those who knew it, and this castle could all collapse at once, how wonderful that would be. Burning his own corpse along with his memories of his mother didn’t sound so bad either. Yielding to his fading consciousness, Alexei closed his eyes.
The door behind his back exploded inward with a thunderous crash.
“Alexei! Are you there?”
It was his father.
Dmitry Slavatov, disheveled and frantic, called his name. As if possessed, Alexei ran to him and clung tightly. It was the warmth of his biological father for the first time in eight years.
“Father.”
“Get back! What in the world is this…!”
But the father he met again after so long shoved him out into the middle of the corridor. Instead of holding him or asking if he was hurt, he rushed into the flames to pull the teacher out. He paid no heed to the fire catching on his own body.
Alexei stood blankly, watching the servants work together to extinguish the fire and his father command them at the forefront. Everyone moved busily, fulfilling their roles. Only Alexei was completely excluded from the situation.
‘So they could work like this.’
The servants hurrying back and forth didn’t spare Alexei a single glance. His father focused all his attention on stopping the spread of the fire.
In the dry winter of the North, where fierce winds were common, even a small blaze could grow uncontrollable, so it was only natural. But Alexei was too young to understand that. So he grabbed his father’s collar as Dmitry shouted himself hoarse, barking orders at the servants.
“Dad. I…”
At that moment, the teacher who had been lying as if dead suddenly sprang up and shouted. For someone with arms charred black, he was remarkably lively.
“Duke Dmitry! You must hear this. This fire wasn’t an accident. I didn’t start it. Young Lord Alexei did! He set it deliberately!”
“Shut up, you bastard!”
Alexei yanked the dagger from his father’s side and lunged at the teacher.
Or rather, he tried to.
A powerful grip caught his wrist. The owner of that hand was Dmitry. Struggling to rein in his fury, he asked his child in a low voice.
“Did you set the castle on fire, Alexei?”
It was a topic completely unfit for what should have been a long-awaited, celebratory conversation between father and son after years apart. And so Alexei dug in his heels. Until his father worried about him first, he did not want to say a single word. Dmitry, however, misread the child’s stubbornly averted face.
A thunderclap of a shout tore through the cold air of the corridor.
“Do you have any idea what you’ve done? You tried to destroy the place where you were born, the place where your mother lived! Even the keepsakes your mother, now gone from this world, left behind!”
Alexei stubbornly refused to say why he had set the fire. Why he had locked the teacher in that room. What he had endured during the years his father abandoned him. Once he started speaking, he felt he would not be able to stop until he poured out every word piled up inside him. Rather than lay everything bare before his father and the people surrounding them, he would rather leap back into the flames.
“Go inside. Don’t come out again until you understand what you’ve done wrong!”
Being beaten and locked in the basement was more familiar, more comfortable, than expressing the painful truth he had suppressed all this time.
It wasn’t that it didn’t hurt. But choosing familiar misery and suffering was easier than summoning courage for an unpredictable future.
“It’s cold.”
The chill rising from the basement floor seeped into his bones. If he stayed in one position too long, his joints stiffened until it became hard to move. Alexei pressed himself flat against the floor until his entire body felt frozen solid. When his body hurt, his mind felt calm.
Several days later, Dmitry came down to the basement himself. Without a word, he led his son upward in silence. With only one step left before reaching the ground level, Alexei finally forced himself to speak.
Even if he couldn’t tell everything he had gone through, he wanted at least a little comfort from his father. It was courage scraped together over a week in the cold cellar.
“If… if someone who isn’t Mother, an omega… touches you without permission… how do you think you’d feel?”
“There’s no need to dwell on such trivial matters. It’s nothing worth worrying about.”
That single sentence, wrung from the courage of a lifetime, was mercilessly crushed. Without realizing it, Alexei clutched at Dmitry’s clothes and asked again.
“Wouldn’t it feel bad? Or wrong? Isn’t it supposed to?”
Dmitry answered coldly.
“If you’re an alpha, it can’t be helped. Things like that are nothing.”
Alexei felt himself float, as if lifted into the air. Or so he thought. When his body mechanically climbed the final step, his mind had already left it behind, lingering somewhere beyond the staircase leading from the basement to the ground above.
When his awareness returned to his body, Dmitry was already walking far ahead down the corridor. Alexei stared at his father’s retreating back. Just before Dmitry stopped and turned around, Alexei ran with all his strength in the opposite direction.
‘How can that be nothing? All those years, everything after Mother died, how can any of that be nothing!’
He ran blindly and fell. Unable to brace himself, he scraped his chin, elbows, and knees, blood seeping out. Alexei staggered back to his feet and kept walking. Crying would change nothing. There was no one to comfort him.
That night, Alexei left the castle for the first time.
If he stayed there even a moment longer, he felt he would go mad.
“The first person I met after leaving the castle was Ilyas.”
“Alek. Wait, just a moment.”
I reached out and took Alexei’s hand where it rested on the table. He blinked like a wound-up doll, then bit down on his lower lip. We both let out the breath we had been holding. The trembling of our joined hands was impossible to control. Breathing felt difficult.
‘This wasn’t something that could be solved by forgetting the past. It wasn’t something that could be fixed by living well in the future…’
Alexei hadn’t grown up wrong. He had done everything he could to survive. A pain that felt like my heart was being sliced through pierced me whole.
‘How could you neglect the child I bore to this extent? You said you loved me. You promised we’d be together forever. How could you disregard my dying wish like this…’
I dug my nails into the bond mark etched on the back of my hand. Violent rage toward Dmitry surged up. My chest tightened. My body felt both burning hot and ice-cold, as if cold flames were flowing beneath my skin.
Then…
“Ivan, I’m back. Did anything happen?”
Dmitry had returned.
“A lot happened. Far too much.”