Walking up to the door of the guest room, the thick scent of peaches choked Xu Yiwen, causing him to cover his nose and mouth with one hand. Xu Baoning also retreated a few steps, not daring to push the door open.
Pheromones between Alphas repel each other, and the same applies to Omegas.
If they lingered for much longer, Xu Yiwen and Xu Baoning would likely start vomiting and collapse on the spot.
Xu Baoning was a Class B Omega, so the repulsive reaction had a much stronger impact on him.
He had already lost the vigor he had outside the master bedroom door, his gaze growing increasingly hazy.
Xu Yiwen was a Class S Omega, and having been temporarily marked by He Xihuan just a few days prior, he currently felt only a slight sense of discomfort and repulsion.
“Go back to your room first,” Xu Yiwen instructed Xu Baoning before holding his breath and pushing the door open to enter.
The pheromones inside the room were several times more concentrated than outside, and a wave of nausea rushed straight from his stomach to his throat.
Suppressing the urge to vomit, Xu Yiwen walked over to the bed, tore open the packaging of a suppression shot, and ignoring the whimpering coming from Xu Baoan, grabbed a pale arm and decisively injected a dose.
Once the injection was administered, the chaotic pheromones rampaging through the room finally settled down a bit.
Xu Yiwen wiped the sweat from his forehead, dragged a chair to the spot farthest from the bed, and spoke in a hollow voice: “I gave you a suppression shot. The doctor will be here right away.”
With his bathrobe pooled around his waist and his face flushed red from holding back, Xu Baoan was still teary-eyed, his slightly hoarse voice laced with a sob:
“Xiao Wen-ge, I am fine. There is no need, do not bother the doctor. I can go home. Mom, Mom, Dad, I want to go home.”
“Shut up!” Xu Yiwen knitted his brows, rubbed his temples, and barked out the command.
Xu Baoan shrank back in fright, biting his finger and falling silent, leaving only soft sniffling leaking through the gaps between his fingers.
After a few quiet seconds, Xu Yiwen stood up. The gaze he cast toward Xu Baoan’s aggrieved eyes was laced with a trace of envy.
The corners of his lips beneath the mask curved downward slightly. Xu Yiwen turned and walked toward the bathroom, splashed some cold water on his face, and called to urge the doctor to come as quickly as possible.
The mirror opposite was speckled with flying water droplets, leaving streaks that, through the blurriness, seemed to outline what Xu Yiwen looked like when he was six or seven years old.
On the first day of first grade, Xu Yiwen was informed by his parents that he would be boarding at school.
At breakfast, Xu Yiwen had no appetite. He took a single bite of an egg, put it down, and timidly pleaded, “Dad, Mom, can I not board at school?”
The expressions of Xu Xiangchuan and Jiao Qin instantly shifted from calm to icy.
No answer was an answer.
Xu Yiwen lowered his head and ate a meal mixed with tears.
When the nanny led him out the front gate, he clung to Xu Xiangchuan’s leg, crying so hard snot and tears streamed down his face as he screamed with a breaking heart:
“Dad, Mom, I do not want to go to school, I do not want to board, I want to go home, I want to stay at home.”
His small fingers were pried open one by one, and he watched with his own eyes as Xu Xiangchuan and Jiao Qin got into another car and drove away.
At that moment, the newly minted first-grader Xu Yiwen understood a hard truth: crying is useless.
When the results of the first-grade exams came out, Xu Yiwen placed first and was invited out to dinner by the parents of a classmate. Xu Xiangchuan and Jiao Qin unexpectedly offered to accompany him.
After that dinner, as if discovering a treasure, Xu Yiwen carved the pursuit of studying hard and getting top grades deep into his bones.
Later, when Xu Fengying and Qiu Yao returned from a business trip and came to the school saying they wanted to take Xu Yiwen home to live with them, Xu Yiwen simply waved his hand and refused.
Water droplets dripped from the edge of the mirror onto the vanity. Xu Yiwen collected his thoughts and let out a scoff.
The parents of the classmate who had invited him to dinner back then were people the Xu family had long wanted to partner with.
No matter how hard he tried or how well he scored, he would never wait for his parents to come and take him home.
A dull, urgent knocking sounded from outside. Only then did Xu Yiwen wipe his face dry, put on his mask, and head out to open the door.
The moment the door cracked open, Xu Baoning, wearing an isolation mask, squeezed right in.
He had clearly recovered his strength, and his complexion was normal; he had not been affected by the room’s pheromones.
“The housekeeper asked me to give these to you, medicine and masks.” He tossed the box of medicine and a mask at Xu Yiwen, then sat down on the edge of the bed to check on Xu Baoan.
It was an isolation mask and medication to ease pheromone rejection. Xu Yiwen put on the mask first, poured a glass of water, pulled down the mask, and swallowed two pills.
Pulling the isolation mask back up, Xu Yiwen felt much more lucid.
“Help him put his bathrobe back on. The doctor will be here soon.” With that reminder, Xu Yiwen went to his own room next door to rummage through drawers for a few patches of isolation tape.
Omegas who were married and had been marked by a partner rarely used isolation tape anymore.
Xu Yiwen was no exception. Having been married for a year with once-a-month temporary marks, he no longer bothered wearing isolation tape on the back of his neck.
Seeing that the tape had not expired, Xu Yiwen took all of it.
The isolation tape on the back of Xu Baoan’s neck had rubbed off, and Xu Yiwen asked Xu Baoning to help him reapply a piece.
Xu Baoning took the tape, his expression turning conflicted.
Staying over tonight was an assignment given to him by his eldest uncle.
When he went back to his room earlier to call his eldest uncle, he had gotten chewed out for failing to summon He Xihuan to Xu Baoan’s room.
Yet after dinner, the housekeeper kept a constant watch on them, refusing to let them go upstairs until bedtime, and right when they went up, they bumped squarely into Xu Yiwen.
He had watched Xu Yiwen head back to the master bedroom, making it completely impossible to call He Xihuan out alone.
Thinking of the scent of He Xihuan’s pheromones, Xu Baoning shuddered all over, feeling as though another breakout of red hives was about to appear.
He Xihuan’s family background, wealth, and looks were certainly attractive, but he was an Alpha who had already marked Xu Yiwen.
Xu Baoning could not understand why his eldest uncle insisted on having the newly found biological son take over the second-hand goods the adopted son had used.
Still, his uncle had said this was for the future wealth and prosperity of Xu Baoan and the Xu family down the road.
Come to think of it, compared to Xu Yiwen helping the He family brush them off, if Xu Baoan and He Xihuan got together, he would definitely side with the Xu family.
Who knows, the Xu family might even stand on equal footing with the He family by then.
After feeding himself this comforting illusion, Xu Baoning had made Xu Baoan drink the pre-arranged catalytic medicine and gone to the master bedroom to fetch people.
As a result, he had only summoned Xu Yiwen and ended up getting affected by the pheromones himself.
After finishing his call with his eldest uncle, when he went back to the master bedroom door to call He Xihuan again, he got spotted by the housekeeper.
The housekeeper handed him the medicine and masks with a smiling face and stood guard right outside the master bedroom door, leaving Xu Baoning with no choice but to return in a rage.
On the bed, the heat on Xu Baoan’s face had subsided slightly, though the redness on his cheeks was still from crying.
Whether they applied the isolation tape or not, tonight’s mission was completely botched.
Clutching the isolation tape, Xu Baoning dropped a ridiculous suggestion: “By the way, do not Omegas in heat need pheromone soothing? The doctor is not here yet, so why do we not have He Xihuan come help out?”
The flash of a guilty conscience in Xu Baoning’s eyes registered clearly in Xu Yiwen’s pupils. In an instant, Xu Yiwen understood the ultimate goal of these two staying over tonight.
How utterly foolish. Even if they wanted to seduce, He Xihuan using pheromones, how could they have the nerve to track him straight to his home?
Could it be they wanted to catch him in the act on the spot so he would actively step down?
It seemed the Xu family had silently decided to discard him as a fake and intended for their biological son to latch onto the He family.
Xu Yiwen let out a cold laugh, sat back down in his chair, lowered his brow, and interrogated sharply: “Was his heat scheduled for today? Or did he eat something he should not have, or drink something he should not have, causing his heat to conveniently flare up tonight of all nights, right when he is staying over at our house?”