The silent vibration of Canglong’s heavy watch buzzed against his wrist at exactly 03:14 AM.
He didn’t need the notification.
He hadn’t slept a single wink.
The bridal chamber was drowning in pitch-black shadows, save for the dying amber embers of the dragon and phoenix candles throwing long, skeletal shapes across the red silk wall panels.
His entire body felt leaden, his muscles coiled so tightly from lying rigidly on the absolute edge of the mattress that his spine throbbed.
For nearly seven hours, he had stared into the void, his pride acting as a physical anchor that stubbornly refused to let him slide even an inch toward the invisible border separating his side of the bed from the right.
The air inside the room was suffocatingly heavy, cold, and entirely sterile.
His unmedicated Enigma senses were raw, clawing violently through the dark, reaching out for the soft, comforting vanilla fragrance of Ce, the scent he had lived with, the one that was supposed to soothe the burning, chaotic pressure currently threatening to rip his chest apart.
Instead, there was nothing.
Just empty, flat air that tasted like stone.
Thoroughly irritated, Canglong cut his eyes sideways through the gloom.Shen Qing was sleeping perfectly.
He was lying flat on his back on the right side of the mattress, his breathing slow, steady, and completely unbothered by the heavy, suffocating command aura pressing down on the room.
He looked entirely peaceful, completely unaffected by the mess they had been forced into.
On the nightstand beside him, a single stray peanut sat under the low amber light, a tiny monument to the Beta’s total indifference.
To a man used to commanding vanguard battalions, that peaceful, unbothered sleep felt like a direct, deliberate insult.His irritation flared into petty malice.
Moving with slow, quiet deliberation, Canglong reached out under the sheets, grabbed a massive handful of the heavy red quilt, and yanked it aggressively toward his side of the bed.
He didn’t just take his share; he claimed the entire middle territory, letting his massive frame shift until the old timber bedframe gave a loud, sharp creak in the quiet room.
Qing’s eyes snapped open instantly.
He didn’t startle, and he didn’t gasp.
He just lay there in the dark for a second, feeling the sudden rush of cold mountain air blast against his bare shoulders.
He didn’t rush to pull it back.
Instead, slowly, he turned his head against the pillow, his dark eyes locking onto the massive, shadowy silhouette of the Commander hogging the blankets.
“Stop pulling,” Canglong commanded, his voice a low, dangerous growl through the shadows.
“Go back to sleep.”
Qing didn’t flinch.
His tone, when he spoke, was a quiet, lethal rasp that carried zero fear.
“I’m freezing because you’re hogging the entire quilt.
If you’re that desperate to have me close, why don’t we just consummate the marriage?
You’d finally find out how good of a partner I could be.
After all, we are legally a couple for the next 176 days.”
The line struck Canglong’s pride like a physical blow.
To an elite predator like an Enigma, who considered mating instincts, dynamic ruts, and physical dominance as sacred and absolute, a baseline Beta casually throwing out a dare to “consummate” just to win a blanket argument was the ultimate humiliation.
It reminded him, with a sour wave of pure fury, that Qing didn’t care about his elite status, his pain, or his grief over Ce. Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
Qing didn’t view him as a terrifying beast or a tragic hero; he just viewed him as an unstable, volatile legal nuisance he had to endure for a few months.
“You don’t even possess a fraction of what Ce had,” Canglong snarled, his voice a bitter, ragged whisper as his control shattered completely.
“He had grace.
He had softness.
You’re just a cold, hollow shell.”
Qing sat up slowly, leaning his back against the timber headboard, his gaze fixed flatly on the Commander.
“Then you should have looked closer at who you were signing for at the altar, Long-ge.
She never once complained about my lack of scent.
We didn’t even need to touch each other to know what we had.
She likes the quiet.
She’s currently waiting for me to finish this mess so I can go back to her, and she definitely doesn’t act like a child throwing a midnight tantrum.”
Hearing this ordinary, scentless Beta casually declare that his loyalty belonged entirely to a civilian woman and that he actively considered this marriage a miserable, loud downgrade from his real life completely pushed Canglong over the edge.
In a flash of pure, unmedicated rage, Canglong lunged.
His hand moved with elite military speed, his bare fingers brutally snatching Qing’s jaw in a vice-like grip, pinning his head back against the dark wood of the headboard.
Qing’s breath caught sharply behind his teeth, his heart rate finally fracturing out of its calm rhythm as Canglong leaned his weight down, his massive frame pinning the Beta into the mattress.
Their faces were inches apart, their breaths burning against each other in the suffocating dark.
For a terrifying half-second, Canglong stared down into Qing’s eyes, driven by a dark, chaotic urge to force this stubborn creature to submit, to break his clean composure, to blur the agonizing memory of Ce by tearing away the Beta’s pride with a forced, aggressive kiss.
But…
Just as his lips almost brushed Qing’s, the flat, sterile, completely scentless air between them hit Canglong’s nose like a chemical burn.
There was no lilly fragrance.
There was no warmth.
There was nothing but the cold reality of a stranger.
A surge of profound disgust for the fraud, for the Beta – Qing, and most of all, for his own pathetic lack of control slapped him in the face.
With a rough, violent jerk, Canglong shoved Qing’s face away, backing off to his side of the mattress with a harsh, ragged breath, looking away into the shadows like he had just touched something foul.
Qing lay back against the pillows, his jaw throbbing and burning where Canglong’s fingers had dug in.
His chest heaved, his mind burning with a cold, icy fury.
Every protective wall he had built as a man had just been violently breached.
He didn’t cry, and he didn’t tremble.
His blood ran hot with pure, icy contempt as he stared at the dark ceiling, his hands clenching the sheets until his knuckles went white.
You think you can treat me like property because of your rank?
he thought, his jaw aching with a dark, unyielding fury.
Let the beast choke on his own unmedicated poison.
My life is mine.
I am the one who controls my terms, and I will walk out of this disaster with my pride entirely untouched.
The silence stretched between them, thick, suffocating, and dripping with raw hatred.
Neither of them moved.
Neither crossed the line.
They lay apart, two dominant forces refusing to yield a single inch of the mattress as the mountain wind rattled the glass panes outside.
Hours bled away into the heavy darkness.
Right around 05:50 AM, just as the sky outside the double-happiness window characters was turning a pale, miserable grey, Qing’s eyes finally began to grow heavy from sheer exhaustion, his mind slipping toward a fractured rest.
Thud.
Thud.
Thud.
A sharp, formal knock echoed loudly through the heavy timber door panels.
The senior household servant had arrived for the early morning family inspection, a mandatory custom to check the status of the room.
Panicking that the chaotic, nut-scattered mattress and their hostile posture would expose the absolute breakdown of their discipline to the entire house, Canglong reacted instantly.
He reached out under the quilt and delivered a sharp, unceremonious shove with his bare foot straight against Qing’s butt, forcing the sleeping Beta awake.
Qing snapped his eyes open, glaring over his shoulder, his voice a sharp, raspy whisper.
“Did you seriously just kick me?”
“If you shove me with your foot one more time, Long-ge, I am throwing you off this mattress,”
Qing whispered, his voice a dry, sleep-deprived rasp.
“Shut up,” Canglong hissed back through his teeth, his fingers violently dragging the tangled red quilt over their laps to hide the chaotic, nut-scattered bedding.
“Fix your shirt.
You look like you’ve been in a street fight.”
“I have been,” Qing replied flatly, refusing to move an inch closer to the Enigma’s side.
“I’ve spent seven hours sharing a bed with an unmedicated vanguard tank.
Move your leg.”
“Do you want my grandfather to walk in here and find us sleeping apart?” Canglong demanded, a micro-vibration of pure panic hitting his jaw as the brass handle outside gave a heavy, metallic rattle.
Qing didn’t budge.
He simply adjusted his rumpled ivory cuff with a cold, steady twist of his wrist.
“Tell him we’re practicing meditation all night.
Open the door.”
P.S:
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