Mistakenly Marked – Chapter 2

Omega

Very soft, trembling, repressed and damp.

Xu Jialuo worked down the hallway door by door, knocking and handing a suppressant injector to whoever was inside.

            

At the end of it, one last Omega-dose injector in hand, she stopped before the room at the far end.

After her mother, Jiang Yi, had given her this villa, Xu Jialuo had, in truth, rarely come to stay.

But whenever she did, she always chose this room at the end of the third floor.

            

The room had a wide balcony that faced a sweep of mountain forest. On foggy days, or when rain fell, mountain haze curled and wreathed through the trees — a beauty nothing like the city’s neon.

Perfect for catching inspiration in solitude.

Right now, though, Xu Jialuo heard a gasp.

            

Through the door. Very soft, trembling, repressed and damp.

Xu Jialuo lowered her eyes, raised a hand, and knocked.

Three polite raps, neither light nor heavy.

            

No answer.

The sound inside snuffed out at once.

She knocked three more times.

            

Still, nothing stirred.

By the maid’s account earlier, an Omega was staying in this room.

She waited a few seconds more in the quiet. Unable to confirm the state of whoever was inside, Xu Jialuo turned the handle and pushed the door open.

            

The instant she crossed the threshold, her phone rang in her pocket.

Xu Jialuo paused in the doorway and fished it out. The caller ID read “Lin Qingman.”

Her fingertip had just begun to slide toward accept when a hand shot out of the darkness — a beast running prey to ground in the night, its figure lunging close at lightning speed.

            

Clang—!

The phone dropped to the floor, shut out behind the door.

The back of her head and her spine slammed hard against the shut door, and Xu Jialuo let out a muffled grunt of pain — only for something cold and sharp to press against her throat.

            

…What the hell?

Her gaze swept the darkened room; dimly, she made out the shattered remains of a white porcelain teacup on the floor nearby.

A few threads of blood-scent were spreading through the air.

            

None of it was hers.

Xu Jialuo dropped her lashes and looked at the hand pressing the white porcelain shard to her neck — gripping it, tight.

The lights were off; she could barely see. All she made out, dim and blurred, was crimson blood dripping down that snow-pale hand.

            

Xu Jialuo’s lashes quivered once, beyond her control.

For a single instant, the scene before her overlapped with old images in her memory. Her breath went tight at once; her vision blurred for a second.

By the time she shut her eyes, steadied herself, and swiftly opened them again, the best window to shove the other woman off had passed — she was pinned fast to the door.

            

This Omega, it seemed, had gone completely berserk, all reason burned away.

…But this one was, in some ways, an exception.

Ordinarily, an Omega whose pheromones had slipped the leash, once in heat, would instinctively ache for pleasure, yearning for an Alpha’s intimate help.

            

Fragile. Half-conscious. Putty in anyone’s hands.

She should not have been like this — so fiercely self-protective as to turn outright aggressive.

This seemed an unusual Omega indeed — one with formidable strength of will.

            

Beyond the door, the ringtone wound down into silence.

Inside the room, pheromones dense with aggression climbed madly in concentration, like detonating explosives.

The back of her neck had begun to itch, faintly. Taking it for a stray strand of hair fallen there, Xu Jialuo tilted her head.

            

The Omega seemed to take it for resistance, and erupted into motion.

The instant the shard pressed forward, Xu Jialuo’s hand flashed out and clamped around her wrist.

Sunk in madness, the Omega struggled, a bestial hiss scraping from her throat as she bore the shard down on Xu Jialuo, driving her into the door without a shred of restraint.

            

Through heavy-lidded lashes, expressionless, Xu Jialuo took in the spectacle of a woman wholly puppeted by her own pheromones.

The world was rather fair, in its way. Xu Jialuo had always thought so.

Alphas and Omegas alike held more privileges than Betas — and carried more risk beside them.

            

As at this very moment: anyone else, Alpha or Omega, would be dragged under by these pheromones, spiraling into the same loss of control.

But Xu Jialuo would not.

Because she was regarded as an ordinary, unremarkable Beta.

            

“You don’t need to do this.”

Gripping the Omega’s slender wrist, Xu Jialuo tipped her chin up. The hand at her side rolled once at the wrist, ready to subdue her at any moment.

Her voice stayed mild as she explained: “I mean you no harm.”

            

She had only meant to soothe the Omega with her voice first, waiting for the opening to strip the dangerous shard from her hand.

But at the sound of it, the frenzied Omega went abruptly still —

and, impossibly, quieted in the space of an instant.

            

Tink—

The bloodied shard of porcelain fell to the floor.

A few seconds later, the Omega reached a trembling hand toward Xu Jialuo.

            

Yet just before it could touch her, she drew it back.

The fearsome aggression of moments ago had vanished without a trace. Head bowed, face swallowed by the dark, the Omega moved in quick, jerky motions, dragging up her skirt hem to scrub hard at the wound that would not stop weeping blood.

As if the wound did not hurt at all.

            

As the blood ran, the whole room steeped deeper in the scent of ice-chilled cherry.

The Omega paid it no mind. She only held out the hand she had wiped clean and rested her fingertips, featherlight, against the side of Xu Jialuo’s face.

Touch, and pause; touch, and pause. Her fingerpads trembled — too reluctant to press, too reluctant to leave — as if tracing the outline of some fragile treasure.

            

The room was too dark for Xu Jialuo to make out any of it.

She knew only that her nape troubled her again, and that her face itched inexplicably. Xu Jialuo brushed back the hair at her neck, turned her head aside to escape the touch, and held out the injector. “This is a suppressant. It works on Omegas.”

“…”

            

The Omega startled, as if a thread of reason had been called back up from the depths. Straining against herself, she straightened and broke off all contact with Xu Jialuo.

Slowly, she raised her head and met Xu Jialuo’s eyes.

In the darkness her features were a blur; all Xu Jialuo could see was a pair of dazed eyes glimmering with a faint glazed-pink¹ luster. Resplendent. Blinding. Like gemstones set into white silk.

            

A sudden sting lanced through the back of Xu Jialuo’s neck.

In that same instant, a very faint breath of wine fragrance rippled through the air.

The Omega — her hand already lifted to take the suppressant — froze. Her pupils blew wide, and all at once she snatched the hand back.

            

The next second, those resplendent eyes gently closed, and the Omega’s trembling, pliant body folded into Xu Jialuo’s arms.

“Uu…”

A scalding-hot cheek nuzzled into Xu Jialuo’s neck, and a single aggrieved, choked sound escaped her.

            

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The villa’s grand hall.

Syringe in hand, Xu Shangning frowned and injected the suppressant into her own scent gland.

Then all strength left her; she slumped into a chair and, at last, let out a relieved breath.

            

Glancing at the maids still hurrying back and forth to deliver suppressants to the guests, Xu Shangning asked, “Where’s Luoluo?”

“Miss Jialuo is helping as well. She should be bringing suppressants up to the guests in the third-floor rooms right about now.”

“Oh, the third floor…”

            

Xu Shangning reached up to smooth her sweat-dampened, shoulder-length hair, repeating the words without thinking.

Then something occurred to her, and she asked rapidly, “Which guests exactly were settled on the third floor?”

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The villa, third floor — the room at the end.

            

In the darkened room, pheromones thick past bearing filled it through and through.

Xu Jialuo stood just inside the doorway, back against the cold wood of the door, the Omega in her arms frighteningly hot.

Ice and fire at once.

            

Even with no nose for the excess of pheromones, being this intimate with a stranger was no pleasure for Xu Jialuo.

The Omega in her arms, plainly, did not share the view.

Far from showing any intention of drawing back, she came nearer still, arms reaching up to hook around Xu Jialuo’s neck.

            

Head tucked into the crook of Xu Jialuo’s shoulder, she nuzzled, soft and slow.

As though greedily breathing in something she could not get enough of.

Strand upon silken strand, fine and close-meshed, the ice-chilled cherry pheromones wound about her.

            

Stripping off, grinding out, every last trace of the other Omegas’ and Alphas’ pheromones that had just clung to Xu Jialuo’s skin.

Inch by inch, laying claim anew.

And all unknowing, Xu Jialuo was shut within the tight-woven cage the Omega had spun from her pheromones.

            

She could not smell a single note of it. She knew only that her collar had been tugged open, and that her skin tingled half-numb under the Omega’s scalding breath.

Too hot — hot enough to leave her inexplicably dizzy.

Xu Jialuo drew her collar closed and tipped her head away from the Omega’s affection. “Please calm down. I’m a Beta.”

            

She had no Alpha gland to answer an Omega’s — still less the soothing Alpha pheromones an Omega in heat required.

But just now, the Omega seemed incapable of understanding a word of it.

“Mm… nnh…”

            

Tormented by her runaway pheromones, the Omega let soft little sounds slip from her throat, one after another.

Pleading. Coaxing.

With the clean hand — the one the blood had never touched — she hooked gently around Xu Jialuo’s neck and pressed herself closer, closer still.

            

The movements were silk-soft; the entangling was absolute.

Like a serpent that had at last trapped the prey it longed for — constricting, and determined to wring out every drop of the sweetest nectar from the one it held.

Through the thin fabric, graceful curves² pressed close, withholding nothing.

            

…Too close.

The dizziness deepened. Xu Jialuo raised a hand to the Omega’s shoulder; the lean, clean line of muscle kept trim by years of exercise pulled taut in an instant.

The Omega seemed to be wearing an off-the-shoulder evening gown. Fingertips long accustomed to piano keys met skin fine-grained and burning — and very nearly seemed to melt.

            

“My apologies.”

Xu Jialuo apologized first, voice low, fingers tightening on the Omega’s shoulder, ready to lever her away.

Then the motion slowed.

            

Xu Jialuo blinked, and looked at the long curls spilling over the Omega — snow winding through them as, shade by shade, they silvered into white.

It was a change that came only when an Apex Omega, deep in heat, turned of her own will to court the one she loved.

“Luo… Luoluo!”

            

Xu Shangning’s voice rang out abruptly, and several knocks landed on the door at Xu Jialuo’s back. “You—how did you get in there?”

Her voice was ragged — she had plainly run the whole way.

But Xu Jialuo had no attention to spare for that. One hand kept the Omega’s shoulder pinned, holding her back from going any further. “The guest in this room — her pheromones are dangerously out of control. She’s lost her reason.”

            

Xu Shangning eyed the lightless seam of the door and gathered that inside, it must be too dark to make anyone out. “Uh… then don’t worry about it — just open up and let me help her!”

Xu Jialuo made no reply, but the moment the words landed, her hand was already rising to the handle.

Just as she turned to open it, the Omega in front of her seemed to sense the intention — she clasped Xu Jialuo tighter and whimpered in distress.

            

Through that one door, knowing nothing of what was truly happening inside, Xu Shangning heard only the sound of the Omega — so fragile, so helpless.

Xu Shangning fought through the battering of pheromones, her tone turning careful:

“Luoluo, you can’t smell the pheromones, so maybe you don’t know — Bo… ahem, ahem — that Omega is in truly bad shape right now. Omegas are fragile creatures, so whatever you do, don’t do to her what you did to that Alpha just now…”

            

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