The car tore through the high-district transit lanes like an uncoiled serpent. Dorrent’s rigid profile. His hands were clamped onto the leather steering wheel at the ten-and-two positions, his knuckles white and bloodless, his veins bulging against his wrists under the sheer pressure of his grip.

Beside him, the passenger seat was a chaotic theater of frantic, desperate motion.

Jannah was thrashing against the electronic security locks, her small, pale fingers clawing uselessly at the reinforced glass of the passenger window before whipping around to rip at the seamless leather dashboard. "Let me out! Dorrent, let me go!" she screamed, her voice cracking, raw with a volatile mixture of panic and unadulterated fury.

In her violent struggle, her body twisted and turned within the confines of the seat. The oversized, crisp white dress shirt she had borrowed from Shadron betrayed her completely. With every desperate kick of her legs against the floorboards and every frantic lunge toward the central console, the hem of the shirt rode higher and higher up her hips.

It exposed the smooth, uninterrupted length of her long, slender, pale thighs, gleaming like polished marble in the dashboard’s dim blue light. As she twisted her torso to slam her fist against the locked door, the fabric bunched entirely over her hip bones, sliding past the safe boundaries of modesty to nearly expose the junction of her body.

Dorrent didn’t look over. He kept his eyes locked straight ahead on the empty, shimmering asphalt of the midnight highway, but his peripheral vision absorbed every single detail with agonizing precision. He could see the pale swell of her hips, the frantic, rapid pulse throbbing in her inner thigh, and the heat radiating from her skin. The sweet, sharp scent of her terrified, volatile omega pheromones filled the enclosed cabin, clogging his filter vents, sticking to the back of his throat, and making his stomach churn with a sickening, toxic heat.

A sudden, sharp memory cut through his rage, violently dragging his mind backward through the archives of his mind, forcing him to remember the very first day he had laid eyes on her.

It had been in the 3rd Street. He had been sitting in the plush, darkened interior of his father’s car, looking through the one-way tinted glass while Guron stood on the cracked cobblestones, trying to buy the services of a common herbalist. Dorrent remembered the exact moment Jannah had turned the corner of that rotting lane. She had been covered in the grime of the slums; her faded, patched dress was practically falling apart at the seams, her hair was an untamed, messy curtain, and her boots were caked in the foul mud of the lower-market stalls. She had been dressed completely anyhowly, a chaotic mess of poverty and exhaustion.

And yet, looking through that glass a few days ago, Dorrent’s heart had done a strange, heavy skip that he had immediately tried to bury under a layer of unadulterated cruelty.

Even then, covered in dirt and surrounded by rot, her face had been striking. Her features possessed an ethereal, haunting perfection—the sharp, stubborn line of her jaw, the wide, piercing depth of her dark eyes, and the narrow, delicate curve of her waist. She was beautiful. In fact, as he looked at her thrashing in his passenger seat now, the realization hit him like a physical blow: she was exactly, precisely his type. She was the exact physical blueprint of the women he had been naturally drawn to five years ago, before his world had turned to ash.

A dark, bitter wave of self-loathing flooded his chest.

Five years ago, it had been a wild, unhinged omega—a creature from a cursed lineage. After a steamy night of passion, the affliction had taken hold. His S-tier biology had gone completely dead, leaving him an impotent king who could rule empires but could never claim a bedroom.

From that day forward, his hatred for omegas had risen until it was a consuming, pathological fire. But the hatred wasn’t simple. It was a twisted, bleeding mirror. After the impotence took over, Dorrent had spent every single day avoiding any woman who was actually his type. If a woman possessed the slender grace, the pale skin, or the fierce, defiant aura that naturally awakened his apex instincts, he would flee from her, erecting a wall of icy arrogance and cruel indifference between them.

Why? Because the alternative was a humiliation he couldn’t survive. To be near a woman who perfectly matched his deepest desires, to feel his mind yearn for her, only to realize that his body was a dead, useless statue that could never satisfy her—it burned him. It tore his masculine ego into bloody shreds. He didn’t hate them more than he hated himself. He hated his broken biology, his dead nerves, and the pathetic reality of his empty throne. 𝕗𝕣𝐞𝐞𝘄𝐞𝚋𝚗𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗹.𝚌𝕠𝚖

To cope with the shame, he had forced himself to seek out women like Joanne. Joanne was beautiful by high-society standards—bronzed, voluptuous, refined—but she wasn’t his type. She didn’t awaken the sleeping beast in his blood. Being with her was safe; kissing her on private balconies was a calculated performance that kept the rumors at bay without ever forcing him to face the terrifying, cold reality of his impotence. He could pretend to be indifferent to Joanne because he truly was indifferent to her.

But Jannah? Jannah was a walking detonator to his carefully constructed defenses.

From the moment she had entered his estate, her presence had threatened to shatter his fortress. She was his exact type, and her proximity was driving his mind into a hyper-arousal that his dead body couldn’t fulfill. That was why he hated her so intensely. That was why he called her "filth," why he called her "trash," and why he had tried to put an ocean of distance between them. He was desperately, pathetically trying to avoid being affected by her striking beauty, trying to protect himself from the agonizing torment of wanting a woman he could never, ever satisfy sexually. His S-tier pride could handle being a monster, but it could never handle being exposed as an inadequate, useless failure in her eyes.

The memory of that first afternoon in the slums flashed brighter, the details interlocking perfectly with his current fury. He remembered how he had sat in the car, watching her repeatedly refuse his father’s astronomical offers of seven point five million credits. Her unyielding pride, her absolute refusal to be bought by the Grefo name, had twisted something dark inside him. He had felt an overwhelming, toxic need to intervene, to step out of the vehicle and shatter her resolve. He had wanted to show her how small, how incompetent, and how utterly unworthy she was of their world, hoping that by breaking her spirit, he could stop his own mind from finding her beautiful.

Instead, his cruelty had backfired. His insults had only ignited a poisonous, black fire in her eyes, driving her to change her mind on the spot and accept the deal just to become the venom under his skin.

"Stop screaming," Dorrent suddenly barked, his voice dropping into a deep, velvety purr that was so laced with suppressed rage.

He reached across the central console, his hand soft as he grabbed the hem of Shadron’s shirt, violently pulling the fabric back down over her pale thighs to cover her exposed skin, his knuckles accidentally brushing against the fiery heat of her hip bone.

He jerked his hand back as if he had been burned, his eyes flashing with a dangerous, unhinged light as he locked his gaze back onto the road ahead, his voice a lethal whisper that cut through her panic.