His mother took to her bed and never rose again. Gong Zheng cared for her for half a month, watching her weep day after day; the moment her eyes opened she would clutch his hand and ask where his father had gone, why he hadn't come back yet. All Gong Zheng could do, over and over, was say: Father isn't back yet. Soon. Soon. Just wait a little longer.
In the end she didn't hold on. While Gong Zheng was out buying medicine, she climbed out of bed in secret, crawled to the balcony, and jumped—without hesitation, without a backward glance.
Gong Zheng came home with a bag full of medicine and walked straight into the scene.
His mother was gone.
News of his father came soon after her death, and it was just as grim. He had tried to rob someone, the story went; in a violent struggle he killed a man, was caught on the spot, and sentenced to death.
Gong Zheng heard it all nearly numb. When the day of execution came, he never went to see his father one last time.
The man died. The debt did not.
They took Gong Zheng away. An Alpha like him had little use to them—no more than free labor. The plan was to beat him senseless for a while, teach him what hardship meant, then toss him to the lower-level managers.
But in the course of that “education,” Gong Zheng fought back so hard, and tried so many times to escape, that the men doing the teaching came away with injuries large and small. One had his ear bitten off. Another had his arm wrenched until it broke.
The matter could have been hushed up either way—but it reached Gong Shiwen's ears. He summoned the boy, curious what kind of person could fight his way barehanded out from under his men and hurt them doing it.
At the meeting, Gong Shiwen was genuinely startled for a moment. From his servants' description of the boy's ferocity, he had expected a hulking brute. Instead there stood a half-grown kid.
Hmm... looking at that school uniform—torn, bloodstained, filthy beyond recognition... Still in school, apparently.
Gong Shiwen asked his men, and learned the truth: it was the boy's father who owed the money. Both parents dead, so the debt fell on the son. A father's debt is paid by his child; owing money means repaying it—it's only natural. Did he have complaints? Gong Zheng only glared at him with murder in his eyes, coiled like he was about to lunge and tear out his throat.
If no one had been holding him back, Gong Shiwen suspected the boy really would have come for him without a second's pause.
Interesting. Gong Shiwen smiled. He moved close, and beneath the mingled smell of blood caught a faint trace of his own kind. He reached out and brushed the stray hair from Gong Zheng's forehead—and marveled. A face that beautiful, on an Alpha.
That face, and that temperament. Exactly to his taste.
But gender was no obstacle to enjoying him. Gong Shiwen pronounced sentence with perfect ease and committed him to one of the private hospitals under his name, for an illegal alteration so inhuman it hardly bore naming. He would remake him into an Omega. He could hardly wait to break him in.
The alteration carried an enormous risk to life. Gong Shiwen's whole comment was a light one: so long as he doesn't die, proceed. If he dies, throw him out—no need to report back to me.
Gong Zheng's fate was shattered in that instant—in the flash of an urge to conquer that crossed Gong Shiwen's eyes the moment they landed on his face.
Rewriting a body's genes is no small matter. Outside the country there had been a few successful cases; at home the procedure was flatly banned—never mind success, it was not even permitted to be attempted.
Gong Shiwen dared. He poured a fortune into it—which to outsiders looked like a vast sum, though in his eyes it was perhaps the loose change from between his fingernails. He didn't even sign for it himself; he had his assistant sign wherever it needed signing, and the money went off to the private hospital.
What Gong Zheng endured during that time in the hospital, he would never in this life dare to look back on.
Drugs injected into his gland, over and over. Every day he woke to syringe after syringe of agents and pills that never ran out. Every morning, the first thing Gong Zheng felt was pain—pain that tore him apart—and hard on its heels came despair, flooding in from every side.
The side effects gnawed at his brain, dismantling his mind inch by inch. He begged the medical staff for painkillers. The answer was restraint straps.
Painkillers damage the gland—they blunt the scent and the diffusion of the pheromones. So he had to endure it. Gong Zheng could not understand. Just so an Alpha could be made to smell sweet, he had to suffer like this, half-mad, in a windowless observation room.
It wasn't fair! Why! Why did everyone else's pleasure have to be built on top of his pain?!
He would not let them win. He would not let them have the last laugh. Never.
He began to seek death.
Again and again he begged to die. He refused food. He attempted suicide. He tried to destroy his own gland...
And they always found a way to stop him.
When he refused food, they fed him nutrients by IV. When he tried to break his skull against the wall or cut his own throat, they strapped him to the treatment table until he could not move a step. When he tried to drown himself in the shower, they took away his right to bathe alone.
So he lived on like that, half-dead, day after day.
The cruelest joke came at the end. When he had finally survived that half year of unendurable torment and was brought before Gong Shiwen, the man couldn't even remember him.
How pitiful. Your suffering, in someone else's eyes, is not worth a glance. He tosses off one light sentence—be altered—and you pay for it in blood; and the man who gave the order forgets you exist before the echo fades.
By the time Gong Zheng was brought in, Gong Shiwen had only just risen from another Omega's side. He gave him an idle once-over and still couldn't recall who this was. You could measure, from that, exactly how little Gong Zheng registered to him—scarcely more than the furniture.
Gong Zheng felt like a clown leaping on a stage, a catfish forgotten on the chopping block. In that moment he hated Gong Shiwen enough to tear him apart—and he did exactly what he had resolved to do. He charged like a madman, snatched the vase off the table, and before anyone could react, smashed it down on Gong Shiwen's head.
The vase burst with a crack, splitting his scalp wide open.
Everyone froze. Three or five bodyguards rushed to slam Gong Zheng to the floor—and Gong Shiwen waved them off with idle fingers.
Blood streamed down into Gong Shiwen's eyes, blurring his vision red. The only thing he could feel was the ferocity, the killing intent, of the man in front of him.
Gong Shiwen, wrapped in a bathrobe, sat calmly on the sofa and wiped absently at the blood running down his forehead—so composed you would never guess he was the one whose head had just been cracked open.
“Altered into an Omega, and the temper's still this wild?” He took the handkerchief a bodyguard offered and cleaned his hands. “Strength hasn't dropped one bit, either...”
The next second, the words still hanging in the air, Gong Shiwen let his pheromones loose—a suffocating flood of scent that drove straight into the nerves and filled Gong Zheng's nose and mouth until he could hardly breathe, and his body began to burn, wrong, from within.
He jerked his head up in disbelief. That feeling—Gong Shiwen was forcing him—here, in front of everyone—into heat—
Damn him. Damn this bastard.