Chapter 86: I Became a King Just to Catch Her Eye
The deafening echo of Bellero’s shout had barely faded from the grand hall before the old Mafia boss spun on his heel, his robe billowing behind him like a dark shroud as he marched down the long, dimly lit eastern corridor toward his private quarters. His boots struck the marble floorboards with a violent, rhythmic finality, his shoulders tense with an unresolved fury that radiated from his pores like an invisible heatwave.
Right behind him, Damian’s footsteps pounded with equal force. The young doctor refused to back down, his eyes blazing with a dangerous rebellion that matched the syndicate leader’s intensity step for step.
Bellero reached his bedroom doors, gripping the brass handle with bone-crushing strength. He threw the door open, but before he could slam it shut to lock out the world, he whirled around to find Damian standing mere inches from the threshold, his chest heaving under his white lab coat.
"Fuck off, Damian!" Bellero roared, his voice dropping into a sub-zero, savage register that vibrated against the walls of the corridor. He raised a hand, pointing a finger into his son’s face, his pheromones expanding in a suffocating cloud. "Get out of my sight and let me goddamn rest! I am entirely sick and tired of looking at your pathetic, weak body and listening to your moral lectures! Go back to your charity clinic and leave the real world to me!"
Instead of retreating, Damian took a predatory stride forward. With a violent thrust of his shoulders, he forcefully bypassed his father’s frame, pushing his way straight inside the bedroom. He didn’t care about the cloying, heavy scent of the beautiful omegas who had occupied the bed earlier, nor did he care about the absolute boundary he was crossing. He spun around in the center of the room, locking his burning eyes directly onto his father’s wrinkled features.
"Is that why?!" Damian shouted back, his voice a cutting blade that sliced through the static of the room. He slammed his fists against his sides, his framework shaking with an intense, long-standing resentment. "Is that the reason why you have always treated me like a complete nobody under this roof? Why you look at me as nothing but a weakling, as someone who can never do a single damn thing for himself, and why you always think you have to forcefully choose every single aspect of my life for me? Because I am not an Enigma?!"
Damian took another step closer, crowding the Mafia God’s space until their chest plates were practically locked, his voice dropping into a raw, blistering accusation. "Let me make reality perfectly clear to you, Bellero—it is absolutely not my fault that I am not an Enigma! If you want to lay blame for my ordinary Alpha genetics, you should look directly into a mirror! It is entirely your fault for having used the exact same primitive, ruthless methods in the past that you are trying to deploy on Jannah right now! You think blood and iron can conquer a woman’s soul? Maybe if you had been more gentle, maybe if you had shown a single shred of genuine humanity back then, Frost would have accepted your heart and fallen for you willingly!"
In a flash of primal violence, Bellero’s face went entirely crimson. A guttural, animalistic snarl ripped from his throat as he launched his frame forward, his hands shooting out like striking vipers. He brutally grabbed Damian by the collars of his shirt and white lab coat, lifting the young doctor slightly off his feet and slamming his back violently against the entry door.
The wood rattled from the impact, but Damian didn’t even blink, his eyes staring right back into his father’s pupils with absolute, stubborn defiance.
"You shut your mouth!" Bellero hissed, his voice a terrifyingly dark vibration that shook Damian’s very core. His fingers tightened around the fabric, crushing the lapels until the seams groaned. "Do not stand here and talk about things you don’t know a single damn thing about, you arrogant, ungrateful boy! You know absolutely nothing of the agony I endured! I tried all means—every single avenue of wealth, devotion, and strategy—to make that bitch love me! I laid the world at her feet, but she always chose Griffin over and over again! No matter what I offered, she threw it back in my face for a penniless street brawler!"
Bellero’s chest heaved violently beneath his robe, a sudden, blinding flash of ancient grief aging his features by decades in a single micro-second. His grip on Damian’s collar trembled, not from a lack of strength, but from the volcanic eruption of a multi-decade obsession.
"I was polite to her by then, Damian!" Bellero shouted, his voice cracking with the weight of a boy’s broken heart. "Before I became the monster you see today, I was just a boy who was willing to show her pure love, to protect her lineage, and to give her every single luxury her heart desired! But she completely overlooked me! She sidelined my devotion and chose a poor, common martial artist who had nothing to his name but his fists! Let me tell you the truth—if it wasn’t for her brutal rejection, I wouldn’t have ended up as a Mafia God at all! I trained day and night to fight, I spilled rivers of blood to start my own criminal empire, and I built this multi-district syndicate because my naive mind thought that maybe... just maybe, she liked strong men with ultimate power and influence! I became a king just to catch her eye, but no matter what height I achieved, I always ended up being completely sidelined in her heart!"
Damian stared at his father’s furious, grieving face, the raw intensity of the confession echoing through the silent bedroom. For a split second, the professional doctor in him recognized the deep, irreversible psychological trauma that had twisted Bellero Boren into a dictator. But his internal moral wall remained entirely unyielding.
"That is absolutely not an excuse enough to become a cold-blooded criminal, Father," Damian said softly, his voice a flat, razor-sharp line of absolute certainty. He reached up, his own fingers clamping around his father’s wrists, slowly but firmly prying the old man’s bruising grip off his collars. "You cannot build a throne out of corpses and expect a woman’s heart to be the prize. Love is a biological frequency that is earned, Bellero. It is completely impossible to force."
"Some things in this life have to be forced, Damian!" Bellero countered instantly, his voice dropping into a chilling, cynical rasp as he stepped back, smoothing down the lapels of his robe with a terrifying calmness. He turned his back to his son, looking out toward the dark, heavily guarded grounds of his estate. "You speak with the luxury of a boy who has never had to secure his own survival. You think your free clinics and soft words can withstand the weight of S-tier tycoons like the Grefo family? You are a Boren. The blood of the syndicate flows through your veins whether you like it or not. It is only a matter of time before you find out exactly how the real world operates, and you are forced to become just as ruthless as me to keep what you want."
Damian adjusted his wrinkled white coat, his posture straight and unyielding as he backed toward the bedroom door, his voice delivering an absolute vow of defiance. "I will never be like you, Bellero. I will win Jannah my own way, without ever turning into a killer."
Bellero slowly turned his head over his shoulder, a dark, incredibly wicked smirk curling his sharp features as his golden eyes flashed with a chilling finality in the shadows.
"We will see, my stubborn boy... we will see."
