Chapter 31: The Echo of the Wedding Night

“Is it because you want to return to Baekya? Are you trying to go back to a lover?”

Anok’s complete silence after confessing his heat only magnified the storm of anxiety, irritation, and sheer impatience swelling within Jae-won.

“Say something, Grand Consort. Deny it, admit it—just give me an answer.”

Overwhelmed by the harsh demand, Anok shrank back as if trying to flee. Watching him stubbornly reject his touch, Jae-won finally let out a heavy sigh and turned around.

It was impossible to remain in this room together any longer. He needed to step outside immediately and order Eunuch Seok to prepare a medicinal suppression tea to break the heat. His steps grew faster, matching the urgency in his mind.

He was just paces away from the door when a dull thud echoed from behind. Surprised, Jae-won spun around. Thankfully, Anok hadn’t lost consciousness, but his strength had failed him, leaving him collapsed on his knees.

He was clearly out of his mind with fever. Driven by a desperate instinct to keep him from drifting under, Jae-won reached out and firmly cradled Anok’s cheeks.

“Stay with me, Anok.”

In that precise second, an indescribable, bizarre sense of deja vu flashed through Jae-won’s mind. But there was no time to dissect the feeling; Anok had suddenly bit down hard on his own lower lip, drawing blood.

Slamming his thumb between Anok’s teeth to stop him required accepting that his own hand would be bitten, yet Jae-won acted without a single shred of hesitation. Even so, Anok shook his head weekly, desperately trying to pull away from him.

“……Let me go.”

“What?”

“Please…… just let me go now.”

The whispered words carried no physical strength whatsoever. With a glassy stare and heavy, fluttering eyelids, it was clear that Anok had reached his absolute limit.

He truly does wish to be cast aside. He wants to leave. He never wanted to be by my side. This position was something he never desired from the very beginning.

“Anok, look at me. What do you mean by that? Let you go? What are you say——”

Deep down, Jae-won desperately wanted him to deny it. But Anok’s frame suddenly went limp. Before he could crash entirely against the floorboards, Jae-won lunged forward, catching him securely in his arms.

“Anok……!”

Anok lay completely still, his eyes closed as if he were dead, while Jae-won held him tightly, frantically shouting his name in utter despair.

Right then, that inexplicable, violent sense of deja vu clawed through every corner of Jae-won’s consciousness once more.

Remember it! Wake up! It felt as if a voice was screaming inside his mind.

The burning fever that had ravaged Anok’s entire frame had finally subsided, but his vision remained blurred and his mind felt sluggish. It felt as though he had been asleep for far too long.

Immediately upon opening his eyes, he couldn’t quite piece together what had occurred. He simply lay there in a daze for a long time, quietly listening to Han-wol making a fuss nearby.

Only after listening to Han-wol complain about how incredibly worried he had been during the two days Anok spent unconscious did the memories slowly trickle back.

He had knowingly ingested the medicine Noble Consort Sa sent, and he had entered the bridal chamber with full awareness that his heat had arrived. He remembered the deceptive tenderness of Yeo Jae-won’s touch, the strange wave of relief that washed over him when the Prince released his Alpha pheromones, and the suffocating heat that steadily intensified……

In the end, he had simply wanted to surrender everything. He had intended to beg Yeo Jae-won to let him go, and in his hazy recollections, it felt as though he had actually spoken those words aloud. However, since even the fact that he had fainted had to be recalled through Han-wol’s words, Anok couldn’t be entirely certain if he had truly uttered that plea to the Prince.

“Do you have any idea how terrified I was during those two days you were asleep?”

Han-wol carried a medicinal bowl into the room, his brows knitted tight with worry. Knowing the boy’s distress was completely genuine, Anok offered a faint, weary smile, his face looking even more pale and drawn after his two-day slumber.

“The physician said that if your fever had stayed that high any longer, something terrible could have happened.”

Perhaps if that terrible thing had actually happened, my mind would be at peace now.

Though the thought crossed his mind, it was hardly something he could say aloud to someone who had spent two days frantically nursing him. Anok remained silent, quietly draining the bitter medicine to the last drop.

“If His Highness hadn’t rushed to summon the imperial doctor and personally demanded they brew a remedy immediately, things truly would have ended horribly.”

“The Prince did that?”

“Yes. He’s been slipping into the inner quarters day and night for the past two days just to check on your recovery himself.”

Handing a small dish of preserved apricots to help wash away the bitter aftertaste of the tea, Han-wol eagerly relayed just how deeply Jae-won had cared for him.

Having worried all the way from the distant Baekya region that the Prince might neglect Anok after their arrival in the capital, Han-wol seemed to have completely re-evaluated his opinion of Yeo Jae-won because of this incident.

But Han-wol wasn’t the only one caught off guard. Anok found himself deeply startled by the news.

He could comprehend the Prince summoning a physician and ordering medicine. Short of throwing another Alpha into the bridal chamber, managing the crisis with suppressants was the only logical choice.

But for a man who would typically detest an ordinary Omega—let alone one actively locked in a volatile heat cycle—to personally frequent the inner quarters day and night was difficult to believe, unless he harbored some hidden alternative motive.

‘The conditions you offered are intriguing, but I will not call off this marriage. I find that I like you.’

Was he truly being sincere? Did he really mean it when he said he liked me?

A hollow laugh escaped Anok’s lips. He found it incredibly difficult to take Yeo Jae-won at his word, yet if it were true, a nagging curiosity bloomed. What was so vastly different about his identity in this lifecycle that allowed him to capture the tyrant’s favor so effortlessly?

From his own perspective, he hadn’t done anything remarkable. He simply hadn’t tripped before the Prince like a fool, and he had possessed enough nerve to speak his mind clearly.

If such minor deviations were enough to earn Yeo Jae-won’s favor, then all the desperate, agonizing struggles of his past life to simply be noticed felt entirely pathetic and hollow.

Therefore, those words had to be a lie. Even if they were true, Anok refused to believe them.

Chewing on his lower lip out of habit, his mind naturally drifted back to what had unfolded in the bridal chamber. He remembered how, as he had bit his own lip to endure the pain, Jae-won’s fingers had pried his mouth open, choosing to absorb the hurt himself.

As that singular memory surfaced, the rest of the missing fragments hidden beneath his two-day blackout came rushing to the forefront.

‘Is it because you want to return to Baekya? Are you trying to go back to a lover?’

Fixated on a lover who didn’t even exist, demanding answers with an intensity that verged on terrifying—that had been Jae-won’s expression.

Yet, it had all taken place while he was half-crazed with fever, his reason stripped away by his cycle. It would be utterly foolish to try and decipher Yeo Jae-won’s true feelings based on such unreliable, distorted memories.

He refused to repeat his past mistakes—smiling at the smallest crumb of kindness only to watch his spirit shatter the moment the Prince turned a cold shoulder.

If he had to endure this dynamic again, he would rather become exactly like the Yeo Jae-won of his past life. He wanted to hold the emotional upper hand, possessing absolute control over the relationship while indifferently observing the other person’s desperate struggles.

‘……If I had been the one in power back then, I might never have chosen to give up on life entirely. If he had been the one in my shoes, keeping his heart would have been an effortless task.’

His thoughts dragged on endlessly, casting a dark, heavy, and suffocating shadow over his mind.

While Anok sat quietly with his back pressed against the wall, his eyelids lowered in deep contemplation, Han-wol had stepped outside for a moment.

Returning with a notably hurried pace, Han-wol’s eyes sparkled as he delivered the news.

“Master Anok! The Prince is on his way here.”

“To the inner quarters?”

“Yes! They say the moment he received word that you had finally woken up, he immediately left the imperial court to come straight home.”

Hearing that he had left the court, Anok’s lips parted in a quiet realization.

In his past life, because he had taken Noble Consort Sa’s medicine and suffered through his heat, he had failed to accompany Yeo Jae-won to the imperial palace to offer their formal post-wedding greetings to the royal family.

Because of his absence, Jae-won had been forced to enter the palace alone to explain the scandalous situation to the Emperor and Empress. To make matters worse, rumors that the new Grand Consort had been neglected on his wedding night quickly leaked outside the estate walls, causing both imperial rulers to despise Anok from the very beginning.

Another exhausting repetition.

As Anok let out a faint, resigned sigh, Han-wol stepped closer, his face clouding with worry once more.

“Are you still feeling unwell? The physician said your fever had completely broken, and that you would be perfectly fine as long as you take your restorative tonic……”

“Restorative tonic?”

“Yes. Not the one Noble Consort Sa sent before, but a completely fresh batch brewed exactly according to the imperial doctor’s new prescription.”

Ah, right. The tonic. Slowly pulling his weak frame away from the wall, Anok reached out and grasped Han-wol’s arm.

“Where is Court Lady Cho right now?”

Now that he thought about it, the person who should have been hovering by his side as his chief attendant was nowhere to be seen. Remembering the sour, toad-faced official who constantly looked for any excuse to have him sent away, Han-wol tilted his head in confusion.

“Come to think of it, I barely saw her at all over the past two days. She only seems to pop up whenever the Prince visits…… other than that, she always looks like she’s rushing off somewhere on urgent business.”

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