On Monday, fresh from their visit to the ancestral Huo estate, a long-awaited clear and beautiful weather graced the campus of Beijing University's Life Sciences department.
The golden morning sun filtered through the spotless window blinds, casting a soft, warm edge over the rows of cold, precision instruments in the laboratory. The dry scent of fir trees intertwined with the faint, sweet aroma of oranges in the air—the near-indelible imprints left by the combined body heat of two people in this room over the past few months.
Silas Shen arrived early. He had changed into his meticulously clean, spotless white lab coat, the gold-rimmed glasses resting on the bridge of his nose. He looked as cool and cloistered as ever, resembling a pristine ice sculpture perched atop an ivory tower, untouched by a single speck of dust.
He pulled back his office chair and sat down, methodically moving his mouse to open the public inbox used for receiving daily academic reports and clinical data feedback.
A few unread emails rested in the inbox, mostly rough drafts of papers sent by graduate students, as well as a draft proposal from the Huo Group's legal department regarding the funding for the next phase of clinical trials. Silas's fingertips slid smoothly across the trackpad until his gaze bypassed the top of the inbox and locked onto a solitary, anonymous email lacking a subject line.
Acting on a sudden, unexplainable whim, he clicked the left mouse button.
The webpage popped up instantly. Within the pale blue dialog box, the content was incredibly short—just a single, simple line of text. Even the punctuation marks were utilized with a rigid adherence to a certain academic standard:
[Silas Shen, it's been a long time. I hear you've been doing well lately?]
And at the very bottom of this line of text, right in the signature area, three words were written cleanly and squarely.
[Julian Liang]
Clack.
It was the dull, crisp sound of the mouse colliding with the smooth office desktop under an uncontrollable, violent surge of force.
Silas's fingers, which had been preparing to grip the mouse to close the window, suddenly clenched tight the exact moment he registered those words. Exerting far too much force, his slender knuckles instantly lost all color, turning a translucent, almost tragically sickly white.
In that split second, the warm air in the laboratory seemed to be completely evacuated in the blink of an eye.
Silas's straight spine stiffened into a posture more rigid than a blade's edge.
Utterly abruptly, an intense wave of physiological nausea surged violently from the deepest recesses of his stomach. It felt as though an invisible, venomous hand lined with barbs was fiercely choking his esophagus, wrenching every single nerve in his body.
Within a few seconds, cold sweat completely soaked the shirt beneath his white lab coat. Silas stared fixedly at those words on the screen in a somewhat self-destructive manner, feeling a dense, sharp numbness crawl along his fingertips like a maggot in the bone, right until it froze his entire heart into solid ice.
That was a nightmare rotting with foul stench, an experience spanning a full decade that he had suppressed with the highest concentration of reason and the coldest experimental data.
"Professor? I passed by the South Gate and grabbed that latte you like best—less sugar, with ice. And my black coffee, I promise absolutely no..."
A highly vibrant, even slightly soaring and cheerful familiar voice suddenly resounded in the quiet corridor without any forewarning.
Immediately following, the frosted glass door of the office was kicked wide open by a long leg. Hunter Huo wore a loose, cream-white sweatshirt today, his entire person radiating the scent of warm sunlight as if he had just finished running on the sports field. He steadily held two cups of hot coffee packed from outside the campus.
However, the moment he saw the silhouette sitting before the computer, Hunter's unfinished words ground to a violent halt.
The youth's sharp intuition reached its absolute peak in this instant; an Alpha's instinctual perception of their mate's emotions caused his entire muscular frame to tense up immediately. Looking at Silas's overly rigid back and the fir tree scent bleeding into the air—which was slightly out of control, radiating an extreme wave of unease and resistance—the two coffee cups in his hands nearly slipped and smashed straight onto the floor.
"Professor?"
Hunter's movements even setting the coffee down appeared somewhat frantic. Taking a few strides to the laboratory bench, he set the cups down with a clatter. The cheerfulness within his tone vanished instantly, leaving behind nothing but an un-dissolvable wave of anxiety and panic. "What's wrong? Why is your face so pale?"
Hearing the youth's voice, Silas's unfocused phoenix eyes finally slowly reconvened amidst the faint blue glow of the monitor.
Acting almost entirely on a survival instinct, his long fingers slid frantically across the trackpad, forcibly closing the email interface entirely with an exceptionally swift, near-disheveled speed.
The computer monitor cut back to the dense rows of correction data, yet those lines that were originally beautiful now distorted like writhing, hideous vipers in Silas's eyes.
Silas closed his eyes, heavily exhaling the remaining cold air trapped in his lungs, doing his utmost to make his voice sound as ripple-free as usual. "It's nothing... just a piece of spam mail that wasn't filtered completely clean."
But he severely underestimated the observation skills of a top-tier Alpha.
Following the direction of the gaze Silas had used to close the window, Hunter's eyes slowly swept across the computer screen, which had already returned to normal. He did not press to ask what exactly was written in that so-called "spam mail," nor did he touch Silas's intentionally maintained dignity as a professor.
But he had seen it.
He had seen it with absolute clarity—when Silas closed the window with that rapid speed just now, those hands, which had always been as steady as a mountain before surgical tables and precision instruments without a single micrometer of error, were shaking.
It was an exceptionally fine, yet无尽 tremor carrying dread and resistance.
Hunter had known Silas for so long; he had seen him cold-faced, he had seen him restrained, he had seen his ear-tips flush from emotion, yet he had never seen this man terrified to such a state because of something.
For a moment, the office was left with only the curling steam rising from the coffee cups.
Hunter took a deep breath, dead-pressing those orange-scented pheromones—which were on the verge of overflowing due to his volatility—back into his body. Instead of leaning in to act spoiled and demand status like he usually did, he took a highly steady half-step forward, arriving right behind Silas.
Extending a broad, burning hot palm across that thin layer of the white lab coat, he slowly and exceptionally gently—yet carrying a weight of ten thousand tons—laid it upon Silas's slightly trembling shoulder.
The youth's palm was too hot, carrying the unique tenacity and certainty of a Huo family man who, once locked on, would never let go.
"No matter what it is," Hunter lowered his head, pressing his cheek close to Silas's somewhat cold earlobe. His voice was pitched extremely low, every single word landing firmly, carrying an indisputable, near-sacred sense of security. "Professor, I'm here."
I'm here. Not as an assistant researcher, but as your family, as your puppy.
That continuous, scorching scent of oranges traveling from his shoulder acted like the strongest autonomous blocker, finally forcing the physiological nausea in Silas's stomach down completely.
Silas's long eyelashes trembled violently behind his gold-rimmed lenses several times. Finally, he slowly closed his eyes, leaning his entire body backward marginally. Though it was a mere fraction of an inch, it rested squarely against the broad, solid chest of the youth behind him.
"...I know."
Silas responded in a low voice, a trace of micro-imperceptible raspiness woven into his cadence, yet he finally recaptured his warmth within the youth's palm.