The Exiled Alpha's Human Male Mate.[BL]

A bitter chuckle escaped Bryce, even as tears gathered in his eyes, born from anything but joy.

What he had just seen left him incapable of distinguishing whether he wanted to laugh or break down and cry, the emotions were so tangled that he could barely identify what he was feeling himself.

He hated that he still cared at all, because it only confirmed that his feelings for Dave were still very much alive, and that, once again, Dave had managed to hurt him deeply enough to leave him utterly speechless.

Or perhaps what wounded him most was seeing Dave with someone he had intentionally made to impersonate him.

Or perhaps it was the possibility that the young man was meant to impersonate Eli instead, which only dragged Bryce back to the painful realization of how Dave had used him to impersonate Eli.

"You disgust me, Dave."

The words emerged through a tremor in his voice.

"This is just your thing, isn’t it? Trying to substitute people. How many of me do you have so far? What about Eli? How many of them have you created?"

Dave did not answer immediately.

He remained rigid, his eyes fixed on Bryce, his face taut with a mixture of terror and tension.

It was obvious that he wanted to explain himself, that there was something he desperately needed to say, but the words seemed to have abandoned him entirely.

His gaze shifted toward Vincent, and sheer disbelief flashed across his face, as though he could scarcely believe that the very man Bryce had been seeing had actually dared to appear before him.

A multitude of emotions flickered across Dave’s face in rapid succession.

_

Vincent, meanwhile, appeared almost indifferent to the turmoil unfolding infront of him.

His attention was directed toward the large, dark window. Or, more accurately, toward what was happening beyond it.

A faint metallic click reached his ears.

The sound was followed by the barely perceptible red glow of a weapon outside, its aim unmistakably trained on Dave’s neck.

He watched without immediately intervening.

For a fleeting moment, he seemed to be weighing whether Dave was worth saving at all. But the moment the trigger was pulled, Vincent reacted on instinct.

He moved with startling speed, seizing Dave and violently wrenching him out of its path, throwing him across the room.

But he was a fraction too late.

The bullet tore through Dave’s lower leg before continuing onward and embedding itself somewhere inside the opposite wall.

Dave crashed onto the floor with a strangled groan, clutching his injured leg as blood immediately began spilling beneath him.

Vincent moved toward him, grabbed Dave’s shirt, tore the fabric from his body, and wrapped it tightly around the wound, applying enough pressure to slow the bleeding.

Dave looked up at him, his face contorted by pain and fury.

"You fucking bastard!" he spat. "You were trying to kill me so you could have him freely! Then why did you change your mind and pull me away? So you could humiliate me first?"

Vincent stared at him for a moment before rolling his eyes.

"I can’t believe this is the person you’re so crazily into," he muttered, turning away from Dave and toward Bryce.

The sheer disbelief in his voice made it sound as though Bryce’s choice in men had personally offended him.

He approached the window and pushed it open.

"Terrible taste, honestly. I should have let him die."

Before either man could respond, Vincent climbed through the window and disappeared into the darkness beyond it.

Bryce remained where he was, staring after him in bewilderment.

Dave, meanwhile, was still clutching his injured leg, his breathing uneven as blood continued to seep through the makeshift bandage.

Less than a minute passed, then a body came hurtling through the open window.

It struck the floor heavily.

Before Bryce could fully process what he was seeing, another man was thrown into the room, landing near the first with a pained groan.

Both men were visibly injured, their bodies battered badly enough that neither appeared capable of attempting an escape.

Vincent followed afterward, climbing back through the same window with remarkable composure.

Bryce was stunned when he recognized the two men Vincent had dragged into the room. He knew them by face immediately.

They were Dave’s own bodyguard and driver, the very men entrusted with protecting him and ensuring his safety.

"What the hell is going on?!" Dave demanded, his voice breaking with shock and pain as he stared at the two men on the floor.

His grip tightened around his wounded leg, but his attention remained fixed on them, "Antony, did you just try to kill me?"

As Dave spoke, Vincent quietly reached into his mind, intending to erase every memory of Bryce from it, just as he had planned.

But the moment he began trying to extract Bryce from them, he encountered something he had never anticipated.

Bryce was everywhere.

He was woven through Dave’s memories so thoroughly that Vincent could not isolate him from the rest.

He was in Dave’s thoughts, embedded within his recollections, threaded through his emotions, as though Bryce had somehow permeated every part of the man’s mind.

It was almost as if he existed in Dave’s blood, his heart, his very consciousness, leaving Vincent with nothing he could simply reach in and remove without destroying everything surrounding it.

The realization frustrated Vincent, he withdrew from Dave’s mind and turned toward Bryce, cutting across whatever Dave was saying.

"I think our work is done here. He’s a mafia lord; he can get whatever answers he needs from his own men and figure out what’s going on. Come on, let’s go."

Bryce hesitated.

Every instinct urged him to leave the room immediately, to put as much distance as possible between himself and Dave before the man could pull him back into the suffocating existence, but his feet refused to move.

The realization that Dave’s own men, the people who were supposed to protect him, had apparently been willing to turn against him and accept an order to kill him was impossible to ignore.

But when Vincent reached for his hand, Bryce allowed him to take it. He let Vincent lead him toward the door.

"Bryce..."

Fear trembled through that single word, bringing Bryce’s footsteps to an involuntary halt, but he didn’t turn around.

"Don’t do this to me, please. I’m begging you... okay?"

Dave’s voice fractured.

"I can’t live without you. I swear, I really can’t. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry, I shouldn’t have tried to make another person impersonate you, and I shouldn’t have tried to sleep with him. After our fight earlier, I wasn’t thinking straight. I was terrified by what I almost did to you,"

Dave admitted, his voice becoming increasingly unsteady.

"I only wanted to find someone I could use to release those desires so I wouldn’t become overwhelmed by them and try to force you to do it when you didn’t want to."

Bryce remained motionless, while Vincent’s expression shifted at Dave’s admission.

"He tried to force himself on you?"

Dave’s head snapped toward him.

"Shut up, you bastard! I’m going to kill you, Vincent Walker...!"

The threat barely escaped his mouth before his body suddenly gave out, collapsing completely onto the floor.

"Dave!" Bryce blurted out, the name escaping him in a rush of alarm.

His face had gone deathly pale, and the blood that had previously been contained beneath the torn fabric began seeping through it again, staining the cloth as his body lay motionless on the floor.

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