The Ring of Bondage - Chapter 1.20

IV.

As the two of them moved together to Luke’s lodgings, he calmed down, if only slightly. Of course, that didn’t mean he had returned to the kind and dignified student Yuria knew.

Luke seemed to be turning something over in his mind as he held Yuria’s hand tightly. With the soldiers surrounding them, she couldn’t run away anyway, yet Luke treated Yuria like smoke that would scatter if he so much as took his eyes off her.

Yuria looked down at the large hand clasping hers firmly. Even after they were left alone in an unfamiliar room, Luke didn’t let go of her hand. Perhaps he intended to hold on to her like this until they reached the ducal residence.

Yuria carefully studied Luke’s expression. With a grave look, he lowered his gaze, moved his lips several times, then turned his head toward Yuria.

“Teacher. You didn’t happen to form an imprint with that man earlier, did you?”

“What? What are you… Luke!”

Yuria, who understood Luke’s words a beat late, shouted in bewilderment. He was asking whether Derek was her imprint partner. Good heavens, an imprint. The word alone made her face burn.

“Derek, that man is just my student’s older brother. An imprint, far from anything like that… I’ve never even smelled Derek’s pheromones…”

At all. Yuria couldn’t finish her sentence. Luke had clearly called him an inferior alpha. As if he had already sensed Derek’s pheromones even from a distance. The scent of an alpha that she, standing right beside him, hadn’t been able to smell.

‘I thought Derek was simply suppressing his pheromones out of courtesy, but if that wasn’t it…’

Yuria covered her mouth.

There was only one reason an omega couldn’t sense another alpha’s pheromones—an imprint.

Was the reason her heat cycle hadn’t come since she left the ducal residence because of the imprint too? But that couldn’t be. It was true that she had joined bodies with Luke during her heat cycle, but a physical relationship alone wasn’t enough for an imprint. An imprint couldn’t be formed through just coupling without feelings.

In Yuria’s mind, a puzzle she didn’t even want to think about fell into place.

“You’ve never… smelled them?”

“No, I, I…”

“If you couldn’t feel that man’s pheromones, then what about mine?”

A familiar scent wrapped around Yuria’s body. A scent that made her heart pound until she could barely breathe. Luke’s pheromones were so thick and clear that her mind went dizzy.

That scent told her the terrible conclusion. Yuria had imprinted on her student that night.

What that meant was clear. Before she had even joined bodies with Luke, she had already held feelings for him.

The emotions she had dismissed and erased as simple regret came back to her belatedly. The base jealousy she had felt while imagining Luke’s wedding, the way she had grown stifled at the news that marriage talks had come in for him, the gaze with which she had watched Luke after he had grown so much that he could no longer be called young.

Had all of that been love?

Guilt and self-loathing mixed together and surged inside her. In the end, everything had been her fault. In a way even uglier than she had already known.

“I’m sorry, I, I…”

“Teacher.”

“I…”

Panting for breath, Yuria curled in on herself. She had been able to run from the mansion. All she had to do was flee with her body.

But how was she supposed to run from this disgusting truth?

No matter what she did, she couldn’t undo what had happened. Even now, her body was gradually heating up. Her imprint partner’s pheromones were urging on her heat.

Unable even to scream, Yuria trembled. Taking her chin in his hand and lifting it, Luke asked in a low voice.

“Please answer me clearly, Teacher. Whether I really am your imprint partner. Whether you react only to me, just as I do to you.”

Just as I do.

Yuria repeated Luke’s words and drew in a breath.

“Luke. Are you saying that you imprinted on me?”

Without an answer, only questions circled round and round. A single tear gathered and rolled from the corner of her trembling eye. Before a reality she didn’t know how to accept, Yuria was simply afraid.

“Yes. I knew right away at the banquet that day. What about you, Teacher?”

Luke’s face, which had been slowly drawing closer, only stopped when the tips of their noses touched. His long eyelashes cast shadows over his bluish-purple eyes. Time flowed slowly, like their breaths mingling in the air.