Took advantage a little

When the wine bottle burst open against that tall, burly B-rank Alpha’s head, the crisp sound of shattering glass gave Wu Qie a strangely familiar sense of comfort.

Did Wu Qie know how to fight?

Of course he did.

Seven or eight years ago, on that wild West Coast where chaos was practically a way of life, alleyways, underpasses, and street courts were filled with white guys and Black guys high out of their minds—

They roamed the streets in groups all day, shouting about rights and justice, but in reality, Asians were the ones truly at the bottom of the food chain.

Back in high school, Wu Qie liked going to street courts to play one-on-one basketball.
At first, it was purely about playing ball.

That kind of simplicity was like a little white rabbit falling into a wolf’s den.

Discrimination and bullying were inevitable, so besides playing, he also had to fight.

The turning point came one time when he tried to go for a layup and was maliciously shoved, crashing into the hoop stand and ending up with blood streaming down his face.

Amid the surrounding laughter, he calmly turned around and put the basketball back into his bag.

Then, before the blood had even finished dripping, he single-handedly took down three Betas and one C-rank Alpha.

Men earn respect through blood.

With that one fight, Wu Qie became famous.

By his second year of high school, Wu Qie had become a well-known “pillar” of that street court.

Everyone knew that by the seaside court, there was an underage Chinese kid who played incredibly well—and fought even better.

The foreigners couldn’t pronounce his name, and he refused to take an English name, so they started calling him “WU.”

After a while, “WU” turned into “woo-woo.”

Every time Wu Qie stepped onto the court, “woo-woo” echoed everywhere.

He would sometimes imagine that he had raised a pack of stray dogs by the sea.

Although Wu Qie only wanted to play basketball, people liked to use “woo-woo” to gamble, betting on wins and losses, on how many points he would win or lose by.

Most of the time, Wu Qie stayed out of it.

But occasionally, when someone lost too much and suspected foul play, they would drag him into it.

At least three times a month, his routine became: play basketball → explain that he wasn’t involved in the gambling → fail to convince them → end up fighting anyway.

This situation continued until the second semester of his second year, when a pair of Italian twins transferred into the school.

They were heirs of a proper mafia family.

Because their personalities were too unruly, the hospital diagnosed them with genetic issues.

The two of them teamed up to deal with the doctor who wrote the diagnosis, and their father, who could no longer tolerate them, exiled them there.

From that point on, Wu Qie had bodyguards.

He spent at least one peaceful semester playing at the street court, and no one dared to provoke him again.

Until one day, the younger twin—who had an explosive temper and was firmly benched on the school team—stood in the locker room after showering, not even bothering with a towel, completely naked, and asked Wu Qie, who had just presented as a Beta, whether he could bear him a child.

“If it’s you, I wouldn’t mind your inferior Beta genes.”

—A bunch of lunatic Alphas.

Wu Qie fleeing back to his home country overnight was partly because of those two insane twins.

Later, Wu Qie sometimes saw a shadow of that madness in Zhao Shu.
But compared to someone who treated real guns as toys at the age of three, Zhao Shu actually seemed rather innocent.

Sometimes Teacher Wu would sigh, wondering why the rule of “losing one thing means gaining another” only ever applied to this kind of nonsense.

—and at this very moment, the principle that “Alphas are all insane” was gaining even more credibility.

Wu Qie had the B-rank Alpha pinned face-down, one arm twisted behind his back.

The Omega waiters dressed as bunnies and cats in high heels could only scream around them.

The crowd quickly descended into chaos.

Wu Qie sat on the man’s waist, bending his wrist, and asked,

“Apologize?”

The Alpha, someone with enough status to be present tonight, felt humiliated.

Under the dim lighting, even if others couldn’t recognize him, he still felt his pride completely shattered.

He spat and said, “What the hell are you acting for? A Beta waiter pretending to be virtuous—ahhh!”

Wu Qie expressionlessly snapped his fingers.

Not many—just the two that had grabbed his ass earlier.

…

While chaos erupted downstairs, Zhao Guipu had just opened the second bottle of wine for the night.

The ice cubes in the glass were cut into perfect squares, crystal clear, emitting a cold mist.

The sound of glass shattering drifted up from below.

He lifted his lashes slightly, his expression unchanged.

At that moment, he was still quite confident that no one would be foolish enough to come onto his territory and cause trouble.

In the private glass room on the second floor sat his business partner for this deal, from the Vise family in Europe.

Their background was far from clean—murder, arson, gambling, union manipulation—they had their hands in everything.

They were one of the oldest and most tightly structured mafia families, and internally very united.

Digert Vise’s younger brother, a fifty-five-year-old A-rank Alpha known as “The Fool in Holy Robes,” was famous for being cunning and low-key.

After trade relations were cut, he immediately arrived in the country to negotiate business with Zhao Guipu—to borrow ships.

At that moment, standing by the floor-to-ceiling window, he smiled and said in Italian,

“There’s a little one fighting downstairs.”

Zhao Guipu didn’t respond.

He was, in fact, a little surprised.

Looking down from the window, he saw someone pressing a security guard’s head against the wall.

Two guards behind him were trying to grab his waist.

Several security personnel were already lying on the ground.

The stage downstairs had originally been arranged according to Digert’s preferences, with waves of dancers performing one after another.

Now they were all pale with fear.

The floor was a mess, and barely any tables were still standing.

The lighting was dim, and Zhao Guipu couldn’t clearly see who it was.

Judging by the overly conservative white shirt and dress pants, it looked like some ordinary waiter who had wandered in by mistake.

He flicked his finger and rang the bell, asking the person who came in,

“What’s happening down there?”

His voice was low, without any discernible emotion.

The one who came to answer was the acting manager of the hotel.

Normally he carried himself well, second only to one person, but when Zhao Guipu came here, he behaved like a dog guarding the door.

Now, being questioned while the situation downstairs was still unresolved, cold sweat instantly broke out.

He stammered, “It’s a Beta… probably came to the wrong place by mistake… and was mistaken for a waiter by the guests…”

Digert laughed.
He understood multiple languages, including Chinese.

Even if he didn’t, he would still recognize the word “Beta.”

“So anyone can come and make trouble on Mr. Zhao’s territory? I’m afraid I won’t be able to keep a single one of your crew.”

The ship was meant to be lent out, and some crew members were expected to be temporarily idle—that had been planned.

But only part of them, like basic security and deckhands.

If none of the senior crew remained, Zhao’s side would still have to pay their base salaries during downtime.

And those salaries were high.

After subtracting maintenance costs and wages, the money earned from leasing the ship would be no different from doing charity work.

Zhao Guipu glanced at the smiling Digert and waved impatiently at the manager.

“Deal with it.”

The manager wiped his sweat and nodded repeatedly before hurrying out.

At that moment, the black-haired young man downstairs released the security guard he had been smashing and kicked the person who tried to attack him from behind.

As he turned, his already wrinkled shirt lifted slightly.

A beam of light hit his eyes, and he narrowed them sharply.

Like a wild cat caught in the light in the middle of the night.

Zhao Guipu paused.

“Wait.”

…

In the end, Wu Qie was subdued by four security guards working together and dragged upstairs.

At that point, he was practically seeing red.
With the mindset that everyone present was trash, he had been hitting anyone he saw.

His knuckles were swollen.

His hair, which had been neatly arranged earlier, was now messy.

His clothes were stained with splattered blood—he didn’t even know whether it was his or someone else’s.

Thrown onto a soft carpet, he didn’t react immediately.

The first thing he noticed was the faint smell of alcohol—not pheromones.

When he looked up, he first saw a pair of long, crossed legs on the sofa, the soles of the shoes facing him.

Then his gaze moved upward.
He saw someone familiar.

To be precise, someone who, before he had agreed to coexist peacefully with Zhao Shu in this marriage, could be considered his “former” relative—his… elder brother-in-law.

Wu Qie was pressed face-down, his back held down.

The black leather shoe in front of him landed on the floor as the man leaned down, gripping his chin and lifting his face.

It was said that when Zhao Guipu was younger, he often sailed personally, even steering ships himself.

Although he no longer went on long voyages, he still went out every year on shorter routes.

Because of that, unlike other pampered elites, his fingertips and palms were rough, with thick calluses.

When those calluses brushed against Wu Qie’s brow, he winced sharply and sucked in a breath.

“Now you know it hurts.”

When the man released him, Wu Qie clearly saw a smear of blood on his fingertips.

There must have been a cut on his brow that had been repeatedly rubbed.

Deliberately.

Wu Qie struggled to lift his head.

Now that he had calmed down, he felt pain all over his body.

His forehead was damp, and one side of his face felt swollen and hot.

Zhao Guipu looked him over for a moment.

For the first time, a hint of something like helplessness appeared in his otherwise calm gaze.

He waved his hand.

“Enough. Let him go.”

The pressure on Wu Qie’s back disappeared immediately.

But just as he got up, a large hand grabbed his wrist.

Unlike Zhao Shu’s rough, forceful pulling, this grip was dry, steady, and impossible to resist.

Before Wu Qie could react, he was pulled onto Zhao Guipu’s lap.

The man’s warm breath brushed against the wound on his forehead.

The scent of tobacco mixed with cologne surrounded him—there was not a trace of pheromones.

Wu Qie froze.

For a moment, even his voice was stuck in his throat.
The man’s hand slid over his back, pressing lightly through the thin fabric of his shirt, tracing down his spine.

His entire body tingled.

He instinctively tried to get up, but the firm thigh beneath him felt like a restraint device.

Sensing his movement, the hand on his back slid down to his waist and applied slight pressure.

“Don’t move.”

The man’s lips brushed his temple, his tone intimate but threatening.

“I don’t know how you ended up here, but you’ve already put my deal at risk. Cooperate, or tomorrow Wu Wenxiong can go to Shark Bay to retrieve your body.”

To outsiders, it looked like the black-haired Beta stiffened briefly before obediently leaning into the man’s arms.

Zhao Guipu chuckled softly.

The hand on Wu Qie’s waist moved away and instead cupped his chin, wiping the blood from his face.

Then he looked up at the other man in the room and said in Italian,

“He’s mine. I told him to stay in the room, but he heard there would be something interesting tonight and couldn’t sit still, so he came down to make trouble.”

…

As Zhao Guipu spoke casually, his fingers lifted the hem of Wu Qie’s shirt and slipped underneath.

His large hand moved slowly against his skin.

Almost instantly, goosebumps spread across Wu Qie’s body.

That touch—

It felt familiar.

The same spot on his waist that had been injured before.

Wu Qie didn’t know if it was intentional.

But he knew one thing—

The threat just now was real.

So even though his entire body was stiff with discomfort and resistance, he didn’t struggle.

The man’s hand didn’t leave his waist.

Almost as if he was reluctant to.

That patch of sensitive skin felt like it was burning.

Wu Qie bit his tongue.

The metallic taste of blood lingered in his mouth.

Knowing his bruised face wouldn’t earn him any sympathy, he simply lowered his head and buried his face into the man’s neck.

…

Zhao Guipu seemed slightly surprised. His hand paused briefly.

Then he laughed softly.

The vibration of his chest made Wu Qie’s nose itch.

Finally, the hand withdrew. The man patted his backside lightly.

“Go. Apologize to my guest.”

Wu Qie lifted his head and looked at the other person in the room for the first time.

A high-ranking Alpha. Blond, blue-eyed, European, around fifty, well-built.

Two high-level Alphas—completely different from the trash downstairs.

Wu Qie felt a surge of frustration.

He had only smashed the place because someone touched him and now he had been thoroughly handled by the real owner.

Swallowing his anger, he turned slightly, still half-sitting on Zhao Guipu’s lap, and said in English,

“Sorry for the disturbance.”

The black-haired Beta, bruised and bloodied, wasn’t as polished as the performers downstairs.

But when his long lashes lowered over his dark eyes, the man still looked at him twice.

The European Alpha finished his drink and laughed.

“Mr. Zhao has good taste. He reminds me of my two unruly nephews.”

Wu Qie didn’t understand most of it.

He instinctively turned to Zhao Guipu for translation.

But their close posture made his nose brush lightly against the man’s cheek.

Zhao Guipu leaned back slightly and didn’t translate.

Instead, he lifted Wu Qie off his lap and set him down, smoothing out his wrinkled clothes.

His movements were gentle—almost affectionate.

“Go back. Wait in the room. Don’t cause trouble.”

Wu Qie felt chills run down his spine.

“…Okay.”

He glanced downstairs.

“What about down there…?”

Zhao Guipu raised an eyebrow slightly, amused.

“What, you want to pay for it?”

Oh.

So he didn’t have to.

Good.

Wu Qie shut up immediately.

Zhao Guipu gestured toward the door.

Someone outside immediately entered and was ordered to escort him out.

As Wu Qie walked out, he glanced back.

Zhao Guipu leaned back slightly, relaxed, and lit a cigarette.

Through the smoke, his fingers brushed over his lips—

The same fingers that had just been touching him.

The glass door closed.

And his view was cut off completely.