I Became the Villain Alpha's Omega (BL)-Chapter 135: A Warmth Shared in the Dark

It started as a heavy, waterlogged weight behind his eyes, the kind of pressure that makes you feel like you’re trying to swim to the surface of a frozen lake with stones in your pockets. Zarius didn’t wake up so much as he drifted upward, his consciousness snagging on the reality he didn’t quite recognize.

Everything was wrong. The North, by its very nature, was a place of biting winds and the scent of old frost, but the air he was breathing now felt thick. Stale. There was the smell of damp stone, yes, but beneath it was something else, the unmistakable, salt-sweet aroma of human sweat. And then there was the heat.

It was an invasive, unfamiliar warmth. It wasn’t the roaring, performative heat of a hearth back at home. It stayed close, steady, like it had its own rhythm. A living, breathing heat that seemed to be fighting a war against the ambient chill.

Zarius’s eyes opened, though they felt like they’d been glued shut with grit. The world was a blur of charcoal greys and deep, bruised shadows. His vision swam, a mix of rock and shadow, before finally, painfully, anchoring on a face.

Cherion. 𝒻𝓇𝑒𝘦𝘸𝑒𝒷𝓃ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝒸ℴ𝘮

The healer was right there, practically draped against him, their bodies pressed together beneath something heavy and warm. He wasn’t just close, he was an intimate constant, his presence taking up Zarius’s entire field of vision. Cherion was asleep, his head tilted at an awkward, neck-cramping angle against the Duke’s shoulder. His face, usually so animated and full of that sharp, Southern sass that Zarius found both irritating and strangely addictive, was a mask of pure exhaustion. There were dark smudges under his eyes that looked like thumbprints in the dust.

A heavy, fur-lined cloak, Zarius’s own, he realized with a start, was draped over them both like a makeshift tent. It kept the warmth in, turning the space under the cloak into something way too warm for the middle of a blizzard..

Zarius lay there, motionless. His heart, usually a steady, iron drum, gave a strange, fluttering kick against his ribs. The fall. It came back in jagged, strobe-light flashes. The sickening tilt of the carriage. The white-out void of the abyss. The weight of Cherion in his arms as they plummeted. He remembered jumping, not out of a sense of duty, but out of a sudden, terrifying realization that the world would be much darker if the man beside him wasn’t in it.

He tried to swallow, but his throat felt like it had been scrubbed with sand. He didn’t move yet, he just watched the steady rise and fall of Cherion’s chest. The healer’s breath was a soft, rhythmic puff against Zarius’s neck. It was a bizarrely domestic sight for two people who should, by all rights, be shattered corpses at the bottom of a ravine.

It was a bizarrely domestic sight for two people who should, by all rights, be shattered corpses at the bottom of a ravine.

A cave.

His brow furrowed faintly.

How...?

His gaze flickered back to Cherion, still half-draped over him, breathing shallow but steady.

...Did he drag me here?

"I hope you’re not hurt."

The words were a wreck. His voice was a low, guttural rasp that sounded more like grinding stones than human speech.

The sound, no matter how quiet, acted like a tripwire. Cherion didn’t just wake up, he jolted. His eyes snapped open, wide, frantic, and bloodshot, scanning the dark for a threat before they finally collided with Zarius’s crimson gaze. For a heartbeat, there was nothing but the sound of the wind howling outside the cave’s mouth.

Then, Cherion’s lower lip began to wobble. It was a tiny, pathetic tremor that he clearly tried to bite back, but the dam had already broken.

"Oh my god," Cherion choked out, his voice cracking into a dozen pieces. "You’re awake. You’re actually... you absolute, idiotic, suicidal lunatic."

Before Zarius could even process the insult, he was blindsided. Cherion lunged, throwing his arms around Zarius’s neck and squeezing with a strength that suggested he was trying to fuse their ribcages together. He buried his face in the crook of Zarius’s neck, his shoulders shaking with the kind of silent, racking sobs that happen when a person has spent too many hours holding their breath.

"I thought I’d end up alone," Cherion sobbed into his skin, the words muffled and desperate. "I thought I was going to have to sit here in this freezing, miserable hole with your dead body until I turned into a popsicle. Don’t ever do that again. Do you hear me? I’ll kill you myself if you jump off another cliff."

Zarius felt a strange, jarring vibration in his chest, a chuckle that turned into a ragged, painful cough. The movement sent a flare of heat through his side, but he didn’t pull away. He couldn’t. His own arms, feeling like lead weights, slowly came up to ghost over Cherion’s back.

"I... think I’m already dying... of your grip," Zarius managed to wheeze out once the coughing fit subsided.

Cherion pulled back just enough to look at him, his face a disaster of tears and dirt, but he didn’t let go. He kept his hands clutched in the fur of the cloak, his knees tucked tightly against Zarius’s thighs. It was then that Zarius tried to shift, to perhaps sit up or at least find a more dignified position for a Duke of the North.

That’s when he felt it.

Or rather, he felt the lack of it.

His brow furrowed, a flicker of genuine confusion crossing his face. He moved his hand, and instead of the cold, unyielding bite of his enchanted steel breastplate or the familiar rasp of his wool tunic, he felt... skin. His own skin. And the warmth he had been registering wasn’t just radiating through clothes.

He looked down, his eyes widening as the edge of the cloak shifted. His armor was gone. His tunic was gone. In fact, most of his dignity seemed to have been left somewhere on the cliffside. He was entirely bare from the waist up, and he wasn’t the only one.

Cherion, sensing the sudden, rigid stillness in the Alpha, went very quiet. He didn’t move away, but his face turned a shade of red that rivaled a Southern sunset.

Zarius’s gaze traveled from his own bare chest to Cherion’s equally exposed shoulders. The realization of what had happened, the skin-to-skin contact, the shared heat, the desperate, clinical intimacy of survival, hit him with the force of a physical blow. It was a level of vulnerability he hadn’t experienced since... well, perhaps never.

He looked at Cherion, his voice dropping an octave, becoming something much more dangerous and much less certain.

"Cherion," Zarius rumbled, his eyes fixed on the younger one. "Why... why are we both currently missing our clothes?"