By Zephyria 
“Larien, I still haven’t had the interview!”
Unable to hold back any longer, Bliss finally shouted. Larien, who had been chatting noisily, suddenly went quiet, and silence fell over the line. In that stillness, unable to bear the embarrassment, Bliss squeezed his eyes shut. That was when Larien asked.
—What do you mean? You haven’t had the interview? Were you rejected before you even went? Or did something happen?
She sounded completely unconvinced. Bliss took a deep breath and let it out with a loud sigh. He couldn’t delay it any further. In the end, he confessed honestly.
“I haven’t gone yet. I’m sorry.”
Larien fell silent once again. Bliss could vividly imagine her face, looking bewildered while holding her phone, and his vision seemed to go dark.
—…You haven’t gone yet? It’s been three days.
After a pause, Larien cut straight to the core of the matter.
—Why on earth?
Bliss answered like a lament.
“I have to get Papa’s permission.”
—Ah….
Only then did Larien let out a low groan. It was impossible to lie with Ashley Miller right in front of him. While the other siblings continued to try and fail repeatedly, Bliss hadn’t even dared to attempt it. Even when she taught him what to say, he always failed, unable to utter a single word. Because of this, he had lived his entire life without ever thinking of lying….
“If I say I’m going on a trip, Father will definitely attach this many bodyguards to me. Then I won’t even be able to get near the Count’s estate. And if I say I’m visiting the Strickland family, he’ll contact the Duke and Duchess immediately, right? Then that bastard will find out right away. He’ll hide himself thoroughly so that I can’t find any opening. As for studying… that’s completely out of the question. See, I don’t have a plausible excuse!”
—…Hah.
Larien sighed once more. There was no point in drafting a scenario if he couldn’t even use it. He probably wouldn’t even be able to memorize the lines properly. What was the use of all this if he couldn’t even reach the destination?
However, Bliss was stubborn. Once he set his mind to do something, he rarely gave up, and since this involved his family, he certainly wouldn’t quit easily. After a moment of silence, Larien proposed Plan B.
—Fine, let’s do this. I’ll buy you about a week’s worth of time.
“Time? What time?”
Bliss asked, puzzled by the unexpected words, and Larien answered nonchalantly.
—If the Count’s estate hires a servant, all this will be for nothing. I have to stop that from happening somehow. If you absolutely cannot go to England, we’ll have to abandon this plan.
Ah, Bliss realized. Larien was right. He hadn’t considered at all the possibility that the Count’s estate might hire another employee while he was just stalling for time.
“Th-thank you, Larien. I get it. You said a week, right? I’ll think of a way somehow.”
—Yeah, good luck. Fighting.
Larien gave a half-hearted encouragement to Bliss’s determination and then hung up.
One week. With a tense expression, Bliss checked his calendar. After drawing a star on the date seven days away, he took a deep breath and whipped himself into gear again.
“Think, think. Think of any way possible!”
He became absorbed in thought, hitting his head repeatedly, but no clever solution emerged. He simply let time slip away without a plan, blaming the limitations of his own intellect. Was it going to end this helplessly? One day, while falling into despair as he looked at the remaining dates, an unexpected opportunity surprisingly arrived.
3.
“What? To England?”
Bliss shouted in surprise at the sudden news. Ashley Miller looked at his youngest son, sitting opposite him at a small tea table, with a bitter feeling.
Between Ashley Miller, a Dominant Alpha, and Conor Niles, a Dominant Omega, there are six children. Five of them are Dominant Alphas, and only one—the youngest, Bliss—is an Omega. Moreover, he is a Dominant Omega, the only trait capable of triggering a rut in a Dominant Alpha that can cause memory impairment or mutate a Beta.
Because the Dominant Omega trait is the rarest and allows the user to completely hide their pheromones at will, they are often identified as Betas in trait tests. Consequently, it is natural for them to perceive themselves as Betas until their manifestation.
Such Dominant Omegas are usually born by a very slim chance of coincidence or between a Dominant Alpha and a Dominant Omega. Even then, the numbers are so small that most people never encounter a Dominant Omega in their entire lives. In the Miller family, only one of the six children was born with such a trait.
The problem was that all the other siblings were Dominant Alphas.
A Dominant Omega’s pheromones are powerful enough to render a Dominant Alpha helpless in an instant, and perhaps because of that, Dominant Alphas are instinctively and strongly attracted to them. Thus, before Bliss was born, the other siblings hovered around Koi, and after Bliss manifested as a Dominant Omega, they showed noticeable interest, often pestering him to let them smell his pheromones.
If there was any silver lining, it was that Bliss had not yet experienced a heat cycle, but….
From Ashley Miller’s perspective, watching this, he couldn’t help but be anxious. If he just left things be and Bliss were to trigger a heat cycle, the aftermath was horrific just to imagine. After much deliberation, he had made the children independent early on and warned them not to approach Bliss without permission, but in truth, there was no way to block them completely. Even now, he frequently received reports that they had contacted Bliss, evading Ashley’s surveillance.
Just like this time.
“Larien visited, didn’t she?”
“Hieeeek!”
As soon as the words were spoken, Bliss turned pale and gasped as if screaming. Ashley watched his son, slowly tapping his fingers on the armrest of the sofa.
The youngest son, who could neither lie nor hide his feelings and was no different from a puppy wagging its tail whenever he saw someone, was also the most precarious existence to him. This boy had absolutely no sense of crisis regarding other traits. To think it would be safe just because they were blood relatives was a preposterous delusion.
As expected, Bliss, not knowing what to do, let his eyes wander frantically before finally managing to speak.
“Pa-Papa. That, that is. The reason Larien came to our house is…!”
Seeing his son unable to continue, a sigh escaped Ashley’s lips. Although Ashley Miller was excessively strict about managing the children’s pheromones, he too was a Dominant Alpha, so he knew well how easily children of the same trait could crumble under an Omega’s pheromones.
Furthermore, due to the influence of pheromones, parts of a Dominant Alpha’s brain are not normal. Therefore, they often easily cross the boundaries of morality and taboos that ordinary people take for granted. This meant that committing an act as heinous as raping a sibling just to ‘vent’ pheromones was possible.
For this reason, he had been agonizing over a question for a long time: whether it was okay to let his children continue to interact like this.
Of course, the answer was already decided. It was only a matter of when. And finally, he had made the decision to send his beloved youngest son across the ocean.
“I am sorry to bring this up so suddenly.”
Bliss flinched and blinked at the truly abrupt statement. Ashley spoke, feeling guilt toward his youngest son, who was a bit lacking but the most lovable and, above all, resembled Koi the most.
“But it is inevitable for your safety. Once the other children find partners and leave marks, they will no longer be affected by your pheromones, so until then, we must use a method like this.”
Even if it was only a temporary measure.
An Alpha could leave a mark on a partner several times throughout their life, as much as they desired, but the effect was weak. It influenced the partner, but that was all. If another Alpha overlaid their own mark on top of an Omega’s existing mark, the previous mark would disappear, and if marks were left in different places, the Omega would be influenced by multiple people simultaneously. Perhaps because the restrictions of the mark were weak, there were also cases where they disappeared for no reason.