Marked by My Omega Rival After Moving In (GL, ABO) - Chapter 33

She was the one who drove Yu Xiaoxiao to the hospital that day.

Xiang Shuhuai hadn’t planned on staying, but when she saw Yu Xiaoxiao looking down, the usual lightness gone from her expression, she hesitated. In the end, she stayed and said softly, “I’ll go up with you.”

Yu Xiaoxiao smiled and nodded. “Okay.”

Yu’s father was already waiting in the hallway. The moment Xiang Shuhuai saw his anxious figure pacing back and forth, she quietly said goodbye to Yu Xiaoxiao and didn’t go any farther.

She stood at the end of the hallway, watching from a distance as Yu Xiaoxiao ran a few quick steps to her father, tightly grasping his hand. The two of them silently supported each other before slowly opening the envelope containing the report.

Xiang Shuhuai couldn’t read the words on the paper, but she saw the two of them freeze, looking at each other in shock. Then Yu’s father suddenly slumped in relief, tears of joy running down his face, and Yu Xiaoxiao threw herself into his arms.

“We… we should call your mom.” Her father sobbed. “It’s great news, really great news… Your mom’s so lucky. And so are we…”

Yu Xiaoxiao wiped her tears and nodded hard. “Yeah!”

—The tumor was benign.

The heavy weight in Xiang Shuhuai’s chest finally lifted.

Thank goodness, she thought. This is how it should be.

She didn’t have any real relationship with Yu Danchun. But… someone like Yu Xiaoxiao shouldn’t have to suffer something like this. Now that everything was okay—it really was a relief.

Standing at the end of the hallway, Xiang Shuhuai watched the happy family from afar.

Yu’s father had already made the call, and Yu Xiaoxiao was holding the phone tightly, excitedly telling her mom the good news—

…But Xiang Shuhuai had neither the identity nor the reason to go over there.

After standing there for a moment longer, she quietly turned and walked away from the hallway.

That night, Yu Xiaoxiao didn’t come home.

Which, of course, made sense. Xiang Shuhuai understood. These past few days, both Yu Xiaoxiao and her father had been under constant stress—eating poorly, sleeping poorly, and mentally exhausted. Now that they’d finally received good news, it was only natural for the family to spend time together.

A family reunion. And after that—what then?

Xiang Shuhuai didn’t have any experience with that. She couldn’t even imagine it. So she just crawled into bed, still confused.

Her fingers hovered over the light switch for a moment, but she didn’t turn off the little nightlight shaped like a Shiba Inu.

…It was too dark here. And too quiet.

She was used to living alone. But with Yu Xiaoxiao gone, the house suddenly felt way too empty. Over the past week, Yu Xiaoxiao hadn’t been sleeping well. Sometimes, Xiang Shuhuai would stay in her room with her until she fell asleep before going back to her own room. But now, outside her tightly shut door, there was nothing but darkness.

Curled up in the softness of her blanket, Xiang Shuhuai found herself thinking again.

Maybe… she shouldn’t have come back?

Now that Chairman Yu was okay, he would have plenty of time to guide Yu Xiaoxiao. Yu Xiaoxiao didn’t need her anymore.

…So what reason did she have to stay?

But she’d already taken her sleeping meds. The drowsiness was starting to hit, and she didn’t have the strength to get up and pack her things to leave.

Tomorrow morning. Once she woke up, she’d say goodbye to Yu Xiaoxiao and leave.

With that thought in mind, Xiang Shuhuai closed her eyes, letting the sleepiness take over, and drifted off.

…But she dreamed of her.

She was sitting at a school desk, surrounded by a crowd of students.

All their eyes turned to Xiang Shuhuai—laughing, mocking, cruel—and she looked at Xiang Shuhuai with a surprised, innocent smile.

Lying open on the desk was Xiang Shuhuai’s old high school diary, its pages worn from use.

Xiang Shuhuai was trapped at the front of the classroom, chained in place by invisible restraints piercing through her collarbones. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t escape.

…A page was turned.

“Ah… she marked you.”

This time, the gentle, childlike voice softly read out the words, each one cutting deep, like someone slicing open her chest and carving them straight into her heart. “That kid?”

Xiang Shuhuai clenched her lips.

“Oh, wait.” The girl corrected herself. “You made her mark you. She didn’t want to do it, right? She was reluctant back then, wasn’t she?”

…Xiang Shuhuai wanted to wake up.

She tried with everything she had—but the dream wouldn’t let her go.

“Did you do it on purpose?” the voice continued, pure and sweet, and all the more cruel because of it. “Did you, ‘my little kitten’?”

Xiang Shuhuai gritted her teeth. “…I’m not yours.”

The girl just gave a soft laugh.

“So cunning,” she said. “Xiang Shuhuai, you like this kind of thing, don’t you? You let her mark you on purpose, used that biological bond to tie her to you—even if all she gave you was a bit of kindness she gives to everyone?”

“I didn’t…”

“You love using her kindness, don’t you? She’s so easy to fool, it’s simple to keep her close. Xiang Shuhuai, are you sure you never once had a thought like that?”

Xiang Shuhuai squeezed her eyes shut.

“Now you two are friends,”

The voice kept whispering, like a snake hissing in her ear.

“—You tricked some pure, clueless girl into being your friend, just to satisfy your pitiful desires. You must be so pleased with yourself.”

Her eyes were shut tight, but she could still see the figure in front of her slowly changing—turning into Yu Xiaoxiao.

In the middle of Xiang Shuhuai’s nightmare, Yu Xiaoxiao looked like she didn’t even belong to this world—so clean, so innocent, it was like she was untouched by any of it.

Yu Xiaoxiao sat there, her round, clear eyes full of confusion as she looked at her. Then she spoke: “…Is that true?”

“Did you trick me, Xiang Shuhuai?”

“I didn’t—!!”

Xiang Shuhuai jolted awake—only to find herself still trapped in a different nightmare from high school.

That sweet, delicate face stared back at her with wide, shocked eyes, as if just now realizing all the dirty thoughts Xiang Shuhuai had ever had—disgust flashing in her expression.

She stood up from her desk, pushed the diary away, and backed up step by step.

“I—I thought…” she shook her head, but her eyes glinted with something dark, almost entertained. “Shuhuai, I thought we were just friends…”

As her words fell to the ground, boom—the whole class erupted into whooping laughter. One of the alpha boys grabbed her diary and threw it high into the air.

Pages fluttered down like snow, slow and light, but they came crashing down on her all the same. Xiang Shuhuai could see every page, every line—printed in black ink, but each stroke seared into her like open wounds.

In the middle of that storm, she saw Gu Jiaxiao just standing there—watching her like she was watching a show, amused and entertained.

That was someone she had once been too powerless to stand up to.

Xiang Shuhuai bit down so hard that her mouth filled with the taste of bl00d. She reached forward desperately, breaking through the invisible wall in her dream, trying to grab hold of that person.

“Gu Jiaxiao—!!”

She finally had strength now.

But—her hand had turned into that of a small child’s. Thin, bony, frighteningly tiny, as if it couldn’t hold onto anything at all.

The young Xiang Shuhuai rushed forward and fell to the ground, and everything around her started to change.

—She was suddenly back in the very first “home” she had ever known.

Her younger self was curled up in a room, trembling as she leaned all her weight against a desk shoved up against the door.

Behind her, the door was being hacked at with loud thuds. A kitchen knife slammed down again and again. The door shook under the blows like it was being hit by thunder, each strike heavier than the last, as if it would shatter any second.

Back then, she wasn’t called Xiang Shuhuai. She had another name—taken from her stepfather’s last name.

Her biological mother, Liu Xiu, was a female omega. She hadn’t finished college before becoming a model, hoping to help pay off her family’s debts and support her younger siblings. Later, Liu Xiu met Xiang Hongshan.

Coming from poverty and lacking life experience, Liu Xiu was no match for the then-CEO of the Xiang Group. All it took was a few sweet words and gestures for her to fall deeply for the man who was over a decade older than her. Holding on to her naïve fantasies about love, Liu Xiu became one of Xiang Hongshan’s many mistresses.

But after she got pregnant, Xiang Hongshan quickly lost interest. Forced to drop out of school and lose her job as a model, and shamed by her family, Liu Xiu had to find whatever work she could to survive. She knew—she was an omega, and omegas needed someone to rely on. How could she survive on her own?

So she soon married Wang Xing, a man who had already been married once before. He was a beta.

Since her stepfather’s last name was Wang, the child was also given the surname Wang.

Out of her lingering love for Xiang Hongshan, Liu Xiu named her daughter Si Hong—思虹, meaning “thinking of Hong.”

Wang Sihong.

It was a cursed name. Just thinking of it made Xiang Shuhuai want to throw up. Every character of that name was something she hated most in the world.

—Her stepfather. Her biological father. And her mother’s pathetic dependence on one, and foolish love for the other.

Wang Xing had divorced his first wife because of his alcoholism. When he drank, he got violent.

Day after day, the young Xiang Shuhuai hid in her room, crying as she listened to the sounds outside—the crash of heavy objects hitting the ground, the shatter of glass bottles, her stepfather’s drunken roars and violent fists, and her mother’s sobs and screams for mercy.

Nothing ever changed. Until she had no more tears to cry. She’d just stare blankly at her bedsheet, stained with old, brown bl00d. That was when she started learning how to hurt herself.

She once begged Liu Xiu to leave him. “Let’s run away together,” she said. But her mother just told her, “Sihong, I’m doing this for you. So you can have a whole family.”

Xiang Shuhuai had believed that lie once.

When she was twelve, she came home from school and saw her stepfather beating her mother again. This time, the beta man was completely out of control. He smashed a broken bottle over Liu Xiu’s head and swung a kitchen knife with the other hand. He had her by the throat, and it looked like she had stopped breathing.

Bl00d was everywhere—on the couch, the cement floor, their bodies. Red was all Xiang Shuhuai could see.

She didn’t cry. Just walked over with a blank face, picked up the fruit knife that had fallen next to the overturned coffee table—

—and stabbed it into the man’s lower back.

Bl00d poured out.

Everything after that was a blur.

Her mother shoved her into a room with a lock. Her stepfather, clutching his wound, hacked at the door in a rage, screaming that he’d kill her like an animal. Her mother lay still on the floor for a long time before leaping up again—like a real wild animal—and attacked the man with teeth and nails.

Xiang Shuhuai never knew why.

Was it a mother’s last instinct to protect her child? Or was it hatred built up after years of abuse?

Did Liu Xiu want to save her daughter, or had she simply reached her breaking point, tired of enduring a man who refused to change?

Xiang Shuhuai didn’t know.

She only knew that she hid in that room, trembling in the stench of bl00d, until she passed out. A neighbor called the police. By the time they arrived, it was already night.

Everyone was dead. And she was given a new name and sent to the Xiang family—where another kind of misfortune began.

Maybe it was because of what happened earlier that day, but this memory had come back to her again in her dreams.

She dreamed of Liu Xiu screaming, crying, calling her by her old name, begging her to open the door, to save her, not to let her be killed by her husband.

Wang Xing’s roars shook the door harder and harder, each strike like it was pounding straight into Xiang Shuhuai’s ribs. She heard the screams and sobs mixing with the thunderous noise.

“Sihong, Sihong—!!” her mother howled. “Shuhuai! Xiang Shuhuai!! Help me, please, save me! Save your mother—”

Xiang Shuhuai jolted awake.

Her body was drenched in cold sweat. She was gasping for air.

Her vision went black for a second. Her heart was pounding so fast she felt like she might faint. A wave of nausea surged up inside her. She stumbled out of her bedroom and collapsed in front of the toilet, throwing up.

But she hadn’t eaten much that night, and there was barely anything to vomit. In the end, all that came up was bitter stomach acid.

She clutched her cramping stomach, shut her eyes tightly, and bit down on her thumb knuckle as she tried to breathe through it, trying her hardest to calm down. Her throat kept trembling from the panic. It felt like she couldn’t get any air in at all.

The beastlike screams from her dream still echoed in her ears.

Tears spilled from her eyes, purely from the physical reaction. Her vision was a blur. In the dark bathroom, the only sound she could hear was her own harsh, rapid breathing—so loud it hurt her ears.

If she had a full-blown panic attack here, it’d be a real problem. Even now, Xiang Shuhuai still remembered to think about that. It was too late to call her assistant…

Then she heard a quiet sound outside the bathroom door.

“…Xiang Shuhuai?”

Xiang Shuhuai jumped, her shoulders twitching from fright. She instinctively turned toward the voice.

—It was Yu Xiaoxiao.

Yu Xiaoxiao was standing outside the door, looking like she’d just woken up. She seemed a little annoyed, her brows furrowed in a sleepy frown.

Bathed in the hallway light, the edges of her pajamas glowed softly, slightly fuzzy around the edges. It made her whole figure seem to shine.

She was the only bit of light in Xiang Shuhuai’s dream. Like the sun.

“Ah…”

Staring at her, Xiang Shuhuai was stunned for a moment.

She must’ve been too loud.

So she swallowed the nausea in her throat and quietly apologized, “Sorry… I didn’t mean to wake you. I’ll be okay in a minute.”

Yu Xiaoxiao just frowned slightly and walked toward her.