Chapter 131: That Is a Disgusting Feeling

Chapter 131: Chapter 131: That Is a Disgusting Feeling

Jealous?

The short word uttered from Lincoln’s mouth struck beside the ear like a clap of thunder, shocking Julian’s entire body until he froze stiff on the spot.

Bright red blood from the palm torn open by the glass shards was still dripping drop by drop with a patter onto the cold white alloy floor, yet Julian could no longer hear any sound at all apart from the echo of that question inside his head.

"No... Impossible!" Julian suddenly sprang up from the swivel chair as though electrocuted, retreating hard backward two paces until his back slammed into the specimen cabinet.

His complexion was deathly pale without a single drop of blood left, his lips trembling while he shook his head frantically as though trying to deny the most horrifying truth in the world:

"How could I possibly feel jealous?! Second Brother, what are you talking about?! Elijah is... the boy is our maternal nephew! I am his youngest maternal uncle! I held him in my arms from the moment he first learned to roll over, taught him to walk, carried him on my shoulders all across the amusement park throughout nine whole years! I only regard him as a little nephew who needs to be protected!"

Lincoln looked at his younger brother’s panicked appearance of deceiving himself and others, letting out a heavy sigh:

"Julian, you are a genius, your reason is clearer than anyone else’s. First of all, Elijah is the biological son of William Hall and Aurora Coronado; between you and the boy there is not even one ten-thousandth of the Vance family’s bloodline whatsoever.

Second, if you truly only regarded him as a maternal nephew just the same as toward Benjamin or Isabella... Then when Benjamin proposed to the third young master of the Mason family, when Isabella publicly dated that Beta Sebastian, why did you happily send congratulatory gifts without having half a point of anger?"

Lincoln pointed straight at the optical screen still paused on Elijah’s image, his low voice not permitting Julian to evade it:

"Yet what about with Elijah? Ask your own heart! From the moment you learned the boy was not of our own flesh and blood, every time you stood from afar looking at him on planet Sirius, was your gaze still simply the gaze of a maternal uncle looking at a nephew? Or right from the very moment you heard the news that someone else wanted to marry him home as a mate, did the Alpha instinct inside you immediately go mad out of fear of losing the person you want to claim as your own?!"

Every sentence and every word of Lincoln’s was like a hammer blow smashing to pieces the final shell of disguise that Julian had tried to put up. The images from throughout the past period of time on planet Sirius flooded back into Julian’s mind like a slow-motion film.

It was the winter afternoon he sat inside the old electric vehicle hiding behind the bamboo clump, dazedly admiring Elijah’s chubby face flushing pink beneath the warm sunlight while holding a lollipop in his mouth writing a screenplay; it was the rainy night outside the primeval forest film set, when seeing the male actor Ray press Elijah against the rock face before bowing down to kiss the youth upon the spiderweb, where his hand hidden inside his coat pocket had clenched so tightly that it dug through flesh and skin out of a nameless, uncomfortable restlessness; it was the times of longing to see Elijah at all hours and in all places...

That was right. He did not want Elijah to call him "youngest uncle" in a polite, distant tone. Even more so, he did not want any other Alpha or Insectoid King to be permitted to touch Elijah’s body, hold Elijah in an embrace, or see Elijah’s radiant smile!

However, right as he clearly recognized what the frenzied emotion boiling inside his chest was, an extreme chill and self-disgust suddenly surged all the way up to Julian’s throat!

Inside his head there immediately appeared the pale face and the blood-drenched, desperate eyes of the character Wyatt in the film [The Love Song on the Rooftop], overlapping with the image of the nine-year-old child Elijah curling up beneath the dark staircase screaming and crying because of being violated by his nominal biological paternal uncle - the demon Jackson Martinez!

Back then, Jackson Martinez was the "biological paternal uncle", an elder in the family who dragged a child of the same bloodline calling him uncle into a dark storage room, ruining all of Elijah’s childhood and pure soul, turning the word "elder" into the most horrifying nightmare in the youth’s life!

Yet what about himself?!

Even though between the two of them there was no shared flesh and blood, throughout seventeen whole years before the truth was exposed, in the perception of Elijah and everyone else, Julian Vance had still been the boy’s "youngest maternal uncle"! It was precisely because he had been too absorbed in playing around, abandoning the boy, that he had pushed the boy into the hands of the beast Jackson.

Now the boy had only managed with great difficulty to step out of the shadow, yet the youngest maternal uncle whom the boy had once trusted and relied on the most like himself... had actually given rise to the possessive lust of an Alpha toward the very nephew he had once raised?!

"No... This cannot be..."

Julian’s throat spasmed violently. He doubled over to retch dryly once, both blood-drenched hands clutching his head tightly as his tall, broad body slid down along the glass cabinet, collapsing to his knees onto the icy laboratory floor.

"Julian!" Lincoln was startled, stepping forward intending to help his younger brother up.

Yet Julian used force to slap himself hard across his own face! The "Smack!" rang out piercingly inside the quiet room; the corner of his mouth immediately oozed blood, his bloodshot eyes staring into the empty space in front of him with utter self-loathing and disgust:

"I have gone mad... Second Brother, I have truly turned into an inhuman lunatic!"

Julian’s voice was hoarse, trembling mingled with a sorrowful, self-mocking laugh:

"Back then the one who ruined Elijah, pushing the boy down into hell at nine years old, was none other than the nominal biological paternal uncle Jackson Martinez! What the boy is most disgusted by, most haunted by, is precisely being looked at with that filthy gaze by someone he once called an elder in the house! Yet now... the very youngest maternal uncle who abandoned him back then like me has actually given birth to that depraved thought toward him!"

Julian gripped the hem of Lincoln’s shirt tightly, hot tears from a man nearly thirty years old rolling down across his pale cheeks:

"That is a disgusting feeling! If Elijah were to learn that I hold this filthy thought toward him, he would look at me no differently from looking at the monster Jackson Martinez back then! He would be disgusted by me to the point of nausea, throwing away even the final bit of polite respect reserved for me clean! Second Brother... I would rather gouge my own gland to pieces with my own hands than ever let this disgusting feeling exist!"

Lincoln looked at his youngest brother tormenting himself inside his embrace to the point where Julian’s mental power was nearly collapsing, his own heart tightening as well. He had never once imagined that the psychological knot between Julian and Elijah would overlap upon the blood-drenched scar of the past to the point of turning into a dead end with no way out like this.

If it were an ordinary pair of maternal uncle and nephew sharing no bloodline after shedding a mistaken identity, developing feelings fundamentally violated neither law nor morality. However, toward a victim who had once been abused by his very own "biological paternal uncle" like Elijah, and toward someone who always carried a deep complex of guilt like Julian, that boundary was no different from a thousand-ton abyss!

Lincoln could only sigh, using his steady hand to pat lightly on Julian’s back that was trembling in waves:

"Calm down, Julian. Stop torturing yourself anymore... I will keep this matter strictly secret; before you manage to untangle the knot inside your own heart yourself, just concentrate on the research lab on Vega."