Cupids: The Wrong Kind of Spark

Chapter 6 The Confession of a Sinner

The bowl of truffle mushroom soup in front of Reyhan was shaking slightly, clinking every time his trembling right hand touched the silver spoon.

This fancy-ass classic Italian restaurant had been totally cleared of any regular customers. Outside the stained-glass doors, twenty buff dudes in bulletproof black suits stood guard with their arms crossed. But the vibe inside the room felt ten times more terrifying, at least for Reyhan’s mental health.

Next to him, Elena Moretti—the most feared mafia queen on the entire north coast—was kneeling on the floor, leaning her elbows on Reyhan’s knee. Her hands, still covered in gunpowder residue, now held a silk handkerchief with a Milanese designer logo. She was carefully wiping the corner of Reyhan’s nose, which was still dripping a thin golden liquid.

"Oh, Master Reyhan... eat slowly, okay. Look, your nose is still leaking gold like this," Elena said, her voice turning all cutesy, pouting her red lips into a worried look that totally didn't match the semi-auto pistol chilling on her left thigh. "Do you need me to feed you? Or do you want me to take out the chef back there because this soup isn't fragrant enough? Just say the word, babe. One snap of my fingers and I'll toss his head into the harbor's shark tank!"

In the kitchen, you could faintly hear a kitchen knife hitting the tile floor, followed by the sound of terrified sobbing from the three-Michelin-star head chef who was eavesdropping on the conversation.

"No need, Elena. I swear, the soup is fire. It's so good that I bet my ancestors in the afterlife are feeling full too," Reyhan cut in quickly, halfway horrified by the mafia boss’s extreme level of devotion. "And please, don't slaughter anyone else today. The supply of five-star chefs in this city is pretty limited."

"Whatever you want, my dear Reyhan... anything for you," Elena replied, flashing the sweetest smile she could muster, totally ignoring the fact that her nimble fingers hadn't let go of Reyhan's waistband, just in case some illegal courier tried to kidnap her idol.

Reyhan sighed, clearing the weird metallic taste from his mouth. His body's limiter was in the red zone. Two absolute syncs in a row—Isabella Vance the corporate princess and Elena the mafia dragon—made his insides feel like they’d been through a double-tub washing machine on max spin.

"Heh, weak kid," Aeros mocked from the corner of his remaining brain space. "Just because two girls are worshipping your footprints, you're acting like a dying single guy after a monthly grocery sale marathon. Back in my day—"

"Back in your day, the currency was still goat heads and limestone, Mr. Emperor. So please, don't fill up my brain capacity with ancient history right now," Reyhan snapped back internally.

"Wait, Babe? Are you talking to yourself?" Elena asked, puzzled, tilting her head with a look of infinite possessiveness. Her eyes darted to a poor male waiter who had been standing frozen in the corner holding a bottle of mineral water. The waiter accidentally made eye contact with Reyhan for 0.5 seconds.

Suddenly, Elena’s jaw tightened. That aura of blood-soaked thorny red roses flared up behind her again. "Hey, kitchen rat. Why are you staring at my Master like that? You want me to stuff a pineapple grenade in your mouth?!"

"M-mercy, Madam! I just wanted to refill the water!" the waiter screamed, his knees shaking so hard the mineral water inside the glass bottle started shaking on its own.

"Elena, stop," Reyhan tapped Elena's shoulder gently. Instantly, that conquering vibration softened the dragon’s muscles. Elena chilled out immediately, looking back at Reyhan with big, glowing eyes like a hungry Persian cat. 

"I need to hit the restroom for a bit. Please... don't hurt the waiter. And please don't follow me into the urinal. My right to bathroom privacy is still protected by law."

Elena pouted her lips, looking a bit disappointed. "Aw... but I wanted to make sure the toilet's water flow didn't mess with your concentration, Babe."

"Not necessary, Elena. Thanks," Reyhan said with a deep sense of resignation before standing up, wiping the leftover gold blood from his sleeve, and walking halfway in a hurry toward the fancy black marble bathroom.

As soon as the bathroom door shut tight and Reyhan made sure there were no hidden cameras (because in detective fiction, cameras are always in the weirdest spots), he immediately turned on the sink faucet, splashing his face with cold water three times.

"Aeros! Get out here!" Reyhan snapped in his mind, staring at the big mirror in front of him.

In the reflection, a faint image of a buff emperor appeared—wearing a gold crown fused directly into his strong forehead—standing against a urinal partition with a totally misplaced arrogant vibe.

"What? You miss the wise words of your handsome teacher?" Aeros’s smirk was getting on Reyhan's nerves.

"Wise my ass! My body feels like it’s gonna break, you know?!" Reyhan cursed harshly, though only in his mind so he didn't look like a psycho talking to bathroom tiles. "You said you were an emperor from an ancient age. You got punished by the heavens until my Veil ripped. Be real with me, what sin did you actually commit back then that made the angels hate your guts so much?"

Aeros crossed his arms, his golden gaze dimming, momentarily covered by a fake-looking but heavy melancholy fog.

"You want to hear the story of my heroism?" Aeros asked softly. "Fine. Take a deep breath of that truffle soup air, Kid. My history was written with the blood of hundreds of millions."

"Just get to the point, don't give me a theater script, Mr. Emperor," Reyhan cut him off, annoyed.

Aeros cleared his throat theatrically before starting his story. "I was the absolute ruler of the Red Dynasty. Khofis I. My Cupid power back then wasn't some passive thing behind a Veil. Every woman on earth imagined my face before closing their eyes. One day, I fell in love with a princess from the western continent who was... unrealistically beautiful."

"And then?" Reyhan leaned his chin on the marble sink.

"The problem was, she was the fiancée of the Sun God's eldest son—the holder of the pure throne. Because I was crazy for her love, and because my ego was as high as the heavens, I used my absolute charisma to move five million soldiers across a sea of toxic sand. We slaughtered half of the northern hemisphere, broke the golden wings of that god’s son, and dragged the princess straight onto my silk bed."

Reyhan went quiet, pretty stunned by the scale of the apocalypse caused by some ancient simple issues. "Five million people died... just because you wanted to steal someone's girl?!"

"Of course!" Aeros grinned wide, as if that was some Nobel Prize-level achievement. "To me, the laws of the universe are just lines of poetry written by cowards to stop the free love of the brave! I ripped their destiny apart, forced my resonance until the heavens cursed my entire bloodline to become invisible support energy in the brain of a mud-human like you!"

"Crazy..." Reyhan muttered. Behind Aeros’s cocky tone, he finally realized the pure savagery behind this tyrant god’s power. This anomaly wasn't just a dating hack; it was a mass distortion machine that could shut down the logic of an entire race if pushed to the limit.

He was holding the controls to a weapon of mass destruction powered by pure emotion. And right now, his first two victims—Isabella and Elena—were already starting to trash their own morals just to fight over one guy in a baggy hospital shirt.

"And now... I’m the one paying for your inherited sins?" Reyhan asked quietly.

“Wipe that grumpy look off your face, my poor host,” Aeros stepped forward in the mirror’s reflection, placing his shadowy hand on Reyhan’s shoulder. “Without my power, you’d be organic fertilizer under Isabella’s Vance Tech concrete right now, or dissolved in a vat of acid by Elena’s mafia goons. My wickedness is the most honest shield protecting your life.”

BAM!

The bathroom door was suddenly kicked open with a high level of violence that Reyhan was all too familiar with. 

Elena rushed in. Her leather jacket pockets looked heavier, and her fingers were dripping with fresh red liquid that smelled strongly of thick rusty iron. Elena saw Reyhan standing in front of the sink with a look of pure horror.

"Reyhan, Babe! Sorry I’m late!" Elena shouted, a bit out of breath, as she frantically checked Reyhan out from head to his sandaled feet. "Outside the bathroom earlier... that crazy head chef tried to smile all nice when you walked by. So, for the sake of your innocent eyes, I had to teach his hands a lesson on how to respect our privacy using his own meat cleaver in the kitchen. Hehehe."

Reyhan froze, staring at Elena’s hands dripping with actual blood from the waiter or the chef who just got wrecked by that mafia boss. The corner of his eye twitched in terror. "E-Elena... did you just paint the restaurant’s kitchen walls with organic red paint?"

"Yes, my love! Just so they realize they shouldn’t be giving disrespectful looks to my future boyfriend!" Elena replied without a single percent of guilt in her adorable, squinting eyes full of yandere madness.

"This is getting crazier by the second..." Reyhan whispered, facepalming in exhaustion. What was left of his human conscience screamed seeing the total lack of moral restraint from this mafia boss just to get a smile out of him.

But before he could give Elena a talk about basic social ethics without any planned murders, the warm vibe in the restaurant bathroom suddenly vanished in a single breath.

Bzzzt!

The antique crystal chandelier on the bathroom ceiling suddenly dimmed in sync. Darkness immediately took over the whole room. A chill so freaking cold, unlike anything Reyhan had ever felt before—even when he was out in the rain at the transmitter tower yesterday—started crawling up from the gaps in the bathroom tiles. 

Dead-looking vines of transparent white ice crystals began to spread fast around the edges of the black marble mirror in front of them. Reyhan’s breath instantly turned into a fog, condensing into solid ice in the air.

Elena, noticing the change, instantly moved forward and grabbed Reyhan’s left arm, her mafia instincts tightening like crazy. "This vibe... it’s not a human killer’s vibe..." Elena hissed sharply.

Inside his consciousness, Aeros’s scream this time shattered the silence of their moral struggle with pure, unstoppable absolute horror.

“REYHAN! THE HEAVEN'S WHORE DOGS HAVE REACHED THIS SECTOR! THE TEAR IN OUR VEIL HAS BEEN COMPROMISED BY THE LEFTOVER SOUL INTEGRATION OF THAT MAFIA BITCH! THEY ARE THE WARDENS!!!”