Help! I Became A Guy In A BL Novel!-Chapter 325: Angry?

Chapter 325: Angry?
"Just like him," His mother spat. "That same smirk. That same look in your filthy eyes."
She used to scream at him to turn away, to cover his face, to stop looking like
that man.
The man who left her, who took everything, who tricked her and abandoned her with nothing but a child she didn’t want. A child, she reminded every day of just how unwanted he was.
And now this boy—this half-wolf boy with a too-big heart and too-soft eyes—said he loved that face.
Soren had nearly wanted to kill him. But that hatred he held changed. For once, someone dared to say that they liked his face.
Maybe because for the first time, someone said they loved something he learned to hate.
Maybe because... He saw himself in Riven too. Not the pain, necessarily, but the loneliness. The stubborn defiance of someone who knew what it was like to be on the outside and kept walking anyway. The half-wolf who refused to cower, who chose to stand tall.
Soren didn’t deny it. Not anymore.
There was something about Riven—something that clawed beneath his skin in a way he couldn’t name. A presence that lingered even in silence. A warmth that remained even when Riven wasn’t around. It was small at first, a strange pull in his chest when their eyes met. A flicker of something... Familiar.
Like he knew this man from somewhere, even though he didn’t. It wasn’t memory—it was instinct. Gut-deep. He had learned long ago to trust his instincts, but that particular feeling he brushed off at first. Told himself it was foolishness. Paranoia. Or worse, need.
But it only grew stronger. Even when he tried to look away.
And that scared him more than he would admit.
He wasn’t a romantic in the slightest, and love at first sight was nothing but bullshit. He could never trust some random person. But with Riven, he felt like everything he believed was being challenged.
Every principle and every rule he had was being contradicted and broken.
And that scared him more than he would admit.
Soren shook the thought away, pressing his fingers to his temples, willing his mind to quiet. He had no room for sentiment. No space for softness. Not now—not when there was still so much noise in his head.
But the memories didn’t leave him. They came back with a vengeance, uninvited.
He remembered the day his men found her.
His mother.
They hadn’t even recognised her at first. One of his scouts, a young man with kind eyes who looked at him with pity spoke quietly, had looked away when describing what he saw. Said she was living in a home just as broken-down and hollow as the one she raised him in. No warmth.
No light. Just rot and dust and the stench of old alcohol. She’d been reduced to a skeleton, sunken-eyed and swaying in the middle of the filth. Empty bottles surrounded her like glass grave markers. She had nothing. Not even shame.
Soren did not know what he felt at that time, he was in a powerful position, and many feared him, but this young scout looked at him with sympathy... With pity when he brought back news of his mother.
’I don’t need pity.’ He thought to himself.
She had sold him for money, once. Said it was for both of them—to give him a future, to give her a chance to escape. She was going to start fresh, she had said. Find a better life. But the truth was simpler and crueller: she had only wanted to survive long enough to drink away her regret.
But she hadn’t started fresh. There was no better life. Only the same spiral, repeated over and over until it carved deep into her bones. Even after selling him off to strangers, even after casting him away like waste, she had fallen again.
And still... He brought her back.
He could’ve left her there to rot. Could’ve let her die in that place where no one remembered her name. It would’ve been easier. Cleaner. No ghosts to deal with. No memories to stir.
But he didn’t.
Instead, he had sent for a carriage. Sent men to carry her broken body home. To clean her. To give her food, warmth, and a bed.
He hadn’t done it out of love. No. That part of him had withered long ago.
He did it because some part of him—some small, pathetic, bleeding part—still needed her to live.
Not to forgive her. Not to mend things.
But because he didn’t want to be abandoned again.
Not even by her.
It made him sick sometimes, how much that truth clung to him. How, after everything, after every wound she had inflicted, a piece of him still craved something from her. A glance. A word. Some shred of acknowledgement that he had once mattered.
But she never gave him that.
When she first opened her eyes under his roof, she hadn’t even recognised him.
She looked around the room like a lost animal, blinking in confusion, until her eyes settled on his face—and even then, there was nothing in her expression. Not shocked. Not joy. Not even hate.
Just numbness.
"Where am I?" she had slurred, slouching back onto the pillow. "Did I die?"
"No," he said coldly. "You were dying. I stopped it."
She had laughed then. A dry, broken thing. "Should’ve let me."
He didn’t answer. Just stared at her, trying to see something—anything—he could hold onto. But there was nothing left in her. No cruelty. No fire. Just the hollowed-out remains of someone who had long stopped living.
So he stood. Walked to the door. And just before leaving, he said quietly, "You’re going to live."
"Why?" she had whispered.
He turned to look at her, his voice sharp as frost.
"Because I want you to see what I became."
He had told himself it was about vengeance. That she needed to know she had failed. That the boy she sold like cattle had risen higher than she could have ever imagined, and that she would carry that regret until the day she died.
But deep down, he knew that wasn’t the truth.
The truth was crueller.
He wanted her to regret not loving him. To realise what she threw away. To see that even the child she hated most could become someone. That he could be strong, respected, feared—even admired.
And still... The old wounds didn’t close.
They bled every time someone looked at him too long. Every time he caught his own reflection. Every time someone touched him gently.
Riven touched him gently.
He feared being abandoned, he feared that if he cared,
Because it made him feel like that boy again—the one who had waited outside his mother’s door for hours just to be let in. The one who had cried himself to sleep, wondering why he wasn’t enough.
But Riven didn’t look at him with pity. He didn’t try to fix him. He just stayed.
Soren clenched his fists.
He didn’t know what to do with that.
---
The scent of antiseptic lingered in the air like a ghost—sharp, sterile, and cold. Soren stood at the doorway of the dimly lit room, his towering presence casting a shadow over the frail figure curled up beneath the thin sheets. The once cruel woman who’d haunted his every childhood nightmare now looked so small, so weak, it was almost difficult to connect the two.
He didn’t step inside. Not at first. He never did.
Since the day he’d brought her back to his house, battered and half-dead from years of drinking and neglect, he had done the same thing every few weeks. He came, he looked, and he left. He never said a word. Never crossed the distance between them.
She never asked him to. Not until now.
The doctor stood beside him with trembling hands. "It will be today," he said cautiously. "She doesn’t have much time."
Soren didn’t look at him. He merely nodded once. No outburst, no threats. The physician had expected fury, maybe violence. But Soren only said, "Leave."
The room fell into silence. The only sound was the slow, shaky breaths she took.
Soren stepped in.
Her eyes fluttered open, clouded by time and regret. She recognised him instantly, and something shifted in her sunken face. Not love, not relief. Something closer to shame.
"Soren," she rasped, her voice dry like paper. "You came."
He stood beside her bed now, staring down at the woman who had once thrown a plate at his head because he cried too loudly. The woman who sold him for a sack of coins because he looked like his father.
"You’ve always come," she said.
"I just wanted to see if you were still breathing," he replied flatly.
"You’re still angry."
"Are you still angry at my father? I’m guessing yes. And you will stay angry until the day you die, so will I." That might be the only sentence he said with emotions, otherwise, he stayed the cold ice block he always had been.