Chapter 4 #2
It wasn’t rough. It was almost gentle, the weight of the arm spreading over him like a heavy blanket, the large hand resting on his opposite shoulder, and the alpha’s body pressed against his, hip to hip, and the scent intensified tenfold.
Raisins. Walnuts. Home.
And something else.
Something new welled up beneath his sternum and spread as a seismic wave, hot and liquid, and told him with the irrational certainty of an ancient instinct: this alpha is yours.
Ren jumped back. He tore himself away from the contact as if Brody’s arm were red-hot iron and retreated until his back hit the wall of the guardhouse.
The impact rattled his teeth. He remained pressed against the surface, arms crossed over his chest, eyes wide open, his breath reduced to quick gasps that scraped at his throat.
Brody didn’t follow him. He stayed where he was, his arm still half-extended in the air, his gray eyes fixed on Ren with that impassive expression that never changed, that revealed nothing.
“All right.”
He let his arm drop. A deliberate gesture of retreat, like a large animal withdrawing its claws to show it could.
Ren didn’t move from the wall. His heart was pounding so hard he was sure Brody could hear it, could smell it, could read every damn signal his omega body was giving off.
Because that’s what it was. A betrayal.
Twenty-one years building a body that could defend itself.
He spent those years training strikes, studying weak points, and learning to read intentions in the eyes of men larger than him.
For twenty-one years, he swore to himself that no alpha would touch him without his permission, that his secondary gender wouldn’t define him, and that he would be more than the sum of his pheromones.
And all it took was an accidental hug for all of that to crumble.
The sensation was still there. Pulsing beneath his sternum like a second heart.
Warm. Sweet. Obscene. It told him to get closer, to press his body against Brody Kovac’s again, to let that arm wrap around his shoulders and that hand hold him and that scent envelop him until the world disappeared.
It told him that this alpha was his, that he belonged to him with the same inevitability that the river belongs to the sea, and that the only thing Ren had to do was surrender.
Surrender.
The word made him so nauseous that he had to clench his teeth to keep from vomiting.
His father expected surrender when he sold him. With his seven hundred thousand dollars, Dimitri Reznov had purchased surrender. The entire world expected a handsome, blond omega with crystal eyes to surrender, to lie down, to spread his legs, and to be thankful for the honor of being chosen.
And now his own body was asking him for the same thing.
A sound escaped him, somewhere between a laugh and a sob. Brief. Dry. Bitter as bile.
“Don’t touch me.”
The words came out broken, but firm.
Brody nodded once. A minimal movement of the head. No offense, no surprise, nothing Ren could use as ammunition.
“I won’t. Follow me to the house. You can walk on your own.”
Without checking if Ren was following, he spun around and left the guardhouse.
He didn’t slow his pace. He didn’t turn his head.
With the same heavy, measured cadence as before, he walked toward the mansion glimpsed through the trees, leaving a trail of raisins, nuts, and cinnamon in the night air that Ren would follow even if he didn’t want to, because his body had already decided for him.
He hated it. Resented every step he took behind Brody Kovac.
Detested the false calm that scent injected into his veins.
Loathed that part of him which hurried to keep pace with his own footsteps.
And above all, he hated the certainty that what he’d felt when he’d collided with that chest would not disappear just because he wanted it to.
The garden stretched out like a small, tamed forest. Old oak trees flanked a light-colored stone path that wound its way between trimmed hedges and dark flower beds, invisible under the waning moon.
Ren walked three steps behind Brody, the exact distance at which the alpha’s scent lost enough intensity to be bearable while remaining traceable.
It wasn’t enough.
The night air tainted every breath. Raisins.
Nuts. Something toasty and deep, like fresh-baked bread, like his grandmother’s kitchen when Ren was six, and the world hadn’t yet taught him what it meant to be an omega.
As the scent entered his nose, it traveled down his spine, settling into a hot knot between his hips that throbbed with his heartbeat.
The suppressants.
How many hours has it been since the last pill?
Before his brother placed him in the car, and he was told they were going to dinner with their father.
Before the casino, the white room, the rubber hands that stripped him, the platform.
His body had been running on terror and adrenaline ever since, and the terror was a brutal but temporary suppressant.
Now that the immediate danger had faded, now that something primal inside him had decided that Brody Kovac’s presence equaled safety, the unregulated chemistry was collecting its debt.
His hands trembled. He clenched his fists.
The path crunched beneath his bare feet. The smooth stones were cold, and that sensation of discomfort was the only thing keeping him anchored to reality, because the rest of his body was doing things Ren hadn’t allowed it to do.
Heat. An intense heat rising from the center of his chest, softening the muscles in his thighs, shoulders, and jaw.
A heat he knew from the simulations that the suppressors couldn’t fully block during his cycles—those brief flashes of need that lasted minutes and that he quelled with cold water and rage.
But this wasn’t like those flashes. This was a slow, thick, constant wave that licked at his ribs from the inside and whispered in the voice of his own cells that the alpha walking ahead of him was the answer to a question Ren had never asked himself.
No.
His jaw ached from the way he clenched his teeth. His nails dug into his palms. The pain occupied his thoughts, along with the cold stone on his feet and the uncomfortable black latex he was still in, which were humiliating clothes from the auction, reminding him of his place in the world.
Brody turned left. The mansion appeared at the end of the path: a drab stone facade, tall windows with dark wooden shutters, ivy climbing up to the second floor.
Beautiful in a restrained way, without the ostentatious obscenity of Reznov’s steel-and-glass mansion.
A side door opened before they arrived, and a gray-haired beta woman held the entrance open for them without saying a word, her gaze lowered, her body turned to make room for them.
The interior smelled of waxed wood and cleanliness. And of Brody. Brody was everywhere, permeating the walls, the carpets, the air circulating through the wide, dimly lit hallways. The mansion was his territory, and every molecule proclaimed it.
Dizziness struck Ren at the base of his skull.
He stopped. Pressed a hand against the wall.
Closed his eyes, and the world spun ninety degrees beneath his feet.
The darkness behind his eyelids filled with the scent, and the scent turned into images he didn’t want to see: skin against skin, large hands gripping his hips, his own back arched, his own throat exposed.
He opened his eyes with a start. He gasped.
Brody had stopped five steps ahead. He didn’t turn all the way around. Just his head, a quarter-profile, just enough for Ren to see the line of his clenched jaw and the reddened rim of a gray eye.
“The room is at the end of the hall.”
Nothing else. No questions. No condescending “Are you okay?” that Ren would have had to tear apart with his teeth to keep from screaming. Just a coordinate. A functional fact. And Brody resumed walking.
Ren peeled himself away from the wall. He walked. One foot, then the other. His legs felt twice as heavy as they had a minute ago.
It’s not a cycle. It can’t be a cycle. The suppressants cover me for three more days, even if I don’t take the dose.
The suppressants were intended for an omega who followed a routine of sleeping eight hours, eating three meals a day, and maintaining standard cortisol levels.
Not for an omega who had been sold by his father, stripped by strangers, auctioned off to predators, and who now walked barefoot through the mansion of an alpha whose biochemistry fit his body like a key in a lock that Ren never knew he had.
The hallway narrowed. The walls closed in.
Or perhaps it was his perception, contracting around Brody’s scent like a pupil around a light.
His hands were sweaty. His ears were burning.
Every brush of air on his forearms felt like an electric stimulus, traveling to the center of his body and detonating.
His obstructed nose made each breath a victory for the enemy.
Yet, breathing through his mouth brought an even more unbearable sensation: the taste of the alpha, infinitely worse.
Never had he experienced something like this.
Alphas had always affected him. It was the price of existing in a body that biology had designed to respond, to complement, to yield.
Ren hated that price and paid it every day with suppressants and training and silent fury.
But the alphas who had affected him before did so like noise affects sleep: they were a nuisance, an intrusion, something he could combat with earplugs and discipline.
Brody Kovac wasn’t noise. Brody Kovac was an earthquake, and Ren was standing right on the fault line.
The door at the end of the hallway was ajar.
Brody pushed it open with one hand and stepped aside, pressing himself against the frame to make room.
Ren saw an enormous bed with white sheets, a window with thick curtains, a table, a chair, and an armchair.
Nothing threatening. Nothing other than a clean, made-up guest room.
But Brody was in the doorway, and to enter, Ren would have to pass within half a meter of him, and half a meter was a distance at which the alpha’s scent would cease to be a fragrance and become physical contact.
He took a step.
The floor shifted.
Either his legs gave out, or gravity changed its mind, or twenty-one years of resistance met its exact limit in that one-meter stretch of hallway.
His knees buckled first. Then his ankles.
His entire body bent forward, as if someone had pulled the foundations out from under a structure.
Before the world tilted, the last thing he processed was the scent of raisins and walnuts multiplying a thousandfold because a pair of arms caught him mid-fall.
Large. Firm. Warm through the fabric.
Brody’s arms.
He pressed his cheek against Brody’s chest. His ear heard Brody’s heartbeat. And the smell. God, the smell. Enveloping him like warm water, like winter blankets, like everything Ren had lost at age seven when his grandmother died and no one ever hugged him again without wanting something in return.
His hands, which were supposed to push, clenched the fabric of Brody’s shirt.
His fingers, which were supposed to strike, clung to the fabric like those of a child on the edge of a cliff.
And the part of Ren that had been fighting all night, the furious part, the part that swore it would never give in, that part looked at him from within with utter horror as the rest of his body sank against the alpha and stopped resisting.