Chapter 5
The light was soft. Diffused. Warm amber seeping through heavy curtains and casting vague rectangles onto an off-white linen bedspread.
Ren blinked against the brightness without recognizing it, recognizing nothing, floating in that limbo of the first few seconds of waking up where the brain hasn’t yet decided which memories to bring back and which to keep buried a little longer.
His bedroom at home.
That was his initial thought.That was his initial thought.
The bed was enormous, like his. The sheets smelled clean, of unscented detergent, resembling his.
The pillow had exactly the firmness he liked.
And the room temperature was perfect—neither too cold nor too warm, the exact point where Ren could sleep without kicking off the covers.
He turned his head on the pillow.
The nightstand wasn’t hers. Neither was the lamp. The wall was a pearl gray shade that in his room was off-white. The window was on the right instead of the left, and the curtains were dark velvet and not the slatted blinds he couldn’t afford to fix.
The limbo broke.
Everything came flooding back. Without order, without mercy, like a drawer someone had tipped onto a table: the underground room, the hands of two strangers washing him, the black latex jumpsuit that squeezed his chest until it stole his breath, the buyers’ eyes appraising his body as if he were livestock, Dimitri Reznov’s voice uttering a figure that amounted to the absolute ownership of another human being, the lights going out, the dash through corridors he didn’t recognize, the guard at the sentry box, the windowless room, the bolt.
And then.
Ren closed his eyes tightly.
The smell of raisins and walnuts, of home.
The firm chest on his cheek. His own fingers clutched a stranger’s shirt as if that stranger were the only thing keeping him in the world.
The surrender of his body, absolute, collapsing against Brody Kovac as if twenty-one years of resistance and rage were worth nothing, absolutely nothing faced with the scent of an alpha his biology had chosen without consulting him.
He had fainted in his arms.
He had fainted in his arms.
Ren opened his eyes and looked at the ceiling.
Smooth, white, spotless. The ceiling someone with enough money to ensure even the plaster is flawless would have.
He stared at it until his pupils ached, because if he stopped looking at the roof he’d have to face what he was feeling, and what he was feeling was a shame so thick it weighed on his sternum like a block of concrete.
I fainted. I fell like a rag doll onto a guy I don’t know. I lost complete control of my body in front of a stranger.
He cupped his hands over his face. His palms covered his eyes, his nose, his mouth. He breathed against his own fingers, and the air came out hot and shaky.
No.
He forced himself to lower his hands, made an effort to breathe. When life blindsided him, his usual response was to assess the facts, distinguish between what he could influence and what was beyond his control, and then act on those controllable elements.
Facts.
He was in bed. A clean bed, in a large room, in the mansion of an Alpha named Brody Kovac, to whom a certain Rocco had sent him with a folded piece of paper and a promise of safety that Ren still didn’t know whether to believe.
He was dressed.
Ren lifted the bedspread and looked at his body.
Someone had taken off his latex jumpsuit.
The mere thought brought on such a violent wave of relief that his eyes welled up.
That synthetic second skin they’d slipped him into as if it were product packaging.
His merchandise uniform was gone. Instead, he was wearing a gray cotton T-shirt, three sizes too big for him, and black sweatpants with the drawstring tied because they were too loose at the waist. Men’s clothes. Alpha’s clothes, judging by the size.
Brody’s clothes?
The thought pierced his stomach with a jolt that wasn’t unpleasant and that, for that very reason, horrified him.
Someone had washed him. Ren brought his wrist to his nose and smelled mild soap, the same unscented kind used on the sheets.
They had washed away the sweat from the run, the makeup they’d put on him for the auction, the remnants of the products they’d applied to make him shine under the lights like a freshly polished object.
Someone had run a sponge or a cloth over his body while he was unconscious, had dried his skin, had lifted his arms to pull his T-shirt over his head, had slid his pants down his legs, and had tended to his wounds.
Who?
The question burned in his throat.
It could have been anyone. An employee. An assistant.
Someone from the staff of a mansion that clearly had staff.
It could have been a professional, efficient person who had treated him with the same clinical neutrality with which the casino’s hands had prepared him for the auction, only this time to restore some dignity to him rather than strip it away.
But it could also have been Brody.
Brody, who had caught him when his knees gave out. Brody, whose arms had caught him before he hit the floor. Brody, who smelled of raisins and walnuts and domestic warmth, and who had shattered every barrier Ren had built with his mere physical presence.
The image assaulted him without permission: Brody’s large hands peeling the latex from his skin.
The wet sound of the material separating from the flesh.
Brody looking at his bare chest, his ribs, the flat abdomen that Ren strengthened every morning with sit-ups because he needed to feel that his body belonged to him.
Brody sliding the gray cotton T-shirt over his unconscious torso with a delicacy those enormous hands shouldn’t possess.
Heat rose from the base of his neck to his ears. It pooled in his cheeks. It ran down his spine to a spot he didn’t want to name.
Stop. Stop right now.
He sat up in bed with a jolt. The sudden movement sent a sharp pain through his leg muscles—his calves tense from the run, his feet bruised by the asphalt.
But the pain was a gift because the pain was real and concrete and had nothing to do with Brody Kovac or the effect Brody Kovac had on his body.
He stayed still for a moment. Sitting on the edge of the bed, his feet dangling without touching the floor, his fingers gripping the mattress, his breathing still uneven.
He asked himself the ultimate question. The one that scared him the most.
He moved his hips. Slowly. Testing. He tensed his thighs, clenched his glutes, searched his body for evidence of something he didn’t want to find: pain, invasion, the unmistakable sign that someone had taken advantage of his unconsciousness to take what the auction promised.
Nothing.
No pain other than muscle soreness. Aside from exhaustion, there was no discomfort. Nothing but soap, cotton, and clean sheets could be found.
Ren let out the breath he’d been holding since he woke up.
It came out in gasps, broken into fragments that sounded dangerously close to a sob.
He bit the inside of his cheek until he tasted the metallic flavor.
He refused to cry. He hadn’t cried when Andrew had abandoned him to his fate; he hadn’t cried when they ripped his clothes off, and he hadn’t cried when seven hundred thousand dollars decided his future.
He would not cry now, in a clean bed, wearing comfortable clothes, with no new marks on his body.
He would not cry.
He swallowed the lump and pushed it down, where he kept everything else.
The soles of his bare feet touched the cold wood of the floor, and though it hurt, the contact brought back some clarity.
He was going to get up, inspect the room, and look for a window, an exit, an angle that would allow him to understand the layout of the place where he was trapped.
Because he was trapped, no matter how soft the sheets were. But then knuckles knocked on the door.
Two knocks. Sharp. Spaced apart.
Ren froze with his hands on the edge of the mattress, his fingers white from the pressure. The visitor didn’t wait for a response. The door opened, and Brody Kovac filled the entire doorway with his shoulders and that absurd height that made the entrance feel cramped.
The scent reached him before the words.
Raisins, walnuts, baked dough, something darker and denser beneath that Ren couldn’t place but that his body instantly identified as a signature, an olfactory imprint that loosened the tendons in his knees and sent a wave of liquid heat to the center of his chest. Ren clenched his teeth. He dug his nails into the mattress.
Brody stood in the doorway. His gray eyes, with reddened lids that made them look feverish, scanned Ren from head to toe, not with the appraising gaze of the men at the auction but with something worse: concern.
The alpha’s jaw tensed. A muscle throbbed beneath the pale skin of his temple.
Ren watched as Brody took a single, deep breath, the air expanding his chest beneath his black T-shirt before he released it slowly through his mouth, controlled, deliberate, like someone holding back something pushing from within.
He feels it too.
The realization hit him like a bucket of ice water.
Brody wasn’t immune. The dilation of his pupils, which had swallowed up almost all the gray of his irises, gave him away.
The way his fingers clenched around the doorknob until his knuckles turned white.
The stiffness of his posture, the distance he maintained with such obvious care that it was almost insulting.
Brody Kovac was fighting his own body not to come closer.
And to Ren, that was scarier than anything else he’d faced the night before.
“Good morning.”
Brody’s voice was deep and controlled. No inflections. No softness.