Chapter 5 #2
Ren didn’t answer. He looked at him from the bed with his back straight, his tousled blond hair falling over his eyes, his fists now clenched on his knees.
He held his gaze because if he looked away, he’d have to admit that every cell in his body was begging him to lower his eyes, to bow his head, to expose his neck, to surrender to whatever that treacherous biology demanded of him.
Brody entered the room. One step. Two. He stopped next to the dresser, three meters from the bed, and leaned against it with his arms crossed. The distance seemed calculated. Ren figured it was the maximum the room allowed without looking ridiculous.
“You’re safe here.”
“You already said that last night.”
Ren’s voice came out raspy, worn down by hours of silence and the knot that refused to dissolve. But firm. Cold. He poured into every syllable all the ice he could extract from that well he’d been digging for years to compensate for what nature had given him.
Brody didn’t flinch.
“And I’m going to repeat it as many times as it takes until you believe it.”
“Why?”
The question was direct, unadorned. Ren tilted his head. Beneath the gray T-shirt that was way too big for him, the bones of his collarbones jutted out like a line of defense.
“Rocco is my contact at the casino.” Brody uncrossed his arms, and ran a hand through his straight black hair.
A mechanical gesture from someone accustomed to giving explanations he didn’t feel like giving.
“He’s been undercover there for months. When he can, when there’s an opening, he offers a way out to the omegas going through the auction. ”
“A way out.”
“A piece of paper with an address and instructions.”
Ren remembered the scrap of paper, Rocco placing it in his hand, the insignificant weight of that rectangle that had changed his life.
“And how many accept it?”
“Few.” The honesty of the answer surprised Ren. “Most think it’s a trap.”
“I thought so too.”
“But you ran here.”
It wasn’t a question. Brody said it with something that wasn’t exactly admiration, more like a stark acknowledgment—that of someone who knows the cost of choosing the unknown abyss when the alternative has a first and last name and seven hundred thousand reasons to claim you.
“I had no choice.” Ren shrugged with a lightness he didn’t feel.
“There’s always a choice. And you chose the right one.”
Silence. Brody’s scent fluctuated with his breath, subtle waves that Ren felt like soft blows to the chest. He focused on the pain in the soles of his feet, on the scrapes from the asphalt, on anything but the urge to breathe deeper.
“Is that what you do? Rescue omegas from auctions?” Ren loaded the word rescue with a sarcasm he didn’t entirely intend but needed as a shield.
“I wouldn’t call it that.” Brody frowned. “We give them an alternative. What they do with it is up to them.”
“And then what? Do I stay locked up here?”
“You’re not locked in. The door isn’t bolted from the inside or the outside.”
Ren remembered the tiny room in the security booth, the sound of the bolt sliding shut, the panic devouring his insides. Brody must have read something on his face because he took half a step forward and stopped dead in his tracks, the muscles in his neck taut as strings.
“That was the guard’s mistake. It won’t happen again.”
Ren swallowed hard. The next question weighed so heavily on him that he could barely bring it to his lips.
“Does my family know I’m here?”
The change in Brody was microscopic, but Ren caught it. A blink. His jaw tightened a millimeter. The fingers of his right hand tapped once against the surface of the dresser.
“First things first: you need to eat breakfast.”
“I asked you a question.”
“And I’m telling you that you haven’t eaten in over fourteen hours.” Brody already had the phone in his hand. He dialed a number without taking his eyes off Ren, as if offering him a challenge or a truce—it was hard to tell which. “Marta. Make breakfast for Ren. Yes. Full breakfast.”
He hung up. He slipped the phone into his back pocket.
Ren watched him from the bed with those blue eyes his mother used to compare to Murano glass; eyes he’d always hated for being too pretty, too omega, too vulnerable. He fixed them on Brody with all the hardness he could muster.
“You didn’t answer me.”
“Eat first. We’ll talk later.”
The evasion was so transparent it almost glowed.
Ren wanted to press him, to force the answer out of him, but his body reminded him with a spasm in his stomach that Brody wasn’t lying about the fourteen hours.
Maybe more. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten.
Before the auction, they’d given him water and nothing else, because they wanted his stomach to be flat under the latex.
They stood in silence, each in his own corner of the room, separated by three meters of dark wooden floor that looked like a minefield. Brody’s scent filled the space with the stubbornness of something alive. Ren breathed through his mouth.
Ren noticed the clothes before Brody said anything. A folded pile on the armchair by the window: a pair of dark jeans, a soft gray cotton T-shirt, underwear still in its wrapper. All his size or close to it. Someone had gone to the trouble of figuring it out.
“The bathroom is over there.” Brody nodded toward a side door that Ren hadn’t noticed the night before. “There are clean towels. Take as long as you need.”
Ren picked up the clothes without saying thank you.
Not because he was ungrateful, but because the word got stuck somewhere between his chest and his throat, blocked by pride and something else he didn’t want to name.
He crossed the room, feeling Brody’s gaze on his back like a physical weight, warm and heavy, and slammed the bathroom door harder than necessary.
The latch clicked. Ren pressed his forehead against the wood and breathed.
The bathroom was enormous. White marble veined with gray, a shower with a glass partition, a full-length mirror that reflected an image he barely recognized.
Dark circles ate away at half his face. His lower lip was chapped, and he had a greenish bruise on his jaw that he didn’t remember getting.
His blond hair fell over his forehead in dirty, matted strands.
He took off the clothes they’d put on him while he slept and stepped into the shower.
The hot water hit his shoulders, and for three seconds the world was reduced to that: heat, steam, the white noise of the stream against the tiles.
Ren closed his eyes and pressed his hands against the wall.
The tension of the last few hours unraveled layer by layer, like old varnish peeling away, and beneath it appeared what he had been holding back.
The scent of Brody.
It clung to his skin, to the clothes he’d just taken off, to the inside of his lungs.
Raisins, walnuts, warm butter, something resinous and dark beneath, like burnt wood.
His body responded with an urgency that churned his stomach.
The heat concentrated below his belly, dense and pulsing, and Ren clenched his teeth until his jaw ached.
No.
He lathered himself with soap. Scrubbed hard.
Tried to think of anything else: the streets he’d walked barefoot, the wet gleam in Dimitri Reznov’s eyes watching him from the front row of the auction, the sound of his own breathing inside that tiny room in the guardhouse.
Terror. Disgust. Rage. Nothing worked. His body wouldn’t listen.
He’d been without suppressors for too many hours, and Brody’s presence on the other side of the door was like a radio signal vibrating through his bones, constant and impossible to ignore.
His erection throbbed with a dull, stubborn pain.
Ren lowered his hand. He hated himself for it. He lowered it anyway.
It was quick, brutal, and without ceremony.
He bit his forearm to keep from making a sound as the images assaulted him without permission: Brody’s hands, large and pale, lifting him off the floor of the guardhouse; Brody’s arm draped over his shoulders, heavy and warm; Brody’s voice telling him he was safe with that grave certainty that seemed more like an oath than a sentence.
He came against the tiles with a spasm that bent his waist, and he stayed like that, hunched under the stream of water, gasping, with the taste of his own skin in his mouth and a shame so thick it could have filled the entire room.
He washed himself again. He scrubbed until his skin turned red. He rinsed his mouth with tap water.
When he stepped out of the shower, he dried off quickly, put on his underwear, jeans, and gray T-shirt.
Everything was a little too big for him, but it was clean and not made of latex.
That was enough. He looked at himself in the mirror.
A flush stained his neck and cheeks. Anyone with half a sense of smell would know what he’d just done.
Brody had more than a keen sense of smell. Brody was an alpha.
Ren closed his eyes. Opened them. Then grabbed the doorknob.
Brody was exactly where he’d left him, leaning against the dresser with his arms crossed, except now his posture had shifted almost imperceptibly. His head tilted slightly. His nostrils flared. His gray eyes fixed on Ren with a stillness that was not calm.
He knew.
Ren ambled towards the window and The garden stretched out green and perfect in the morning light.
He couldn’t look at Brody. He couldn’t hold his gaze, knowing that his body had just betrayed him in the most basic and humiliating way possible.
He felt dirty inside. He hated himself. He hated being an omega.
He hated that his biology turned him into something that responded to a stranger’s scent like an animal.
“No one in this house is going to touch you without your permission.”
Brody’s voice came from behind him, deep and controlled. Ren kept his eyes on the garden.
“Not the staff, not the guards, not anyone who walks through that door. Do you understand?”
Ren nodded without turning around.
“Look at me when I’m talking to you.”
Ren clenched his jaw. He turned. He didn’t look up past Brody’s jawline, which was square, unshaven, with a thin scar running across his chin from side to side.
“No one is going to touch you.”
“Not even you?”
The words slipped out before he could swallow them.
Ren looked up and instantly regretted it.
Brody’s eyes changed. They didn’t darken—they were already dark, storm-gray with those red rims that looked like they never slept—but something shifted behind them, something possessive and territorial that made every hair on Ren’s body stand on end.
Brody looked at him the way a predator looks at the thing in the world that isn’t prey.
Ren felt a churning feeling in his belly, a hot, wet tug that ran down his spine and loosened his knees.
“Not even me.”
Silence. The air between them grew tense. Brody didn’t move, but his scent changed. It grew denser, darker, the sweetness of raisins crushed beneath something wild and hot. Ren took an involuntary step back, his body seeking distance while every nerve ending begged him to do the opposite.
Brody took a deep breath. He exhaled slowly. When he spoke again, his voice had dropped to a register Ren hadn’t heard before, a rough, animal whisper that vibrated in his eardrums.
“You’re mine.”
Ren stopped breathing.
“I’ve known it since I opened that door and you fell to your knees.
I knew it before I saw your face,” Brody didn’t move closer.
He didn’t move a muscle. But every syllable fell on Ren as if it were caressing him.
“And you know it, too. Whatever you’re feeling, that pull you can’t explain, is the bond.
And it’s okay to acknowledge it, because I already have. ”
Ren opened his mouth, and closed it.
“But I will not do anything about it for the moment.” Brody lifted his chin. His expression hardened. “Not unless you want me to.”