Chapter 7 #2
It was subtle at first, a warmth that came from nowhere, that had no physical source.
The scent of home intensified but differently, softer, more perfect.
It wasn’t the raw scent Ren had felt before, the one that made his skin boil.
It was something else. Something that smelled of thick blankets and rain pounding against windows and quiet breaths in the dark.
Protective pheromones. Pheromones designed by millions of years of biology to tell an omega exactly one thing: you’re safe, everything’s fine, you can relax.
Ren’s body obeyed before his mind did. His shoulders dropped.
His jaw relaxed. His fingers released the iron handle and fell to his sides, limp, useless.
His heart, which had been pounding against his ribs like a bird against a cage, slowed down.
Ren took a deep breath for the first time in hours, and the air reached the bottom of his lungs unimpeded.
And then he hated him.
He hated him with a cold, clean fury that welled up in the center of his chest and rose his throat like bile.
“You can always use that against me,” he murmured.
His voice sounded small. Ren clenched his fists to make up for it.
“It’s not fair,” he complained next. “You can make me feel whatever you want without me being able to do anything to stop it. You can calm me down, you can excite me, you can paralyze me. And I have nothing. Nothing equivalent. Nothing that works the other way around.”
Brody didn’t move.
“I don’t work that way.”
“Every alpha works that way.”
“Not me.”
“That’s what anyone who worked that way would say.”
Brody exhaled through his nose. A long pause. Ren watched the alpha’s hands close and open once, the only gesture betraying something beneath that constructed calm. When he spoke, his voice was lower.
“Is your father an Alpha?”
Ren didn’t answer. There was no need. The question already contained the answer, and they both knew it. The silence stretched between them like a sheet of ice.
Brody took a step. Just one. The cold marble beneath his bare feet made no sound.
“I will not use who I am to control you. I will not calm you without your permission unless you’re in danger. You can hate me if you need to hate someone, but I will not be that person.”
Another step. Ren should have backed away. The door was behind him, the handle within reach. He could turn around, open the door, and run toward freedom with nothing and no one to stop him.
But his legs wouldn’t respond. Brody’s pheromones still surrounded him like warm water, and Ren felt them seep through every crack in his armor, every fissure the last twenty-four hours had opened up in him.
“Let me protect you.”
Brody stopped less than a meter from Ren. From that close, the scent was thick, almost solid, and Ren had to tilt his head back to look him in the face. The difference in height was striking. Ren only came up to Brody’s collarbone.
Brody’s gray eyes had a red rim that the dim light of the hallway turned into something dark, almost maroon.
They weren’t kind eyes. They were eyes that had seen things Ren didn’t want to imagine.
But in that moment, looking down at him with an intensity Ren felt in his bones, there was no trace of depredation in them. There was something worse.
Certainty.
“I know who bought you.”
Ren’s stomach clenched.
“I know what he paid for you. And I know what he’ll do when he finds you.”
Ren opened his mouth. Then closed it.
“I will not turn you in.”
The words fell like stones into still water. Ren felt them sink, one by one, piercing through layers of mistrust, of rage, of accumulated terror, until they touched something soft and exposed that he’d been hiding beneath everything else for years.
I will not turn you in.
No one had ever said that to him. No one. His mother had died before she could say it. His father had done exactly the opposite. And every alpha, every beta, every person Ren had met since he came out as an omega at fifteen had looked at him as one looks at an object with a fluctuating price tag.
Ren clenched his teeth. He clenched his fists.
He clenched everything he could clench inside his body to keep his frame upright, to keep from collapsing right there, in the black-and-white marble lobby, in front of an alpha who smelled of home and who was telling him he would not hand him over to his buyer.
It wasn’t enough.
The first sob burst from his chest as if torn from him. Soundless at the start, just a sharp spasm that shook his shoulders. Then came the air, wet, ragged, and with it a noise Ren didn’t recognize. Guttural. Animal. The sound of someone who has been holding a weight they cannot bear for too long.
Tears burned his eyes before they fell. Ren brought his hands to his face, covering it, because if Brody saw him like this, he could never look at him again. His knees trembled. The marble floor pulled him down, and Ren let himself fall because he had no strength left to resist gravity.
Ren didn’t reach the floor.
Arms caught him mid-fall—huge, firm—and the scent of raisins and walnuts enveloped him like a thick blanket someone had thrown over him without asking.
Ren tried to push against Brody’s chest, his palms flat on the fabric of the T-shirt, but the muscles in his arms wouldn’t obey him.
His fingers curled inward, clutching the fabric instead of pushing it away, and that made him cry even harder.
Brody said nothing. He lifted him off the floor in one fluid motion, one arm under Ren’s knees and the other on his back, and the shift in orientation—the world tilting, the ceiling taking the place of the walls—drew a wet gasp from him.
Ren closed his eyes. If he didn’t see, he could pretend it wasn’t happening.
That an alpha wasn’t carrying him like a child down the hallway of a mansion that wasn’t his, his face drenched and his body trembling against a chest that beat with a slow, steady pulse.
The rhythm of Brody’s heart was steady. Ren felt it through the T-shirt, through his own skin, setting a pace different from that of his own racing heart. Every beat told him you’re safe, you’re safe, you’re safe, and Ren wanted to tear his ears off for hearing it.
Brody’s footsteps echoed on the stairs. They were going up.
Ren recognized the turn to the right, the stretch of carpeted hallway where the sound was muffled, the distinctive creak of the third door.
His room. The smell changed when they entered, mingling with that of clean sheets and the wood of the headboard.
Brody laid him on the bed with a care that Ren felt like a second humiliation.
He turned onto his side, his back to Brody, and wiped his face with the backs of his hands. His eyes were swollen and his nose was running. All was pathetic, from the fetal position his body had adopted without permission to the trembling he couldn’t stop.
The mattress sank beneath his back. Brody had sat down on the edge.
“Look at me.”
Ren shook his head.
“Ren.”
His name in that deep voice ran down Ren’s spine like something liquid and hot. Ren sunk his teeth into the inside of his cheek hard enough to taste the metallic flavor of blood.
“Never try to leave this house again.”
“I’m not your prisoner.”
“No. But Reznov’s men are out there, and they’re not the type to give up. If you leave this property, they’ll find you. And whatever happens after that, there’s no turning back.”
Ren stood still. The trembling subsided, replaced by a dense cold that filled his chest.
“Promise me.”
“What?”
“That you won’t try to walk out that door again.”
Ren turned his head just enough to see Brody over his shoulder.
The alpha had his forearms resting on his knees, his hands hanging between his legs.
His black hair fell over his forehead. His gray eyes looked at him without blinking, without pressure, without the predatory intensity Ren had seen in them before. He was just waiting.
“And if I promise nothing?”
“Then I’ll post someone at your door.”
“So I am a prisoner.”
“You’re someone I will not let die out of pride.”
The word pride hurt him more than anything else Brody could have chosen. Because it was accurate. Because Ren knew that going out into the street in his condition, with half the criminal underworld looking for him, wasn’t bravery. It was pride by another name.
He sat up on the bed. Slowly. His legs felt heavy and his head was throbbing. He sat facing Brody with his legs crossed and his hands on his thighs, his knuckles white.
“Tell me what you’re doing to fix this.”
Brody looked at him for a long second.
“I’m making moves. That’s all I can tell you.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one I have.”
“Are you negotiating with Reznov?”
Brody’s silence was answer enough. Ren felt bile rising in his throat.
“Are you going to buy me? Is that it? Are you going to pay him and keep me as if I were a transfer of ownership?”
“No.”
“Then what?”
“Give me a few days.”
“How many?”
“As many as I need.” Brody leaned forward.
The smell intensified. Raisins, walnuts, a hint of cinnamon underneath, something Ren couldn’t name but that relaxed his jaw muscles.
“Trust me for a few days. That’s all I’m asking.
After that, if you want to leave, I’ll help you leave.
Papers, money, a safe place. But right now, I need you to stay here and not do anything stupid. ”
Ren swallowed. The distance between them had closed without either of them having moved. Or maybe they had moved. Maybe Ren had leaned forward when he heard the word papers or maybe Brody had stepped closer when he said trust me, but the result was the same: less than a foot between their faces.
Brody’s breath reached his lips. Warm.
“How are you doing this?” Ren whispered, no longer sure if he was asking about the negotiation or what the scent of Brody was doing to his gut. “How are you…?”
He didn’t finish the sentence. The gray eyes dropped to his mouth. A minimal, involuntary movement that lasted half a second, but Ren saw it and his entire body responded with a wave of heat that rose from his belly to his throat.
No.
The word rang clearly in his head, but his body had already lunged in the opposite direction. He leaned the last centimeter, and Brody’s lips met his halfway. He didn’t know who closed the distance. It didn’t matter.
The kiss was clumsy at first. Dry. Lips touching lips with too much pressure, Ren’s nose bumping against Brody’s cheek, the wrong angle.
Ren placed a hand on Brody’s neck to correct him, and the skin beneath his fingers burned.
The alpha’s pulse was racing, furious, contradicting the calm he’d built up, the measured voice, the control.
Brody was just as affected as he was. Ren felt it in that wild pulse, and a dark satisfaction washed over him.
Brody took Ren’s jaw in one hand. The fingers were large and spanned from his ear to his chin, and he gently turned Ren’s face until he found the right angle. Then, yes. Then the kiss changed. Brody’s lips parted over his, and Ren stopped thinking.
He kissed him as if he’d been thirsty for years.
He kissed him with his teeth, biting his lower lip until Brody growled, a deep sound that Ren felt vibrate in his ribs.
Brody’s hand slid from his jaw to the nape of his neck, and his fingers closed around the short hair at the base—firm, without pulling, just holding—and Ren arched toward the touch like a plant toward the light.
He hated himself for it. He hated himself with a cold, familiar violence, the same he felt every time his omega body did something his mind hadn’t allowed.
But the hatred wasn’t enough to pull away.
Nothing was enough. Brody’s scent enveloped him, filled his lungs, ran through his veins like an injection, and Ren needed more.
More contact. More heat. More of the alpha’s racing pulse beneath his fingers, more of the biological, savage certainty that his mouth, his powerful hands, his enormous body, were meant for him.
When they pulled apart, Ren’s lips were swollen and his cheeks wet with tears he didn’t remember shedding. Brody pressed his forehead against the boy’s. Both of their breaths were ragged, mingling in the tiny space between their mouths.
“A few days,” Brody murmured.
Ren closed his eyes. Shame burned his skin, thick and sticky, but beneath it, beneath it all, his body vibrated with a relief he couldn’t deny. That kiss had ripped something out of him. Something he needed to keep standing. And the worst part was that he felt better without it.
“A few days,” he repeated, his voice breaking.