Chapter 9 #2
He turned on the shower. He didn’t wait for the water to warm up.
The icy stream drew a hiss from between his teeth, but he stood there, under the icy cascade, until the last trace of that scent vanished from his skin.
Until his body stopped searching for something that wasn’t there.
Until he was just Ren again. Just him. Clean. His own.
He lathered himself up twice. He scrubbed his neck with care. His wrists. Behind his ears. Every spot where the pheromones clung most tightly. The water washed it all away, and Ren closed his eyes and breathed in the scentless steam.
You can accept his protection without accepting the bond.
He repeated it to himself as he turned off the faucet.
As he dried himself with the white towel someone had left folded next to the shower.
As he dressed in the jeans and t-shirt from the day before.
It could be practical. It could be transactional.
Brody offered security. Ren needed it. End of the equation.
There was no need to add anything else. He didn’t need the sweatshirt, or the warmth, or the feeling of belonging somewhere.
He combed his wet hair back with his fingers. In the mirror, the person staring back at him had a firm jaw and straight shoulders. Good. That was better.
The sweatshirt was still on the floor when he stepped out of the bathroom. He didn’t pick it up. He didn’t look at it.
The hallway smelled of coffee, and something fried.
Ren went down to the first floor and followed the scent to the kitchen, his stomach tight with hunger and nerves.
He didn’t know if Brody would be there. He didn’t know what face to make if he was.
He didn’t know how to look a man in the eye after having slept wrapped in his clothes like an abandoned puppy seeking comfort.
He pushed open the kitchen door and stopped.
Jax took up half of the kitchen island. Not metaphorically.
Literally. The man was a mountain in human form: a back as broad as a two-door wardrobe, arms straining the seams of a black t-shirt that would likely have been loose on any other body, and hands the size of frying pans clutching a bowl of cereal.
He chewed with his mouth closed and read something on a tablet propped against the juice pitcher.
Ren walked in without saying hello. He opened the fridge.
“You’re look like shit.”
Ren didn’t turn around. He studied the inside of the fridge more closely than necessary: milk, eggs, a Tupperware container with what looked like rice, fruit, butter.
“Thanks.”
“No, seriously.” Jax left the spoon in the bowl. The metal clinked against the ceramic. “Did you get any sleep?”
Ren took out the milk and the fruit. He closed the fridge with his elbow.
“I slept.”
“And yet you still look like that?”
Ren set the milk down on the counter harder than necessary.
“I don’t have a choice but to feel this way, okay? It’s not like I can choose to wake up fresh and rested when my body thinks every alpha within a twenty-meter radius is an invitation.”
Jax looked at him. No mockery, no trace of the sarcastic tone from the night before. He just looked at him, with those dark eyes that didn’t match his size because there was something too calm in them, something too measured for a body built for destruction.
“You can always choose.”
Ren opened his mouth to reply. He closed it. The phrase hit him sideways, at an angle he hadn’t expected, and lodged there like a splinter under a fingernail.
You can always choose.
“It’s easy to say when your biology isn’t holding you hostage.”
Jax picked up his spoon. He shoveled a mouthful of cereal into his mouth, then chewed and swallowed.
“Your biology doesn’t choose for you. It pushes you. Pushing isn’t the same as deciding. You decide whether you walk in that direction or plant your feet on the ground.”
Ren stood motionless by the counter with a banana in his hand and the milk open.
Jax’s words were simple. Almost banal. The thing someone would write on a motivational mug or the back cover of a cheap self-help book.
But coming from a man who could probably break a table with his bare hands and who, yet, sat eating cereal for breakfast like a twelve-year-old reading his tablet, they carried a different weight.
They carried the weight of someone who knew strength and had decided not to use it.
You always have a choice.
Ren peeled the banana slowly. He sliced it onto a plate.
He poured milk into a glass. The motion gave him time to think, to let the splinter sink in a little deeper.
Because Jax was right. Ren had been in that house for three days, blaming his biology for every moment of weakness.
For the shiver when he ran into Brody. For the erection in the shower.
For the deep sleep wrapped in someone else’s sweatshirt.
As if his body were a separate entity acting against him, a traitor lodged beneath his own skin, an enemy he couldn’t expel because they shared the same flesh. But that wasn’t it.
His body was pushing him. It was making his pulse race.
It was making his skin damp. That was true.
But the decision to grab the sweatshirt had been his.
The decision to put it on, his. The decision to fall asleep breathing in Brody, his.
His biology had set the table, but Ren had sat down to eat.
He leaned against the counter and bit into a slice of banana.
He chewed it slowly. And then the thought shifted.
Because if he could choose, if biology pushed but didn’t decide, if the agency was still his even when his body screamed at him to give in, then every resistance he had offered until now was also a choice.
Every time he had pulled away from Brody.
Every time he’d fought against the pull of the bond.
That wasn’t biology overcome by will. It was will against biology.
And for the first time, the idea didn’t taste bitter.
He was choosing. Actively, consciously, with every muscle he tensed when Brody got too close. He was planting his feet on the ground exactly as Jax described.
He picked up the glass of milk. Drank. The cold liquid slid down his throat and cleared up something that had been murky for days.
Because if biology was the push and not the decision, then there was a possibility—albeit remote, uncomfortable, and hard to swallow—that the push had a direction that wasn’t just destructive.
Biology had pushed him toward Brody. And Brody was the reason he wasn’t chained to Dimitri Reznov’s bed.
Biology had led him to stay when every rational cell in his brain was telling him to run.
And staying meant a roof, walls, and an unlocked door.
Biology had calmed him with a scent of raisins and walnuts when panic threatened to devour him.
And that calm had allowed him to sleep for the first decent few hours in months.
What if it wasn’t a trick of the body? What if it were a mechanism? What if biology, for once in his life, wasn’t working against him but building a bridge toward something his mind refused to recognize as safe?
The banana tasted sweet. Too sweet. Like when he was a child and his mother would slice the fruit into thin rounds and place them in a cat-shaped bowl.
No.
Ren set the plate down on the counter. The memory dissolved as quickly as it had come, replaced by something more urgent. Because there was a problem that neither biology, nor Brody, nor the sweatshirt could solve.
His father.
Julian Valois had sold him out. He’d sold him out just as he’d sold his mother’s jewelry, but Ren had vanished before the transaction was completed.
Which meant Julian still owed a lot of money.
And a Julian Valois in debt was a dangerous Julian Valois, because a man with no honor or scruples, backed into a corner, was capable of anything just to survive another day.
“Hey.”
Ren blinked. Jax was watching him from across the island with his spoon suspended halfway between the bowl and his mouth.
“Are you still here?”
Ren picked up the glass of milk. He squeezed it.
“Yeah. I’m still here.”
After breakfast, Ren walked through the part of the house he could access, hands in the pockets of the jeans someone had lent him. Even though they were almost his size, he had to roll them up twice at the ankles, and the fabric dragged as he walked.
He visited the library, the living room, the dining room, the gardens. That was the extent of the perimeter Brody had marked out, as if Ren were a dog on an invisible leash.
He stopped in front of a door at the end of the east hallway that wasn’t part of the allowed route.
Dark wood with a numeric keypad recessed into the frame at eye level.
Four digits. Ren tried the most obvious combination: one-two-three-four.
The little red light flashed twice, and nothing happened.
He tried zero-zero-zero-zero. Same result.
He pressed his ear against the wood. Silence on the other side, or something too muffled to make out.
He continued.
At the end of the west hallway was another door, this one without a panel but with a magnetic lock that responded to a card. Ren didn’t have a card. He pulled the handle three times with increasing force until the metal left a pink mark on his palm. The door didn’t budge a millimeter.
On the second floor, he found a third blocked entrance: a staircase leading up to what must have been a loft or a third floor. A steel grate blocked the way halfway up, secured with a digital lock that emitted a high-pitched beep when Ren touched it.
He stepped back.
Someone had designed that house to look open when in reality it was a box with sealed compartments. The high ceilings and generous windows gave an impression of freedom that crumbled the moment you tried to go beyond the permitted areas.