Chapter 10 #2
Jax laughed. A short, genuine laugh that escaped his chest like a bark. And then he changed his stance, lowered his center of gravity, and Ren knew he’d stopped treating him like a kid.
The second hour was different. Ren found his rhythm.
His muscles were burning—his quads, his obliques, his forearms where he absorbed every block—but the pain was clean.
Honest. It was nothing like the pain of the past few weeks.
It wasn’t like the disgust, or the humiliation, or the dull panic of waking up not knowing where he was.
It was pain he had chosen, and that difference changed everything.
He dodged. He countered. He missed. He tried again.
Sweat soaked his t-shirt, plastered his blond hair to his forehead, and trickled down his temples.
He breathed with his mouth open, his chest rising and flopping.
And for the first time since the night of the auction, since his brother had grabbed his arm and handed him over like someone returning a defective item, he felt alive.
Not free. Not yet. But alive.
Jax threw a straight punch. Ren deflected it with his left forearm, spun into Jax’s space—where no sane omega would venture, because there the alpha had all the advantage of his bulk—and hooked his leg behind the knee.
Jax lost his balance. He didn’t fall, because Jax seemed incapable of falling, but he stumbled two steps backward and had to put a hand on the tatami.
“Damn,” Jax sat up, wiping his lip with the back of his hand. He looked at him with wide eyes. “How much do you weigh? Sixty-five?”
“Sixty-three.”
“And you almost took me down with sixty-three kilos?”
“Almost.” Ren allowed himself something he hadn’t allowed in days. He smiled. Barely a curve at the left corner of his mouth, small and fleeting, but real. “Next time it won’t be, almost.”
Jax shook his head and got back into guard.
“I like that. Come on, another round.”
There were three more rounds. Ren lost them all, but none were easy for Jax. The alpha had to work for every take-down, every control, every submission. And in the last round, when Jax tried a clinch, Ren drove a knee into his thigh that drew a growl and slipped under his arm.
“Damn, blondie.” Jax was out of breath. He was sweating just as much as Ren. He slumped down onto the tatami with his legs spread and his arms on his knees. “Your instructor knew what he was doing.”
Ren collapsed beside him.
His chest was heaving up and down at a brutal pace. His quads were trembling. His hands were red and swollen beneath the bandages, and a bruise was forming on his left forearm where he’d blocked the last hook. It felt good.
The word struck him as so strange that he repeated it in his head as if it were another language. Good. It felt good. His muscles were shattered, the air scratching at his throat, his heart pounding against his ribs as if it wanted to burst out. All of that was his. He had chosen all of that.
“Tomorrow at seven,” Jax said.
Ren turned his head. Jax held his gaze, and beneath the sweat and heavy breathing was something Ren hadn’t seen on an alpha’s face in a long time: respect.
“At seven.”
The kitchen smelled of beef stew and fresh bread.
Ren sat on the stool at the far end of the island, the one furthest from the door, just as he had done since the first night.
Habit. Control. Always knowing which way to make a getaway.
Jax was already devouring his portion with fervor.
Rocco hadn’t shown up. Neither had Zev. Brody walked in through the side door with the phone pressed to his ear, hung up without saying goodbye, and served himself a plate without looking at anyone.
He sat down across from Ren. And then he saw it.
Brody’s spoon stopped halfway between the plate and his mouth.
His gray eyes, rimmed with red from the lack of sleep that Ren was recognizing as chronic, fixed on Ren’s left cheek.
Right where the skin, thin and pale, showed a purplish bruise the size of a plum.
Brody set the spoon down on the table. The metallic clang against the wood sounded like a gunshot in the kitchen’s silence.
“What’s on your face?”
Ren instinctively brought his hand to his cheek and then regretted the gesture because it gave away that he knew exactly what Brody was talking about.
“Nothing. It’s nothing.”
Brody rested both open hands on the table. His knuckles were white.
“What is that?”
“A bruise.”
“I can see it’s a bruise. I want to know who gave it to you.”
Ren shrugged with an indifference he didn’t have to fake, because he was actually proud of every bruise Jax’s training had left him with. They were medals. Proof that he could still stand his ground.
“Jax and I have been training, you know that. Hand-to-hand combat. These things happen.”
The silence that followed grew increasingly tense. Jax, who until then had been eating with the carefree ease of someone who fears nothing in this world, looked up from his plate. He chewed, swallowed, and then looked at Brody.
“We were practicing, Kovac. He did well. He almost took me down.”
Brody said nothing. He pushed his chair back with a horrible screech against the tile floor.
He stood up. He circled the island in three strides.
The scent of raisins and walnuts that normally enveloped Ren like a warm blanket turned acrid, laced with something metallic that made the hairs on his arms stand on end.
The punch connected with Jax on the cheekbone.
The impact was sharp, resounding, and brutal.
Jax and the stool fell backward, and the alpha landed on his back on the kitchen floor with a thud that made the glasses in the drainer rattle.
Ren jumped to his feet, his heart racing, his hands clenched on the edge of the island.
And Jax laughed.
Not a nervous or forced laugh. A deep, belly laugh that came from deep within him, lying on his back on the cold tiles with a reddened cheek and his arms spread wide. He laughed as if Brody had told him the best joke of his life.
“Seriously, Kovac?”
Brody was standing over him. He was breathing with his jaw clenched. The flares of his nostrils were quivering. Ren could see his pulse throbbing in his neck, fast and violent.
“I told you not to touch him.”
“It was practice.” Jax was still lying there, not bothering to get up. He was smiling with blood on his teeth. “The kid needs to train. Or would you rather that the next time someone chases him, he doesn’t remember how to smash their face in?”
Brody opened his mouth to reply, but the kitchen door swung open and Rocco walked in with a paper bag under his arm.
He stopped a step inside the doorway. He looked at Jax on the floor.
He looked at Brody, standing there with clenched fists.
He looked at Ren, frozen by the island. He assessed the scene with the same expression as someone who finds a puddle of coffee on the countertop.
“You guys need to sort out your own shit.”
The phrase fell flat, without emphasis, without judgment.
Which seemed to enrage Brody more than any other provocation.
He turned toward Rocco, and the air in the kitchen thickened.
Ren felt it on his skin like a shift in atmospheric pressure before a storm: the dominant alpha’s pheromones filling the room, crushing, demanding submission.
“My shit?” Brody took a step toward Rocco. His voice had dropped an octave. “You want to talk about my shit, Rocco? That son of a bitch laid his hands on Ren. He marked his face. My omega has a bruise the size of…”
“I’m not your omega.”
The words came out of Ren’s mouth before he could stop them. Sharp. Clear. Absurdly brave for someone who weighed sixty-three kilos and was surrounded by three alphas who could pin him to the ground with one hand.
The silence was absolute.
Jax stopped laughing. Rocco lowered the paper bag. Brody turned toward Ren.
He looked at him.
And Ren felt the ground disappear.
It wasn’t an aggressive gesture. Brody didn’t move, didn’t step forward, didn’t raise his voice.
He just looked at him. With those gray eyes rimmed with red, with pupils dilated until they almost swallowed the iris, with an intensity so dense and so still that Ren felt it like a hand closing around his sternum.
The scent of raisins and walnuts returned, no longer acrid or metallic but deep, possessive in a way that brooked no argument.
It wasn’t a threat. It was a truth. A truth that Ren’s body recognized before his mind did, and that ran down his spine like an electric current.
The scent made his knees go weak, warmed his belly, and stole the air from his lungs.
Ren opened his mouth to protest. To repeat it. To scream that he wasn’t anyone’s property, that his body was his own, that a biological bond meant nothing.
But what he did was tilt his head to the right.
Slowly. Without thinking. As if the muscles in his neck obeyed something prior to language and reason. He exposed the long, pale line of his throat, the area where his pulse beat faintly beneath the skin, the exact spot where an alpha would mark his omega if the bond were sealed.
He offered his neck.
To Brody. In a kitchen that smelled of stew, with Jax lying on the floor and Rocco holding a paper bag as if it were a shield.
No one breathed. Brody closed his eyes. He closed them tightly, his eyelids clenched and his jaw locked, as if Ren’s gesture caused him physical pain he needed to contain.
He inhaled through his nose. Slowly. Deeply.
And when he opened his eyes again, the predator was still there, but bound.
Controlled. A beast on a chain that Brody himself held with both hands.
He turned to Jax.
“Next time you train with him, if you leave a single mark where I can see it, I’ll break the hand you used to touch him.”
Jax, still on the floor, raised both palms.
“Message received.”
Brody left the kitchen without finishing his stew. The door closed behind him, and the air seemed to decompress. Ren released all the oxygen he’d been holding in for a good minute and grabbed the island because his legs were shaking.
Rocco set the bag down on the counter and looked at him with a half-smile that Ren would have loved to wipe off with a punch.
“Well, well.”
“Not a word.” Ren ran his hands over his face. He could feel the heat in his cheeks, in his ears, in the neck he’d just offered like a tamed animal.
Jax got up from the floor, brushing off his pants. He touched the cheekbone where Brody had hit him, felt the swelling with his fingers, and shrugged.
“Seven in the morning, blondie. But tomorrow I’m putting a face guard on you.”