Chapter 11
Ren was running down a hallway he knew all too well.
The walls were those of his old house. He was barely aware of the yellow floral wallpaper his mother had chosen before she died, now faded and stained with moisture in the corners.
The carpet beneath his bare feet felt just as rough as ever.
Ren was sixteen, and he knew what was going to happen because it had already happened, and because his body remembered it before his mind did.
The door to his father’s study was open.
Julian Valois was waiting for him, seated behind his desk with his hands folded on the polished wood and that expression Ren had learned to fear: the calm of a man who has already decided.
Standing beside him was an alpha Ren didn’t recognize.
In his forties, wearing a dark suit, loosened tie.
He smelled of stale leather and something acidic that Ren would identify years later as contained excitement.
“Ren, this is Mr. Whitmore. He needs company tonight.”
Ren shook his head. His father sighed as if the gesture were tedious, as if the refusal were a teenage whim not worth paying attention to.
“I’m not asking for your opinion.”
Mr. Whitmore was looking at him. Not at his face. Lower down. Ren was wearing his pajama top and a pair of cotton pants that were too short for him because he’d had a growth spurt that summer and no one had bothered to buy him new clothes.
“He’s small for his age.” Whitmore’s voice was thick, pasty.
“He’s an omega. They’re like that.”
Ren took a step back. The doorframe hit his shoulder blade. His father looked up, and in his eyes there was no cruelty, no sadism, nothing. Just numbers. Just the figure Whitmore had promised him, which would pay off that week’s gambling debts.
“Ren,” the warning tone. The syllable sharp as a lash.
Whitmore stepped closer. His hand grabbed Ren’s wrist. The fingers were thick and calloused.
They squeezed too hard. Ren pulled his arm away.
It didn’t work. It never worked. The acrid scent of the alpha enveloped him, and his stomach churned.
He opened his mouth to scream, but Whitmore’s other hand covered his lips and nose, and he couldn’t breathe; he couldn’t…
He woke up screaming.
The sound tore through the darkness of the room like something alive, something with claws.
Ren sat up in bed, his chest heaving, the sheets twisted around his legs like a trap.
His T-shirt clung to his torso, soaked in sweat.
It took three heartbeats to remember where he was.
Not at home. Not in his father’s studio.
At Brody’s mansion. In the guest room. Safe.
Safe.
The word tasted like a lie in his mouth.
The door burst open. Brody filled the entire doorway with his body: barefoot, in gray sweatpants and a crumpled black T-shirt, his hair falling over his forehead. His gray eyes, rimmed with red, swept the room, searching for the threat, the intruder, the danger. They found nothing.
Only Ren. Sitting in the middle of the bed with his fists clenched on the sheets and his breathing ragged.
Brody didn’t touch him.
He stood in the doorway with his arms at his sides and his hands open, as if to show he wasn’t carrying anything in them.
And then Ren felt it: the warm, thick wave of his pheromones, the scent of raisins and walnuts spreading through the room like a blanket someone unfolds over a trembling body.
It enveloped his chest. It loosened his fists.
It slowed his heart by a beat, two, three.
The relief was instant and involuntary. Ren hated it with every fiber of his being.
“Stop.”
Brody looked at him, bewildered.
“Stop doing that.” Ren wiped his face with the back of his hand. His cheeks were burning. “I don’t need you to manipulate me into calming down like I’m an animal.”
Something flashed across Brody’s face. A brief spasm in his jaw, a blink that lasted too long.
He cut off the pheromones. Just like that, as if turning off a faucet.
The void that gesture left behind was worse than the nightmare.
Ren felt the cold seep into the space the scent had occupied, a cold that reminded him of Whitmore’s hand, of the hallway in his house, of the dull yellow wallpaper.
Brody nodded once. He took half a step back.
“Okay.”
He was going to leave. Ren saw it in the stiffness of his shoulders, in the way his right foot had already turned toward the hallway. He was going to close the door and leave him alone in that dark room with the echo of the scream still vibrating off the walls.
“Brody.”
The voice that came out of his throat didn’t belong to him. It was small. Fragile. The voice of the sixteen-year-old boy who hadn’t been able to scream when the hand covered his mouth. Brody stopped.
“Stay.”
The word hung suspended between them. Ren didn’t embellish it. He didn’t justify it. He added nothing because he had no energy left to construct excuses. Just that. Stay. That bare, pathetic word.
Brody didn’t approach the bed. He crossed the room in silence, walked around the mattress, and sat down in the armchair by the window.
The frame creaked under his weight. He rested his elbows on the armrests, folded his hands over his stomach, and tilted his head back until the nape of his neck touched the backrest.
“I’m not leaving.”
Ren lay on his side, facing the armchair.
In the dim light, he could barely make out the alpha’s outline: the broad line of his shoulders, his sharp profile against the faint light filtering through the curtain.
He didn’t ask him to send his pheromones again.
It wasn’t necessary. That he was there, breathing three meters away, taking up space in the darkness, was enough.
Ren closed his eyes. Sleep didn’t come quickly, but when it did, it brought no nightmares.
The darkness helped. It was like a curtain stretched between them, a reasonable excuse to stare at the ceiling instead of meeting those gray eyes, to let the words flow without having to see what expression crossed the other’s face as he listened.
Without light, there were no expressions to read, no pity to reject, no horror to pretend not to look at.
Only the thick gloom of the room and the sound of his own voice, which belonged to him more when it had no real audience.
“It was my father.”
The words came out hoarse. Ren swallowed them for a moment, regretted it, and then let them go because they were already out and he couldn’t take them back.
“The first time he did it, I was sixteen.” He moistened his lips. The ceiling was a dark smudge above his head, without shape or depth. “He took me to the home studio. He told me he had a friend who wanted to meet me. To be nice. That the family needed me to be accommodating.”
From the armchair, an indistinct sound came. Guttural. It wasn’t a word.
“The man’s name was Whitmore. Something like that. I don’t remember exactly. I remember the yellow wallpaper and that it smelled of pipe tobacco and something acidic, like metal. And I remember my father closing the door behind him as he left.”
Another growl. Lower this time, deeper. Ren felt the vibration in his ribcage as if the room itself had shaken.
“He didn’t… he didn’t actually rape me. Not that night.
” He rolled over in bed until he was lying completely on his back.
The sheets weighed heavily on his chest. “But he touched me. He took off my t-shirt. He put his hands on me, and I couldn’t move because my father had told me to be nice.
I was sixteen and didn’t know I could say no. ”
The growl turned into something else. Something that made the hair on his forearms stand on end. It wasn’t pheromones. It was pure sound, animal and uncontrolled, the rumbling of something dangerous held in by force within a body too big for that armchair.
“Brody?”
Silence. Then a sharp crack. The alpha’s knuckles against the armrest.
“Brody, say something.”
Another crack. The wood of the armrest protested.
“Say something other than a growl.”
Brody’s breath filled the room. Heavy. Forcibly controlled. When he spoke, his voice sounded unfamiliar. Ragged at the edges, as if every syllable cost him something he couldn’t afford to spend.
“I can’t.” A brief silence. “If I let myself go any further than this, if I open my mouth and let out what’s inside me right now, I’m going to get up from this chair, and I can’t afford that. Because if I get up I’m going to drive to your father’s house.” Pause. “And I’m going to kill him.”
The words fell into the darkness with the weight of a sentence. No rhetoric. No embellishment. The simplicity of an inevitable fact stated aloud.
Ren propped himself up on one elbow. His heart was beating in a strange place in his chest, displaced, as if Brody’s declaration had moved it.
“Why?”
The question sounded stupid even to his own ears. But he asked it because he wanted to understand. He needed to know if it was generic rage, moral outrage, the protective instinct of any alpha toward an omega in danger, or something else. Something worse. Something he couldn’t ignore.
Brody laughed. There was nothing joyful about the sound. It was dry and weary, frayed at the edges.
“You don’t understand, do you?”
Ren didn’t answer.
“Ren.” The armchair creaked again. Brody’s body must have leaned forward because his voice sounded closer, even though he was still several feet away. “What’s between us isn’t… it isn’t attraction. It isn’t chemistry. It isn’t your body reacting to the nearest alpha.”
“I know what…”
“No. You don’t.” Brody’s voice cut through the air. “Our bond is exceptional. You understand the concept, but not what it means to me. It’s possible for you to hate it. You are able to resist it. You can throw my sweatshirt across the room every night before you put it on.”
Ren clenched his jaw.