Chapter 12
Ren dug his fingers into the flour and spread it over the pan in circular, methodical, almost hypnotic motions. The cold metal beneath his palms gave him something to focus on. Something tangible. Something that didn’t smell like raisins or nuts or anything else that would make him lose his mind.
“You’re putting in too much,” Marta said from the other side of the counter, pointing to the excess flour piling up at the edges of the pan.
Ren shook off the excess with a sharp tap against the marble surface.
“Better?”
“Better.”
The beta cook was a woman with broad hands and a voice without inflection, the person who occupied a space without disturbing the surrounding air, and Ren was grateful for that.
For the past two mornings, he’d been coming to the kitchen after his training with Jax to help her, not because he was interested in baking but because Marta didn’t give off pheromones that would throw him off balance, and the mechanical rhythm of measuring, mixing, and beating anchored him to the here and now.
He poured the batter into the pan. Thick, dark, with that dense sheen of melted chocolate and butter. He smoothed the surface with a spatula and raised the cookware to eye level to check that it was level.
And then he felt it.
It wasn’t dizziness. It was heat. An internal pulse that began at the base of his skull and traveled down his spine like liquid mercury. He blinked. He grabbed the edge of the counter with his free hand and breathed through his mouth.
“Are you okay?” Marta looked at him, frowning.
“Yeah. Just… Yeah.”
Ren set the pan down on the countertop. He rested both hands on the marble and closed his eyes. The heat wouldn’t go away. It was throbbing. It pulsed beneath his skin with the rhythm of a second heart that shouldn’t be there.
Fever. He’d had that sensation for a couple of days. He’d attributed it to stress, to being cooped up, to sleepless nights. But it wasn’t stress.
No.
He opened his eyes. He looked at his hands, covered in flour, and the slight tremor running through his fingers.
How many days had it been since he’d taken his suppressants?
He’d lost count. Since before the auction.
At the casino, they’d taken them away along with his clothes, his dignity, and his name.
And he hadn’t asked for them here because his head was so preoccupied with Brody, the bond, the rage, and the confusion that he hadn’t stopped to think about the most basic need for an omega.
Idiot. You’re a complete idiot.
Ren knew his cycle. He’d tamed it over the years with regular doses of suppressants that crushed every symptom before it could bloom.
He’d been so effective at erasing it from his life that he’d forgotten the signs.
The low, constant fever. His skin’s sensitivity.
The way certain smells hit him amplified, as if someone had turned up the volume on the world.
“Marta.”
“Hmm?”
“One hundred eighty degrees. Thirty-five minutes. If you stick a toothpick in and it comes out clean, it’s done.”
“I know how to bake a cake, kid.”
Ren grabbed the pan and slid it into the oven. The blast of heat when he opened the door hit his face and sent a bead of sweat rolling down his temple. He closed it. He wiped his hands on his apron and hung it on the hook next to the fridge.
“I have to find Brody.”
Marta didn’t ask why. She gave him a nod that was both a dismissal and an approval, and went back to her onions.
Ren left the kitchen and walked down the long hallway that connected to the main wing of the house. His bare feet on the wooden floor. Each step amplified the sensation. It wasn’t pain yet, but the promise of it.
He passed the library. The door was open, and the smell of old books hit him with absurd clarity: paper, dust, dried glue, the wood of the oak bookshelf. Every molecule of air spoke to him. Ren quickened his pace.
Brody’s office was at the end of the east hallway, behind a double door that was always closed. Ren had seen it from a distance but had never gone inside. Although no one had explicitly forbidden him, something about that door marked a territory that wasn’t his.
Now he didn’t care about the territory.
He knocked. Two sharp knocks with his knuckles. Sweat trickled down the back of his neck and soaked the collar of his t-shirt.
“Come in.”
Ren turned the doorknob.
And the world tilted.
Brody’s scent hit him like a wall. It wasn’t subtle or gradual.
It was a shock. Raisins. Walnuts. Dark caramel.
Burnt wood. The concentration of the scent in that enclosed space where Brody had been working for hours was dense, so saturated that Ren felt it enter through his nose, through his mouth, through his skin, through every open pore of his feverish body.
His knees buckled.
There was no transition. One second he was standing in the doorway, and the next he was on the floor with his palms flat on the floorboards and his head hanging between his shoulders.
The heat that until then had been a warning turned into a fire.
It coursed through his belly, down his thighs, up his chest to his throat.
Every nerve ending in his body ignited at once.
“Ren.”
Brody’s voice. Close. The squeak of a chair being pushed back. Quick footsteps.
Ren raised a hand. Palm out. Wait.
“Don’t touch me,” his voice came out broken, splintered. “Not yet. Listen to me.”
The floor beneath his hands was cool, and Ren pressed his forehead against it. He was breathing through his mouth. Short. Fast. Like a wounded animal.
“What’s going on?”
“Heat.”
Silence. A silence so violent that Ren felt it in his bones.
“The suppressants.” Ren swallowed. His throat was burning. “They took them from me at the casino. I have taken nothing since… I don’t know. Days. A week. More. I’ve had a fever for two days but didn’t recognize it. I’ve never had it without suppressants, no…”
The words tangled in his mouth. A wave of heat rose from his lower abdomen and wrung a sound from him that was neither a word nor a moan but something in between, something primitive and shameful that echoed in the silent office.
“Ren, look at me.”
He couldn’t. Looking at him meant smelling him more closely, and smelling him more closely meant losing what little control he had left.
But his body no longer belonged to him. The heat was devouring him from within like a fire that someone was feeding with every breath, and the fuel was Brody; his scent, his proximity, his damn existence.
“I need…” Ren clenched his fists against the floor. “Do you have suppressants? Anything? Anything at all?”
“They won’t work once the cycle has started.”
Ren clenched his teeth. He knew that. Of course, he knew that. Suppressants were preventative, not curative. Once the heat entered the active phase, no chemical could stop it. There were only two options: endure the pain for days or…
Another wave. This one was worse. It twisted his stomach and doubled him over. A liquid, hot pain that originated in the center of his abdomen and expanded in concentric waves. Ren gasped. He bit his lower lip until he tasted the metallic flavor of blood.
“It hurts,” he murmured.
“I know.”
“No, you don’t,” Ren finally lifted his head. His eyes were watering from the effort of holding himself together. He saw Brody kneeling in front of him, less than a meter away, his hands resting on his own thighs, his knuckles white. “You do not know what it feels like.”
Brody’s eyes were dark. Not gray. Black.
His pupils dilated until they swallowed the iris completely.
Ren saw him struggling. He saw the tendons in his neck taut as cables, the vein in his temple pulsing visibly beneath his pale skin, his jaw locked at an angle that had to hurt.
The alpha inside Brody was awake, standing tall, roaring against the bars of a discipline that was creaking.
“Help me,” Ren’s voice was a whisper. “Don’t make me go through this alone.”
“Ren…”
“I’m not giving up.” Tears fell down his cheeks. Hot. Fast. He hated them. “It’s not giving up if I’m choosing. Do you hear me? I’m choosing.”
Brody didn’t move. He wasn’t breathing. Ren saw the struggle in his eyes, the titanic effort of a man who had promised himself he wouldn’t touch without permission and who, now that he was receiving permission, didn’t trust it.
“If I touch you now,” Brody said in a voice that was more gravel than sound, “I won’t be able to stop.”
“I know.”
“No. You don’t know. Listen to me,” Brody leaned forward. The scent intensified, and Ren moaned involuntarily. “If I touch you now, the bond is complete. There’s no turning back. Do you understand what that means?”
Ren understood. He’d read about it in the library books. A completed bond was permanent. Irreversible. Etched into both their biology like a mark on bone. It wasn’t a contract that could be broken or an agreement that could be renegotiated. It was forever.
Another wave of pain shot through his abdomen, and Ren fell forward.
His hands found Brody’s shoulders, and the contact felt like sticking his fingers into an electrical outlet.
The jolt ran through his arms, down his chest, and exploded in his stomach.
His whole body arched toward Brody in desperation.
His movements were involuntary but, inevitable.
“Forever,” Ren whispered against Brody’s neck, his lips brushing the alpha’s warm skin, the scent of raisins and walnuts flooding his lungs. “I know. Help me.”
Brody placed his hands on Ren’s waist. Slowly.
With a gentleness that shouldn’t exist in someone his size.
And he lifted him off the ground as if Ren weighed nothing, as if he were something precious and fragile that might break if he squeezed too hard.
Ren’s legs wrapped around Brody’s waist out of pure instinct, without his brain having a say in the decision.