Chapter 12 #3
“Don’t look at me like that,” Ren said, and it slipped out without thinking.
“Like what?”
“Like I’m something.”
“You are everything.”
Ren swallowed. The lump in his throat was too big, too hot, too real.
Then Brody moved down.
Not toward him, not over him. Downward. The deliberate slowness caused Ren to take a second to comprehend what was happening.
Brody’s lips traced his sternum, his abdomen, his hipbone.
He stopped there. He pressed a long, still kiss against the skin, like a wordless declaration.
Ren didn’t know what to make of it. He didn’t know where to look.
“Brody, you don’t have to…”
“I know.”
And he kept going down.
When Brody’s mouth took him, Ren forgot to breathe.
It wasn’t the clumsy, mechanical gesture he’d known before—transactional, borrowed.
Brody did it slowly. With care. With his tongue learning what drew sounds from him and which were the best, and returning to them, and perfecting them.
As if he’d decided that was the only task in the world and intended to do it well.
As if Ren’s pleasure were the goal, not the means.
Ren threw his head back. His hands searched for something to hold on to and found Brody’s hair. He didn’t pull. He just held on because he needed an anchor.
The others didn’t do this. The others never did this.
The thought slipped into his mind without permission and got stuck behind his eyes.
He remembered hands that opened him without looking at him.
Mouths that sought his neck to bite it before asking anything.
Alphas who smelled his scent and saw fuel, not him.
And now this: Brody, with all the patience in the world between his legs, in no hurry and with no agenda, returned something to Ren that he didn’t know had been stolen from him.He felt the heat behind his eyelids and crushed it before it could amount to anything.
“Stop,” he said, gently tugging at Brody’s hair. “Come here. I need…”
Brody climbed up. Gray eyes met blue ones.
“Tell me.”
“You.” The word came easier than it should have. “I need you.”
He pulled Brody down and kissed him so he wouldn’t have to add anything else.
Brody shed the rest of his clothes. The skin-to-skin contact was like closing an electrical circuit.
Ren’s entire body reacted at once, every nerve awakening, every muscle relaxing and tensing at the same time.
The heat was still there, but transformed by the alpha’s touch, turned into a dull, pleasurable ache.
Brody traced his lips along Ren’s neck. His collarbone. His sternum. Slowly. Deliberately. Ren dug his fingers into Brody’s back and arched his hips against him.
“Brody…”
“I’m here.”
“I know. I can feel you.”
And he could feel it. Everything. Brody’s weight on top of him.
He felt the beat of his heart against his own.
The scorching heat of his skin. The scent mingled between them until it formed something new, something that wasn’t just raisins and walnuts but also something that smelled like Ren, like the two of them together, mixed, inseparable.
Brody prepared him with his fingers. Patiently.
Using Ren’s own lubrication, he slid one in first, then two.
The movements were deliberate and attentive, seeking not only to open but to loosen, reading every reaction, every tension that gave way beneath his hands.
Ren had always had to prepare himself. This was nothing like that.
Brody was taking his time as if Ren’s body were something that deserved to be cared for.
As if Ren’s comfort mattered more than his own urgency, and Brody’s urgency was clear—Ren felt it against his thigh, saw it in the contained tension of every muscle in the alpha—but Brody controlled it and forced it to wait.
Ren clenched his fists around the sheets, then around Brody’s neck, then around his shoulders, not knowing where to grip, not knowing how to contain what was building up inside him.
“Now,” he said.
“Are you sure?”
“Brody.”
“Okay.”
When Brody finally entered him, it was slow.
Very slow. Stopping every inch as if asking, as if waiting for an answer.
Ren stopped breathing. Not because of pain—the pain was minimal, almost nonexistent after the preparation—but because of the fullness.
Because of the impossible, absolute sensation that something that had been out of place his whole life was finally falling into place.
Brody stopped inside him when he reached the bottom.
Ren’s head was flanked by his trembling arms. His forehead was pressed against Ren’s. Their eyes closed for a moment.
“Tell me if…”
“Don’t stop. Don’t even think about stopping.”
Brody moved. Slowly at first. Deeply. Finding the angle with methodical patience until Ren made a sound he hadn’t planned to make, and Brody stopped right there, at that exact spot, and returned to it again and again as if he’d marked it on a map.
Each thrust was a wave that coursed through his entire body and, as it receded, left something warm and bright behind, like foam on the sand.
Ren wrapped his legs around Brody’s waist, and Brody changed the angle, and the world fragmented into points of light behind Ren’s eyelids.
The pace quickened. Brody buried his face in Ren’s neck and took a deep breath, a desperate, ragged sound, as if Ren’s scent were destroying him just as his own was destroying Ren.
Brody’s fingers clenched around Ren’s hip hard enough to leave a mark.
Possessive. Territorial. But even that was different—not the careless mark of someone grabbing what belongs to them, but that of someone holding on to what they don’t want to lose.
Ren felt the pressure, and something inside him responded with a surrender so deep it frightened him.
“Mine,” Brody growled against his neck. The word vibrated on Ren’s skin like an invisible mark.
“Yes.”
He didn’t know if he said it or thought it. It didn’t matter.
Brody lifted his head. His gray eyes were black, completely dilated, and Ren saw in them something wild and ancient struggling against something human and conscious.
Brody’s mouth opened. His fangs emerged.
The alpha’s gaze fell on the junction between Ren’s neck and shoulder, that exact spot where the skin was thinnest and where a bite would seal the bond forever.
Ren saw the struggle. Brody clenched his jaw tightly. The muscles in his neck were taut as steel cables. The superhuman effort to resist an instinct screaming at him to bite, to claim, to complete what biology had begun.
Brody turned his head. He sank his teeth into the pillow next to Ren’s head.
The fabric tore. A sharp, brutal sound that contrasted with the gentleness with which his hips continued to move inside Ren.
That control, that Brody respected his independence, sent Ren plummeting beyond the abyss.
He screamed without restraint, shaken by the longest, most perfect orgasm of his life.
As he calmed down, he felt Brody tremble against him, reaching climax as well.
The knotting began slowly. A growing pressure, different from penetration, wider, deeper, filling Ren beyond what he thought possible.
It wasn’t pain. It was too much to be pain.
It was his body recognizing something it had been made for and responding to it with an intensity that took his breath away.
Ren had never experienced that with any alpha.
He dug his nails into Brody’s back and screamed again as he felt a new orgasm shake him.
Brody held him. Without moving. Without demanding.
Holding the weight of Ren’s reaction with his arms wrapped around his back, his chest pressed against Ren’s, the knot expanding inside him until the two were joined in a way that allowed no separation, that admitted no distance, that made them one.
Ren trembled. His whole body vibrated with the spasms of the orgasm and with something else, something that throbbed in the center of his chest and that felt all too much like what he didn’t want to name. Brody’s head rested on his shoulder. The alpha’s breath warmed his skin in uneven bursts.
Brody’s hand traced his side. Slowly. From his hip to his ribs. A gesture that was nothing sexual. That was just tenderness. Just presence.
Ren looked at the ceiling. Tears slid down his temples onto the sheets before he could stop them.
He didn’t know why he was crying. Perhaps out of relief.
Perhaps out of loss. Perhaps because he had just crossed a line he didn’t know how to uncross.
Perhaps because no one had ever touched him like that before.
And now that he knew how it felt, he would never stop longing for it.
Brody kissed his temple. His eyelid. The corner of his mouth. Without words. Without demands. Entwined with him, inside him, around him.
And Ren, for the first time in twenty-one years, stopped fighting.
Consciousness returned like murky water clearing little by little.
First the ceiling. White. Unfamiliar. Then the weight of the comforter on his naked body.
Then the dull ache between his legs and in his thigh muscles, as if he’d run a marathon.
And finally the sound. A soft, rhythmic snore, animal in its cadence.
The snore of someone sleeping with the absolute peace of one who has been satisfied to the core.
Ren turned his head on the pillow.
Brody was sleeping face down. One arm stretched out toward Ren, fingers splayed on the sheet as if they’d been clutching something that was no longer there.
His bare, broad back, crisscrossed by red lines left by Ren’s nails.
The comforter covered him from the waist to mid-thigh.
His black hair fell messily over his forehead, and the torn pillow still bore the marks of his teeth.
Ren remained still. Watching.
The light seeping through the half-closed blinds cast golden lines across the alpha’s pale skin.
His shoulder blades rose and fell with his breath.
A muscle in his back twitched in his sleep.
Ren’s eyes traced his spine, the ribs that stood out beneath his skin as he inhaled, the curve where his back ended and the sheet began.
Beautiful.
The word slipped into his mind without permission, and something warm blossomed in his chest.
Then the memories came flooding back. All of them. All at once.
His own hands clutched the sheets. His own voice pleading. The knot expanding inside him. The tears. The surrender. That word, mine, that Brody had growled against his neck and to which Ren had replied with a yes that still burned in his throat.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
He pulled back the comforter with surgical precision.
Millimeter by millimeter. The mattress didn’t budge.
Brody kept snoring, his mouth half-open against the tattered pillow.
Ren pulled one leg out first. Then the other.
He planted his feet on the wooden floor, and the cold crept up from the soles of his feet to his ankles.
He stood up.
And he felt it.
Hot. Thick. Slipping down the insides of his thighs in slow streams that reached his knees. He closed his eyes and clenched his teeth. The amount was obscene. Abundant. As if Brody had poured everything inside him out during the knotting and his body hadn’t been able to hold it all in.
Damn you, Kovac.
He cursed himself, too. Twice.
He moved barefoot across the room, picking up his clothes from the floor one by one. The wrinkled jeans by the door. The t-shirt crumpled into a ball at the foot of the bed. Brody had ripped them from his body with an efficiency Ren would not remember now. He would not remember anything. Never.
He got dressed quickly, the alpha’s semen cooling against his skin, sticky and intimate and absolutely unbearable. He didn’t look in the mirror next to Brody’s closet. He didn’t want to see his own face. He didn’t want to see whatever his eyes might betray.
He left the room without closing the door to avoid the click of the latch. The hallway was empty. Ren walked barefoot to his room with his shoes in his hand, and every step reminded him of what he had just done because every step caused a dull tug between his legs.
He showered with water so hot it left his skin red. He lathered his body with soap three times. Not because he wanted to wash Brody off his skin. But because he didn’t want anyone else to detect his scent on him. The logic of an omega who knew the rules of the world he lived in.
He dressed in clean clothes. Dark jeans, a gray t-shirt that was loose on him.
He looked at his hands. They weren’t shaking.
Good. He ran his fingers through his damp hair, took a deep breath, exhaled, and went down to the kitchen as if it were just another morning where nothing extraordinary had happened.
The kitchen smelled of fresh coffee and toast. Jax was sitting at the kitchen island with a bowl of cereal in front of him and his phone in his hand. He looked up when Ren walked in.
And he froze.
Jax’s nostrils flared. Once. Twice. The alpha’s eyes widened and his jaw dropped slowly. The spoon hung suspended halfway between the bowl and his mouth. A drop of milk fell onto the countertop.
Ren looked at him. Looked at him with all the coldness that his twenty-one years of survival had taught him to muster.
“No comments.”
Jax closed his mouth. Opened it. Closed it again. He ran a hand over his face and let out a laugh so explosive that the cereal in the bowl shook.
“All right.”
Ren poured himself some coffee without looking at him.