Chapter 13
Jax tossed him the hand wrap without warning. With a reflex that pleased the alpha, Ren caught it as it flew.
“Today we’re doing free sparring.”
Ren wrapped his knuckles in silence. He tightened the wrap around his left thumb, then his right, clenching the end of the fabric between his teeth.
He needed this. He needed the clean pain of physical exertion, the kind of pain he chose, that he controlled.
Not the other kind. Not the kind that had left invisible marks between his hips or a scratchy throat from moaning things he’d never admit out loud.
Jax stood facing him in the center of the tatami. He took off his shirt and tossed it onto the floor. The mass of muscle was absurd, almost comical if it weren’t so genuinely lethal.
“Whenever you’re ready, blondie.”
Ren attacked first. Straight on. A low hook that Jax blocked with his forearm and answered with a sidekick that Ren dodged by ducking. They moved in circles. Testing distances. Ren landed a blow to Jax’s side that didn’t even faze the alpha but stung Ren’s knuckles.
“Not bad.”
Jax counterattacked. A quick combination that Ren recognized because they’d practiced it the day before, so he read it and rolled to the left. He got up with his knees bent, hands up, breathing controlled.
Then Jax sniffed the air.
Unabashedly. With his nostrils flared like an animal tracking. And he smiled. That wide, lazy smile Ren had already learned to fear.
“Hey. You smell amazing today.”
Ren let his guard down for a second. Just a second.
“Shut up.”
“Seriously.” Jax tilted his head and sniffed again, theatrically, exaggeratedly. “It’s like raisins with nuts but mixed with something sweeter. What could it be? I don’t know. Let me think.”
“Jax.”
“Honey, maybe? Caramel? Ah, no. It’s more like…”
Ren threw a right hook that would have knocked the wind out of anyone his size. Jax dodged it by twisting his torso as if he had all the time in the world, and when Ren sailed past on momentum, the alpha gave him a gentle pat on the back.
“…like an omega who’s spent the entire night rolling around with his destined alpha.”
The heat rose Ren’s neck to his ears. Burning. He tried a roundhouse kick that Jax blocked with his shin and returned with a light shove that sent him stumbling back three steps.
“Nothing happened.”
“Ah, no. Of course.” Jax scratched his chin. “Your scent has changed radically overnight for purely atmospheric reasons.”
Ren charged again. Two quick punches: a jab and a cross. Jax deflected both with open palms without backing up an inch.
“Did you know that when an alpha marks an omega with his scent during knotting, the omega’s scent changes permanently until…?”
“I said shut up!”
Ren launched a wild, furious combination. Left fist. Right fist. Knee strike. Jax blocked the first two and caught the knee with both hands before it reached his groin. He held him like that for a moment, balanced on one leg, trembling with rage.
“You’re losing control, blondie.”
“Let me go!”
Jax let him go. Ren staggered backward but didn’t fall. He regained his guard stance, jaw clenched and glassy eyes shining like shards of ice. They circled each other again. They exchanged blows. Ren landed an elbow to Jax’s chest that made the alpha nod with genuine respect.
“Good hit. Seriously.” Pause. “Did Brody teach you that move last night, or did you figure it out on your own?”
Ren roared. He literally roared, a guttural sound he didn’t know he could produce, and lunged at Jax with his elbow raised.
The alpha spun on his heel, wrapped an arm around his waist, and lifted him off the ground as if he weighed as much as the t-shirt he’d tossed aside earlier.
He set him down three meters away and pointed to the mat.
“Breathe.”
“Fuck off.”
“Breathe, Ren.”
Ren breathed. Not because Jax asked him to, but because his lungs were burning, his legs were shaking, and sweat was running down the back of his neck in hot rivulets.
They kept training. Jax eased up on the intensity, but not on the comments.
“Seriously, you smell so good that if I were Brody, I wouldn’t have been able to either…”
Ren threw a knee to Jax’s groin, which Jax barely blocked.
“That’s dirty!”
“Then stop smelling me.”
“Impossible. You stink of him. The entire room stinks of him because of you.”
Ren growled and attacked again. And Jax dodged again. They moved across the tatami like a choreography of frustration and uneven fun. Then the gym door opened.
The scent of raisins and walnuts, of freshly baked cookies, of dark wood and warm skin, drifted in first. Then Brody entered.
His shoulders filled the doorframe as though it had been built to measure for him.
His black hair, slicked back, and his gray eyes, rimmed with red, fixed on Ren with an intensity that stopped his heart for half a beat.
“Omega.”
A single word. Three syllables. Uttered with the quiet authority of someone naming something that belonged to him. The silence lasted a second. Ren crossed the distance between them in four strides.
He drove his fist into Brody’s stomach with all the strength left in his right arm.
He felt the alpha’s abdominal muscles contract beneath his bandaged knuckles. Brody doubled over with a sharp grunt that reverberated through the room.
Ren was about to hit him again. He clenched his left fist, and his anger fueled a powerful blow. But a massive arm wrapped around him from behind and lifted him off the ground.
Jax.
“Freeze. Stop.”
“Let me go!”
“Stop, Ren.”
Brody straightened up, his hand on his stomach and his eyes bloodshot with something darker than pain. He looked at Jax. Fixed on his hands around Ren’s torso. Focused on his forearms pressed against Ren’s chest. And the voice that came from his throat wasn’t human.
“Get your hands off my omega.”
“I’m not your omega!”
Ren kicked out at the air. Jax held him as if he were carrying a rebellious punching bag. Brody took a step toward them, and Jax, for the first time since Ren had known him, stepped back. Not out of fear. Out of caution. He set Ren down on the ground and raised both hands.
“He’s all yours, bro.”
Ren spun to face Brody and threw another punch.
Brody caught him. He snatched his fist in midair with one hand, then the other when Ren tried with his left, and crossed both his arms over his chest, pinning him against his own body.
Ren struggled. Pushed. Tried to bite. But the physical disparity was grotesque, and Brody’s body was a cage of muscle and bone against which he couldn’t win.
“Let me go, Kovac.”
“No.”
“I said let me go.”
“And I said no.” Brody’s voice vibrated against the back of Ren’s neck, rough, final. “You and I are going to talk.”
“I have nothing to talk to you about.”
“You do.” Brody spun him around without releasing his wrists and pushed him toward the door with his body. Not brutally, but inexorably. Like a moving wall. “Walk.”
Ren dug his heels into the floor.
Brody lifted him up. One arm under his knees, the other on his back. He carried him just like the night of the heat. Ren thrashed against the alpha’s chest, against his shoulders, but Brody walked toward the door without flinching.
The last thing Ren saw before leaving the gym was Jax sitting on the tatami floor, his arms resting on his knees and a smile as wide as a piano.
Brody set Ren down on the office floor as if he were placing a box of explosives on a table. Carefully, but without gentleness. He closed the door behind him, and the click of the latch echoed in the room lined with dark wood and shelves crammed with books no one read.
Ren took three steps back. He smoothed out his t-shirt, soaked with sweat from training, and crossed his arms. His heart was pounding so hard he could feel the pulse in his teeth.
Brody walked around the desk and leaned against the edge, facing him. He didn’t sit down. He didn’t claim the position of power that the desk offered him. He stood there, arms crossed, unconsciously mimicking Ren, and for a long moment neither of them spoke.
“Are you okay?”
Ren blinked.
“Pardon?”
“Physically,” Brody vaguely gestured toward Ren’s body with a nod of his chin. “Are you okay?”
The heat rose from his chest to his ears in a rush of warm blood that Ren couldn’t stop.
He knew exactly what he meant. The heat.
What they’d done in that bed that smelled of raisins and walnuts.
The weight of Brody on top of him, inside him, the knotting that had kept them joined for a time Ren didn’t want to quantify.
“I’m perfectly fine.”
“Ren.”
“Perfectly fine, Kovac.” He fixed his gaze on a spot on the bookshelf behind Brody’s head because looking him in the face was unbearable. “I’d rather not talk about that.”
Brody watched him for a second longer than necessary. Then he nodded once, turned, opened the top drawer of the desk, and pulled out a long, white box. He slid it across the wooden surface toward Ren.
“Suppressants. Pharmaceutical grade, the same ones they prescribe at the Midtown clinics.” He ran a hand through his black hair, sweeping it back from his forehead, and something in his jaw tensed. “I should have given them to you on the first day. I didn’t think of it, and that was a mistake.”
Ren took the box. He held it between his fingers and turned it to read the label. They were good. Better than the ones he bought with the little money he had left after his father emptied his account. He pressed them against his chest as if they were a lifeline.
“Thanks.”
The word came out smaller than he’d intended.
Brody didn’t answer. He tilted his head in a slight nod of acknowledgment and leaned back against the desk. And Ren looked at him then. He really looked at him for the first time that morning, without the filter of anger or shame.