Chapter 16 #2
Ren felt the knot throb again and a new wave of pleasure surged up his spine, hot and thick, but his eyes were already closing and his mind was already sinking, and the last thing he registered was Brody’s mouth against his temple and the scent of raisins and nuts and the darkness swallowing it all as his body continued to contract in an orgasm that wouldn’t end, that stretched on, that merged with sleep until Ren no longer knew where the pleasure ended and unconsciousness began.
Sunlight filtered through the half-closed curtains and cast golden lines across the rumpled sheets.
Ren blinked. Once. Twice. The ceiling wasn’t his own.
The pillow smelled of raisins and walnuts and something darker, denser, which made him close his eyes again and sink a little deeper into the mattress.
Brody’s legs were tangled with his own. Skin against skin, heat against heat.
The alpha’s thigh rested between his with a weight that should have felt intrusive but anchored him to the bed like a warm anchor.
Ren could feel Brody’s chest rise and fall against his back, the slow, deep breath of sleep, the arm wrapped around his waist with an open hand resting on his abdomen.
Ren didn’t move.
He lay there, still, eyes closed, mouth curved into something that wasn’t exactly a smile but looked a lot like one.
The bond hummed between them like a low-voltage electric current; constant, gentle, neither painful nor urgent.
Just present. It was like the beating of a heart that wasn’t his own but somehow belonged to him.
He had never felt this way before.
Even as a child, when his mother was alive and sang him French lullabies at bedtime, it wasn’t like this.
Not even during the few enjoyable moments of his adolescence, when he still believed his father would change and the Valois family would regain some of the dignity it once had.
Not even during his best days at the gym, when his body obeyed him and his fists landed, and he could pretend for a couple of hours that being an omega didn’t mean a thing.
This was different. This was not having to pretend.
The question buzzed around his head like a persistent mosquito: was he doing the right thing?
He’d asked it so many times in the last few days that the words had lost their edge.
And now, with Brody’s warmth pressed against his back and the scent enveloping his senses like a blanket woven just for him, the question dissolved before it could fully form. It couldn’t be wrong. S+
something that made him feel as if his bones were finally resting where they belonged. It couldn’t be wrong to breathe without his chest aching.
Ren turned.
Brody slept with his mouth ajar and his hair tousled on the pillow, black and smooth as spilled ink.
His eyelashes cast tiny shadows on his cheekbones.
He had a red mark on his left shoulder—Ren’s teeth, Ren’s bite—and scratches running down his chest like a map of what they’d done the night before.
Ren ran a finger along his collarbone. The skin was soft there, unexpectedly soft for a man of his size. Brody didn’t move. Ren moved his hand up to his jaw, traced the line of the bone with his thumb, and leaned in.
He kissed him on the lips. Slowly. With his mouth closed, barely a press, a brush.
Brody woke up with a start. His gray eyes opened, disoriented for half a second, and then locked onto Ren’s with a clarity that didn’t belong to someone who’d just woken up. The red rim of his irises glowed in the morning light.
“Good morning.”
Ren’s voice came out hoarser than he’d expected.
Brody didn’t answer with words. His hands moved before his mouth did: one wrapped around the back of Ren’s neck, the other grabbed his hip, and in one fluid motion he pulled him on top of him.
Ren landed on Brody’s chest with his knees on either side of his waist and his palms flat against his pecs.
The alpha’s erection pressed against the inside of his thigh, hard, hot, insistent.
“Good morning.”
Brody said it, looking up at him with narrowed eyes and that wolfish half-smile that transformed his face into something equally dangerous and magnetic. He grabbed his hips with both hands and lifted him just enough to align them.
Ren let himself fall.
The penetration was slow, deep, and Ren threw his head back and bit his lip hard because the sound he wanted to let out would have put the whole mansion on alert. Brody dug his fingers into his hips and pushed upward, and the slowness lasted exactly two more seconds.
Then it was chaos.
Ren rode him, his thighs burning, his hands on Brody’s chest, his hair falling over his eyes, blond and tousled, drenched in sweat at the temples.
Brody thrust from below with a force that made the bed creak against the wall.
Rhythmic. Brutal. Without delicacy or pretension.
Ren leaned forward and bit his lower lip, and Brody growled; an animal, guttural sound that vibrated against his ribs, and twisted his hips with his hands to change the angle, and Ren saw white lights behind his eyelids.
He came with his forehead pressed against Brody’s, his body shaking, his muscles contracting around him.
Brody followed three thrusts later with a muffled growl against his neck, and Ren felt the heat fill him from within and the pressure of the knot expanding, and he stayed there, sitting on top of him, panting, too weak to move.
Brody brushed his hair away from his face.
Ren looked at him. The gray eyes met his gaze with something that wasn’t just sated desire, but something deeper, more still, that squeezed something inside his chest.
He said nothing. There was no need.
They showered together. Brody’s bathroom was spacious, with dark tiles and a rain shower that fell from the ceiling like a warm waterfall.
Brody lathered his back with slow, circular motions that weren’t sexual but weren’t innocent either.
Ren pressed his forehead against the tiles, closed his eyes, and let the alpha’s hands trace his shoulders, his sides, the curve of his waist. When Brody kissed the nape of his neck, Ren arched his spine without thinking, and Brody’s laughter rumbled against his skin.
“Insatiable.”
“Shut up.”
Brody bit his earlobe, and Ren gave him a half-hearted elbow to the ribs. They rinsed off. They dried off. Ren put on a pair of jeans and one of Brody’s t-shirts that hung off one shoulder, leaving his collarbone exposed. Brody looked at him with narrowed eyes.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
But the alpha’s jaw was tense in a way Ren was recognizing as restraint. Ren raised an eyebrow, grabbed the hem of the t-shirt with two fingers, pulled it to one side, exposing even more skin, and turned toward the door.
Brody’s footsteps followed immediately.
They went down the stairs together. The mansion’s hallways were silent at that hour, bathed in the morning light streaming through the tall windows. Ren felt his body soft and satisfied, every muscle relaxed in a way no workout had ever achieved.
The aroma of roasted coffee and warm bread reached them before they crossed the kitchen threshold.
Jax was sitting on a stool in front of the central island with a cup in his hands and his legs stretched out.
It was ridiculous how big he was. The stool looked like a toy piece of furniture beneath him.
He looked up as they entered, and his eyes darted from Ren to Brody and back to Ren with surgical precision.
He sniffed the air. The corner of his mouth turned up.
“Well, well, well. What a face you two have on…”
“One more word and I’ll beat you up in the gym,” Ren threatened.
Jax shut his mouth. He opened it. He shut it again. He stared at Ren with wide eyes and then burst out laughing so hard that the cup shook in his hand. He leaned back on the stool, clutched his stomach, and kept laughing until tears streamed from his eyes.
“Oh my God,” he wiped his face with the back of his hand. “You’re going to beat me up? You?”
“Try it and you’ll find out.”
Jax laughed again. He slapped his thigh with his open palm and shook his head as if he’d just heard the best joke of the year.
Brody walked around behind Ren, opened the cabinet above his head, and took out two mugs.
He set them on the counter. He poured himself some coffee and then poured Ren some too.
The gesture was ordinary, domestic, so natural that Ren stared at the steaming mug in front of him as if it contained something more than just coffee.
Jax was still smiling, his face flushed.
“I will not say anything. I will not say a single word.”
Ren picked up the cup and took a long sip. The coffee was bitter and strong and perfect.
“You’d better not.”
Brody’s library occupied a corner of the ground floor that opened onto the backyard.
Two enormous windows let in the afternoon light and cast golden rectangles onto the Persian rug.
Bookshelves covered the walls from floor to ceiling, crammed with volumes arranged by size.
For years, no one seemed to have touched them, except for a section in the lower left corner where worn spines and used pages showed someone had interacted with them.
That was where Ren had found the book three days earlier.
He curled up in the leather armchair by the window with his legs tucked beneath him and Brody’s t-shirt covering him down to mid-thigh. The book was heavy. Hardcover, thick paper, small print. Destined Bonds: Biology, Myth and Clinical Evidence. It wasn’t light reading.
He turned the page with his thumb and scanned the paragraph where he’d left off the night before.
“Pheromonal recognition between destined mates triggers a neuro-endocrine cascade that differs substantially from the standard hormonal response between a compatible alpha and omega. Oxytocin release in the omega increases by a factor of four to seven compared to a conventional interaction, which explains the intensity of the attachment response and the difficulty in rationalizing or suppressing the bond once it has begun.”
Ren snorted.
Difficulty rationalizing. That was an understatement. What he had felt upon entering that office and falling to his knees was anything but rational. It was a collapse. A controlled demolition of every wall he had built over twenty-one years so he wouldn’t need anyone.
He kept reading.
“In documented cases of destined bonding, the omega’s heat cycle comes early and present with greater intensity if the destined mate is in constant proximity. Conventional suppressants progressively lose their effectiveness, and only clinical-grade inhibitors partially mitigate the response.”
That explained a lot. Ren had been on suppressants for years.
Years regulated like clockwork, without a single cycle that had come early or a single night when he’d lost control of his body.
And then Brody had arrived with his scent of raisins and walnuts and his deep voice, and everything had gone to shit in less than a week.
He dog-eared the page. A bad habit his mother would have scolded him for.
The next chapter was the one he’d been avoiding for two days.
“Fertility and Destined Bond.”
Ren’s eyes lingered on the title. He read it twice. Three times. Then he looked down at the first paragraph.
“The conception rate during a heat cycle shared between destined mates is significantly higher than the population average. Recent studies place the probability of fertilization at 78% when full bonding occurs without a contraceptive barrier, compared to 34% in unbound alpha-omega pairs.”
Seventy-eight percent.
Ren closed the book with his finger inside to keep his place and looked out the window. The garden was green and still. A bird landed on the branch of a maple tree and tilted its head as if watching him.
Seventy-eight percent. Brody had knotted him.
They hadn’t used a condom. Ren didn’t take birth control because the suppressants he’d been using since he was fifteen already contained a hormonal component that prevented ovulation, but those suppressants had been out of his system for days when Brody and he had fucked in that uncontrolled heat that had swept everything away.
He opened the book again.
“The knotting between destined mates has an average duration of forty-five minutes, compared to the usual fifteen or twenty. The longer duration exponentially increases the probability of implantation.”
Forty-five minutes. Ren remembered Brody’s weight on top of him, the heat that wouldn’t let up, the constant pressure of the knot filling him from within, and the way a fresh wave of pleasure would course down his spine every time he tried to move.
He hadn’t timed it. He wasn’t in any condition to time anything. But it had been long. Very long.
He closed the book and set it on the armrest of the chair.
He rested his head against the backrest and brought a hand to his flat stomach beneath Brody’s t-shirt. The fabric smelled of him. Ren took a deep breath and let the scent fill his lungs.
He did not want to be pregnant. Not now. Not amid that chaos where his father had put a price on his head and a Russian mobster was claiming him as his property, and his only protection was an alpha he’d known for less than two weeks.
He did not want to.
But his hand stayed there, on his stomach, and something opened up inside his chest like a sprout pushing through the earth before anyone had given it permission. Something that wasn’t fear or rejection. Something still and warm that looked all too much like tenderness.