Chapter 18 #2
Silence at the table.
“Ninety-four percent.”
Ren closed his eyes.
“Thanks, Zev. Very helpful.”
“You’re welcome.”
Brody exhaled through his nose. Not exactly a laugh, but almost. Zev kept typing as if he had said nothing out of the ordinary, and perhaps to him it wasn’t. Ren was understanding that Zev’s brain processed information from the world as pure data, without the filter of social awkwardness.
Rocco passed the bread to Ren.
“Eat. Now you have to feed two.”
Ren took a piece and broke it between his fingers. The crumbs fell onto his plate. He felt the heat rising up his neck and into his ears. He wasn’t used to this. His life had been characterized by negative attention, so he didn’t seek it out.
“Congratulations, Ren.”
Rocco said it, looking him straight in the eye, and Ren felt something tighten in his throat. He nodded. The words wouldn’t come.
Jax chewed with the patience of a predator waiting for his turn. Ren could see it. He could see how the alpha held back whatever was churning inside him with the discipline of someone who trains his body to know exactly when to strike.
The blow came between the second and third bites of stew.
“You know what the best part of all this is?”
No one answered. No one needed to.
“That, technically, I’m already an uncle. Which means I have rights.”
“You have no rights,” Brody muttered without looking up from his plate.
“I have the right to spoil that kid, to teach him how to fight, and to tell him the story of how his father punched his other father in the stomach in front of the entire house.”
Ren set his spoon down on his plate. The heat wasn’t just in his neck anymore. His ears were burning.
“That wasn’t…”
“It was exactly that. I was there. I have eyes.”
Rocco coughed up something that sounded suspiciously like a stifled laugh. Zev kept typing, but Ren caught the hint of a smile at the corner of his mouth.
“Besides,” Jax continued, serving himself more stew with absolute nonchalance, “I want it on record that I was the first to know you were pregnant. Before Brody. Before anyone. Because I have a nose for it.”
“You’ve got a big mouth.”
“And you’ve smelled like a pregnant man for days, so don’t give me that…”
“I smell like what?”
“Like a pregnant man. Your scent has changed. You used to smell like those sour lemon candies, the ones that sting your tongue, and now you smell like that, but sweeter. Like someone poured honey over them. It’s pretty…”
“Finish that sentence and I’ll break your nose.”
Jax shoved an enormous piece of bread into his mouth and chewed with his eyes wide open, the very picture of outraged innocence.
Brody placed his hand on Ren’s knee under the table. The gesture should have calmed him down. It didn’t.
“Hey, it’s a compliment. You smell good. You smell like a fertile, bonded, happy omega, and if that offends you, well…”
Ren stood up. The chair scraped against the floor.
“Say that again.”
Jax swallowed the bread.
“Which part?”
“The part where you call me a fertile omega like I’m a cow.”
“I didn’t say cow. I said…”
Ren grabbed the piece of bread left on his plate and threw it at his face. Jax dodged it on reflex. The bread bounced off the wall, and Rocco let out a hearty laugh that shattered the tension in the kitchen like glass.
“Hey!” Jax stood up, palms flat on the table. “We don’t waste food in this house!”
“Well, don’t call me fertile.”
“But you are! It’s a biological fact, not an insult!”
Zev looked up from his tablet for the first time all dinner.
“Technically, he’s right.”
“Nobody asked you, Zev!”
The kitchen turned into a crossfire of voices, Jax gesturing with half a piece of bread in his hand, Rocco doubled over with laughter over his plate, Zev returning to his tablet as if the surrounding chaos were white noise.
Ren felt the blood pounding in his temples and his stomach tightening with something he was slow to recognize.
Brody kept eating.
Ren turned toward him.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?”
Brody chewed. Swallowed. Looked at him.
“No, I’m enjoying this.”
Ren was tying his shoes when Brody appeared in the doorway with the car keys dangling from his index finger.
“You have an appointment in an hour and a half. We’re leaving in ten minutes.”
Ren looked up. His heart gave a sharp jolt, a mix of relief and something he didn’t want to examine too closely.
“Did you find someone?”
“Two cities from here. No connection to my uncle. A gynecologist specializing in pregnant omegas. Private practice, back entrance.”
Brody said it as if he were reading a tactical report, not arranging his son’s first prenatal checkup. Ren finished tying the second knot and stood up.
“Ten minutes.”
“Nine already.”
Ren changed into a less flashy t-shirt, brushed his teeth, and splashed water on his face.
In the mirror, his reflection showed him something he still didn’t quite recognize: color in his cheeks, a sparkle in his eyes he didn’t remember ever having.
He stepped away from the mirror before sentimentality got the better of him.
Brody was waiting for him next to a black SUV parked in the back of the mansion.
The windows were so dark they looked opaque from the outside.
Before Ren could open the passenger door, Brody pulled a black cap out of the back pocket of his jeans and placed it on Ren’s head, tucking his blond strands inside with quick fingers.
“Uh…”
“Your hair is visible from space.”
Ren adjusted the cap himself, brushing Brody’s hands away with a gentle swat that didn’t contain a shred of genuine rejection.
“You’re exaggerating.”
“Platinum blonde. Seriously. It’s like wearing a neon sign.”
They got in. Brody started the engine, and the car pulled out through the back gate of the property—the one Ren had never used—heading down a side road flanked by high stone walls and dense vegetation.
The engine was barely audible. The air conditioning smelled of new leather, raisins, and walnuts—that scent Ren had long since stopped trying to ignore.
The first twenty minutes passed in comfortable silence.
Ren watched out the window as the landscape shifted from residential to industrial, then to open fields, then to a three-lane highway.
Brody’s hand rested on the gearshift, near Ren’s knee without touching it.
The mid-morning sun filtered through the tinted windows, casting everything in a dark amber hue.
Brody glanced in the rearview mirror. A quick, almost imperceptible gesture. Then he did it again. And again.
Ren noticed.
“What’s going on?”
Brody didn’t answer. He took his phone out of the dashboard holder, pressed a contact, and put it back. One ring. Two.
“Go ahead.”
Jax’s voice filled the car through the speakerphone.
“We’re being followed.”
A brief silence. Then Jax let out a sound that was half sigh, half growl, the audible equivalent of someone confirming what he already knew.
“I know. Gray sedan, two cars behind you. I’ve been tracking it since the highway on-ramp.”
“One of Malachi’s guys?”
“I’m not sure, but the plates are rentals. If it were Reznov, he’d be more discreet. This smells like your uncle, though I’ve got Zev working his magic.”
Ren turned in his seat. He couldn’t see anything through the tinted rear window, only blurry shapes, lights, the anonymous flow of the highway. But his heart was racing. He could feel it in his wrists, his neck, his temples.
“Is this for real?”
Brody didn’t look at him. He kept his eyes shifting between the road and the rearview mirror, his jaw so tight that the muscles on the sides of his face formed hard lines beneath the skin.
“Did you think I was lying to you?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Every time I told you it was dangerous to go out. Every time I explained that Reznov was still looking for you. Every time I asked you to be patient while I organized this…”
“I thought you were exaggerating a little.”
The silence that followed was worse than a scream. Brody turned his head toward him. Just for a second. But that second was enough for Ren to see something in his gray eyes that wasn’t anger. It was something colder. Sharper.
“I was exaggerating.”
“A little.”
“I’m telling you there are dangerous people looking for you, that they’ve put a price on your head, that your father and your brother would rather see you dead than free, and you thought I was exaggerating a little.”
The words fell like stones on glass. Ren felt every one of them.
“I didn’t think you were lying, Brody. I thought you were overprotective. That maybe…”
“Maybe what? That I was making up threats to keep you with me?”
The question hit him where it hurt. Because yes.
A small part of him—the part that had grown up distrusting every outstretched hand, every open door, every gesture that seemed generous—that part had considered the possibility that Brody was exaggerating the danger to keep him inside the mansion. To keep him close. To control him.
“Ren.”
“Don’t talk to me as if I’m an idiot.”
“I’m not talking to you like you’re an idiot. I’m talking to you as someone who’s spent weeks planning every move to keep you safe and who’s just discovered that the person he’s protecting isn’t taking it seriously.”
“I take it seriously!”
“Not if you think I’m exaggerating!”
“Well, sorry for not understanding the exact magnitude of the shit I’m in, Brody, when no one gives me the full picture and I have to piece things together as best as I can!”
“I’ve told you everything I could tell you!”
“It’s not enough!”
The car sped up slightly. Brody corrected it immediately, easing off the gas pedal with a control that didn’t match the tension tightening his knuckles on the steering wheel.
“It’s never enough with you.”
“And what do you expect? That I trust you blindly? That I sit back and obey without asking questions? Because I’ve been there before, Brody, and it didn’t end well for me.”
Jax’s breathing came through the speakers. Slow. Patient. The breathing of someone who’s been waiting for a while.
“Guys.”
Neither Ren nor Brody answered.
“Hey guys.”
“What!” they both said with the same irritation, in the same rhythm.
“Stop arguing. We’ve got something more urgent than your chronic inability to talk without yelling at each other.”
Brody pressed his lips together. Ren crossed his arms.
“The sedan has closed the gap. It’s not two cars anymore, it’s one. And a second vehicle just pulled out from a side road. White van, no identification.”
Ren’s stomach clenched. The heat of the argument evaporated suddenly, replaced by something icy that ran down his spine.
“Are they closing in on us?”
“Not yet. But they’re in a coordinated pursuit formation. If we keep going toward the clinic, they’ll have us pinned down.”
Brody hit the turn signal. He slowed down. The next exit appeared three hundred meters ahead.
“We’re turning back.”
“Brody…”
“We’re turning back, Ren.”
Ren shut his mouth. Not because he agreed. Not because Brody was right, and he knew it. But because Brody’s hand had left the gearshift and closed around his knee with a firm pressure that asked for no permission, that asked for nothing. It simply said: you’re here and you’re going to stay here.
Brody took the exit. The white van didn’t follow them.
The gray sedan did.