Chapter 24 #2
Ren sought Brody’s eyes across the table.
He found them waiting, gray and reddened at the edges as always, but warm.
The corner of Brody’s mouth curved a millimeter.
Ren suppressed his smile by biting the inside of his cheek and dropped his gaze to his coffee.
The understanding between them needed no words.
They both watched what was growing between Sergei and Marta with the clarity of people who recognize a pattern they have lived themselves.
“Hey, Sergei.”
Jax’s voice cut through the moment with surgical precision.
“Hmm.”
“What were those sounds last night? From your room.”
The silence was instantaneous. Marta froze with the piece of peach halfway to her mouth. Sergei stopped chewing. Zev looked up from his tablet for the first time all morning with very wide eyes.
Jax leaned back in his chair with his arms crossed and that shark smile Ren knew far too well.
“Because it sounded like someone dying. Or being born. I’m not sure.”
Sergei’s hand moved so fast Ren barely saw it. The clip resonated with a dry smack against the back of Jax’s neck and the alpha’s head jerked forward. Jax rubbed his neck without stopping smiling.
“Worth it.”
“Shut your mouth.” Sergei returned to his toast with a calm that belied the red of his ears.
Marta didn’t look up from her plate. She put the peach in her mouth and chewed with the dignity of a queen in exile.
Rocco let out a short, stifled laugh that he swallowed with a sip of juice. Zev dropped his gaze back to his tablet, but Ren caught the nervous tic at the corner of his mouth. Even he was entertained, though he would never admit it.
The conversation fragmented again into multiple threads.
Rocco asked Brody about the purchase of some piece of land that had nothing to do with anything important.
Zev murmured something about the Wi-Fi signal in the east wing playing up.
Marta offered Sergei more coffee with a tilt of her head that might have looked professional if not for the way their fingers brushed as the cup changed hands.
Jax stretched in his chair and looked at Sergei with a furrowed brow.
“You broke the punching bag.”
Sergei chewed without flinching.
“The big one.”
Another bite.
“The only one we had.”
Sergei shrugged, a minimal gesture implying absolute indifference.
“It was old.”
“It was three months old.”
“Old.”
Ren rested his chin in his hand.
“Fix it the same way you did when I broke it.”
Jax turned his head toward him with an expression of theatrical offense.
“I beg your pardon? I fixed it because you’re Brody’s omega.” He raised his hands as though the logic were irrefutable. “Rank has its privileges. He…” he pointed at Sergei with his thumb “…has no privileges.”
“I have bigger fists,” said Sergei without looking up from his plate.
Ren took his napkin, screwed it into a ball and threw it at Jax’s face. It hit him on the forehead. Jax caught it as it bounced and threw it back with an accuracy that would have been alarming had Ren not dodged it by tilting his head. The napkin landed in Zev’s coffee.
“For fuck’s sake,” muttered Zev. He extracted the soaked napkin with two fingers and dropped it on the table with a grimace of disgust.
Rocco threw his own napkin at Jax in solidarity. It caught him on the ear. Jax stood up with his napkin in one hand and Rocco’s in the other, arms spread wide.
“Seriously? Everyone against me?”
“Always,” said Ren.
“You should be used to it by now,” added Brody with a sip of his coffee, his first verbal contribution to the chaos in several minutes.
Jax screwed up both napkins and threw them at Brody. One bounced off his chest. The other fell into his cup. Brody looked at the napkin floating in his coffee with an expression that would have made more sensible men take a step back.
Jax sat down.
Ren felt the laughter rise through his chest like something warm and bubbling. He let it out—a sound that would once have surprised him with its ease. Not now.
Brody pulled the napkin from his coffee with two fingers, set it on his plate and looked at Ren. He caught him laughing and something softened in those gray reddened eyes. But only for an instant. He resumed his usual expression and looked at Jax.
“You owe me a coffee.”
“I owe you a lot of things. A coffee isn’t the worst of them.”
The conversations started flowing again.
Ren leaned back against the stool, one hand on his belly out of habit, and watched Brody listen to something Rocco was saying while nodding with a slight frown.
But his eyes drifted to Ren. Just a second.
Back to Rocco. Then to Ren again. Then to Jax. Then to Ren.
The third time he caught him looking in under a minute, Ren dropped his left hand under the table and placed it on Brody’s thigh. He stroked it with his thumb, a slow, repetitive movement, the way you run your hand along the back of a restless animal to settle it.
Brody went still beneath his touch. His jaw tightened. Ren kept stroking.
Brody turned his head toward him, his lips pressed together.
“I’m not a dog.”
He said it quietly enough that only Ren should have heard it. Or so he intended. The entire table went silent.
Jax reacted first. His laugh exploded like a gunshot and he doubled over the table.
Rocco covered his mouth with the back of his hand.
Zev raised his eyebrows without lifting his eyes from the tablet, though the smile gave him away.
Sergei looked at Brody with something bordering on the sympathy of a comrade fallen in battle.
Marta pressed a hand to her chest and let out a high-pitched giggle she tried to disguise with a cough.
Brody closed his eyes for a moment. Set his jaw. Then looked at Ren with that intensity that promised consequences.
Ren held his gaze and didn’t move his hand from his thigh.
“Of course not,” said Ren. He gave his leg a pat. “Dogs don’t growl as much.”
The table erupted.
The chairs emptied one by one. First Rocco with his long stride and his half-wave over his shoulder.
Then Zev, the tablet already lit before he crossed the threshold.
Jax stretched with his arms above his head, stole a piece of toast from Sergei’s plate and disappeared dodging the Russian’s swipe.
Sergei followed, muttering something in his language that sounded like a credible threat.
Marta collected her cup, gave the two remaining a warm look and excused herself with a “I’ll go see to the rooms” before disappearing down the hallway.
The silence fell over the kitchen like a blanket.
Ren dug his spoon into his cereal. There wasn’t much left, floating in the lukewarm milk, and he chased them with a laziness he felt no urge to disguise. He chewed slowly.
Brody stood.
The sound of crockery being stacked filled the kitchen. Plate on plate. The clinking of cutlery falling together in the sink. The tap turning on. Water against steel. Ren didn’t look up from his bowl but his eyes drifted on their own, drawn by the movement of the alpha to his left.
Brody was clearing the table with the efficiency of someone accustomed to leaving no trace.
Forearms uncovered, the sleeves of his black t-shirt taut across his biceps.
His large hands wrapping around the cups as though they were eggshells.
He leaned across to reach Zev’s plate at the far end of the table and the muscles of his back mapped themselves beneath the cotton.
He left the plates in the sink, picked up the sponge, soaped it.
The circular movement of his wrist as he scrubbed. The water sliding over his knuckles.
Something traveled down Ren’s spine. Slow, electric, and familiar.
In those first days that shiver had terrified him. It had seemed like an intrusion, a fault in his own body, something he hadn’t asked for or consented to. Now he recognized it for what it was: his entire system telling him he was looking in the right direction.
Brody rinsed the last glass, turned off the tap and dried his hands with a cloth hanging from the oven handle. He turned and caught Ren watching him. He said nothing. He crossed the kitchen to him.
Ren set down his spoon in the empty bowl and leaned back slightly on the stool to make space. There was no need to say it. No need to ask. Brody lowered his gaze to Ren’s belly, that gentle curve the loose t-shirt didn’t quite conceal, and then raised it to his eyes.
Ren nodded.
Brody’s hand came to rest on his stomach.
Flat. Open. Warm through the fabric as though his skin radiated something beyond temperature.
The fingers didn’t close, didn’t press, didn’t search.
They simply stayed there, still with a delicacy that didn’t belong to those hands capable of breaking necks and gripping knives.
Calloused from training, broad as shovels, with prominent veins that Ren already knew from memory.
But like this, resting over the life growing inside him, they seemed like something else entirely.
Ren held his breath without meaning to.
Then he felt it.
A flutter. Something tiny and submarine moving beneath Brody’s palm. It wasn’t the first time the baby had moved, but it was the first time it had done so under its father’s hand, as though it recognized him, as though the warm pressure of those fingers were a call it was answering.
Brody turned to stone.
His pupils dilated until the gray of his iris reduced to a thin ring.
His jaw loosened a fraction. His lips parted without producing a sound.
Something crossed his face that Ren had never seen on him before.
Not the intensity with which he looked at him when he desired him.
Not the fierce tension of when he protected him.
Not the contained tenderness that sometimes escaped him in the small hours when he believed Ren was sleeping.
It was something before all of that. Something without a name.
As though the ground beneath his feet had shifted a centimeter and Brody was recalibrating his place in the entire world.
Ren covered Brody’s hand with his own. His pale, slender fingers over those wide knuckles. He pressed down. He felt the double warmth: Brody’s hand, the life beneath it.
He smiled. Not a wide smile, nor a calculated one. Just the curve of the lips that appears on its own when the body knows something the mind hasn’t yet put into words.
“To think I didn’t want you.”
He said it quietly, his voice roughened by the remnants of that morning’s sleep and something more that he wasn’t going to name because naming it would be to diminish it.
Brody lifted his eyes from his hand on the belly. He looked at him. The reddened edges of his irises seemed softer at this hour with the morning light coming through the kitchen window. Ren held his gaze without the impulse to look away that had governed him months before.
Brody’s smile was slow. It started at the left corner of his mouth, barely rose, arched his lips without showing teeth.
It wasn’t a smile of victory or possession.
It didn’t say I told you so or I knew you’d come to me.
It said something else. Something Ren read in the private language they had built between silences and arguments and shared nights.
Brody’s thumb moved. A minimal arc across the fabric. Back and forth. Back and forth. As though memorizing the texture of the moment.
The baby moved again. More faintly this time.
A butterfly-wing brush against the inner wall of Ren’s body.
Brody felt it too because the pressure of his hand increased by just enough, just what was needed, as though he wanted to tell that tiny thing that he was still there, that he wasn’t going to lift his palm.
Ren leaned forward. His forehead touched Brody’s temple. He breathed in raisins, walnuts, the soap they used to wash the dishes. Home. The word always came. It no longer bothered him.
“Did you feel it?” he murmured against his hair.
Brody turned his head just enough for their noses to brush. His warm breath against Ren’s lips.
“Yes.”
A single syllable. Rough. Full to the edges.
Ren closed his eyes. Brody’s hand was still on his belly, his own hand over it, and the kitchen smelled of spilled coffee and soap and the butter from Jax’s toast. Muffled domestic sounds from a house waking up reached them from somewhere.
Footsteps overhead. The murmur of Marta humming.
The absurd and precious normality of an ordinary morning.
And to think he hadn’t wanted him.
And to think he now didn’t know where he ended and where what he felt for this man with his hand on his stomach and wonder written across his face began.
Brody kissed the corner of his lips. Barely a graze. Then he pulled back, ran his knuckles along Ren’s cheek, and picked up the empty cereal bowl without another word.
Ren watched him carry the bowl to the sink and opened his mouth to say something but closed it. There was no need. Everything that mattered had already been said in the space between their hands.