Page 32 of Sold to the wrong Alpha
The first thing he noticed was the jaw. Brody had kept it clenched since day one, yes, but now the jaw muscles were visible even when he wasn’t speaking, even when he was just chewing a piece of bread or drinking water from a glass. A constant tension, as if the bones of his face were holding up something that weighed too much.
The second thing was the hands. Brody had large hands, with thick veins crisscrossing the backs. Ren had felt them on his shoulders the first night and remembered them as warm, firm, confident. Now those hands were trembling. Not much. Not in a way that anyone not looking would notice. But Ren was looking. He was looking because he couldn’t help it and because it was the only thing he allowed himself to do regarding Brody Kovac.
On the third day, during dinner, Brody dropped his fork. The metal clattered against the ceramic plate with a sharp sound thatcut through the silence of the dining room. Brody picked it up without saying a word, but Ren saw he was struggling to close his fingers around the handle. He saw it in the split second it took the alpha to regain his composure. He saw it, and a chill ran down his spine.
On the fourth day, Brody didn’t show up for breakfast.
Ren sat in the kitchen with a cup of coffee he didn’t touch and waited forty minutes. Rocco came in, served himself some toast, and gave him a wink.
“Where is he?”
Rocco spread butter with an offensive calm.
“In his office. He’s been there since four.”
“In the morning?”
“He hasn’t been sleeping much lately.”
The remark was casual. Rocco said it while looking at the toast, not at Ren, and that’s why it hit harder. Because it wasn’t an accusation. He didn’t intend it to be that way. It was a random fact tossed into the air like someone dropping a coin to see which side it landed on.
Ren stood up without answering.
He found the office at the end of the east hallway, a solid oak door that Ren had never opened because it belonged to the part of the house Brody hadn’t shown him. He knocked with his knuckles. Twice. Silence. He knocked a third time, and the door opened from the inside.
Brody filled almost the entire doorway. Black shirt with the top buttons undone, dark pants, his bare feet on the wooden floor. His hair, normally slicked back with almost surgical precision, fell loose over his forehead in uneven strands. And his eyes.
The eyes.
The dark circles weren’t dark circles. They were purplish shadows eating away at the skin beneath his lower eyelids, two sickly colored crescents that contrasted with the pallor of the rest of his face. The red rims of his lower eyelids, which Ren already knew, were now swollen, bloodshot, as if Brody hadn’t slept in days.
“What do you need?” Brody asked, and his voice came out hoarse. Worn out. Like sandpaper run over the same surface too many times.
Ren didn’t answer immediately. He just stared at him because something inside his chest had shifted, a weight he’d been ignoring for days and that now settled between his lungs with uncomfortable precision.
He knew the theory. He’d studied it, not out of interest but out of necessity, because an omega who doesn’t understand the mechanics of what governs his body is an omega who loses. Destined bonds worked both ways. It wasn’t a system of ownership where the alpha took and the omega gave. It was a circuit. A circuit that needed to close for both parties to function and that, when kept open, drained energy from both ends. The alpha wasn’t sleeping. The alpha wasn’t eating well. The alpha was losing control of his fine motor skills, losing mental clarity, and hormonal stability. Everything Ren had attributed to his own weakness as an omega—the constant hunger for closeness, the low-grade fever that wouldn’t subside, the insomnia—was happening to Brody too.
Brody, who hadn’t complained. Who hadn’t said a word. Who had simply obeyed Ren’s order to step away and had been quietly falling apart.
“Do you sleep?”
The question slipped out before Ren could filter it. Brody blinked. Confusion flashed across his face for half a second before the mask slipped back into place.
“Enough.”
“You’re lying.”
Brody rested one shoulder against the doorframe. The gesture seemed casual, but Ren recognized the economy of the movement: Brody needed the support. He needed it physically.
“How many hours?” Ren pressed.
“I don’t count them.”
“Brody.”
The name did something. Ren saw it run through the alpha’s body like an electric current: a slight spasm in his shoulders, a change in his breathing, a fleeting dilation of his pupils. Brody closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, something in them had given in. Not completely. Just a fraction. Just enough.
“Two. Three, if I take my meds.”
