Page 45 of Sold to the wrong Alpha
The phrase fell flat, without emphasis, without judgment. Which seemed to enrage Brody more than any other provocation. He turned toward Rocco, and the air in the kitchen thickened. Ren felt it on his skin like a shift in atmospheric pressure beforea storm: the dominant alpha’s pheromones filling the room, crushing, demanding submission.
“My shit?” Brody took a step toward Rocco. His voice had dropped an octave. “You want to talk about my shit, Rocco? That son of a bitch laid his hands on Ren. He marked his face. My omega has a bruise the size of…”
“I’m not your omega.”
The words came out of Ren’s mouth before he could stop them. Sharp. Clear. Absurdly brave for someone who weighed sixty-three kilos and was surrounded by three alphas who could pin him to the ground with one hand.
The silence was absolute.
Jax stopped laughing. Rocco lowered the paper bag. Brody turned toward Ren.
He looked at him.
And Ren felt the ground disappear.
It wasn’t an aggressive gesture. Brody didn’t move, didn’t step forward, didn’t raise his voice. He just looked at him. With those gray eyes rimmed with red, with pupils dilated until they almost swallowed the iris, with an intensity so dense and so still that Ren felt it like a hand closing around his sternum.
The scent of raisins and walnuts returned, no longer acrid or metallic but deep, possessive in a way that brooked no argument. It wasn’t a threat. It was a truth. A truth that Ren’s body recognized before his mind did, and that ran down his spine like an electric current. The scent made his knees go weak, warmed his belly, and stole the air from his lungs.
Ren opened his mouth to protest. To repeat it. To scream that he wasn’t anyone’s property, that his body was his own, that a biological bond meant nothing.
But what he did was tilt his head to the right.
Slowly. Without thinking. As if the muscles in his neck obeyed something prior to language and reason. He exposed the long, pale line of his throat, the area where his pulse beat faintly beneath the skin, the exact spot where an alpha would mark his omega if the bond were sealed.
He offered his neck.
To Brody. In a kitchen that smelled of stew, with Jax lying on the floor and Rocco holding a paper bag as if it were a shield. No one breathed. Brody closed his eyes. He closed them tightly, his eyelids clenched and his jaw locked, as if Ren’s gesture caused him physical pain he needed to contain. He inhaled through his nose. Slowly. Deeply. And when he opened his eyes again, the predator was still there, but bound. Controlled. A beast on a chain that Brody himself held with both hands.
He turned to Jax.
“Next time you train with him, if you leave a single mark where I can see it, I’ll break the hand you used to touch him.”
Jax, still on the floor, raised both palms.
“Message received.”
Brody left the kitchen without finishing his stew. The door closed behind him, and the air seemed to decompress. Ren released all the oxygen he’d been holding in for a good minute and grabbed the island because his legs were shaking.
Rocco set the bag down on the counter and looked at him with a half-smile that Ren would have loved to wipe off with a punch.
“Well, well.”
“Not a word.” Ren ran his hands over his face. He could feel the heat in his cheeks, in his ears, in the neck he’d just offered like a tamed animal.
Jax got up from the floor, brushing off his pants. He touched the cheekbone where Brody had hit him, felt the swelling with his fingers, and shrugged.
“Seven in the morning, blondie. But tomorrow I’m putting a face guard on you.”
Chapter 11
Ren was running down a hallway he knew all too well.
The walls were those of his old house. He was barely aware of the yellow floral wallpaper his mother had chosen before she died, now faded and stained with moisture in the corners. The carpet beneath his bare feet felt just as rough as ever. Ren was sixteen, and he knew what was going to happen because it had already happened, and because his body remembered it before his mind did.
The door to his father’s study was open.
Julian Valois was waiting for him, seated behind his desk with his hands folded on the polished wood and that expression Ren had learned to fear: the calm of a man who has already decided. Standing beside him was an alpha Ren didn’t recognize. In his forties, wearing a dark suit, loosened tie. He smelled of stale leather and something acidic that Ren would identify years later as contained excitement.
