Page 48 of Sold to the wrong Alpha
“But I don’t have that choice.” Brody exhaled. The sound had weight and density. “I accepted it the moment I saw you fall to your knees in front of me at the guardhouse and I scented you. There was no deliberation. There was no decision. It was a fact. Like breathing.”
The silence between them solidified. Ren could hear his own pulse in his ears, fast and erratic.
“So when you tell me that a man laid his hands on you when you were sixteen and that your father allowed it…” Brody’s voicebroke on the last word. Not from sadness. From restraint. From something violent pressing against the seams of his self-control. “I’m not hearing a sad story about an omega I’ve rescued. I’m hearing that someone hurt the person who is mine in a way I can’t undo. And everything I am, every part of me that is Alpha, is telling me to walk out that door and destroy the one responsible.”
Ren remained motionless.
The brutal honesty of those words cut right through him. There was no manipulation. There were no pheromones. Just Brody’s voice in the darkness, raw and exhausted, confessing something Ren hadn’t asked him to confess.
He lay back down. Slowly. The sheets crumpled beneath his shoulders.
Mine. The word reverberated in his mind. Brody used it without hesitation, without apologizing for it. He felt it as a fact. And the most unsettling thing wasn’t that he said it, but the echo it stirred within Ren: a deep, subterranean vibration that recognized the statement as true.
Ren had read about destined bonds in the library. He knew that one-sided acceptance of the bond existed, that an alpha could surrender to it while the omega rejected it, and that this asymmetry was painful for both in different ways. For the alpha, a constant need to protect and possess something that didn’t belong to him. For the omega, the slow erosion of their resistance until the body gave in or the bond withered.
But he also knew that exceptional bonds didn’t wither. They were permanent. Irreversible. A curse or a salvation, depending on who was telling the story.
Brody had accepted it without a fight. Without resentment. As a fact.
And Ren was there, lying in a bed that wasn’t his, wrapped in sheets that smelled faintly of raisins and walnuts because everything in that house smelled like that, thinking about what it meant for someone to want to kill for you. Not protect you. Not rescue you. Kill. Destroy the one responsible, Brody had said. With the same matter-of-factness with which a law of physics is stated.
When was the last time anyone got angry on his behalf? When did anyone last hear what he experienced and respond with anger rather than discomfort, pity, or silence?
Never. The answer was never.
His mother knew it and looked the other way. His brother suspected it and never asked. The alphas who had used him knew it and took advantage. And his father…
His father had closed the door behind him and had allowed—or rather, encouraged—the encounters.
Ren brought his fingers to his face. He pressed them against his eyes until he saw spots of light. He would not cry. Not again. He refused.
“Brody.”
“Here.”
“Don’t go after my father.”
A long silence. So long that Ren took his hands away from his face and turned his head toward the armchair.
“Not tonight,” said Brody.
Ren wanted to say something else. He wanted to tell him he didn’t accept the bond, that he would not give in, that he still hated what his body felt every time Brody was near. But the words wouldn’t come. They got stuck somewhere between histhroat and his chest, blocked by something he didn’t want to examine.
He turned onto his side, facing the window again. He closed his eyes.
Brody’s breathing filled the space between them. Unwavering and rhythmic. And Ren let that breathing lull him without admitting it.
Light seeped in through the edge of the curtain like a thin sliver. Orange, premature, barely a thread that crossed the room and died against the opposite wall.
Ren opened his eyes.
He didn’t remember falling asleep. He didn’t remember the exact moment when Brody’s breathing had ceased to be a conscious sound and become part of the dream. But there it was: the morning, the thick silence of a house not yet awake, and the figure of the alpha in the armchair by the window.
Brody slept with his head tilted against the backrest. His long neck, exposed, revealed a vein beneath his pale skin. His spread legs, his bare feet on the carpet, his arms crossed over his chest as if even in sleep he needed to hold something back. The black t-shirt stretched across his shoulders in a way that Ren registered with uncomfortable clarity.
The hair. Black, straight, shiny under that first ray of sunlight brushing his temple. It fell over his forehead in messy strands that softened the harshness of his features. Awake, Brody had clenched jaws and piercing gray eyes. Asleep, that hardness disappeared somehow. With his shield fallen, without his armor, he looked a little more young and tender.
Ren didn’t move.
