Page 78 of Sold to the wrong Alpha
Brody’s footsteps followed immediately.
They went down the stairs together. The mansion’s hallways were silent at that hour, bathed in the morning light streaming through the tall windows. Ren felt his body soft and satisfied, every muscle relaxed in a way no workout had ever achieved.
The aroma of roasted coffee and warm bread reached them before they crossed the kitchen threshold.
Jax was sitting on a stool in front of the central island with a cup in his hands and his legs stretched out. It was ridiculous how big he was. The stool looked like a toy piece of furniture beneath him. He looked up as they entered, and his eyes darted from Ren to Brody and back to Ren with surgical precision. He sniffed the air. The corner of his mouth turned up.
“Well, well, well. What a face you two have on…”
“One more word and I’ll beat you up in the gym,” Ren threatened.
Jax shut his mouth. He opened it. He shut it again. He stared at Ren with wide eyes and then burst out laughing so hard that the cup shook in his hand. He leaned back on the stool, clutched his stomach, and kept laughing until tears streamed from his eyes.
“Oh my God,” he wiped his face with the back of his hand. “You’re going to beat me up? You?”
“Try it and you’ll find out.”
Jax laughed again. He slapped his thigh with his open palm and shook his head as if he’d just heard the best joke of the year.
Brody walked around behind Ren, opened the cabinet above his head, and took out two mugs. He set them on the counter. He poured himself some coffee and then poured Ren some too. The gesture was ordinary, domestic, so natural that Ren stared at the steaming mug in front of him as if it contained something more than just coffee.
Jax was still smiling, his face flushed.
“I will not say anything. I will not say a single word.”
Ren picked up the cup and took a long sip. The coffee was bitter and strong and perfect.
“You’d better not.”
Brody’s library occupied a corner of the ground floor that opened onto the backyard. Two enormous windows let in the afternoon light and cast golden rectangles onto the Persian rug. Bookshelves covered the walls from floor to ceiling, crammed with volumes arranged by size. For years, no one seemed to have touched them, except for a section in the lower left corner where worn spines and used pages showed someone had interacted with them. That was where Ren had found the book three days earlier.
He curled up in the leather armchair by the window with his legs tucked beneath him and Brody’s t-shirt covering him down to mid-thigh. The book was heavy. Hardcover, thick paper, small print.Destined Bonds: Biology, Myth and Clinical Evidence.It wasn’t light reading.
He turned the page with his thumb and scanned the paragraph where he’d left off the night before.
“Pheromonal recognition between destined mates triggers a neuro-endocrine cascade that differs substantially from the standard hormonal response between a compatible alpha and omega. Oxytocin release in the omega increases by a factor of four to seven compared to a conventional interaction, which explains the intensity of the attachment response and the difficulty in rationalizing or suppressing the bond once it has begun.”
Ren snorted.
Difficulty rationalizing. That was an understatement. What he had felt upon entering that office and falling to his knees was anything but rational. It was a collapse. A controlled demolition of every wall he had built over twenty-one years so he wouldn’t need anyone.
He kept reading.
“In documented cases of destined bonding, the omega’s heat cycle comes early and present with greater intensity if the destined mate is in constant proximity. Conventional suppressants progressively lose their effectiveness, and only clinical-grade inhibitors partially mitigate the response.”
That explained a lot. Ren had been on suppressants for years. Years regulated like clockwork, without a single cycle that had come early or a single night when he’d lost control of his body. And then Brody had arrived with his scent of raisins and walnuts and his deep voice, and everything had gone to shit in less than a week.
He dog-eared the page. A bad habit his mother would have scolded him for.
The next chapter was the one he’d been avoiding for two days.
“Fertility and Destined Bond.”
Ren’s eyes lingered on the title. He read it twice. Three times. Then he looked down at the first paragraph.
“The conception rate during a heat cycle shared between destined mates is significantly higher than the population average. Recent studies place the probability of fertilization at 78% when full bonding occurs without a contraceptive barrier, compared to 34% in unbound alpha-omega pairs.”
Seventy-eight percent.
