Page 92 of Sold to the wrong Alpha
“I’m coming. Two minutes.”
“We don’t have two minutes!”
And they didn’t. Because the doors of the gray sedan opened. Both at once: the driver’s and the rear passenger’s. And from a third door Ren hadn’t seen, a white van parked behind the sedan with its headlights off like the dead eyes of a nocturnal animal, a third figure emerged.
Three men. Three alphas. He knew it by the way they moved, by the width of their shoulders, by the heavy cadence of their footsteps on the asphalt. One of them was holding something. Not a weapon. Something worse: a plastic zip tie.
“Ren,” Brody’s hand closed around his wrist. Blood on his fingers. Blood everywhere. “Run.”
Ren looked at him. Held his gaze. Placed his hand against his cheek and felt the feverish heat of his skin and the erratic pulse beating at his jaw.
“I’m not leaving you.”
The passenger door opened.
The first alpha’s hand reached in before his body did, searching for Ren’s arm, and Ren met it with a kick that connected with his solar plexus. The man doubled over. Ren kicked again, this time at his face, and felt the satisfying crunch of cartilage under his sneaker. The alpha staggered back, howling, hands clutching his nose.
The second came through the same side. Bigger. More prepared. Ren threw a punch that caught him on the jaw but barely moved him. The alpha seized his forearm and yanked. Ren sank his teeth into the hand gripping him. He bit until he tasted someone else’s blood, until bone scraped against his incisors. The alpha roared and let go.
Ren scrambled back over Brody, placing himself between him and the open door. Brody’s blood was soaking through his jeans. He could smell it mingling with the scent of raisins and walnuts that was fading with every second that passed.
The third alpha didn’t grab him. He circled the car from behind. Ren spotted him in the side mirror, still hanging from its shattered mount. He was coming from his side. They were going to catch him in a pincer.
“No!”
He launched himself at the one in front with his full body weight. Elbow to the throat. Knee to the groin. Everything Jaxhad taught him in their training sessions, every technique, every dirty trick, every move designed to compensate for the mass difference between an omega and an alpha. He landed a clean blow to the second man’s solar plexus and watched him stagger.
But the third was already there.
He wrapped both arms around Ren’s torso from behind. Ren kicked. Threw his head back, aiming for the nose, and caught him on the chin instead. The impact rattled his own skull and filled his vision with white stars, but he didn’t stop. He slammed his heels into the alpha’s shins. He twisted like something wild and desperate.
The screech of tires came like a thunderclap.
Jax.
He saw him get out of the car before it had fully stopped. He moved with a fluidity that didn’t match his size, as though gravity didn’t apply the same rules to him. The first alpha, the one with the broken nose, barely had time to turn before Jax’s fist connected with his temple in a blow that sounded like a bat striking a watermelon. He crumpled. Jax didn’t stop. He moved to the second, grabbed him by the collar of his jacket, lifted him, and slammed him against the hood of the gray sedan with a methodical violence that looked less like rage than pure efficiency.
But the third alpha still had Ren. And there was another car.
Black. No plates. It pulled up alongside the van in a controlled skid. The rear door swung open on its own.
The alpha holding him lifted him off the ground. Ren screamed. Not a scream of fear, but a guttural, primal scream, the cry of an animal being torn from its pack. He clawed at the surroundingarms. He twisted, freed one arm and struck backward, aiming for eyes, throat, any soft point.
“Brody!”
Brody’s voice didn’t come. Or it came too weakly to cut through the chaos.
The alpha shoved him into the black car. Ren beat against the door, the window, the seat, everything. Other hands inside the car pinned his arms while the first man held his legs. The door slammed shut.
The engine roared. The tires screamed. And through the rear window Ren watched Jax sprinting after them, his legs eating up meters of asphalt at a speed impossible for a man his size, and the black car leaving him behind.
The last thing he saw before the street disappeared around a corner was Brody’s wrecked car under the yellow light of a streetlamp. The passenger door hung open like a mouth. And inside, invisible from that distance but present in every fiber of his body, the scent of raisins and walnuts guttering out like a candle starved of air.
Ren’s fist connected with the alpha’s cheek and twisted his head to one side. He didn’t wait to see the effect. He drove his elbow toward his throat, missed by centimeters, and caught the collarbone. The car rocked with each impact, the leather seats squealing under the struggle of two bodies that didn’t fit in that cramped space.
The alpha growled something in a language Ren didn’t recognize. He grabbed Ren by the hair. Ren dug his fingers into the wrist holding him, drove his nails in until he felt the skingive, and with his other hand went for the eyes. The alpha turned his face just in time. Ren’s fingers raked his temple and left four red furrows that bled.
From the front seat, the driver shouted something. An order. A complaint. Ren didn’t process it. His world had shrunk to that square meter of back seat, to the solid body pinning him, to the metallic smell of someone else’s blood mixed with stale sweat that turned his stomach.
