Ren shook out his hand. His knuckles were burning.
“Six languages. Fuck you, Sergei.”
The Russian didn’t say a thing. There was no need.
Marta had the kitchen lit up like a lighthouse when they came through the back door of the mansion. The warm ceiling lightsspilled over the central island where she had laid out plates, cups, a steaming coffee pot, a basket of freshly baked bread, butter, jam, scrambled eggs in a wide dish and crispy bacon in another. As though she knew the exact hour they would arrive. As though making breakfast at four in the morning for men who smelled of gunpowder and blood was something she did every Tuesday.
She asked nothing.
She looked at Brody, looked at Ren, counted heads, added another plate when she saw Sergei come in behind Rocco. Her eyes lingered on the Russian a second longer than strictly necessary. Then she went back to the coffee pot and poured a cup that she set down precisely where Sergei ended up sitting, as though she had calculated the man’s trajectory before he knew himself where he was going.
Ren dropped onto the stool beside Brody. The scent of raisins and walnuts enveloped him immediately, more intense than usual, denser, as though Brody’s body was compensating for the separation by producing twice what it normally emitted. Ren closed his eyes. He let it in. It filled his lungs, loosened his shoulders, untied something in the pit of his stomach that had been taut for days.
He leaned toward Brody. His lips grazed the alpha’s jaw, the rough line where several days of stubble prickled against his skin.
“I missed you.”
He said it quietly. Just for him. Just for that five-centimeter space between his mouth and Brody’s ear where the world didn’t exist.
Brody didn’t answer with words. He passed his hand to the back of Ren’s neck, fingers threading into the blond hair, and heldhim there a moment. His thumb stroked the base of his skull in a slow movement that Ren felt travel down his spine like warm water.
Then he let him go and slid a plate toward him.
“Eat.”
Ren obeyed. Not because it was an order but because his body was demanding it loudly. The first mouthful of scrambled eggs tasted of salt and butter and something that closely resembled being alive. He chewed slowly. Brody put a piece of toast on his plate without being asked. Poured him juice. Passed him the jam.
And as he did it, his eyes moved over Ren’s face with the thoroughness of a cartographer drawing a new map. They stopped at the left cheekbone, swollen and violet. At the split eyebrow. At the lower lip, thick and inflamed from a blow that was already changing color.
Brody’s jaw tightened. His nostrils flared.
“Who?”
The question came out like a stone thrown at glass. Ren chewed his toast calmly and pointed at Sergei with the butter knife.
Sergei, in the act of grabbing a strip of bacon, stopped dead with his hand mid-reach. The entire table looked at him. Marta stopped pouring coffee.
“He attacked me first.”
The Russian’s voice sounded almost offended. He set the bacon on his plate with a delicacy that contrasted sharply with the size of his hands.
“Three times. Three different nights. The last time he bit through my forearm.”
He rolled up his sleeve. A semicircular bite mark crossed his forearm, red and clearly defined.”
Ren shrugged with his mouth full of toast.
“I had to try.”
“He broke a chair against the window.”
“It was a viable plan.”
“He tried to pick the lock with a plastic spoon.”
“And it would have worked if you hadn’t come in so fast.”
Jax leaned back on his stool and crossed his arms, his smile split unevenly across his face.
