No.
His jaw ached from the way he clenched his teeth. His nails dug into his palms. The pain occupied his thoughts, along with the cold stone on his feet and the uncomfortable black latex he was still in, which were humiliating clothes from the auction, reminding him of his place in the world.
Brody turned left. The mansion appeared at the end of the path: a drab stone facade, tall windows with dark wooden shutters, ivy climbing up to the second floor. Beautiful in a restrained way, without the ostentatious obscenity of Reznov’s steel-and-glass mansion. A side door opened before they arrived, and a gray-haired beta woman held the entrance open for them without saying a word, her gaze lowered, her body turned to make room for them.
The interior smelled of waxed wood and cleanliness. And of Brody. Brody was everywhere, permeating the walls, the carpets, the air circulating through the wide, dimly lit hallways. The mansion was his territory, and every molecule proclaimed it.
Dizziness struck Ren at the base of his skull.
He stopped. Pressed a hand against the wall. Closed his eyes, and the world spun ninety degrees beneath his feet. The darkness behind his eyelids filled with the scent, and the scent turned into images he didn’t want to see: skin against skin, large hands gripping his hips, his own back arched, his own throat exposed.
He opened his eyes with a start. He gasped.
Brody had stopped five steps ahead. He didn’t turn all the way around. Just his head, a quarter-profile, just enough for Ren to see the line of his clenched jaw and the reddened rim of a gray eye.
“The room is at the end of the hall.”
Nothing else. No questions. No condescending “Are you okay?” that Ren would have had to tear apart with his teeth to keep from screaming. Just a coordinate. A functional fact. And Brody resumed walking.
Ren peeled himself away from the wall. He walked. One foot, then the other. His legs felt twice as heavy as they had a minute ago.
It’s not a cycle. It can’t be a cycle. The suppressants cover me for three more days, even if I don’t take the dose.
The suppressants were intended for an omega who followed a routine of sleeping eight hours, eating three meals a day, and maintaining standard cortisol levels. Not for an omega who had been sold by his father, stripped by strangers, auctioned off to predators, and who now walked barefoot through the mansion of an alpha whose biochemistry fit his body like a key in a lock that Ren never knew he had.
The hallway narrowed. The walls closed in. Or perhaps it was his perception, contracting around Brody’s scent like a pupil around a light. His hands were sweaty. His ears were burning. Every brush of air on his forearms felt like an electric stimulus, traveling to the center of his body and detonating. His obstructed nose made each breath a victory for the enemy. Yet, breathing through his mouth brought an even more unbearable sensation: the taste of the alpha, infinitely worse.
Never had he experienced something like this.
Alphas had always affected him. It was the price of existing in a body that biology had designed to respond, to complement, to yield. Ren hated that price and paid it every day with suppressants and training and silent fury. But the alphas who had affected him before did so like noise affects sleep: they were a nuisance, an intrusion, something he could combat with earplugs and discipline.
Brody Kovac wasn’t noise. Brody Kovac was an earthquake, and Ren was standing right on the fault line.
The door at the end of the hallway was ajar. Brody pushed it open with one hand and stepped aside, pressing himself against the frame to make room. Ren saw an enormous bed with white sheets, a window with thick curtains, a table, a chair, and an armchair. Nothing threatening. Nothing other than a clean, made-up guest room.
But Brody was in the doorway, and to enter, Ren would have to pass within half a meter of him, and half a meter was a distance at which the alpha’s scent would cease to be a fragrance and become physical contact.
He took a step.
The floor shifted.
Either his legs gave out, or gravity changed its mind, or twenty-one years of resistance met its exact limit in that one-meter stretch of hallway. His knees buckled first. Then his ankles. His entire body bent forward, as if someone had pulled the foundations out from under a structure. Before the world tilted, the last thing he processed was the scent of raisins and walnuts multiplying a thousandfold because a pair of arms caught him mid-fall.
Large. Firm. Warm through the fabric.
Brody’s arms.
He pressed his cheek against Brody’s chest. His ear heard Brody’s heartbeat. And the smell. God, the smell. Enveloping him like warm water, like winter blankets, like everything Ren had lost at age seven when his grandmother died and no one ever hugged him again without wanting something in return.
His hands, which were supposed to push, clenched the fabric of Brody’s shirt. His fingers, which were supposed to strike, clung to the fabric like those of a child on the edge of a cliff. And the part of Ren that had been fighting all night, the furious part, the part that swore it would never give in, that part looked at him from within with utter horror as the rest of his body sank against the alpha and stopped resisting.
Chapter 5
The light was soft. Diffused. Warm amber seeping through heavy curtains and casting vague rectangles onto an off-white linen bedspread. Ren blinked against the brightness without recognizing it, recognizing nothing, floating in that limbo of the first few seconds of waking up where the brain hasn’t yet decided which memories to bring back and which to keep buried a little longer.
His bedroom at home.
That was his initial thought.That was his initial thought. The bed was enormous, like his. The sheets smelled clean, of unscented detergent, resembling his. The pillow had exactly the firmness he liked. And the room temperature was perfect—neither too cold nor too warm, the exact point where Ren could sleep without kicking off the covers.
