Ren picked up the clothes without saying thank you. Not because he was ungrateful, but because the word got stuck somewhere between his chest and his throat, blocked by pride andsomething else he didn’t want to name. He crossed the room, feeling Brody’s gaze on his back like a physical weight, warm and heavy, and slammed the bathroom door harder than necessary.
The latch clicked. Ren pressed his forehead against the wood and breathed.
The bathroom was enormous. White marble veined with gray, a shower with a glass partition, a full-length mirror that reflected an image he barely recognized. Dark circles ate away at half his face. His lower lip was chapped, and he had a greenish bruise on his jaw that he didn’t remember getting. His blond hair fell over his forehead in dirty, matted strands.
He took off the clothes they’d put on him while he slept and stepped into the shower.
The hot water hit his shoulders, and for three seconds the world was reduced to that: heat, steam, the white noise of the stream against the tiles. Ren closed his eyes and pressed his hands against the wall. The tension of the last few hours unraveled layer by layer, like old varnish peeling away, and beneath it appeared what he had been holding back.
The scent of Brody.
It clung to his skin, to the clothes he’d just taken off, to the inside of his lungs. Raisins, walnuts, warm butter, something resinous and dark beneath, like burnt wood. His body responded with an urgency that churned his stomach. The heat concentrated below his belly, dense and pulsing, and Ren clenched his teeth until his jaw ached.
No.
He lathered himself with soap. Scrubbed hard. Tried to think of anything else: the streets he’d walked barefoot, the wet gleam in Dimitri Reznov’s eyes watching him from the front row of theauction, the sound of his own breathing inside that tiny room in the guardhouse. Terror. Disgust. Rage. Nothing worked. His body wouldn’t listen. He’d been without suppressors for too many hours, and Brody’s presence on the other side of the door was like a radio signal vibrating through his bones, constant and impossible to ignore.
His erection throbbed with a dull, stubborn pain.
Ren lowered his hand. He hated himself for it. He lowered it anyway.
It was quick, brutal, and without ceremony. He bit his forearm to keep from making a sound as the images assaulted him without permission: Brody’s hands, large and pale, lifting him off the floor of the guardhouse; Brody’s arm draped over his shoulders, heavy and warm; Brody’s voice telling him he was safe with that grave certainty that seemed more like an oath than a sentence. He came against the tiles with a spasm that bent his waist, and he stayed like that, hunched under the stream of water, gasping, with the taste of his own skin in his mouth and a shame so thick it could have filled the entire room.
He washed himself again. He scrubbed until his skin turned red. He rinsed his mouth with tap water.
When he stepped out of the shower, he dried off quickly, put on his underwear, jeans, and gray T-shirt. Everything was a little too big for him, but it was clean and not made of latex. That was enough. He looked at himself in the mirror. A flush stained his neck and cheeks. Anyone with half a sense of smell would know what he’d just done.
Brody had more than a keen sense of smell. Brody was an alpha.
Ren closed his eyes. Opened them. Then grabbed the doorknob.
Brody was exactly where he’d left him, leaning against the dresser with his arms crossed, except now his posture had shifted almost imperceptibly. His head tilted slightly. His nostrils flared. His gray eyes fixed on Ren with a stillness that was not calm.
He knew.
Ren ambled towards the window and The garden stretched out green and perfect in the morning light. He couldn’t look at Brody. He couldn’t hold his gaze, knowing that his body had just betrayed him in the most basic and humiliating way possible. He felt dirty inside. He hated himself. He hated being an omega. He hated that his biology turned him into something that responded to a stranger’s scent like an animal.
“No one in this house is going to touch you without your permission.”
Brody’s voice came from behind him, deep and controlled. Ren kept his eyes on the garden.
“Not the staff, not the guards, not anyone who walks through that door. Do you understand?”
Ren nodded without turning around.
“Look at me when I’m talking to you.”
Ren clenched his jaw. He turned. He didn’t look up past Brody’s jawline, which was square, unshaven, with a thin scar running across his chin from side to side.
“No one is going to touch you.”
“Not even you?”
The words slipped out before he could swallow them. Ren looked up and instantly regretted it. Brody’s eyes changed. They didn’t darken—they were already dark, storm-gray with those red rimsthat looked like they never slept—but something shifted behind them, something possessive and territorial that made every hair on Ren’s body stand on end. Brody looked at him the way a predator looks at the thing in the world that isn’t prey.
Ren felt a churning feeling in his belly, a hot, wet tug that ran down his spine and loosened his knees.
“Not even me.”
