Two words. Nothing more. And then the air changed.
It was subtle at first, a warmth that came from nowhere, that had no physical source. The scent of home intensified but differently, softer, more perfect. It wasn’t the raw scent Ren had felt before, the one that made his skin boil. It was something else. Something that smelled of thick blankets and rain pounding against windows and quiet breaths in the dark. Protective pheromones. Pheromones designed by millions of years of biology to tell an omega exactly one thing: you’re safe, everything’s fine, you can relax.
Ren’s body obeyed before his mind did. His shoulders dropped. His jaw relaxed. His fingers released the iron handle and fell to his sides, limp, useless. His heart, which had been pounding against his ribs like a bird against a cage, slowed down. Ren took a deep breath for the first time in hours, and the air reached the bottom of his lungs unimpeded.
And then he hated him.
He hated him with a cold, clean fury that welled up in the center of his chest and rose his throat like bile.
“You can always use that against me,” he murmured.
His voice sounded small. Ren clenched his fists to make up for it.
“It’s not fair,” he complained next. “You can make me feel whatever you want without me being able to do anything to stop it. You can calm me down, you can excite me, you can paralyze me. And I have nothing. Nothing equivalent. Nothing that works the other way around.”
Brody didn’t move.
“I don’t work that way.”
“Every alpha works that way.”
“Not me.”
“That’s what anyone who worked that way would say.”
Brody exhaled through his nose. A long pause. Ren watched the alpha’s hands close and open once, the only gesture betraying something beneath that constructed calm. When he spoke, his voice was lower.
“Is your father an Alpha?”
Ren didn’t answer. There was no need. The question already contained the answer, and they both knew it. The silence stretched between them like a sheet of ice.
Brody took a step. Just one. The cold marble beneath his bare feet made no sound.
“I will not use who I am to control you. I will not calm you without your permission unless you’re in danger. You can hate me if you need to hate someone, but I will not be that person.”
Another step. Ren should have backed away. The door was behind him, the handle within reach. He could turn around, open the door, and run toward freedom with nothing and no one to stop him.
But his legs wouldn’t respond. Brody’s pheromones still surrounded him like warm water, and Ren felt them seep through every crack in his armor, every fissure the last twenty-four hours had opened up in him.
“Let me protect you.”
Brody stopped less than a meter from Ren. From that close, the scent was thick, almost solid, and Ren had to tilt his head back to look him in the face. The difference in height was striking. Ren only came up to Brody’s collarbone.
Brody’s gray eyes had a red rim that the dim light of the hallway turned into something dark, almost maroon. They weren’t kind eyes. They were eyes that had seen things Ren didn’t want to imagine. But in that moment, looking down at him with an intensity Ren felt in his bones, there was no trace of depredation in them. There was something worse.
Certainty.
“I know who bought you.”
Ren’s stomach clenched.
“I know what he paid for you. And I know what he’ll do when he finds you.”
Ren opened his mouth. Then closed it.
“I will not turn you in.”
The words fell like stones into still water. Ren felt them sink, one by one, piercing through layers of mistrust, of rage, of accumulated terror, until they touched something soft and exposed that he’d been hiding beneath everything else for years.
