Brody placed his hands on Ren’s waist. Slowly. With a gentleness that shouldn’t exist in someone his size. And he lifted him off the ground as if Ren weighed nothing, as if he were something precious and fragile that might break if he squeezed too hard. Ren’s legs wrapped around Brody’s waist out of pure instinct, without his brain having a say in the decision.
The heat of Brody’s body against his was such a brutal relief that Ren sobbed. He didn’t cry. He sobbed. A dry, short animal sound. The pain didn’t give in, but it transformed, shifting from a fire that destroyed to a fire that illuminated, and the difference lay in Brody’s arms encircling his back and in the alpha’s heartbeat against his chest.
“My room,” Brody said.
It wasn’t a question. Ren nodded against his neck. He didn’t trust his voice. He trusted nothing other than the solid, warm body holding him.
Brody walked. Ren heard doors opening and closing, the sound of footsteps on wood, a distant voice that could have been Jax or Rocco saying something he couldn’t quite make out, and Brody’s reply, deep.
“No one is to come up.”
Stairs. The rhythmic movement of Brody’s body climbing the steps. The alpha’s jaw brushing against his temple. The scent grew concentrated, thickening and turning liquid and hot like dark honey.
Ren buried his face in the hollow between Brody’s neck and shoulder and took a deep breath. The pain throbbed, but the scent contained it, cradled it, kept him in a limbo between suffering and something that dangerously resembled peace.
A door. The last one. Brody pushed it open with his shoulder, and the scent that poured out of that room was like diving into an ocean made of the alpha’s scent. Every surface, every fabric, and every molecule of air soaked in it. Ren arched his back and dug his fingers into Brody’s shoulders.
“I’ve got you,” Brody said. His voice vibrated in his chest, and Ren felt it resonate against his ribs. “I’m here.”
Ren opened his eyes. The room was large, austere. A massive bed with dark sheets. Closed curtains that filtered the light into golden streaks. Nothing superfluous. Nothing decorative. Only the essentials, like Brody himself.
He laid him on the bed. The contrast of the cold sheets against Ren’s burning skin sent a shiver through his entire body. Hecurled up on his side. Knees pulled up to his chest. Fists clenched.
Brody knelt beside the bed. At eye level.
“Look at me, Ren.”
The blue eyes met the gray ones. Gray again, not black. Brody was breathing heavily but had regained some control. Enough to do what he did: raise his right hand and leave it suspended in the air between them, palm up. Open. Offered. Untouched.
“You decide,” he said. “Every step. Every moment. You decide.”
Ren looked at the hand. Large. Calloused. With a thin cut on the index finger. A hand that could break his bones but that floated in the air, waiting for permission.
The pain intensified. A fierce contraction that shot through his belly and stole his breath. Ren reached out and intertwined his fingers with Brody’s. The contact was an anchor. A fixed point in a sea that was swallowing his whole.
“Don’t let go of me.”
Brody closed his fingers around his.
“Never.”
Ren writhed on the dark sheets, soaked in sweat. The heat was melting his bones from the inside, a fever that had nothing to do with illness and everything to do with what he’d been refusing to name for the past two days. His skin burned. His throat burned. His eyes burned, crystal clear even now, even so, shining with something between rage and desperation as he intertwined his fingers with the alpha’s. He clenched his jaw and kept resisting, because that was how he’d always done it.
“Brody,” he moaned.
His voice came out broken. Unrecognizable.
Brody remained kneeling beside the bed, watching his every move. He held Ren’s fingers firmly, and his expression revealed the need to help his omega, as he had called him recently. But he held back because that was what Ren had asked of him.
“Help me,” the young man pleaded now, and the next spasm bent his body in half. Ren clenched his teeth until his jaw cracked. “Brody, please.”
“What do you want me to do?”
His gray eyes focused on him. Red at the edges, dilated in the center. Brody’s face looked carved from stone, but the tendons in his neck stood out like ropes about to snap.
“You know,” he groaned.
“I need you to say it.”
