Page 26 of Sold to the wrong Alpha
He didn’t finish the sentence. He couldn’t finish it because there was no sentence that could cover that up, that could erase those three seconds in which his body had shown exactly what he was: a weak person used to taking blows.
He clenched his teeth until they ground together.
“Fuck you.”
He stormed out of the kitchen. With a forceful shove, he sent the door crashing against the wall. With eyes burning and hands trembling, he crossed the hallway without seeing a thing, a coiled rage and humiliation devouring each other in his chest like two snakes. He would not cry. He would not cry. He would not cry.
Behind him, Brody’s voice cut through the hallway like a bullet.
“You’re safe here. Even if you hate me for it.”
Ren didn’t stop.
Chapter 7
Ren kicked the bedroom door shut and stood in the middle of the room, breathing through his mouth because the air still tasted of raisins and walnuts and that damn scent of home that clung to his clothes, his skin, the back of his throat as if he’d swallowed it.
He brought his hands to his face. Pushed them away. Brought them back up. He didn’t know what to do with them, with the lingering tremor running through his fingers, with the muscle memory of having cowered like a beaten animal in front of a man who hadn’t even touched him.
It hadn’t been Brody.
It had been his father.
His father in the kitchen at home at eleven o’clock at night with the belt coiled around his fist and that look of annoyance, as if hitting him were just another household chore, like washing the dishes or taking out the trash. His father’s view was that an omega failing to comply was worthless. His father signing papers in an office that smelled of leather and bourbon while Ren stood waiting, unaware that those papers were yet another agreement that would lead him to another alpha’s bed for the forgiveness of yet another debt.
No. It hadn’t been Brody.
But Brody had seen it.
That was the unforgivable part.
Ren walked to the window and pressed his forehead against the glass. The garden stretched out below, dark green in the morning light, with its trimmed hedges and gravel paths and the security guardhouse in the background like a gentle reminder that this was still a cage. A pretty one. With clean sheets and clothes that were too big for him and food he didn’t have to beg for. But a cage.
He stepped away from the window. He took three steps toward the bed. He turned. He went back to the window.
What hurt him most wasn’t that he’d cowered. What hurt him most was the reason he’d cowered, and the reason wasn’t fear of Brody. It was the bond. That invisible, biological thing that had made him let his guard down to the point of reacting with his bare body, without armor, without the mask he’d spent years building. In front of any other alpha, he would have held his ground without batting an eye. He would have kept his jaw clenched, his shoulders straight, his gaze fixed. He would have turned fear into defiance, because that was what he knew how to do, what he’d been doing since he was fourteen, when he began training his body so that no alpha could subdue him without effort.
But Brody wasn’t just any other alpha.
Brody was the alpha whose scent dismantled his defenses like someone removing screws from a structure, one by one, with mechanical patience, until the structure collapses. Brody was the alpha who had brought him to his knees without touching him. The alpha whose presence warmed his blood, softened his muscles, and told his brain he was safe when he wasn’t; that hecould surrender when he couldn’t; that Brody’s broad chest was a place to rest his head and find peace.
Lies. All biological lies.
A bond. With a stranger. With an alpha who locked him in a mansion and told him where he could go and who he could talk to, and then dared to call it protection. With an alpha who whispered that he was his as if that were something Ren should be grateful for.
No.
He didn’t want a bond. He didn’t want the invisible chain that tied him to Brody, just as he didn’t want the visible chains Reznov would have put on him. Different material, same principle. Someone who decided for him. Someone who controlled his body without asking his permission. His father had done it with blows. Reznov would have done it with money. Brody did it with pheromones and grave words that sounded like promises.
And Ren didn’t want promises from anyone.
The room suddenly felt too small, the walls too close, the ceiling too low. Brody’s scent hung in the air like a ghost that refused to leave, and Ren needed to get it out of his body, out of his head, out of his nervous system, which kept responding to him the way a plant responds to light.
He went to the bathroom. He splashed cold water on his face. He observed his image in the mirror. Blond hair plastered to his forehead. Blue eyes bloodshot from something other than sleep. High cheekbones. Lips pressed into a thin white line. He looked like what he was: someone at the end of his rope.
He could leave.
The idea flashed through his mind like lightning and stayed there, bright, pulsing.
