Page 58 of Sold to the wrong Alpha
Ren breathed. Not because Jax asked him to, but because his lungs were burning, his legs were shaking, and sweat was running down the back of his neck in hot rivulets.
They kept training. Jax eased up on the intensity, but not on the comments.
“Seriously, you smell so good that if I were Brody, I wouldn’t have been able to either…”
Ren threw a knee to Jax’s groin, which Jax barely blocked.
“That’s dirty!”
“Then stop smelling me.”
“Impossible. You stink of him. The entire room stinks of him because of you.”
Ren growled and attacked again. And Jax dodged again. They moved across the tatami like a choreography of frustration and uneven fun. Then the gym door opened.
The scent of raisins and walnuts, of freshly baked cookies, of dark wood and warm skin, drifted in first. Then Brody entered. His shoulders filled the doorframe as though it had been built to measure for him. His black hair, slicked back, and his gray eyes, rimmed with red, fixed on Ren with an intensity that stopped his heart for half a beat.
“Omega.”
A single word. Three syllables. Uttered with the quiet authority of someone naming something that belonged to him. The silence lasted a second. Ren crossed the distance between them in four strides.
He drove his fist into Brody’s stomach with all the strength left in his right arm.
He felt the alpha’s abdominal muscles contract beneath his bandaged knuckles. Brody doubled over with a sharp grunt that reverberated through the room.
Ren was about to hit him again. He clenched his left fist, and his anger fueled a powerful blow. But a massive arm wrapped around him from behind and lifted him off the ground.
Jax.
“Freeze. Stop.”
“Let me go!”
“Stop, Ren.”
Brody straightened up, his hand on his stomach and his eyes bloodshot with something darker than pain. He looked at Jax. Fixed on his hands around Ren’s torso. Focused on his forearms pressed against Ren’s chest. And the voice that came from his throat wasn’t human.
“Get your hands off my omega.”
“I’m not your omega!”
Ren kicked out at the air. Jax held him as if he were carrying a rebellious punching bag. Brody took a step toward them, and Jax, for the first time since Ren had known him, stepped back. Not out of fear. Out of caution. He set Ren down on the ground and raised both hands.
“He’s all yours, bro.”
Ren spun to face Brody and threw another punch. Brody caught him. He snatched his fist in midair with one hand, then the other when Ren tried with his left, and crossed both his arms over his chest, pinning him against his own body. Ren struggled. Pushed. Tried to bite. But the physical disparity was grotesque,and Brody’s body was a cage of muscle and bone against which he couldn’t win.
“Let me go, Kovac.”
“No.”
“I said let me go.”
“And I said no.” Brody’s voice vibrated against the back of Ren’s neck, rough, final. “You and I are going to talk.”
“I have nothing to talk to you about.”
“You do.” Brody spun him around without releasing his wrists and pushed him toward the door with his body. Not brutally, but inexorably. Like a moving wall. “Walk.”
